Prick Up Your Ears
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Movie Reviews of Prick Up Your Ears
Movie Review: The Joe Ortan story sort of...
Summary: 4 Stars
I liked this film for the scenes involving their defacing of library books (new covers inside flap synopsis)and the librarian playing Sherlock Holmes, to catch them. this is a really funny part of the movie. This film also features men having fornicating with other men and how to do this; So if you believe men should only fornicate with women or just their wives steer clear of this one.
I watched this one as an in site to an artist and didn't know what to expect. Also the great actor Wallace Shawn plays a writer.
Movie Review: Gary Oldman's Other Side
Summary: 4 Stars
Just goes to show his wide range of performances. From this to the Scarlet Letter to the Professional to his Sci-Fi's. He is a Credit to the Screen. Bravo, Mr. Oldman.Movie Review: Separating performance from film leaves me unsettled...
Summary: 3 Stars
There is an awful lot going for this film, but sadly, the way it is presented takes it down a notch or two for me. I just found the construction of this film to be somewhat of a mess, and while I wanted it to engage me, and at times it is, it failed to really rally me in the way I wanted it to. It is an effective piece that kind of falls short of truly grasping all that it could have been, beings that it carries with it some weighty subjects.
The life of playwright Joe Orton is an astonishing one.
Director Stephen Frears (and screenwriter John Lahr) really share all the blame in making this film less than brilliant, for the acting across the board is beyond stellar, and the crisp cinematography (from starlit skies to murky bathrooms to cramped and repressive apartments) is a true highlight. The script is just jumbled to me and it fails to really capitalize on what it has to work with. There are moments that really seem to float and give promise that this is going to really take off, and then it just falls flat once again. I particularly liked the way in which Joe's demise was handled, but it is really just a brief glimpse at Frears capabilities.
Frears is better than this.
The most important aspect of this film is the acting, for it is the most redeeming. Around many a cinematic circle, Gary Oldman is considered one of the most overdue actors for an Oscar nomination in who knows when. He is an astonishing actor who has proven himself time and time again, and this is one of his crowing achievements. He posseses a naughty sensuality that completely compliments the man that was Joe Orton and gives light to Orton's own artistic viewpoints. His self-centered theatrics are superbly handled without any clichéd manipulations. Alfred Molina is astonishing here. When I first saw the film I found him to be rather annoying and obnoxious and I felt he was forced; until the end when his character seemed to click. Upon rewatching the film I saw how his entire performance was really a stem of the inevitable, like a work reversed. If you watch the scenes from end to beginning you can see the progression of his character (or at least the full understanding of his character) and that made me absolutely adore his performance. The queen of the film is Vanessa Redgrave, who just oozes with absolute control as Peggy, Orton's agent. Her scenes were some of my favorite, such a superb supporting work; never taking away from the star but never allowing us to forget she is there.
Marvelous.
Like I said; the acting across the board is phenomenal and some of the best work of the 80's (I'd place Molina and Redgrave on my best supporting ballot for, like, EVER). I only wish that the remaining facets of the film met their grandeur. It was a nice idea, but the execution leaves one wondering how this could have gone so wrong.
Movie Review: The movie that made me a Molina fan
Summary: 3 Stars
And it was this picture that made me a fan of his. Ostensibly a biopic of the late Joe Orton (a British playwright of some note in the Britain of the middle Sixties), the movie is really a study of a relationship. Frears, director of the classic "Dangerous Liasions", brings the same focus to the relationship between the lovers and how the emotional tragedy of an impending break up leads to the ultimate act of despair.
Molina plays Orton's lover who eventually murders him when he realizes Orton's about to move on without him to fame and fortune. So Molina's character bashes Orton's head in with a "blunt object."
It's an intense study a gay relationship; surprisingly frank even for the late Eighties when just having two gay guys in bed together created a firestorm of controversy on the show "Thirtysomething". As Vanessa Redgrave's character put it, "[Molina's character] was the first wife." And he couldn't take it. So as we see all to frequently, he killed his lover and then committed suicide with qualudes.
Molina's edgy intensity and the honesty about gayness in the days in Britain when it was still felonious make for a gem of a movie.
It also shows Oldman's huge talent--too often wasted on brain- -dead actioners like "Air Force One." Still, I suppose one has to make cash for the studios to get to do what one really wants.
Molina's gravitas, and this was my first taste of it, helped to give Spiderman 2 a weight it wouldn't have had and it gives this movie a dignity and pathos that saves it from becoming a mess lurid sensationalism.
Movie Review: Ken and Joe were lovers. ..
Summary: 3 Stars
. . . . well, maybe not lovers but more like two men who
shared a sexual history. When Ken hammered Joe to death,
it was hardly an act of love, but it was certainly an
act of history.
Unravelling the history of Ken and Joe is what Prick Up
Your Ears is about. Joe was playwright Joe Orton. Ken
was first his mentor, then his lover and finally-when
Joe's fame exceeded his-his depressed and angry drudge.
Prick Up Your Ears doesn't unravel the history of this
relationship so much as it caresses its surface,
playing with issues of wit and style. The play is
attractive, even funny, but it never hellps us to
understand what kept this unlikely pair together
for 16 years.
The movie rises above the level of morbid peep
show only by standing on the shoulders of three
great performances. Alfred Molina as the tormented
Ken and Gary Oldman as the sociable and heartless
Joe keep the somewhat superficial screenplay together.
Julie Walters (Educating Rita) as Joe's crazed kin
almost steals the show.
In the end, Orton's inability to recognize the value
that Ken had added to his life and Ken's refusal to
live without that recognition leads the grisly murder-
suicide with which the film begins.