Vinyl

1965
4.2| 1h10m| en
Details

Andy Warhol’s screen adaptation of Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange”.

Director

Producted By

Andy Warhol Films

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Trailers & Clips

Also starring Edie Sedgwick

Reviews

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.
Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.
Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.
GholamSlayer There are bad movies, and there are BAD movies. After 70 agonizing minutes, I realized this is genuinely in the running for worst movie I've ever seen. I can't think of a single redeeming feature, just the bad ones, from the wooden acting, truly unimpressive cinematography and staging, (I'd complain about the editing, but there is none), etc. Best to just read the book and watch the Kubrick movie.
dale-51649 This film is difficult to summarize. I didn't realize it was based on "A Clockwork Orange", even being a fan of the much more famous Kubrick version. It basically is the result of Andy Warhol pointing his camera at the various misfits, hustlers and drug addicts that hung around The Factory, and telling them to "act".So why is the film deserving a 7 star review? Well, did you ever see one of those ordinary clay pots in a museum, and find yourself fascinated by it because it was thousands of years old? This film is an artifact of another time; an era when sex, drugs and rock n' roll were more interesting, because they were seemingly happening for the first time.During this black and white"classic" we are treated to a memorable segment of Gerald Malanga dancing so frenetically that we wonder if he suffers from a degenerative neurological disorder. Filled with unnatural energy, he hammers out his various lewd moves with contortions including "the jerk". A bored Edie Sedgwick looks on , first motionless then later unenthusiastically joining in. Is she mocking him? Is she lucid enough to mock? This viewer will never know . In the background we hear several quips of a lascivious and evil laugh, too loud and weird for us ever to forget. If they put warning labels on movies , this one might have one saying "Warning: the following cannot be unseen".The people who are in the film still living can be seriously labeled "survivors", and they are as deserving of the term as anyone who has experienced famine , disease, or abuse. It is easy to see why the life expectancy of 'the scene" was similar to an infantry man on the front lines of any war, and most in these frames are no longer with us. I am sure many avant-garde choreographers have been inspired by the head whipping dance segments , "Beevis and Butthead" come to mind. Memorable, original; but not for the emotionally labile.
Rodrigo Amaro "Vinyl" is so bad that for a moment I almost enjoyed it when I realized what's his creator was intending to do. I almost feel bad in writing a negative review about it because I understood what Andy Warhol made here. The problem is the experience's result on me, how I felt until I reach a positive enlightenment about what this is all about. Seeing the whole picture as a whole it didn't satisfied me to look at it in a good way.Slowing down this confused thoughts, let me go from the beginning now. "Vinyl" is a free adaptation of Anthony Burgess revolutionary work "A Clockwork Orange". You read right. Kubrick wasn't the first to play with this material. Forget about Alex DeLarge, his rebellion, his mates and the violence and all. All we see here is the part of his "treatment" to become a good person and get nauseated with the things at once he used to love. In its one hour and so, "Vinyl" goes to show a young man being tortured by an eccentric group of people through some strange methods such as forced to hear loud music (among the songs there's "Nowhere to Run" - Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, OK, this is not really torture, that is such an uplifting and great song. Might work to the youngsters of today who can only listen to noise they call music), spanking, suffocation and other things. For the most part this young man will suffer physical and verbal abuse to finally reach his "cure". Yes, the characters speak but you can barely understand what they're saying.My enlightenment came after a long while and so many thoughts trying to figure out what's the movie's point. Warhol wanted that we feel all the pain, the misery, the annoyance his main character gets from those people. He succeed in that! We feel bored, hurt to a certain extent horrified by all the punishment the man gets (even if the camera is still and we don't have close ups to see what's happening to him in the background but there's his scream to be heard), we feel anguished, tormented, wanting for all that (the movie, the music and the beatings) to stop. The whole situation is like a damaged vinyl, it keeps going on and on repeating the same part until someone turns the player off, or change the record. Brilliant, isn't it? I got it!Here comes the problem in enduring such thing. It sounded pretentious and it didn't work. Warhol is cheating on us here. David Lynch can disturb us, present his shocking show, make it difficult to us but in the end we feel that we've got something there even if we didn't