Come Anticipate "Brokeback Mountain" With Me

"DO YEW HAYTE MEE?"

Or something like that.

Apparently Michelle Williams may be 'acting' off the set much like Katie Holmes, IF you know what I mean...

Movies like this always make me want to move to one of those shithole militia states - they're all so pretty and clean.

They're the best.

Revenge is sweet, but it's not magic.

I thought Heath Ledger gave the best performance in "Monsters Ball" --I don't care much about accent authenticity, and if only Halle Berry's character had blown her brains out before she did all that caterwauling.

but . . .

I am totally stoked to see them make out with each other.

OW OW OW

Because it is magnificent. Like George Michael's ass, it will one day rule the world.

I've got a GREAT ASS!! Let's go to the video!

Except, particularly with movies, the lionized/cherished love stories seldom see the couple together at the end (exempting comedies -- or unless they're ghosts).

"Maurice" is most definitely wish fulfillment.

And yes, dramatic film love stories generally don't end happily ever after. I'm sure there's several where the story is about all sorts of horrible shit people do to each other or endure and then everything works out in the end anyway, but I can't remember any of 'em off the top of my head.

to provide the source texts so that I'm not badly summarizing:

People can tolerate two homosexuals they see leaving together, but if the next day they're smiling, holding hands and tenderly embracing one another, then they can't be forgiven. It is not the departure for pleasure that is intolerable, it is the waking up happy.- Michel Foucault

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn't have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it 'To a Happier Year' and not al together vainly. Happiness is its keynote - which by the way . . . has made the book more difficult to publish. If it ended unhappily, with a lad dangling from a noose or with a suicide pact, all would be well . . . but the lovers get away unpunished and consequently recommend crime. - E. M. Forster

The question is one of what makes a story worth telling; a story of a happy couple who stay together without incident would be boring, and of course no one would make a film about it. But . . . the imperative that gay sex lead to death and punishment in the name of realism reifies the very problem it depicts/memorializes, and this is a strategic, political problem for how we represent gay existence. It's got nothing to do with whether Annie Proulx's story is well written and moving (which it certainly is in my opinion).

Ultimately, Brokeback Mountain is an anachronism. After one furtive night on the mountain, Jake and Heath are able to analyze their nascent relationship through an early 21st century lens, as though they’d had the benefit of six seasons of Will & Grace behind them.

A lot of this films are awful, but all of them feature a great Keaton performance.

(And I haven't even mentioned her Kay in The Godfather series)

http://towleroad.typepad.com/towleroad/2005/11/gyllenhaal_in_d.html

Proulx may well mitigate the course of many confused, love starved raging hearts...with 68 small pages (large typeset). Amazing. The book/movie underlines,capitalizes and italycizes auto-betrayal of the heart and unites its close cousins - anguish and hoplessness. This rendition of love exposes, in its tortuous lesson, the 'right key'. Timely

Queer cultural critic Gary Indiana (who can be a real ninny, but not so much here maybe) isn't thrilled...

"The case has already been made by some critics that Ang Lee's is the first 'mainstream' movie with 'A-list stars' to deal with a gay male relationship—a weird assertion, given how narrowly 'mainstream' would have to be defined for this to be true, and how small the theater audience for mainstream films, however you define them, has become, and how wholly dependent on DVD sales and rentals this putative mainstream currently is. (As far as that goes, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, remarkable as they are as Jack and Ennis, respectively, have been 'A-list' stars for about six months, which isn't the same thing as being Barbra Streisand or Warren Beatty.)

I'm not sure what this type of claim is supposed to signify—that Hollywood is on the cutting edge of social progress? That every other movie on this subject has been merely a "festival film" or in some other way unimportant compared to one with saturation booking in a thousand multiplexes? Or could it mean that we prefer to think we're making progress when the clock is running backwards?"

http://villagevoice.com/film/0548,indiana,70453,20.html

Jed, you know about this:

Armond White vs Gary Indiana on Christianity & Bresson

and no, i didn't make it to the screening. apparently heath ledger lives off the graham l stop. i think my gf is gonna stalk him. also, after seeing this and jarhead, lisa sez jake is 100% gay. the rumor is he's dating peter saarsgaard (maggie's a beard!).

Jams, you have given me too much dream fodder now... Heath & Michelle Williams lived in Cobble Hill, I thought (and old rumor is Naomi Watts usta beard for Heath).

Kyle, GI's point was that Beatty was a star for 40 years, that JG isn't the icon of 1960s/70s Warren.

Which is clearly bullshit. No one under the age of 45 cares about Beatty or Streisand (esp. Streisand).

CHECK OUT THEM TITSCALAS

http://bestmessageboardever.com/uploads/post-524-1128176479.jpg
http://us.movies1.yimg.com/movies.yahoo.com/images/hv/photo/movie_pix/focus_features/brokeback_mountain/_group_photos/jake_gyllenhaal4.jpg

Since the last time either WB or BS made a film no one except their moms knew who Jake and Heath were, you're mistaken. He's saying it's not as big a risk for them as it would've been for the other two in 1971.

It may not even prove to be the best Disney film starring Gyllenhaal.

http://www.jakegyllenhaal.info/jgallery11.jpg

Except he says nothing about 1971 or 'back in the day.' He says they've been stars for "six months" - which means they can't be cultural figures of Beatty and Streisand's magnitude.

That he's an old fogey may just underscore the fact that he's out of touch. No one cares about Beatty or Streisand. They could play gay grandparents all day long and no one would care - 'cuz no one will see them.

How many big grossers have centered on JG or HL? None (Jarhead
is doing OK).

Now, Morbs, you're right that neither Gyllenhaal or Ledger have single-handedly carried a box-office smash (unless A Knight's Tale counts, which it probably shouldn't) -- but I'd argue that both are very much A-list stars. (And I bet lots of people went to see The Patriot and Day After Tomorrow because of Heath and Jake, respectively.)

The argument seems to take hold if you want to take on Warren Beatty tho, I mean I'm not really sure why he was Indiana's example.

I am pretty sure that Streisand was one of the stars of the top-grossing comedy of 2004.

I would be willing to bet you really good money that more people know who she is than know who Heath Ledger is.

http://www.online.rtlklub.hu/kepek/0507/203749/kolumbusz.jpg

(xpost)

Is Babs enormous among any group of people not getting ready to collect a social security check?

Been to the Castro or Chelsea lately?

DeNiro's lack of "slide off"? Like, The Fan or Rocky and Billwinkle!? :o

Redford though, he still stands as a valid example!

Jams remarking his GF loved it -- the b.o. success will depend on straight women.

Indiana would have had a much better point with a couple of current, legitimate royalty

But see, you get his POINT. Screw the example.

(Dick Tracy had several dozen times the Fun Quotient of every 'serious' comic-book adaptation since, and a Screaming Al Pacino that fit, for once...)

What if Brokeback had been makeable in 1980? Jeff Bridges and Dennis Quaid... mmmm...

Ally, I promise to be rational about 'Spielberg sucks' if I can point out the massive silliness of The Thomas Crown Affair, one hot chess match aside. ;)

Veering dangerously off topic but Dick Tracy has a terrible rap. The worst part about it is actually probably Warren Beatty but even he is ok. I haven't seen it in quite a while though. Both Madonna and Al Pacino were actually great choices, despite their obvious flaws in like virtually every other movie thrown at them. Even Bullworth wasn't really horrible! It is a little unfair, Warren Beatty's drop off had less to do with the actual quality of his work vis a vis others and more to do with Warren Beatty as a person.

*eyes roll back into head.

More bits on the MSM hypefest (Heath: "But in the end, it was just like kissing a person"):

http://towleroad.typepad.com/towleroad/2005/12/the_brokeback_j.html

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/articles/051212fr_archive01

http://www.slate.com/id/2131264/?nav=fo

Read his lovely review of The Lion, the Witch, & The Wardrobe

http://notonlybutalso.typepad.com/notonlybutalso/2005/12/brokeback_promo.html

Armond White doesn't always 'review the reviews.' He critiques the way 'good' films are ID'd and positioned in the culture by the marketing-media complex, which inevitably requires mentioning his peers sometimes. Esp when it's the most visible movie critic in the nation idiotically dismissing War of the Worlds on the grounds that 'tripods are illogical.' Or those who hail a filmmaker who makes one interesting movie (Christopher Nolan) as a visionary, which enables him to make bilious mega-budget juvenilia like -- you know.

Morbs appears to be correct, at least for this guy.

