Frisky business is the theme of this week’s home entertainment round-up, featuring a trio of films about men — including designer Yves Saint Laurent — who just can’t resist affairs and flings and, well, plain ol’ slutting it up (as in Prick Up Your Ears, above), not to shame anyone or anything.
Now for the details!
Saint Laurent
($34.99 Blu-ray; Sony)
This second 2014 biopic to focus on fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, starring Gaspard Ulliel, is arguably the better one and made without the approval of YSL’s estate and life partner, Pierre Bergé. Gorgeously art directed, in episodic fashion it traces their relationship and YSL’s stardom and tortured genius-fueled delves into drugs and promiscuity.
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Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Prick Up Your Ears
($29.99 Blu-ray, $14.99 DVD; Olive)
Stephen Frears’ 1987 biopic about genius British playwright Joe Orton is essential LGBT cinema, and comes hot on the heels of Criterion’s release of Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette. Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina portray one of the most dysfunctional gay couples ever committed to celluloid — Love Is Strange indeed! — as Orton, who became the toast of London’s West End with cheeky plays like Loot and was even hired to pen a screenplay for The Beatles, and his not-so-talented-wannabe-writer mentor/boyfriend, Kenneth Halliwell, who went bonkers over Orton’s insatiable appetite for cruising and hookups. Comical and tragic, this one’s a must and quite the history lesson to boot.
Finding Neighbors
($24.99 DVD; Strand)
A graphic novelist in midlife crisis starts shifting his attentions from his therapist wife to a gay neighbor in this sleeper dramedy.
ALSO OUT:
I’m a Stripper: Digital Dancer
Pitch Perfect 2
Arrow: Season 3
Modern Family: Season 6
SeeingAll
Who could’t love the idea of Gaspard Ulliel as Yves St. Laurent ?
MarionPaige
Joe Orton’s sexual preference was for under age boys. He traveled to North Africa for the purpose of having sex. Orton’s lover reportedly left a note saying Orton’s diaries explained why he killed Orton. What I think he meant was that Orton was a horrible person and his diaries showed that very clearly.
One of the most revealing passages for me was when Orton described giving a young boy he’d just had sex with vanilla extract and telling the kid it was cologne. He described looking at the kid with glee as the kid smeared vanilla extract across his chest.
Billy Budd
Whay does Vanilla Extract do to a person? Does it have any effect?
CarlIsle
It’s interesting that “Saint Laurent” got better reviews than “Yves Saint Laurent”. Both movies were on the boring, drawn out side, but I actually found the latter marginally better because it covered a longer span of Yves’ life.