Word: pricks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This decision makes Orton the man, not Orton the event, the focus of the film. We get an idea of the outrageous sexual farce Orton concocted for the Beatles in his never-made Up Against It, but Prick Up Your Ears is far more concerned with the irreverent way Orton dealt with McCartney and Co. than with what he wanted...
...bizarre circumstances of Orton's life hardly make for an empathetic telling, but in Prick Up Your Ears, screenwriter Alan Bennett and director Stephen Frears have fashioned a compelling, naturalistic and extremely entertaining picture. What could have easily been a sexo-literary freak show instead ripples with wit and energy...
...film obliquely raises questions of art and society, but at its heart, Prick Up Your Ears is the story of two intriguing men and their problematic relations. The brilliant performances by Gary Oldman as the randy playwright and Alfred Molina as the whining Halliwell necessarily make the film, because Bennett and Frears have all but ignored the charged times in which the Orton story unfolded. Although painstaking detail masterfully recreates the setting of the story, the filmmakers have largely eschewed an attempt to depict the explosive social scene of 1960s London...
Though bickering has made them famous, the best-kept secret about Siskel and Ebert is that they agree much more often than they disagree. Their tastes are generally similar (two thumbs up for Prick Up Your Ears and Swimming to Cambodia; two thumbs down for Blind Date and The Secret of My Success). Both rail regularly against teen sex comedies, violent horror films and car chases. Good movies are almost always those that have "characters you can identify with...
...Prick Up Your Ears is a view from outside, cool as Orton's craft. But Ken Russell has always been caged inside the beautiful mad creatures he imagines artists to be. No distance, no irony, no coherence, no prisoners. And no surprise that Russell now turns to Gothic, Stephen Volk's script about the famous night in 1816 that Byron (Gabriel Byrne) spent with his mistress Claire Clairmont (Myriam Cyr), his lover John William Polidori (Timothy Spall), his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands) and Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Godwin (Natasha Richardson). From that spectral evening emerged Mary...