I only saw one of those VV picks (Brokeback Mountain) and thought it was pretty bad.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 1:54 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

Though I'd like to see most of them.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 1:58 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

Wait, why am I posting here?
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 1:58 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

I guess mainly to say: Brokeback Mountain = NOT THAT GOOD.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 1:59 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

I guess mainly to say: Brokeback Mountain = NOT THAT GOOD.
Why didn't you say so when I asked everyone (in Chicago) what they thought? I still really want to see it.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), December 23rd, 2005 2:11 PM. (jaymc) (later)

Mainly because I didn't want to offend my friends on that thread who loved it and also because in the week since I've seen it I've moved gradually from "It was OK, kinda boring but some good acting" to "Wait, that was a pretty sucky movie, huh?" I think before long, I'm going to be all-out hating on it, that's usually how these things work for me.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 3:35 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

So what you're saying is, you hate fags.
-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), December 23rd, 2005 3:37 PM. (jaymc) (later)

I hang out with you.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 3:40 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

I think it's the opposite, I'm so gay-tolerant (YAY ME!) that just a movie being about gay people isn't enough to make it "daring" or "fascinating" for me. There didn't seem to be much point to the movie other than HERE ARE SOME SEMIFAMOUS HUNKY DUDES PRETENDING TO DO EACH OTHER IN THE BUTT, which basically makes it mainstream gay porn but not much more in itself. The story was predictable and dull, Ledger was good but Gyllenhaal was pretty bad, the scenery was nice I guess.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 3:46 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

It wasn't even good gay porn: too many tits.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 3:47 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

Jake's tits or the cows'?
-- Erick Dampier is better than Shaq (wooderso...), December 23rd, 2005 3:49 PM. (miloaukerman) (later)

Princess Diary's tits, Dawson's Creek's tits.
-- n/a (nu...), December 23rd, 2005 4:34 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

POW - I'M THERE
-- j blount (jamesbloun...), December 24th, 2005 2:31 AM. (papa la bas) (later)

Hathaway is actually pretty good in this, considering she has to play a pretty young cowgal as well as a wealthy, manipulative wife straight out of Dallas. As a whole, the aging among the characters in the film was rather unconvincing: I cringed as Heath Ledger's daughter skyrocketed through adolescence while Ledger himself looked the same.
-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), December 24th, 2005 10:35 AM. (jaymc) (later)

Hathaway is actually pretty good in this, considering she has to play a pretty young cowgal as well as a wealthy, manipulative wife straight out of Dallas. As a whole, the aging among the characters in the film was rather unconvincing: I cringed as Heath Ledger's daughter skyrocketed through adolescence while Ledger himself looked the same.
-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), December 24th, 2005 10:35 AM. (jaymc) (later)
I agree with the second part of this, but thought Hathaway was too cartoony-stereotypey. I thought the cute one from Dawson's Creek was better.

-- n/a (nu...), December 24th, 2005 12:23 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

Actually, the whole Gylenhaal plotline post-butt sex is pretty fucking ridiculous exaggerated redneck family drama, like Raising Arizona but "serious."
-- n/a (nu...), December 24th, 2005 12:32 PM. (Nick A.) (later)

mostly agreed, that plotline didn't go much of anywhere but otherwise i thought this was pretty great.

"this is the kind of tasteful tearjerker that's often overrated and smothered with prizes because it flatters our tolerance and sensitivity. Lee focuses on the men's wasted lives and the heartbreak of their spouses and other relatives, but the movie makes one hanker for the sort of unabashed queer stories found outside the mainstream."

Actually, I liked Gyllenhaal much more than Ledger. For once he acts like a sex symbol, putting those blue eyes to good use.

A more legitimately controversial film would have shown Ennis and Jack having fun fooling around whenever they got away to Brokeback Mountain, but perhaps Lee thought this would have violated Proulx's intentions.

The best part of the movie (for me) was recognizing that the Mexican prostitute was played by the director of photography (Rodrigo Prieto).

So it's the Guess Who's Coming To Dinner of 2005, then.

A suspicion that's haunted me since I saw the film; but it's much too cold and spare.

You great feeb, it was Aslan.

Don't forget he also cruises Ennis a few minutes into the film.

I forgot you lived in Miami.

close - San Francisco.

I forgot you lived in Rockford.

What a bunch of crap.

And some bits of Scarface.

Aw yeah.

Lotsa dull dull domestic melodrama, and there's hardly any carnality (or eroticism) in it after the spit-lube. The way the next-to-last scene with the daughter panders to the hetero 'mainstream' made me kinda ill. Bet the Best Picture Oscar, and I wonder if Heath will keep up the Novocaine Mouth in his acceptance speech.

Boys with that brand of bizarre, oversized features can crawl in my tent too.

Wow. I know the scene is not in the story, but any scene as well-played as that one (Kate Mara gives the film's least heralded good performance) works just fine.

Anthony: you got mail.

Compare/contrast slash fiction, written and read almost exclusively by heterosexual women.

I agree, but a rather cold one. It reminded a bit of a Douglas Sirk picture: kitsch redeemed thanks to the director's tonal control.

Apparently Michelle Williams may be 'acting' off the set much like Katie Holmes, IF you know what I mean...

-- Dr Morbius (wjwe...), November 10th, 2005.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You guys realize if there's any pudding in this film, it'll be the strawman indie film as outlined by Cartman in South Park?
-- mike h. (m...), November 10th, 2005.

Can anyone translate, or explain?

xpost
Unsubsantiated rumor: MW and HL's coupling (and child) is a front for his gay/bisexuality.

South Park's Cartman once defined 'independent film' as movies about gay cowboys eating pudding.

People are so often unwilling to explain things these days.

(I saw a ref to Ang Lee referring to The Last Picture Show as a different kind of male-male romance that inspired him, so our Jeff Bridges-Dennis Quaid fantasy version could be within reach. You get the time machine, I'll work on convincing Proulx to write it when we get to 1979.)

Nude Jack washing Ennis' shirt by the river is one of the most erotic scene in the film (and Most Likely to Freeze Frame).

My Fave Erotic Moment: Jack, quietly licking his lips and barely able to keep his hands off Ennis, during his surprise visit after learning about the divorce -- more evidence that Hot Jake was as much up to the physical acting challenges as Ledger.

They are, to contrast marriage, babies, the hearth, all the domestic shit that in the film's ideology make men less manly, and the homoerotic romance of wide open spaces, mountains, rivers and the world of "real men".

(Am will now shit down my throat_)

if they're so vital, then their parts could have been written as more than blank stereotypes. there was so little to them that i just found them distracting. michelle williams got a little more to work with and did fairly well, but anne hathaway had about 20 minutes of screen time total and could barely act her way through what few scenes she had.

Bloggerific WFMU DJ Mark Allen's take (scroll to 12/14) -- has anybody ever heard "stemmin' the rose" before btw?:

http://www.markallencam.com/toptenoftheweek.html

"In their first encounter in the tent, with all the spastic pushing, slap-punching, violent face-butting and pants-ripping, Ledger and Gyllenhaal display the intimacy of a pair of drunken paraplegics fighting over the last belt buckle at a Western Wear closing sale."

This is, of course, quite incorrect.

By LARRY DAVID
Published: January 1, 2006

SOMEBODY had to write this, and it might as well be me. I haven't seen "Brokeback Mountain," nor do I have any intention of seeing it. In fact, cowboys would have to lasso me, drag me into the theater and tie me to the seat, and even then I would make every effort to close my eyes and cover my ears.

And I love gay people. Hey, I've got gay acquaintances. Good acquaintances, who know they can call me anytime if they had my phone number. I'm for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that. I just don't want to watch two straight men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot. That's all.

Is that so terrible? Does that mean I'm homophobic? And if I am, well, then that's too bad. Because you can call me any name you want, but I'm still not going to that movie.

To my surprise, I have some straight friends who've not only seen the movie but liked it. "One of the best love stories ever," one gushed. Another went on, "Oh, my God, you completely forget that it's two men. You in particular will love it."

"Why me?"

"You just will, trust me."

But I don't trust him. If two cowboys, male icons who are 100 percent all-man, can succumb, what chance to do I have, half- to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I'm with at the time? I'm a very susceptible person, easily influenced, a natural-born follower with no sales-resistance. When I walk into a store, clerks wrestle one another trying to get to me first. My wife won't let me watch infomercials because of all the junk I've ordered that's now piled up in the garage. My medicine cabinet is filled with vitamins and bald cures.

So who's to say I won't become enamored with the whole gay business? Let's face it, there is some appeal there. I know I've always gotten along great with men. I never once paced in my room rehearsing what to say before asking a guy if he wanted to go to the movies. And I generally don't pay for men, which of course is their most appealing attribute.

And gay guys always seem like they're having a great time. At the Christmas party I went to, they were the only ones who sang. Boy that looked like fun. I would love to sing, but this weighty, self-conscious heterosexuality I'm saddled with won't permit it.

I just know if I saw that movie, the voice inside my head that delights in torturing me would have a field day. "You like those cowboys, don't you? They're kind of cute. Go ahead, admit it, they're cute. You can't fool me, gay man. Go ahead, stop fighting it. You're gay! You're gay!"

Not that there's anything wrong with it.

Larry David appears in the HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm."

Stephanie Zancharek, whose negative review I otherwise accept, remarked that Anne Hathaway was poorly directed -- a ridiculous assertion.

