Come Anticipate "Brokeback Mountain" With Me

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.