Ahhh! How could you fall asleep to A Woman is a Woman or Breathless or Band of Outsiders?
To be fair, Breathless is the only one of those that I've seen (I've seen a couple of others - Masculin/Feminin, that King Lear that he did, I think there have to have been others. So I'm still willing to have my socks knocked off, but yeah, it just hasn't done it for me so far. Something about the weird cutting leaves me cold for some reason. But I'm still working my way through his oeuvre.
Jason, help me out here. What don't I get about Neil LaBute?
I think you get it. He writes the same play or movie over and over again about twice a year, and it wasn't that great to begin with. Everyone I know in the theater world thinks that his work sucks and that critics and theaters in the US and UK fawn all over it because he had success in film (though it was really just the first one) and
then became a playwright, which never, ever happens. It's pretty much just another example of the sort of pathetic, low-level starfucking one sees throughout theater, the literary equivalent of casting Tina Yothers in a new play because she's a "draw."
Anyway, people say he's a nice guy (never met him), but his work blows.
I'm just really suspicious of anyone who really loves "A Clockwork Orange," especially if he (and it's always guys) has an Alex poster on his wall. Be honest--do people who really love this movie enough to watch it repeatedly kind of enjoy the rape scenes? In a purely unironic way?
This is pretty insightful. I think both the movie and the book are really good, but once was enough for both of them. What gets routinely missed by the Alex-worshipping hipster goons is the fact that it's supposed to be a real discussion about crime vs. civil liberties (much of which gets lost in the film, probably because Kubrick was a stylist above all else). Here's a really wrenching factoid for ya: the event that happens to the victims in the book had happened in real-life to the book's author, Anthony Burgess (presumably not the singing and stuff, but who knows?). He had to drink heavily while writing it in order to get through it.