Mark Allen writes:

In a heartbreaking scene where Lureen [Anne Hathaway] is telling Ennis an obviously made-up story of how her husband died, she's shown reciting the tall tale over the phone in a bored monotone, perched in a gorgeous all-white living room, dripping in silver, turquoise and platinum mile-high hair... any look of emotion on her face obscured by mountains of Mary Kay.

http://www.outsports.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=8;t=002660

(the later pages, obv)

http://www.the-ozone.net/05-06images/football/12-27-05/NotreDame/images/12-27-05-FB-0533.jpg

I read the Ioannis Mookas article you posted. It made several good-but-predictable points ("Is it me, or is there not something inherently masochistic in gays obediently lining up to throw our mythic disposable income at a movie whose stars assiduously deny their own gayness, as well as their characters’?") and a few ridiculous ones (giving your money to the Evil Media Conglomerate NBC Universal; guess I should stop buying major-label albums too.).

None of the film's more fervent dismissals are as perceptive as the guarded raves in the Voice, Slate, and Salon.

Yeah, I grok the quixotic nature of the anti-GE screed, but it makes marginally more sense in the context of this REVOLUTIONARY film! And all the purty shots of pollutant-free Wyoming (Alberta).

Good spotting of DP Rodrigo Prieto in the hustler alley upthread.

Nice late bit by Roberta Maxwell as Jack's mom. Tho the dad's "and there was this OTHER fella" -- maybe the most withering line in Proulx -- loses most of its sting cuz we've SEEN the other fella already.

leaving aside the issue of whether or not i'm "quite incorrect" in my dislike of anne hathaway, this seemed to be the case amongst the audience the other day. it was a sold-out showing, and from what i overheard the main topic of exit discussion was what the telephone scene actually meant. i'm also assuming that not all of these people were drooling idiots incapable of picking up on the subtleties of the plot, and that either her performance or the direction led to some confusion.

I don't know, overall it seemed poorly written or poorly portrayed. I can't put my finger on it.

I'm not saying that Jack was indeed beaten to death; since the scene is definitely shot from Ennis' point of view, it's subjective. But Lureen's reaction (and how Hathaway intoned the lines) sure as hell suggested that she was lying about something.

the wives are vital!! they probelmatize a competely queer reading, they hetreosexualise the discourse.

i think the word "heterosexualise" is a little silly, but you're right, they complicate the film, although a lot of people felt like the film doesn't show much (enough) sympathy with the michelle williams character. in a way her and heath's divorce, like jake's death, seem to invest the narrative with a certain degree of "realistic" chance or randomness but also serve as a kind of escape for the screenwriters who are able to deal only superficially with some of the most knotty issues that a story like this could potentially raise.

the weird last scene w/anne hathaway just amplified the ambiguity of the "flashback" to gyllenhaal's death. the robotic way hathaway recites the circumstances of gylenhaal's death could lead to a number of irreconciliable interpretations. i don't know if it was *designed* that way or if the screenwriters and director weren't seeking that kind of ambiguity. in any event i'm not sure what the ambiguity (intended or not) adds to the film.

i thought hathaway was just fine. anyway i was too distracted in the earlier scenes by her RED HAT. yow.

i still think the last shot was lovely.

actually i agree, but i think that in the context of an overall robotic performance in an underwritten role it becomes ambiguous in a way not perhaps intended.

I was rooting for her to leave Ennis! The film would rightly be dismissed as Guess Who's Coming To Dinner if the wives had been shrewish harridans. In fact, all the women are sympathetically written and acted (even though Lureen's increasingly ridiculous hair-do's are a bit much).

yeah her character was kind of ... inconsistent.

don't know if that means: complexity or incoherence.

the RED HAT was definitely erotic

http://www.co.lubbock.tx.us/HR/Halloween/1_Halloween-Red-Hat-Lady-20.jpg

A.H. should've had a peroxided mustache.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00008438V.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Now this may be the most hetero-pandering scene in the movie. Judging from the audience's reaction (everyone applauded), it had its intended effect, although Lee is too tasteful a director to film a scene like this with intentions this crass.

(hmm...maybe he could use more crassness like this)

Lurleen looked fantastic in the beginning when she was barrel-racing. But the later perioxide look was horrid. maybe that's why jack started going to prostitutes.

Who's Afraid of Riding 'Brokeback'?

BY JIM EMERSON
January 3, 2006

"Whoa, Nelly!" It seems that "Brokeback Mountain" has set off a tizzy of squeamish homosexual panic that's rippling across the nation! From critics to pundits to stand-up comics making sophomoric puns -- everybody's cracking the same lame and uncomfortable "gay cowboy" jokes over and over, but for different reasons, and I'm trying to keep track of it all. Let's see, over here we have those (mostly straight male critics) who think it's "not gay enough" (whatever that means) and might alienate its "core audience." And over here are those (mostly gay activists) who resent that the leads are ostensibly straight actors instead of gay ones.

And over here are some Kinsey 1-6 men and women wiping their eyes and noses on their sleeves. I don't think any of this other stuff would even be brought up now if "Brokeback Mountain" hadn't turned out to be such a darn good movie. And it's a Western, you know.

To me, what's been fascinating are the conflicted reactions of those who either do or do not want to see the movie in the first place: They're "afraid" to see it because of what it might reveal (to themselves or others) about their own sexuality; or they don't want to see it because they think it's a Hollywood plot to ram a "gay agenda" down America's collective throat; or they feel guilty about not wanting to see it because they're not homophobic, but they just don't want to watch two guys in love (even though they do like Westerns); or they want to go but they can't take a (female heterosexual) date (what would they talk about afterwards?) and they don't want to go by themselves or with another guy; or they want to wait until it's out on DVD because they don't want to see it, or be seen with it, in public....

Let's take a look at some examples of "Brokebackophilia" and "Brokebackophobia":

1) Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Heath? Bill O'Reilly (who amazingly thinks that "Spin" and "Talking Points" are two different things) told Michael Medved and Jeannie Wolf that he wasn't going to see it because he was "afraid." Of what, he didn't say, but it was apparently supposed to be a joke about his wooziness when it comes to... what? Horsies? Marlboro Men? Sheep? I dunno. So, then Larry "Not That There's Anything Wrong With That" David wrote a satirical op-ed in the New York Times in which he made fun of people like Bill O'Reilly (and himself), trying to find excuses for why he said he didn't want to see the movie:

I'm for gay marriage, gay divorce, gay this and gay that. I just don't want to watch two straight men, alone on the prairie, fall in love and kiss and hug and hold hands and whatnot. That's all.

Is that so terrible? Does that mean I'm homophobic? And if I am, well, then that's too bad. Because you can call me any name you want, but I'm still not going to that movie.

To my surprise, I have some straight friends who've not only seen the movie but liked it. "One of the best love stories ever," one gushed. Another went on, "Oh, my God, you completely forget that it's two men...." [...]

If two cowboys, male icons who are 100 percent all-man, can succumb, what chance to do I have, half- to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I'm with at the time? I'm a very susceptible person, easily influenced, a natural-born follower with no sales-resistance.
Fox's John "War on Christmas" Gibson (the guy with the biggest, gayest neo-Liberace helmut-pompadour blonde dye job you've ever seen) has announced again and again that he isn't going to see "the gay cowboy movie" (ha ha!) either, and was glad that Larry David, uh, "rode to [his] rescue." Funny guy. Funny ha-ha, I mean.

To me, this is the funniest part of the whole homosexual-panic reaction to "Brokeback Mountain" -- not just that seeing it or not seeing it is seen as a kind of statement, but that it's necessary for people to make a statement about seeing it or not seeing it. Some people not only feel defensive about not wanting to see it, but feel compelled to come out and announce that they don't want to see it. Does that mean they're really homophobic, or latent queer, or right-wing fundamentalists or all of the above? I "came out" recently about my (initially) unconscious resistance to seeing "King Kong" (it has to do with the 3-hour running time and my fear of feeling bad when they kill the big, sweet, furry galoot -- I don't like to see even CGI animals get hurt), but since when do people have to feel so guilty or conflicted about not wanting to see a movie? As it happens, Larry David's straight friends are right: Part of what's so good about "Brokeback Mountain" is precisely that it's a great movie love story and that you don't even think about playing stupid, reductive identity politics with the characters' lives.

(Anybody who thinks that "straight" and "gay" are permanent or exclusive binary options, or comprehensive definitions of human sexuality, will probably be surprised or confused by the movie anyway, because it doesn't make an issue of "gay" or "straight" identity or behavior. It's just a movie about the lives of these two guys who meet and work together and develop a friendship with benefits at a crucial time in their lives -- and, as with a lot of male friendships, that early on-the-job bonding becomes a life-long relationship. And, every once in a while, Jack and Ennis have sex.)

My friend John, whom I've known (entirely platonically!) for almost 30 years and who now lives with his wife Mary in Los Angeles, told me recently about a male friend of his who wanted to go see "Brokeback Mountain" but didn't know how. He knew he couldn't take a date. He didn't want to go by himself -- or with another guy (how would that look? he obsessed). So, John came up with the perfect solution: He invited his friend to accompany him and Mary.

"Great!" said the friend. "But if Mary cancels, I'm not going."

