This page is a companion to the Media Mentions page. This documents when ACO is used to describe something or as a comparison in the media.

V for Vendetta

Noordman, 21, of Redlands, and Damien Guerrero, 20, of Highland, are charged with the September 2003 shooting death of Kelly Bullwinkle, who was found one month later in a shallow grave in San Timoteo Canyon. Noordman and Guerrero both have claimed that the shooting was an accident, the result of a prank that turned unexpectedly deadly when Guerrero's finger slipped on the trigger of a pistol. Guerrero said it was Noordman's idea to scare her best friend, who Guerrero had a brief romantic link to, with a gun and a pre-dug grave in the canyon. He created a webpage that featured quotes from ACO.

The Sunday Times - Scotland 6/4/06

We seem to have become inured to the casual but extreme violence taking place throughout our once thriving towns and villages. For 40 years Stanley Kubrick's film of A Clockwork Orange (That would be 35 years. The film will be 40 years old in 2011 - Alex) was withheld from cinemas because of its horrific content, but every week in Scotland incidents similar to those chronicled in Anthony Burgess's novel occur. Young thugs and hooligans appear before the courts day-in and day-out charged with the most appalling acts. But apart from a few well-chosen words from the judge at the time of sentencing, they are processed in a moral vacuum, free to avoid confronting the true nature of their crimes.

V for Vendetta

Vengeance is theirs in sharp 'Vendetta'
By Claudia Puig | USA Today 3/15/06
There is a Pygmalion quality to the relationship between V and Evey, and the film has echoes of A Clockwork Orange and Fahrenheit 451.

Disastrous U.S. and British policymaking gives rise to terrorism - what a shocker
Ruthe Stein | San Francisco Chronicle 3/16/06
Don't go in expecting "Matrix 4'' because the trilogy's creators, Andy and Larry Wachowski, are being heavily promoted as the writers and producers. Their new effort is far more in the subversive tradition of "The Battle of Algiers'' and "A Clockwork Orange.''

Dylan Young | Hour.ca 3/16/06
Penned by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, the book is a piercing evocation of dystopian Britain, every bit as bracing as 1984, A Clockwork Orange or Nicholas Nickleby, and easily their equal in unrestrained and appropriately delivered brutality.

Explosive Filmmaking
Brian Orndorf | OhmyNew 3/16/06
Directed by James McTeigue (his first film after years as an assistant director), the early moments of the film have the same madcap energy and twisted sense of humor found in another anti-establishment piece: "A Clockwork Orange."

Spinning Out of Control
By Tricia Olszewski | Washington Free Weekly 3/17/06
Is it wrong to expect a Serious Examination of the Issues from a pop-cultural whirl that throws together 1984, Batman, Zorro, A Clockwork Orange, and just about any other dark-avenger /rebel-with-a-cause/totalitarian-futureworld source you can think of?

By Derrick Bang | davisenterprise 3/17/06
Readers were appalled by the dysfunctional aspects of Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange," published in 1962; such a breakdown of social order, punctuated by roving bands of well-to-do young rapists, seemed utterly unthinkable. Burgess' vision was no more palatable when Stanley Kubrick put his stamp on the material and transformed it into an equally disturbing 1971 film ... and yet here we are, 35 years later, and the casual brutalities of "A Clockwork Orange" have not only come to pass, but become almost quaintly old-fashioned. How could Burgess have known?

Nearly five years after 9/11, sci-fi flick begins frenzy of terrorism-themed movies
By Joe Neumaier | New York Daily News 3/17/06
Clearly, the movie is more 1984 than Star Wars, with a dash of A Clockwork Orange and Brazil thrown in, as well as elements from such hot-button fantasies as The Matrix, Fight Club and Minority Report.

X marks the spot
By David Germain | AP Movie Writer 3/17/06
First-time director James McTeigue, a Wachowski brothers protege as assistant director on "The Matrix" movies, effectively creates an image of Britain under the government's boot heel, blending the somberness of George Orwell's "1984" with the flair of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" and Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

Positive Review
By Sean Chavel | cinecon 3/17/06
The Wachowski Brothers, creators of "The Matrix" films, were going to make "V for Vendetta" their highly anticipated follow-up film. They wrote the adapted screenplay based on the graphic comic book novel by Alan Moore. The text is an allegory on a futuristic, and eerily plausible, fascist society that owes deeply to "1984" and "A Clockwork Orange."

Sci-fi thriller 'V' becomes a lecture
By Christopher Borrelli | Toledo Blade 3/17/06
V for Vendetta plays at times like a clearinghouse of pop allusions and political commentary, including 1984, Phantom of the Opera, Batman, A Clockwork Orange, Lindsay Anderson's 1968 If..., dystopian future worlds, totalitarian governments, nods to Abu Ghraib, more than a fistful of passing references to the Bush administration, the Patriot Act, Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Thatcher's England, knife fights, the symbolic destruction of landmarks, corrupted bishops, concentration camps, Macbeth, film noir, and the "1812 Overture."

