Come Anticipate "Brokeback Mountain" With Me

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.