John, who's in the music industry, said: "This is the perfect DVD movie. It could be huge."

2) "Not gay enough" or "too gay"? "Brokeback Mountain" -- like "Munich," another one of 2005's best movies -- does not paint its characters in solid black-and-white. But that's exactly what worries some, who have been trying to predict whether (supposedly straight, "mainstream") audiences will find it "too gay" and be turned off, or whether (supposedly gay, activist) audiences will find it "not gay enough" (in a political sense) and be turned off.

In his "Straight dudes' guide to 'Brokeback,' " David White at MSNBC offers some advice to those who are worried about the "too gay" part:
You kind of have no idea how important it is for you to shut up. But it’s crucial. I was recently at a press screening for another movie and I overheard four guys in the theater lobby talking about “Brokeback.” They were resolute in their refusal to go see it and they couldn’t stop loudly one-upping each other about how they had no interest, were not “curious,” and were, in the words of the loudest guy in the group, “straight as that wall over there.” Oh, the wall with poster for the Big Gay Cowboy Movie on it? That straight wall? Well here’s something that everyone else now knows but that guy: he’s probably gay. Being silent marks you as too cool to care about how other men see you. It means you’re comfortable and not freaked by your own naked shadow. Did Steve McQueen go around squawking about how straight-as-a-wall he was? No, he didn’t. He was too busy being stoic and manly.
And besides:
It’s about 130 minutes long and 129 of them are about Men Not Having Sex.
And:
Dude, it's a western.... And the script was adapted by none other than Total Dude Larry McMurtry. That guy is the coolest western writer in the country. He wrote “Lonesome Dove.” You love “Lonesome Dove.” In fact, the only problem with remembering that it’s a western is having to ignore the fact that most westerns are about 1000 percent gay. If you think I’m making that up, just go watch “Red River” again.
I would add that "Brokeback Mountain" isn't even 10 percent as gay as "Top Gun" or "Jarhead," and that the man-on-man contact in both those films is much heavier and more explicit than any "stemming the rose" in "Brokeback."

Back in September, David Poland, over at The Hot Button, made a prediction after seeing "Brokeback Mountain" in the mountains of Colorado at the Telluride Film Festival:
I still think that there could be some backlash against the film since it depicts gay men (presumably, though one of the two men is clearly a happily active bi-sexual and the other seems okay with married life though obsessed with the other man, though not men in general) as unable to move forward, suppressed by society and the threat of anti-gay rage rearing its head. It's hard to imagine Larry Kramer or Andrew Sullivan going for the politics of this film.

On the flip side, I didn't find a gay man at Telluride who saw the film and was not a fan, including some very, very smart, fully out, sharp-tongued guys. [...]

In so many ways, "Brokeback Mountain" is not inherently political. It is a very old-fashioned romance....
More recently, in the Village Voice year-end movie poll, critic Steve Erickson said:
It's no surprise that a "Brokeback" backlash is coming, but the form it's taking is odd: straight male critics complaining it's not gay enough. They think a gay film has to prove — or at least aspire to — its outlaw authenticity. "Brokeback" is not just another story of tragic, helpless victims. Repression, especially the internalized variety, is the clear villain here. It comes in many forms: Straight people claiming the authority to determine queer legitimacy and then fetishizing it is one.
... while another critic, Nathan Lee, wrote:
If I hear one more straight critic complain that "Brokeback Mountain" isn't particularly gay, I'm gonna spit on my hand, lube up my ----, and ---- him in the ----. I'm only kissing if he looks like Heath Ledger, though.
Only Lee didn't use all those little dashes.

So, you may be shocked to learn that, despite what you may have been led to believe, "Brokeback Mountain" is not, in fact, all things to all people. I know, it's a wild concept. The movie tells a small-scale, narrowly delineated story, specific to these individual characters in their time and place, that makes no overt political claims -- except, natch, that it's part of a Hollywood conspiracy to promote a "pro-gay" agenda. It's also not particularly gay, although there's some of that in it.

Which brings me to my favorite "review" of "Brokeback Mountain" over at Red State Update. In a variation on SCTV's "Farm Film Report" with Billy Sol Hurok (Joe Flaherty) and Big Jim McBob (John Candy), Jackie Brole and Dunlap (played by Nashville comics Travis and Jonathan) discuss that new "King Kong" movie everybody's been talkin' about (the new one, not the old black-and-white one), and how it's nice to enjoy a good Western. What I think is particularly great about this hilariously inarticulate discussion -- which is sort of the whole "Brokeback" tizzy in a nutsack -- is that it's not just another stupid "gay cowboy" joke, but is more about the perceptions of moviegoers than it is about the movie itself.(Thanks to readers who sent in this link.)

3) "Is it breakthrough enough"? Finally, and perhaps most curious of all, is a commentary by my former Los Angeles Film Critics Association colleague David Ehrenstein, who points out that "Brokeback Mountain" is not a gay breakthrough like some are saying because it was preceded by many much gayer movies, and that those who say it's some kind of "gay breakthrough" are wrong because the movie is not what they say it is -- i.e., a "gay breakthrough" movie. Then he kind of bashes the movie for not being the very thing that he says it isn't:
Heath Ledger’s faithful Ennis Del Mar waits for Jake Gyllenhaal’s straying Jack Twist and his “fishing trip” invites just as Irene Dunne pined away for a “drop-in” from her married lover, John Boles, in 1932’s "Back Street." But we’re not supposed to speak of such things, living as we do in what Gore Vidal calls “The United States of Amnesia.” We’re instead encouraged to ignore the precedents shattered by three decades of truly groundbreaking queer films — with "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (1971) leading a pack that also includes "My Beautiful Laundrette" (1985), "Parting Glances" (1986), Todd Haynes’ "Poison" (1991) and "Velvet Goldmine" (1998), Gus Van Sant’s "Mala Noche" (1985) and "My Own Private Idaho" (1991), "Savage Nights" (1992), "The Long Day Closes" (1992), "Wild Reeds" (1994), "Urbania" (2000), "Les Passagers" (1999), Patrice Chereau’s "L’Homme Blesse" (1983) and "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train" (1998), "Kinsey" (2004), and, just this year, "Tropical Malady" and "Mysterious Skin." No, what’s really supposed to be important is the saddle-packing same-sex equivalent of "Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner."

Newsweek’s Smith is simply agog at how “Gyllenhaal and Ledger don’t dodge it. The kissing and the sex scenes are fierce and full-blooded. But if the actors were taking a risk, they sure don’t seem to think so.” Goodness, you’d swear the thing starred Tom Cruise and Kevin Spacey.

And what about gay actors playing gay roles? Is it beyond their ken? Would they be open to accusations of “simply being themselves” rather than “really acting”? In a marvelously irreverent article published in The Guardian called “Gay for Today,” writer Philip Hensher put it best: “There are no gay actors — or at least, there weren’t until Nathan Lane, to everyone’s utter incredulity, came out. Of course, there were gay actors in America’s past — James Dean, Cary Grant, Dirk Bogarde, Rock Hudson, Danny Kaye. Plenty of them, in fact. But, for whatever reason, there’s hardly a single gay actor of recognizable stature working in Hollywood. An incredible fact.”
Maybe I missed the part where "Brokeback Mountain" announced it was a "gay breakthrough." (Oh, the marketers are also being criticized for downplaying the gayness -- even though there may not be enough -- in trying to reach a "mainstream" audience.) I agree with David that all the swoony talk about how "brave" this solidly classical movie is -- or the actors are -- is sheer sheep dung. But "Brokeback Mountain" is no pedantic liberal thesis movie like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." And it's not the movie's fault that some ignorami are writing about it as if it were. (David: Think "All That Heaven Allows" or "Ali -- Fear Eats the Soul," in the guise of a traditional, sexually and emotionally repressed Western. Is there any other kind -- "Johnny Guitar" excepted? I mean, while we're citing Todd Haynes and Gus van Sant, shouldn't we mention Douglas Sirk and R.W. Fassbinder and Howard Hawks and John Ford -- "Two Rode Together," indeed! -- too?)

As for the "gay actor" question, I look at it this way: We all know there are a lot more gay actors playing straight parts than straight actors playing gay parts. The big difference is that the gay actors pretend that not all of what they do is acting.

Hensher's catty comments are so disingenuous he reminds me of Austin Powers: "Yeah, and I can't believe Liberace was gay. I mean, women loved him! I didn't see that one coming." Surely there's no doubt that are at least as many high-profile gay (or Kinsey 1+) actors working in Hollywood as there've ever been. And just like those Hensher mentions from the past, most of them -- with the notable exception of "Lord of the Rings"/"X-Men" icon, Sir Ian McKellen -- are not "out" to the general public. But everybody in the movie biz seems to know who they are. Or, at least, they've heard some pretty good rumors.

Whether these actors want to officially come out on the job or not is up to them. I'd like to think it wouldn't hurt their careers at all, but I'm not going to blame them for shutting up if they think it would. Or if they just don't want to deal with the particular kind of media attention they'd be inviting. And, again, that's hardly the fault of "Brokeback Mountain" or Ang Lee or Heath Ledger or Jake Gyllenhaal. Don't hate them because they're pretty!

