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.
― Ico Comogene (Steve Shasta), Monday, 30 January 2006 19:26 (eighteen years ago) link
Holy shit, SOMEONE ELSE HAS SEEN IT.
― Erick Dampier is better than Shaq (miloaukerman), Monday, 30 January 2006 19:38 (eighteen years ago) link
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
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 February 2006 14:31 (eighteen years ago) link
― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Thursday, 2 February 2006 14:54 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 February 2006 14:58 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 February 2006 15:45 (eighteen years ago) link
...emphasis mine.
I'm sorry... huh?
― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Thursday, 2 February 2006 15:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 February 2006 16:03 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 February 2006 16:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― DV (dirtyvicar), Thursday, 2 February 2006 16:12 (eighteen years ago) link
xpost
― Stephen X (Stephen X), Thursday, 2 February 2006 16:12 (eighteen years ago) link
THOSE RED STATE CONSERVATIVES ARE RESISTING THE RIVER SODOM AS IT OVERFLOWS ITS BANKS.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 February 2006 16:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Thursday, 2 February 2006 16:40 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.queerty.com/queer/brokeback-art-s.jpg
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 February 2006 16:43 (eighteen years ago) link
(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)
― Erick Dampier is better than Shaq (miloaukerman), Thursday, 2 February 2006 20:15 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 February 2006 20:24 (eighteen years ago) link
― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Thursday, 2 February 2006 20:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― Erick Dampier is better than Shaq (miloaukerman), Thursday, 2 February 2006 21:13 (eighteen years ago) link
Yeah, the Twist Thanksgiving with the TV set.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 February 2006 21:23 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 February 2006 22:38 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 February 2006 22:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― A BOLD QUAHOG (ex machina), Thursday, 2 February 2006 22:40 (eighteen years ago) link
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)
― Erick Dampier is better than Shaq (miloaukerman), Friday, 3 February 2006 02:57 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, 3 February 2006 03:51 (eighteen years ago) link
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18712
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Sunday, 5 February 2006 19:01 (eighteen years ago) link
― M. White (Miguelito), Wednesday, 8 February 2006 17:15 (eighteen years ago) link
― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, 8 February 2006 17:21 (eighteen years ago) link
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!
― Melinda Mess-injure, Thursday, 16 February 2006 03:20 (eighteen years ago) link
Willie Nelson gay cowboy valentine OMG WTF!!
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 16 February 2006 03:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 16 February 2006 03:46 (eighteen years ago) link
― Melinda Mess-injure, Thursday, 16 February 2006 05:42 (eighteen years ago) link
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.)
― amateurist0, Thursday, 16 February 2006 07:16 (eighteen years ago) link
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)
― anthony easton (anthony), Thursday, 16 February 2006 08:00 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 16 February 2006 12:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 16 February 2006 14:10 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 16 February 2006 16:59 (eighteen years ago) link
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 Lex (The Lex), Thursday, 16 February 2006 17:47 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 16 February 2006 18:08 (eighteen years ago) link
― anthony easton (anthony), Friday, 17 February 2006 00:20 (eighteen years ago) link
http://community.livejournal.com/wranglers/631500.html
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, 17 February 2006 01:19 (eighteen years ago) link
ihttp://destinationdaniel.smugmug.com/gallery/1213678/1/56764738
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Wednesday, 22 February 2006 16:33 (eighteen years ago) link
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, 22 February 2006 19:01 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:21 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:26 (eighteen years ago) link
― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:28 (eighteen years ago) link
― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:29 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:35 (eighteen years ago) link
― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:39 (eighteen years ago) link
― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:42 (eighteen years ago) link