Word: ganges
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...decision, the court declared that capital punishment violates a section of the California constitution that prohibits "cruel or unusual punishment." Thus 107 men and women awaiting death in the state's prisons, including Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson and four members of his gang, will be spared. "Society," said the court, "can be protected from convicted criminals by far less onerous means than execution." Death, the justices added, "is, literally, an unusual punishment among civilized nations." And since the death penalty nowadays is neither swift nor certain anyway, it may not act as much of a deterrent. But Governor Ronald...
...been more than a year since the suntanned Marlboro heman, the Silva Thins cad, the perky Virginia Slims Ms., the romping Salem couple and all the rest of the cigarette-selling gang have appeared on U.S. television. Yet the hopes of health authorities that a tar-free screen might help cut down on cigarette consumption have gone up in, well, a puff of smoke. Per capita use of cigarettes in 1971, at 132.4 packs, stayed just about on a par with that of other recent years, and total cigarette sales increased by a solid...
...nihilistic put-down of an English welfare state grown large enough to make its population (willingly) swallow dubious measures it dictates, the book attacks not only this future society but the unthinking few who rebel from it. Alex, the narrator, is the fifteen-year-old leader of a street gang, one of many which terrorize unwary citizens in poorly-policed night hours. He is a sadistic punk, only a little better than the authority figures he confronts, and no better than the elders he kills and rapes. If his NADSAT slang, composed of Russian, rock and road talk...
KUBRICK, however, removes the ambivalence of the Burgess viewpoint, and weights all material on Alex's side. The people whom the gang beat up are ugly or ridiculous--they spout cant about the lack of law and order or assume mere postures of fear. Alex still gets to screw two teen-age girls, but here he doesn't first get them drunk or shoot them up with horse. Kubrick makes his representatives of the state not only bland, but sexually randy. Most important for audience emotion-letting: out of all the victims seen, only Alex suffers. Kubrick has, in general...
What Kubrick has made from Burgess's fantasy is a plush animated cartoon, with extraordinary color consistency (credit John Alcott's lights), one acceptable action setpiece (a gang battle, not the "Singin' in the Rain" sequence), and a cast of characters in no way as interesting and varied as that of Fritz the Cat. The Ludovico Treatment, not as indispensable to the book's development as Burgess's language and characters, not only dominates the film's outlook, but the way in which it works...