So, there you go. It's completely up to you if you want to see or skip the first sort-of gay but maybe not gay enough cowboy love story Western picture show. Just don't assume it's what anybody else tells you it is. Or isn't. You know what "assume" does...

No, and no.

A Western by definition is not centered solely on a romance. A manhunt, a cattle drive, defeating the railroad baron ... In fact, the romance usually is soured by/interferes with this objective. But cuz BBM has the right hats and scenes at rodeos, got-damn, it must be a Western.

i do think the sort of pat critical pronouncement that "it's a western" is one of those mildly "shocking" statements that doesn't really hold water. so i'm basically agreeing with you.

more to the point, what PURPOSE does calling this film a Western serve? not a very interesting one to my mind. yes, it's about the West. yes, it's about ranch hands in big hats. but it otherwise doesn't engage (critically or otherwise) with the "Western" syntax.... which is not a criticism.

Rancho Notorious: But she made the wules on that wanch! Very political! Plus it has manhunt / suspense / climactic shootout elements, doesn't it? (It's been years.)

This is brilliant.

or like every melodrama ever made for that matter

(not a bad thing!!)

-- ShawShank Rambo Connection

what did you think it meant?

the first half played out like a silent movie, if there had been no dialogue or sound you would have been able to follow the action quite closely, partly becasue the camera lingers so long on the charaters faces and because of how conventional Ang Lee's language is (i mean this in a good way). Also it has lots of those kinds of shots that act as foreshadowing devices ( As soon as Anne Hathaway's red hat comes off you know Jack is going to mary her) or to fill in for action off camera (shot of exterior of tent/ shot of clouda passing across the moon/ shot of jack and ennis holding hands etc), or which are just cliche'd shots used well (the rear view mirror as jack drives away from ennis).

another thing about the first half of the movie is that it doesn't communicate any overhelming passion or joy or even, apart from a brief scene witnessed by the boss, any fun between the men so that you are, to an extent, left wondering why the romance kicks off in the first place and why ennis, in particular, is so keen to revisit it 4 years later. i think you can look at that as a strength or a weakeness. it's possibly a strength in that the film maker is trying to communicate that there's degree of nostalgia (for simpler times without the commitment of wives and children to look after) that pulls the men back together.

The Performaces are all pretty good, especially Heath Ledger (to my amazement), Michelle Williams and Roberta Maxwell, incredibly moving in those brief scenes as Jack's Mother. Anna Hathaway isn't so much bad as miscast. Here's Annie Proulx's hilarious appraisal of Heath Ledger's Performance:

"Heath Ledger erased the image I had when I wrote it. He was so visceral. How did this actor get inside my head so well? He understood more about the character than I did. This isn't nice for a 70-year-old woman to say, but it was a skullfuck."

Skullfuck!

the film gets much stronger once it opens out to include other charaters. i thought the scenes with both Ennis's daughter and his new waitress girlfriend worked particularly well andit would have been nice to see more of them but, since Proulx herself says to little of them it, at least, stays true to her story.

Of course the key to Ennis's love for jack is that he never really appreciates the man until he's gone. there's a hint of this with the final scene at the lake but the film packs quite a punch in the beautifully judged scene where Ennis finds the shirts in Jack's room. i had to fight back the tears at this point. The final scene and the shot afteR Jack's daughter leaves the trailer are almost unbearably moving.

The movie has been discussed so much that we've almost overlooked what it does superlatively well, of which that first scene is a fine example. It's pretty clear that Jack is cruising Ennis; what's remarkable is that Lee lets the scene play. It's been a long time since a mainstream film eschewed dialogue for cinematography, body language, and the sheer gorgeousness of the actors.

another thing about the first half of the movie is that it doesn't communicate any overhelming passion or joy or even, apart from a brief scene witnessed by the boss, any fun between the men so that you are, to an extent, left wondering why the romance kicks off in the first place and why ennis, in particular, is so keen to revisit it 4 years later.

During their idyll on Brokeback Mountain there are hints. Ennis gets upset when Aguirre calls them back a few weeks early. Their goodbye is very well acted: watch how Gyllenhaal tries to stay non-chalant and fails miserably.

Jack, the one most likely to live on Castro Street, seeks him out on a hunch. His moneyed married life was going nowhere; he takes a chance and sends a postcard to the last guy with whom he had any fun (it's clear he's interested in other men besides Ennis), with no hope that Ennis will respond.

(not a bad thing!!)

Nah, of all that genres that live on, I'm most ready to bury this one.

Sarah Schulman from Slate's year-in-culture summary:

Brokeback opened the door to a far more complex look at how homophobia destroys people's lives, the consequences of cruelty on gay people's emotional stability, and how familial homophobia is the place where much of this is enforced. Where the movie fell short was in the acknowledgement of gay subculture and rebellion. It seems unlikely to me that Jack Twist would have missed the existence of the gay revolution. All he had to do was turn on the television or go to church to hear about Anita Bryant and Gay Liberation in Dade County, or stumble onto the Gay Rodeo circuit, or go to a dentist's office to see Leonard Matlovich on the cover of Time magazine.

http://www.slate.com/id/2133842

Of course he didn't. Check out his sideburns and 'stache!

said the music jarred a little in places tho; which I didn't notice

"Ennis, girls don't fall in love with fun"

"I wish I knew how to quit you" was a little wishy-washier and whatever heath was saying, around that time, too, wasn't great but oh well

totally

There were problems - neither wife had enough screentime to be either really good or really bad (though MW's eyes/reaction shots when she first sees Jack and Ennis were fantastic), and that same guitar line that played whenever they were together got annoying fast, but the strings that blended into white noise at other times were a nice touch.

In a way, I guess all the stuff upthread about it catering to hetero audiences and not being all that radical in its depiction of homosexuality, etc. is right, but I think that's because the gayness (as promoted) was a red herring. I saw a movie about longing and repression and being stuck in the same damn place your entire life, unable to save yourself or make a better life.

The last shot: after Ennis buttons up Jack's shirt he looks at a postcard of Brokeback Mountain, mumbling "Jack, I swear..." then the camera pans away to the open window.

It is devastating. He's still keeping the love of his life in the closet.

Last night's Tonight Show appearance by Heath Ledger was fairly remarkable, because Ledger and Leno managed to talk for a solid 15 minutes, much of it about Ang Lee and Brokeback, and never mention the word gay or anything approximating it.

Ledger: "I just looked at it as an incredible opportunity to play this, you know...complex, lonely figure..."

The omission seemed fairly obvious to me...

http://towleroad.typepad.com/towleroad/2006/01/talk_about_brok.html

crosspost

nick and I were sure we recognised her from something else but imdb says she hasn't been in anything I'd have seen

See Havoc, in which she plays a brazen teenage strumpet.

the movie goes for a solid two hours without mentioning the word gay!

S1ocki:

"You know I ain't no queer."
"Me neither."

When Jack's mother helps Ennis put Jack's shirt in the bag, does she put Jack's slip Jack's ashes in there too? I know there was a moment between Ennis and Jack's mom, but I didn't quite see / don't remember what exactly happened.

If so, perhaps Ennis in the last scene is swearing he will scatter Jack's ashes on Brokeback... even though it may be a while, what with his daughter wedding and his history of letting jack down, etc.? I dunno.

But Jay and Heath didn't even mention "stemmin the rose"! (and presumably they're not closeted 1960s sheep herders)

Compare his interview to Gyllenhaal's last week, in which the gay stuff was NOT ignored and Gyllenhaal was as open and coltish as Jack Twist. Maybe cuz he's more at ease in the spotlight.

If so, perhaps Ennis in the last scene is swearing he will scatter Jack's ashes on Brokeback... even though it may be a while, what with his daughter wedding and his history of letting jack down, etc.? I dunno.

Nope. It's ambiguous. Again, the story (and I paraphrase): Ennis mumbles, "Jack, I swear" even though Ennis is not the swearing kind and Jack had never asked him to swear anything.

you're being sarcastic, right? those huge, close-up shots of his face on the big screen... holy god damn i'll break his somethin'

I saw a minute or two of the Ledger interview - I think he was still in-character from the junkie movie he's doing. What little I saw consisted of him refusing to make eye contact with Leno.

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), January 18th, 2006. (tracklink)

duh... thanks a lot, though, that's the hottest thread ever

http://boxofficemojo.com/daily

"hetero-pandering" is such a cynical phrase.

Was dragged to see this for a second time with a straight friend swayed by the publicity. A lot of my objections now seem trivial. I'm more impressed now by Heath Ledger's great physical performance; so few actors these days know how to move in character. By the time Jack Twist delivers his excoriating final monologue Ennis has for all intents and purposes shriveled, a smoking and drinking waste of a man. All those scenes of Ennis hunched over at a bar are quietly and insistently convincing.

The Thanksgiving scenes - in which Jack and Ennis try to convince the audience that they're Real Men besides being fags - are the only hetero-pandering moments.