2020 Vision: Takes dystopia to a new level
By Milan Paurich | Cleveland Free Times 3/19/06
Who has time for romance when you're fighting totalitarianism and the fate of the world hangs so precariously in the balance? If that sounds like A Clockwork Orange meets Fahrenheit 451, you're not too far off the mark.


This Clockwork Orange routine must have been a hit.
Derek Malcolm | The Guardian 10/4/03
I remember defense counsels telling juries at the time of Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, in which a tramp was set alight by Malcolm McDowell and his friends, that their clients would never have committed a similar crime if they had not seen the film. Speciousness has never before risen to such heights, and it continues today. "Retrograde" films or videos (of which there are plenty) have been accused of everything under the sun, sometimes by myself. But nothing has ever been proven, and certainly not conclusively.

By Chad Jones 10/1/03
More than 30 years after he was re-invented as a rock superhero, Jesus is still wailing like a member of Black Sabbath through "Jesus Christ Superstar." The 1971 Broadway production was a close relative of the rock musical "Hair" with both apostles and centurions looking like they'd just wandered in from Woodstock. But this version, directed by Kevin Moriarty (based on the 2000 Broadway production directed by Gale Edwards), is a cross between "Rent" and "A Clockwork Orange."

Texas 9/23/03
Audrey Wick, director of first-year English, assigned A Clockwork Orange to her sophomore literature class several years ago. Some students said they were offended by the violence portrayed in the Anthony Burgess novel, so she gave them another assignment. The book remained in the course curriculum, though. Wick said the novel has a significant social message of which violence is a major part. The story follows 15-year-old Alex, a British teenager who beats and rapes London citizens. He is given a treatment that backfires, causing him to attempt suicide. Violent and graphic images are described throughout his ordeal. "I've always felt that people should be able to read what they want. Banning books is just counterproductive."

We Want Our Cheap TV!
By Steve Smith | Econtent November 2001
The holes in the streaming video business model are now obvious to all. To make the model worse, it turns out that aside from the behavior modification screening room in "A Clockwork Orange," the PC may be the least comfortable place ever devised for video entertainment.

10/3/03 - Holy Ghost Revival on their music: 
"I mean, we're not trying to look different, but along with the music, there's a visual aspect. It can't be denied. You can't just go up there in T-shirts and baggy jeans and baseball caps-well, you could, but it sends a different message. I'm kind of more into a Dickensian thing-ripped-up coats and stuff. Or A Clockwork Orange. Or Bela Lugosi. And I'm really into Peter Lorre and all his suaveness."

9/28/03 - Straits Times Asia
But by the mid-1990s, his company was in crisis. Ted Turner's competitive World Championship Wrestling (WCW) had upped the stakes by not only stealing most of McMahon's stars but also by encouraging savage, no-holds-barred tactics from the pages of A Clockwork Orange.

9/23/03 - The Hollywood Reporter interviews Jeff Stein
Stein: That kind of ultra-violence. That kind of "A Clockwork Orange" thing The Who had. Speaking of which, the white boiler suit Pete Townshend (was wearing) onstage at Woodstock. Abbie Hoffman going on stage and going on about, "How can all of you 500,000 people have a good time while brother John Sinclair (the political activist) is in jail for 10 years for two joints”, and Pete came up and smacked him on the head with his guitar and sent him flying off the stage. I looked all over for that and the only thing I ever found was this old port-a-pack footage, but it looked like the (camera person) wasn't really on it when it happened because all that existed was Pete kind of steadying the mic as if something had just happened and something had just gone flying, which was Abbie Hoffman. And then (Pete) says something, like, "Nobody should come up on this fucking stage ..."

9/03 - The Times
Like Hinckley, who would become obsessed with Taxi Driver, a film Bremer inspired, Bremer was powerfully influenced by a movie. The film he fixated on was A Clockwork Orange. He fantasized himself as the sociopathic and sadistic Alex. According to James W. Clarke in On Being Mad or Merely Angry, "After first considering a mass murder in his hometown, Bremer decided that assassinating a prominent representative of that 'silent majority' would be a more spectacular, more outrageously perverse act."

9/4/03 - Gregor Jordan on Buffalo Soldiers:
"And I guess my inspiration for the ending was from A Clockwork Orange, to show that society can't succeed in breaking a character who is totally amoral yet full of energy and appetite. It makes the point that you can't draw up a list of winners and losers. What does war do? It determines who lives to fight another day."

9/03 - John Petkovic
Like "A Clockwork Orange," "Irreversible" reminds us that the production values of violence often affect us as much as violence itself. We cringe when it is personal: when a man bludgeons another with a heart full of hate and a fist full of blood. Yet, we don't think twice about it in its antiseptic, anonymous form.

Archived 2003-09 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net

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