solve the whole charade. It's easier to enjoy and obtain something from his works. Can't say the same about the pop art master with this particular film that is too long with its allegedly message, it's exhausting and often you'll be closing your eyes, falling asleep but amazingly hearing all what's going on. It's funny that I made the comparison between Lynch and Warhol because it reminds of an overreacting criticism of a reviewer who said that Lynch treated badly his actors in "Blue Velvet", he tortured them by making them perform strange things. I don't see it that way in that movie, but here I do. There's no stunt doubles here, everything looks and sounds quite real (it might have been some technique, I don't know) every time the young actor gets spanked, bound to a chair, screaming and moaning. He was mistreated in so many ways to one can wonder how much money did he got for all of this (you can't get much of an indie project).Like I said before, I feel a little bad for disliking this. It's a bad movie for what it tries to make to us but it's not so lame like many disastrous Hollywood flicks that might had a good intention that got perverted on the way. Highpoint of this is listening to "Nowhere to Run" twice with the actors performing some crazy dance movements. Gladly, such scene appears when I thought this could have been a great movie, right in the first minutes. An experience for the courageous at heart and mind who can spare an hour of his life without getting anything in trade. I watched the whole thing, didn't like it but don't regret nothing. 2/10
Jake Ray At this point in my life I have seen worse and stranger films than Andy Warhol's Vinyl, but I cannot say that improved my viewing experience. The film is the pop-artist's interpretation of Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" and was made six years before the much more famous Kubrick version. Why is Vinyl not as memorable as the widely known and accepted 70's adaptation? The answer to that question is easy - Warhol's version sucks.Vinyl does follow the basic story of "A Clockwork Orange". Victor is a troubled youth who is taken in and made subject to a terrible experiment that makes him submissive to violence. If left at this, the movie would have been kind of neat, but poor production quality and significant artistic liberties make this an unusual and uncomfortable experience.In this film, the camera hardly moves. All of the characters exist is the same small space and world. Warhol's camera is the dictator over what is important, and it never allows the viewer to get a full sense of what is going on. This creates a cramped and almost unwatchable series of events that are sort of explained, yet hardly audible.The acting is almost laughably bad. The cast is made up of Andy Warhol's Factory regulars, and I would be surprised if any of them knew how to properly play a character. Some names that may shout out to art snobs are Gerard Malanga (in the lead role) and Ondine (as Scum Baby). Watching these "famous" socialite figures bumble through their lines is sometimes hilarious. You can hear voices off screen feeding lines to the actors. If they forget what they are saying they will just stop and move on to the next part. It is unbelievable that Vinyl got as far as it did in production.But that ties in to what makes Vinyl sort of interesting. This is not a film that was rehearsed ahead of time. The actors did not know their lines or cues or anything before Warhol put the camera on them and shouted action. Heck, it does not even have an opening or ending sequence of credits. All we open and close to is Warhol yelling the names of the cast and crew from off camera.There is also a very strange homosexual sadist scene around the end of the picture. I cannot confirm or deny whether or not the source material contained any sexual undertones, but Warhol must have seen them in there somewhere. I am not sure why they decided that leather masks and wax burning was the way to go, but I remember the torture scene in the novel to be a bit less...weird.One positive note about Vinyl is that the audience gets to see the beautiful Edie Sedgwick throughout the entirety of the action. She serves as almost a part of the set. She does not speak, but she smokes and dances and forces the audience to pay attention to her. It is no doubt that Warhol wanted her to be a star. She has a mesmerizing quality about her. Knowing the story of her tragic life and death, it was almost sad to see her first on-screen appearance. She did not look as though she knew what she was getting into with the Factory. Even if she did, she was out of place.Vinyl is not the least entertaining movie that I have ever seen, but I cannot understand why it has been deemed significant. Yes, an Andy Warhol telling of "A Clockwork Orange" might seem interesting to the everyday moviegoer - but the horrible acting, sound quality and direction makes the whole thing not worth the time.If this film had been directed by anybody else, I doubt the public would have ever even heard of it. I would have been okay with that. Pop-art and the fifteen seconds of fame may be the good things that Andy Warhol brought to the world, but Vinyl is a bad movie. I would rather look at the soup can for 70 minutes....