And the score is wonderful.

The Director's Fingerprints by Joe Morgenstern

since you have to be a subscriber to read the article on internet, I copy and paste the key points:

Pinning down who did exactly what can be hard even for someone who's been an intimate part of the process. "Ang Lee has a way of letting the film unfold itself," says Sydney Pollack, a top-flight director in his own right who was the executive producer of "Sense and Sensibility." "He's like a Zen presence on the set. He has a way of tapping the energy that already exists in writers and actors and other people working for him, of perfectly mixing it so that he doesn't ever appear to have his hands all over it. Yet every movie he's ever done bears his stamp quite clearly."

All of which goes back to the original question: How do we as spectators see that stamp? Where do we find the direction? Clues vary from film to film, but, as a case in point, I've picked a few from Ang Lee's most recent film, "Brokeback Mountain." They're nothing more than clues, since I'm a spectator too -- I wasn't on the set to watch him work -- but they may give some sense of the director's sensibility.

The opening shot bespeaks both immensity and simplicity -- a far-off trailer truck, announced by two notes on a guitar, traversing a vast mountain landscape at night.

The early sequences -- the two cowboys, Jack and Ennis, moving sheep through the mountains -- are photographed lyrically, but again the shots are strikingly simple. When the men speak haltingly of themselves, their scenes are paced somewhere between leisurely and slow. At first I found the pace trying, then came to recognize it as a sign of the director's trust in his audience's willingness to stay with the story as it unfolds.

Heath Ledger's Ennis -- hooded, laconic, recessive -- is a radical departure from the actor's previous work. Does that mean the decisive influence was directorial? Not necessarily, but at a minimum the director was hospitable to his co-star's performance.

The first leaps in time -- suddenly Ennis is married, and then, just as suddenly, the father of two children -- are so abrupt as to make you wonder if the projectionist switched the reels. But they're evidence of the director's daring; time will not be wasted on tidy transitions.

The film looks spare throughout -- plain buildings and plain rooms to go with the plainspoken protagonists. That's the province of the production designer, to be sure, but the consistency of style, both physical and visual, suggests a strong directorial influence as well.

There's enormous power in the long, almost silent passage when, and after, Ennis's wife discovers her husband in a passionate embrace with Jack. Michelle Williams created the performance, but Ang Lee -- and his editor -- constructed the sequence in a clear-eyed way that shows the actress's work to stunning advantage.

A phone call, near the end, brings Ennis important news about Jack from Jack's wife, Lureen. (I'm avoiding specifics for those who haven't yet seen the film.) Another director might have played most of the scene on Ennis's face, since the news affects him most directly. Ang Lee chose to give much greater prominence to Lureen, who, thanks to Anne Hathaway's acting, tells an enthralling tale beneath the camera's steady gaze.

These discrete, somewhat abstract observations can't begin to convey the totality of the film. Taken together, though, they reflect some of the qualities that inform the film -- physical beauty, clarity, confident pace, firm though delicate control. If there's a single word for what connects these various qualities, it's direction.

(He's since apologized, but here's an excerpt of his original review:

The sheep do nothing special as they bleet around the bush, but Jack and Ennis do do something special. They have sex. Jack, who strikes me as a sexual predator, tracks Ennis down and coaxes him into sporadic trysts. But sporadic isn’t frequent enough for Jack. He wants Ennis full time! He whines, he pleads, he shouts that when they’re apart, he’s desolated. Jack can’t absorb Ennis’ implied response: better desolate than never! Heath Ledger’s performance under Ang Lee’s direction is outstanding, and Brokeback does have a few dramatic peaks. But this may be because its unconventional theme is outside the buns, it is being wildly overpraised. Not by me!)

http://towleroad.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/marlboro_towleroad_1.jpg

Ang Lee continues to astonish. In 1995, when his best-known film was Eat Drink Man Woman, set in his native Taiwan, the producers of Sense and Sensibility tapped him to direct their picture: an act of perception, of courage, for which all of us owe them thanks. Lee proceeded--incredibly--to make the best of the Jane Austen films. He then went on to make five more pictures, among which were two ultra-American ones, The Ice Storm, about Connecticut suburbanites, and Ride With the Devil, about the Civil War.

Both of those films, whatever their other qualities, were made with societal comprehension. The fact that Lee was educated in theater and film at American universities must of course have much to do with his American ease. Now he shows it again in Brokeback Mountain, which deals with the American West in the twentieth century, and now we owe even more thanks to the producers who launched him on his unique career. (One of those producers worked on this new picture.)

The screenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on a story by Annie Proulx, is about two cowboys who are lovers. In 1963 in Wyoming, two ranch hands named Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are hired to spend the winter tending a thousand sheep up on Brokeback Mountain. (Shepherds though they are, through much of the film they call each other "cowboy," and we do see them later with cattle.) Ennis and Jack had not known each other previously, and they don't spend a lot of time together now. Ennis sleeps somewhere off near the sheep, and Jack bunks in a pup tent. One inclement night, however, they share the tent. There has not been the slightest hint of physical attraction between them, nor is there now as they bed down together. During the night, however, they find themselves--the phrase is apt--having sex.

In the morning they are their customary laconic selves as they go about their jobs, but they are both marked for life--by love. They have sex together again up in the mountains. Later on, through the years, they continue to meet as often as they can, even though in time both of them marry. The film traces their torment when separated, their happiness at reunions, and their near-pride in their private selves. Their marriages are not blissful--Ennis's wife indeed has seen the two men kissing--but they seem to accept marital trouble as part of the world's harassment of their truth.

The delicacy and pain and almost unbearable joy of the pair, though given to us through the actors, began with Lee, I believe--his vision of Ennis and Jack. He apparently sees their relationship as double. One part is the basic human lot, their immersion in a general current of emotional need that seems to flood around all men and women, that looks for reification, for person and place, in one or another sort of gender relationship. The second part is more specific: the morning after their first experience, Ennis and Jack virtually decide that they must be in love. They specify to each other that they are not "queer," but the condition that allows them to be themselves without shame is to believe that they are in love. This is a matter far from fakery. They are as truly in love as two people can be, but they are grateful for it because this spiritual union licenses them to continue their occasional beddings, and helps to justify each man to himself.

Their story does not finish as they might have wished: it couldn't, given the world in which they live. But their relationship from beginning to end has a finespun texture that is, I'd guess, the result of Lee's vision. His treatment of their love is so affirmed yet gentle that it seems, more than the story, the purpose for which he made the film.

The landscape in which most of it takes place is majestic, thrilling. It was actually shot in the Canadian Rockies, and the cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto, presents the scenic marvels to us like resplendent gifts. The interweaving of the grand landscape with the intimate story has a peculiar synesthetic effect: it almost transmutes into music, Beethoven perhaps, in which great chords shape the cosmos through which a poignant lyrical theme winds.

Brokeback Mountain does not contain the slightest suggestion that its purpose is to chronicle a case or a social problem. (It has provoked a blizzard of articles on the subject of cowboy homosexuality, most of them paying little attention to the film's art.) It simply treasures two human beings who, unlikely as we may have thought it for these men, find themselves fixed in a discomfiting yet thorough passion. They inhabit a world that vaunts macho masculinity; nonetheless they seem secretly fortified by their fate.

The two leading actors are superb. Merely to remember their performances is to be moved again. Ennis is played by Heath Ledger, an Australian who has mastered western accent and bearing. He gives Ennis a solidity through which his new experience shivers like a crack through a rock. (An extrinsic fact to whet appetite: Ledger has just appeared in a film as Casanova.) It seems possible that, even allowing for the messiness of almost any acting career, Ledger may be on his way to the heights. Jack is Jake Gyllenhaal, who, in an odd way, has been slipping quietly into prominence. His performances in Proof and Jarhead hardly went unnoticed, but his Jack makes us realize that we have been watching the emergence of something more than a usable young leading man. As Jack, he creates a dogged sensitivity, a man who has not lived by emotional finesse but now finds himself capable of it and will not relinquish it.

Lee's part in these performances? In the diary that Emma Thompson kept while making Sense and Sensibility, she wrote: "I am constantly astounded by Ang--his taste is consummate. It sometimes takes a while to work out exactly what he wants but it's always something subtler." It seems highly likely that Ledger and Gyllenhaal could say the same.

So in all the tumult about this film, the eruption of its subject into wide attention and the consequent revelations about cowboys' lives in the past, let us--without forgetting the American sources of the screenplay--acknowledge the anomaly that the director is Chinese. Where his mind and imagination will take Lee next I do not yet know, but I certainly want to follow.

Hello, jeans in the 60s were butt-tight!

Go to your local vintage store and try on a pair of 60s jeans if you don't believe me.

Holy shit, SOMEONE ELSE HAS SEEN IT.

The movie also misses the deepest joy of family, which is that sense of connection to the great wheel of life. Giving birth to, educating and loving a kid are among the profound joys of human existence. "Brokeback Mountain" cannot begin to imagine such a thing; that reality simply is not on its radar, and if you looked at the story from another vantage -- the children's -- it would be a different tale altogether: about greedy, selfish, undisciplined homosexuals who took out a contract in the heterosexual world, and abandoned it. They weren't true men; they failed at the man's one sacred duty on Earth, which is to provide.

