Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

I found this film in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I am pretty confident I would never have even heard about this film were it not for the book. I was most interested to watch it when I found out it was a work by artist Andy Warhol, and then finding out it is an early adaptation of the Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange was even more interesting. Basically it is all set in one room, all the characters are actors hanging around waiting for their cue, or just watching the play-like scenario unfold. Victor (Gerard Malanga) is the leader of the gang who loves violence and being bad, you see a man in the background being tortured throughout, and Victor loves music, including "Nowhere to Run" by Martha and the Vandellas. But Victor is caught by police, the Doctor (Tosh Carillo) is determined to cure him and change his ways, using aversion therapy, which sees Victor strapped to a chair, put in a gimp mask, and made to watch what he originally used to love. Victor appears to be better, but slowly descends into a kind of madness, the film culminates in a short orgy, before Victor slumps down to rest for a cigarette, the film fades to white. Also starring Larry Latrae, J.D. McDermott, Ondine, Jacques Potin and Edie Sedgwick. The acting is very amateurish, you see the actors fluff their lines and drop things, seeing them all in the background suddenly appear as a character is daft, and the worst bit comes ten minutes towards the end when loud music is playing in an opposite room, everything becomes inaudible. I wish I could say I enjoyed this film, but it is so bad that you can't take it seriously, even if it was onstage as a play, you should definitely stick to the brilliant Stanley Kubrick version and not bother with this nonsense, unless you really have to study it as a dedicated cinema fan, a pretty pointless experimental satire. Adequate!

Vinyl is significant in it actually does, after the really, really mixed-bag of The Velvet Underground and Nico, show me that Warhol is somewhat serious about his craft as a filmmaker. It's daring as an experiment actually pays off, for the patient and willing viewer that is. Where-as Velvet took its camera cues from an epileptic monkey on amyls, Vinyl is more ambitious in its minimalist way. And as an adaptation of Clockwork Orange it's... only so close as to maybe reference street crime and being "bad" or "good" and signing your life away. If your looking for droogs, need not enter here you do.Vinyl is, as Velvet was in all actuality and Sleep and Blow Job and Empire, all in 'one shot'. Curiously I never really saw the film change its cans, though maybe that was an editing trick (or maybe not, I'd have to see it again to be sure), but it all looks to be a movie 'in-camera' as it were. It's a kind of deranged classic of framing and composition. Warhol of course is open for improvisation- he doesn't seem like the kind of guy, on the opposite end of Kubrick ironically enough on this project- to do a lot of "takes". Just roll and let it happen. In that sense Warhol had a perverted sense of mixing documentary and fiction, or maybe as with Herzog the lines could blur. This is no way to compare the two filmmakers, but there you go I just did by accident.So, the movie. It's about a, uh, I guess a street hoodlum who see the cops as "good" but doesn't want to be "good" and wants to rail against the f***ers. The film starts out on a shot of this man's face (played by a not-good-but-interesting actor Gerald Malanga) and pulls out to show the whole scene: a woman (Edie Sedgwick) on the right side, a 'doctor' or some authority figure on the left, and a few figures in the back. One of these figures, for at least the first half of the movie, is being tortured while standing up. This makes for a morbidly funny picture as Malanga and Sedgwick dance not once but twice to Martha and the Vandella's fantastic "Nowhere to Run" (this is where Warhol has his best sense of play and fun, something that seems uncharacteristic but must have its moments). Then it goes on to have a 'story' of Victor (Malanga) being caught, brought in for the "treatment" of the Ludovico sort, though it's never called that here perhaps for copyright reasons, and then Victor proceeds to get tortured. Oh, and there's a Gimp in there too. And he's not sleeping.Vinyl does entertain if one can get keyed into it. I was never particularly bored by this, and I have to give credit to Warhol, whether by actual direction or by accident, had a vision for where he wanted to go with the actors and the framing of his 'shot(s)'. It's all content and some style, as the actors move in and out of the frame and it barely changes once it makes its move down into its wide-angle position on all of the players for the movie. Another weird note is that Warhol didn't write the dialog that's given to the actors, many of whom are clearly not professionals by any stretch of the imagination. They even look like they're reading off of the newspapers and stuff they have in their hands, which gives the movie a kind of bizarre theatricality to it.Vinyl takes a look at what few didn't realize was around at the time, if anyone outside the factory or small underground NYC theaters saw this, which is the culture or mentality of S&M and punishment, maybe for pleasure, maybe not. I have to wonder if it was all a put-on, and maybe it was. Warhol must have had a sick-puppy sense of humor, and it comes out here. Certainly I was laughing through a lot of it- maybe at it, but who knows, it is meant to be camp to an extent- and it succeeds on the level of actually being about "something". What that is fully, I don't know. Whatever themes it gleams off of Burgess' novel are very trivial; it could have been any book that's anti-authority and about a juvenile delinquent. The one thing separating it is its science fiction nature of torture and surrendering the body to "science" as it were.I suppose as a recontamination it could go like this: If you have to see one Warhol movie in your life, it might as well be this one. But only if you despise things like cut-aways and montage. If you've also been looking for the longest-take-imaginable, it's here. If you're looking for a coherent adaptation of Burgess' novel... stick with Kubrick, even if he possibly, though not likely, ripped-off the opening shot of his film from Warhol's opening of this movie. Like it or not, its a deranged would-be master piece of single-shot filmmaking.

Man, that Andy Warhol must have really not wanted to spend any money on his movies. I can't even really call this a movie, since it follows no story, and no real directing and acting.Watching this was an horrible experience and it actually felt like a torment. What this movie basically is are Andy Warhol's usual groupies sitting in a corner with a camera pointed at them, doing either weird stuff or absolutely nothing. Appearantly this was Andy Warhol's version and interpretation of Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange' but the movie doesn't even follow its story. It's as if Warhol one day picked up a camera and said 'let's shoot something, I'm bored!'. I'm sure they all had good fun doing weird stuff in front of the camera but why bother us with it? The movie doesn't make a point about anything. It doesn't provoke and it's not even artistically a well shot movie.The camera doesn't move at all, not even when the actors accidentally are out of frame. Also no cuts were made and I'm pretty sure they never rehearsed or prearranged anything. Everything was shot on the spot and things were made up as it moved along. As a result of this the movie just goes on and on, even when absolutely nothing is happening. I seriously had to fast-forward through most of this movie or else I would had most likely never been able to finish it. It was that pointless, annoying and just plain awful to watch.Funny thing is that the 'actors' themselves also didn't had a clue what they were doing. You can constantly hear voices off cam whispering their lines and saying what they should do next. Besides, they are simply horrible at what they are doing. Edie Sedgwick constantly had a hard time not laughing or looking at the people behind the camera's. Highly annoying and distracting.Completely unwatchable, even from an artistic viewpoint.1/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

The brilliance of this movie, is that, Andy Warhol created his version of the greatest film of all time (Clockwork Orange)...SIX YEARS BEFORE the greatest film of all time was even released.The Opening shot.The "Old Up Yours." The Violent "Flickers" If Kubrick never saw this film...I'd be amazed...