― 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
― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:44 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:44 (eighteen years ago) link
― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:46 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 March 2006 18:53 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Thursday, 2 March 2006 19:53 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 2 March 2006 20:02 (eighteen years ago) link
"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
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Friday, 3 March 2006 16:59 (eighteen years ago) link
― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 3 March 2006 17:19 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, 3 March 2006 17:21 (eighteen years ago) link
― RoxyMuzak© (roxymuzak), Tuesday, 7 March 2006 16:47 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 9 March 2006 17:08 (eighteen years ago) link
http://davecullen.com/brokebackmountain/img/ad-final.jpg
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 9 March 2006 20:01 (eighteen years ago) link
End of annoyance.
― Allyzay Rofflesberger (allyzay), Thursday, 9 March 2006 20:23 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Thursday, 9 March 2006 22:03 (eighteen years ago) link
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.
― Allyzay Rofflesberger (allyzay), Thursday, 9 March 2006 22:16 (eighteen years ago) link
― Erick Dampier is better than Shaq (miloaukerman), Thursday, 9 March 2006 23:04 (eighteen years ago) link
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?
― anthony easton (anthony), Friday, 10 March 2006 11:23 (eighteen years ago) link
― anthony easton (anthony), Friday, 10 March 2006 11:25 (eighteen years ago) link
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, 10 March 2006 13:40 (eighteen years ago) link
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!"
― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Friday, 10 March 2006 14:14 (eighteen years ago) link
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=SCANNERS
― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, 10 March 2006 14:23 (eighteen years ago) link