Having babies is universally accepted as a "profound joy"?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020102477.html

...emphasis mine.

I'm sorry... huh?

xpost

THOSE RED STATE CONSERVATIVES ARE RESISTING THE RIVER SODOM AS IT OVERFLOWS ITS BANKS.

http://www.queerty.com/queer/brokeback-art-s.jpg

(OTOH, the best scene - Ennis flipping Alma over to give 'er the Old Jack Twist is also in the book, so it all balances out)

Yeah, the Twist Thanksgiving with the TV set.

And I agree with Anne Hathaway: she admitted that they were all surprised when Williams found the one correct way to say the line without laughing.

The Gillie Thanksgiving scene was ruined by his facial expression. Jaw set, narrowed eyes, thin mouth does not equal backbone, it equals petulant child mad at daddy. (Which is actually more accurate as to the content of the scene, but not what they wanted to portray, I think)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18712

Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other), is a story of forbidden love in small town Texas, written 25 years ago by the improbably named Ned Sublette. "Now a small town don't like it when somebody falls between sexes," runs the first verse, "No, a small town don't like it when a cowboy has feelings for men."

Awright, this song comes out of the closet with Willie Nelson!

Willie Nelson gay cowboy valentine OMG WTF!!

i didn't take it to mean anything, or rather, it's a thought that isn't completed aloud (maybe not even internally) and that the audience isn't privy to. HOWEVER, the way he says it has a rueful quality which testifies to his continuing to think of jack. i dunno, have you ever spoken aloud to a loved one who's died? me, i tend to sort of choke on desperation and futility before i finish a sentence. which when portrayed on screen is some kind of moving.

as for the visual quality of that last shot, i don't really know how to explain its effect but i think the oblique framing was an interesting choice. somehow seemed less maudlin than if the postcard were frame center. also evoked a certain naivete which comes across in amateur photographs which i feel is powerful (à la found magazine). but i think i'd need to spend more time than i have right now to articulate that well.

i think this movie had a fair number of problems but did a lot of things very well.

anyone who holds its popularity or critical success against it is being silly. and david ehrenstein is ridiculous.... he seems to be always applying some stonewall-era notion of "gay consciousness" to the contemporary scene. he's always trying to impishly "out" people or castigate them for naivete in denying that certain attributes *are* "gay" (as though anything could be unproblematically "gay"). actually it's the impishness that bothers me most. it's as though he's continually trying to shock people into a realization they'd made a few decades back. (he writes to an educated/liberal audience as though they're jack twist's dad. i always end up feeling patronized.)

that said, remember that the whole film is framed obliquey, and the last shot is an acknowledgement, and i keep thinking that the man-on-man fucking is a mcguffin, to the films larger themes (ie the decimation that unexpected desire can cause, ideas of masculinty and honour, concepts of duty, and what the implications of derlicting that duty is, and larger, more formal working thru of isolation, landscape and comfort, and i think that it is one of 6 of 7 movies that talk about the current crisis of male heterosexuality)

I agree; it's partly why I keep reviving the thread. It depends on to what extent one accepts the film's rather bleak vision.

he writes to an educated/liberal audience as though they're jack twist's dad

wow. OTM.

yeah, what anthony said, basically.

reading the entirety of this mammoth thread, it was surprising to see that a lot of the lines or scenes most heavily criticised were taken verbatim from the book (which i read about a year ago) - "jack nasty", "i swear", even lureen's 'robotic' phone scene. the film is incredibly faithful to the source material. (apart, possibly, from making jack and ennis so hott, but i ain't complaining about that, in fact i have a full-on j gyllenhaal crush now. despite the bad tache!)

The film's emphasis on what Morbius called the dull domestic melodrama comes scarily close to fetishizing the repression; I said "scarily close," but in my opinion it never falls over the cliff, in large part thanks to the exemplary casting (I've always thought Heath and Gyllie seemed more game than the script and Ang Lee permitted) and the material's natural terseness.

http://community.livejournal.com/wranglers/631500.html

ihttp://destinationdaniel.smugmug.com/gallery/1213678/1/56764738

Some lives are full of misery, but this doesn't mean movies that reflect them are automatically more truthful. If the shepherds played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal had sustained a happy, loving relationship over several decades in spite of everything, Brokeback Mountain might have been truly daring -- and it wouldn't have been less believable. The impulse to privilege the dark is hardly new; in prerevolutionary Russian cinema, tragic plots ending in suicide were so common and popular that some Hollywood imports with happier endings were revised to make them more "commercial." I would argue that a certain complacency surrounds some of these doom-ridden scenarios, especially ones that suggest social change is impossible -- a vested interest in the status quo, even conservatism, seems to lurk behind the apparent apoliticism.

But Rosenbaum's ire is misplaced. While I'll agree that showing Ennis and Jack having middleaged sex or living in Frisco would have been more revolutionary, it would've been a different movie altogether, and not Annie Proulx's short story.

The tragic appeal is clearly what made it "makeable" enough to be the multiplex landmark; Twist's doom IS the political message.

If I'd read the Proulx story at the time it was published in the New Yorker, I think I'd have forgotten it in a month.

Of course, the parting doesn't always have to be fatal, eg Casablanca. Jack could've gone to law school, then to work for Lambda.

"Except for their long-running argument about getting their own ranch, we have almost no sense of what brings them together and sustains them as a loving couple. [The movie's] valorization of gay love is predicated on making that love socially and physically invisible.

"...The men are beautiful, the passions run high, the sex isn’t obvious, and no one is happy in the end. It’s the perfect unhappy Hollywood homosexual fantasy for people who’ve been disillusioned by the traditional happy Hollywood heterosexual fantasy."

http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid5416.aspx

The interview's most shocking admission? He's an Academy member. He also really dug Capote:

I liked it, I’m a great fan of Ang Lee. He did the best Civil War movie ever made, called “Ride With The Devil.” And it was really, really good. Lee had an extraordinary feeling, for somebody from Taiwan, for the American Civil War. It was just fascinating. So I was eager to see the movie about the two sheepherders, actually is what they are, they’re not cowboys. You can see there’s not a cow in the movie, just a lot of sheep. You can see how the two sheepherders might get tired of the sheep and begin to look to each other, as a kind of variation on a theme. I liked it, I thought it was quite moving, obviously thematically it’s important to do a picture like that about two ordinary men, seized at a time in which all this is forbidden and so on.

It would have been nice, at the same time, if…it would have been better had they started with Kinsey, which was practically erased by the Academy, to which, alas, I belong. I thought that was a terrible error, because it was the best movie of last year, and informative and instructive: You learned a lot about the nature of human sexuality, that there isn’t just one good team and one bad team and one healthy team and one sick team. It’s not that at all.

Sex is a continuum. You go through different phases along life’s way … and if you don’t, you’ve been sort of cheated.

http://davecullen.com/brokebackmountain/img/ad-final.jpg

End of annoyance.

It's just really really pathetic, though at least they aren't calling out any of the other movies in their ad so they're being class about it.

i keep thinking that jack and ennis have no idea how to deal with sex, that they let everything fall apart because they have no idea how to channel/funnel the long, slow, eating away that desire can do to a person (both each other, and their wives, and for ennis the girl in the bar)

life in the middle of the fly over is lonely, my father and his father didnt talk about anything, and that code of masculine silence, and the belief that duty to the land/work goes above all else is central to the film (which is why randy qauids charchter is pissed--nto because they are fags, but b/c they are fucking one one is supposed to be tending the sheep.)

there is no denial to pointing out that this movie is not about gay people, because sexual identity didnt have any cohesion in the west at all until lets say the early 70s, and violations of gender were alot more dangerous because they meant work didnt get done...

the gay cowboy thing is a mcguffin. this film may be a radical film not for the sodomy, but because its the first film in recent memory that hollywood understood what the fuck it meant to be RURAL, YOU KNOW LIKE NOT FROM NEW YORK OR LA, and currently not part of la or new york, remember, it ended almost in 1990, its current in destablizing the red state/blue state shit that we have to constantly go thru (its also why prolux is so impt, and canadian writers like valgardsen and
sinclair ross were too)

(patricia nell warren, whos amazing book the front runner, will be finally made because this thing made bank, makes similar points in her recently published essays.

is this opinon so out there, so strange, that it doesnt make sense, am i seeing a different movie?

Everyone KNOWS which one they're silently calling out.

Today's big NY Times movie ad features big smiling Jake & Heath pics. "It's the FEELGOOD Doomed Fags Tragedy of the Year!"

