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Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9780792845270 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Original recording reissued, NTSC ISBN: 0792845277 Label: MGM Home Entertainment Manufacturer: MGM Home Entertainment Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: MGM Home Entertainment Release Date: May 02, 2000 Running Time: 111 minutes Sales Rank: 40414 Studio: MGM Home Entertainment Theatrical Release Date: May 08, 1987
Amazon.com: Joe Orton was briefly the embodiment of a certain kind of '60s rebel, and Stephen Frears's film adaptation of the British playwright's biography successfully conjures up that outrageous spirit. The hostile, fussy codependency between Orton (Gary Oldman) and his brooding lover Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) forms the centerpiece of a story that features not only Orton's success and his brutal demise at Halliwell's hand, but also a vivid depiction of what gay sexuality meant in a repressive era. What really propels it are the performances--Oldman's naughty, overgrown boy could believably have written Orton's romps, and the powder-keg priss rendered by Molina helps establish motivations that the script lacks. It's always good to see Vanessa Redgrave (ideal as Orton's agent), and Julie Walters has a hysterically unrecognizable bit as Orton's exasperated mum. If the film is a bit aloof, it's also crisp and often acidly funny (Orton and Halliwell do jail time for writing luridly phony synopses in library books). Frears has done a memorable bit in bringing both a man and his time to life. --Steve Wiecking
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - DVD Pick Up Your Ears
DVD arrived in goodly time and in great quality... the movie itself wasn't as good as I had remembered it, but the service was A-1.
Rating: - What a Way to GO
"PRICK UP YOUR EARS"
What a Way to Go
Amos Lassen and Literary Pride
"Prick Up Your Ears" is a gem of a movie. It tells the true story of English playwright Joe Orton and his homosexual relationship with his talented but not so successful partner, Kenneth Halliwell. It is a solid drama and most amazing is that it is twenty years old.
Joe Orton was a daring and rebellious writer. Told through flashbacks, Orton's literary agent, played wonderful by the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave, relates her memories and reads entries from Orton's diary, beginning ... Read More
Rating: - A Well-Acted, Fascinating Biography
I've been a huge fan of both Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina for years and I think they are both outstanding in this biography of the late British playwright Joe Orton.
Although most people think of Oldman from films like AIR FORCE ONE or the Harry Potter films and Molina from SPIDER-MAN 2, they are both some of the most dependable and most talented actors in films today.
PRICK UP YOUR EARS would be worth seeing for either one of these actors, but both of them make this an excellent film.
I would recommend it to anyone who likes them but I would also warn anyone about the ... Read More
Rating: - Ken and Joe were lovers. ..
. . . . 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 ... Read More
Rating: - A great biographical representation.
Joe Orton was the, "bit of rough", Leicester lad who became the voice of edgy, sexual charged playwriting in the 60's, exactly the kind of representaions peole were seeking at the time.
The film depicts his life and rise to fame beautifully, exploring his sexually charged adoloscence,his early admission to RADA, his emerging and confident sexuality and meeting with Halliwell, throught to his final success and the destruction of his realtionship with Halliwell which led to their deaths; Halliwell battered Joe to death with a hammer before overdosing himself on a barbiturate cocktail (bizarrely Halliwell ... Read More
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