On perhaps the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of sleekness is Andy Warhol's dirty, ragged Vinyl, his film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel A Clockwork Orange. Fans of Kubrick's version from 6 years later would probably have a hard time at first recognizing the story amid Warhol's static mise-en-scène and the stilted, halting performances of his untrained actors. Factory regular Gerard Malanga plays the lead, Victor, in one of the most hilariously bad performances ever put on film. He sounds like he's auditioning, poorly, for a high school play, and the other actors aren't much better. The exceptionally long takes don't help matters, as flubbed lines and stammers are left in along with blank moments while the actors search for the next bit. Clearly, realism and emotional investment are far from Warhol's mind here; all the actors show about as much interest in the story as they would in a gum wrapper on the street. This disconnection is coupled with Warhol's decision to film the entire thing from a static viewpoint. There are just three shots in the hour-long film, and all the "action" is limited to one tiny corner of a room where all the characters are crammed into the shot. The net effect is that the story becomes curiously flat and affectless, mirroring the numbing of Victor's mind that accompanies his transformation from bad to "good." In Warhol's version of the story, form and content are truly married; if Burgess' story is a parable on the dangers of ...
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