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=SCANNERS

Annie Proulx on how her Brokeback Oscar hopes were dashed by Crash

On the sidewalk stood hordes of the righteous, some leaning forward like wind-bent grasses, the better to deliver their imprecations against gays and fags to the open windows of the limos - the windows open by order of the security people - creeping toward the Kodak Theater for the 78th Academy Awards. Others held up sturdy, professionally crafted signs expressing the same hatred.
The red carpet in front of the theatre was larger than the Red Sea. Inside, we climbed grand staircases designed for showing off dresses. The circular levels filled with men in black, the women mostly in pale, frothy gowns. Sequins, diamonds, glass beads, trade beads sparkled like the interior of a salt mine. More exquisite dresses appeared every moment, some made from six yards of taffeta, and many with sweeping trains that demanded vigilance from strolling attendees lest they step on a mermaid's tail. There was one man in a kilt - there is always one at award ceremonies - perhaps a professional roving Scot hired to give colour to the otherwise monotone showing of clustered males. Larry McMurtry defied the dress code by wearing his usual jeans and cowboy boots.

The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash - excuse me - Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver.

After a good deal of standing around admiring dresses and sucking up champagne, people obeyed the stentorian countdown commands to get in their seats as "the show" was about to begin. There were orders to clap and the audience obediently clapped. From the first there was an atmosphere of insufferable self-importance emanating from "the show" which, as the audience was reminded several times, was televised and being watched by billions of people all over the world. Those lucky watchers could get up any time they wished and do something worthwhile, like go to the bathroom. As in everything related to public extravaganzas, a certain soda pop figured prominently. There were montages, artfully meshed clips of films of yesteryear, live acts by Famous Talent, smart-ass jokes by Jon Stewart who was witty and quick, too witty, too quick, too eastern perhaps for the somewhat dim LA crowd. Both beautiful and household-name movie stars announced various prizes. None of the acting awards came Brokeback's way, you betcha. The prize, as expected, went to Philip Seymour Hoff-man for his brilliant portrayal of Capote, but in the months preceding the awards thing, there has been little discussion of acting styles and various approaches to character development by this year's nominees. Hollywood loves mimicry, the conversion of a film actor into the spittin' image of a once-living celeb. But which takes more skill, acting a person who strolled the boulevard a few decades ago and who left behind tapes, film, photographs, voice recordings and friends with strong memories, or the construction of characters from imagination and a few cold words on the page? I don't know. The subject never comes up. Cheers to David Strathairn, Joaquin Phoenix and Hoffman, but what about actors who start in the dark?

Everyone thanked their dear old mums, scout troop leaders, kids and consorts. More commercials, more quick wit, more clapping, beads of sweat, Stewart maybe wondering what evil star had lighted his way to this labour. Despite the technical expertise and flawlessly sleek set evocative of 1930s musicals, despite Dolly Parton whooping it up and Itzhak Perlman blending all the theme music into a single performance (he represented "culchah"), there was a kind of provincial flavour to the proceedings reminiscent of a small-town talent-show night. Clapping wildly for bad stuff enhances this. There came an atrocious act from Hustle and Flow, Three 6 Mafia's violent rendition of "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp", a favourite with the audience who knew what it knew and liked. This was a big winner, a bushel of the magic gold-coated gelded godlings going to the rap group.

The hours sped by on wings of boiler plate. Brokeback's first award was to Argentinean Gustavo Santaolalla for the film's plangent and evocative score. Later came the expected award for screenplay adaptation to Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry, and only a short time later the director's award to Ang Lee. And that was it, three awards, putting it on equal footing with King Kong. When Jack Nicholson said best picture went to Crash, there was a gasp of shock, and then applause from many - the choice was a hit with the home team since the film is set in Los Angeles. It was a safe pick of "controversial film" for the heffalumps.

After three-and-a-half hours of butt-numbing sitting we stumbled away, down the magnificent staircases, and across the red carpet. In the distance men were shouting out limousine numbers, "406 . . . 27 . . . 921 . . . 62" and it seemed someone should yell "Bingo!" It was now dark, or as dark as it gets in the City of Angels. As we waited for our number to be called we could see the enormous lighted marquee across the street announcing that the "2006 Academy Award for Best Picture had gone to Crash". The red carpet now had taken on a different hue, a purple tinge.

The source of the colour was not far away. Down the street, spreading its baleful light everywhere, hung a gigantic, vertical, electric-blue neon sign spelling out S C I E N T O L O G Y.

"Seven oh six," bawled the limo announcer's voice. Bingo.

For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.

I'm not dissing Brokeback Mountain, it's still my second favourite film of, oh, the last twelve months or so. When did Hotel Rwanda come out? (Don Cheadle was better in that than Crash).

Randy Quaid Sues Over 'Brokeback'
Actor claims producers defrauded him

TMZ obtained a copy of the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming producers falsely represented the movie to him as "a low-budget, art house film, with no prospect of making any money." Quaid claims the representations were a ruse from the beginning. 'Brokeback' has grossed around $160 million.

Quaid's suit claims that in 2004, he met with director Ang Lee, who offered him the role of Joe Aguirre. The suit alleges that Lee told Quaid: "We can't pay anything, we have very little money, everyone is making a sacrifice to make this film."

The suit does not specifically state how much Quaid made, but it does claim that the defendants "were engaged in a 'movie laundering' scheme designed to obtain the services of talent such as Randy Quaid on economically unfavorable art film terms..."

The suit asks for $10 million in damages as well as punitive damages. It also seeks "restitution for all ill-gotten gains."

http://glreview.com/13.2-holleran.php

Brokeback The Opera.

we await the "Jack Nasty" aria.

I don't get this movie. The desire between the two beefy lunks at the centre seemed totally phoney. Unbelievable. Non-existent. It just wasn't there.

And jeezus, the whole thing is about 2.5 hrs long, to tell a non-story.

Egad, this thread. I'm spouting nonsense all over it.

this was on TV last night and I finally sat through it and it was garbage. I hate you Ang Lee. The end.

we don't see enough of Gylly's arse.

also Rosenbaum OTM way upthread

xp

my wife cried at the end though (she professed to being bored with the rest of the film)

Well, you have to see this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3fiHumNOm0

It is a little slow, but its beautifully shot. Can't agree that it would be complete garbage.

I recently watched this movie again and it's totally awesome and classic all around.

It is a little slow, but its beautifully shot

Beautiful widescreen nature shots are always beautiful.

It's all downhill after the first tent fuck.

ain't that always the way...

I love widescreen outdoor nature shots too but there was nothing particularly interesting about these, sorry.

It's not just those though. I really like the way a majority of the scenes are framed. I haven't watched it in a long time so I'm having trouble bringing up specific examples, but I just really loved the way the whole film looked.

my reaction was the opposite, really.

Gyllenhaal was pretty good tho. shouty monologue at the end was a bit much. but he aged the character in a believable way (stunt mustache!)

i dunno if anyone has mentioned this but the thing that pissed me off abt this movie was that first sex scene. I mean, we're supposed to believe that these guys start barebackin it with a little spit for lube and that he gets it in that easy and that gyllenhaal is bottoming for the first time and that he actually enjoys it. at least enough to do it again. That shit would be fn sore, even a little "whoa man, take it easy" and i might buy it.

are we so sure that it's gyllenhall's first time?

and maybe it hurts but he doesn't want it to stop so he shuts up about it

(the spit detail is hot imo- i'll take it over realism)

I got the impression that this wasn't jack twist's first rodeo, so to speak.

yeah, where wd u get that idea, esp as he goes cruisin in Mexico when Ennis is unavailable.

The story makes it clear that Jack's been twistin' before Ennis.

this movie

Seems like Randy Quaid's actin' like mean ol' Joe Aguirre:
Randy Quaid Sues Over 'Brokeback'
Actor claims producers defrauded him

TMZ obtained a copy of the lawsuit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming producers falsely represented the movie to him as "a low-budget, art house film, with no prospect of making any money." Quaid claims the representations were a ruse from the beginning. 'Brokeback' has grossed around $160 million.

Quaid's suit claims that in 2004, he met with director Ang Lee, who offered him the role of Joe Aguirre. The suit alleges that Lee told Quaid: "We can't pay anything, we have very little money, everyone is making a sacrifice to make this film."

The suit does not specifically state how much Quaid made, but it does claim that the defendants "were engaged in a 'movie laundering' scheme designed to obtain the services of talent such as Randy Quaid on economically unfavorable art film terms..."

The suit asks for $10 million in damages as well as punitive damages. It also seeks "restitution for all ill-gotten gains."

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto)

foreshadowing of crazy?

Guessing Randy would love to work under economically unfavorable art film terms now

http://www.hotflick.net/flicks/2005_Brokeback_Mountain/005BBM_Randy_Quaid_005.jpg

lol that randy quaid screenshot

it took me a while to see this, but i thought it was a pip

i guess the ending was a little 'tragic homo' but i thought it was great anyway

Coming to London:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Frqhn7VXgAA4niC?format=jpg&name=900x900

Was just wondering what happened to Lucas Hedges ...

He had himself fitted for Heath Ledger's jacket.

"A play with music" but definitely NOT a gay-ass musical, heavens no!

I can imagine Faist as Jack Twist more easily than Hedges as Ennis del Mar.

I can definitely imagine them in those roles better than the inverse.