Brokeback Mountain

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Post by Okri »

I'm praying that my local independent theater is the one that gets it. The audiences there rock and seeing the trailer (in front of Good Night and Good Luck) was fine, even if the audience was full of older people (there was about 70 people and two thirds were probably around during the time depicted).
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Post by flipp525 »

I'm starting to think that I want to see this movie on like a Tuesday matinee or a late Sunday showing, some time when there aren't a whole lot of people. I don't want other people's uptight reactions affecting my enjoyment of what is shaping up to be the movie of the year.

With that said, has any movie in recent memory garnered such anticipation?
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Post by Penelope »

Terry Lawson comments about the trailer reaction in the Detroit Free-Press:

Truth be told, trailers lie
BY TERRY LAWSON
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

December 4, 2005

I don't see trailers -- or what used to be called previews -- at the movies much anymore.

While it once was exciting to see a minute or two of scenes from upcoming films, it's now a numbing experience to sit through 15 minutes of the things -- after the commercials in some theaters.

By the time the trailer for next summer's blockbuster is over, the popcorn's gone.

They usually don't attach the trailers at critic screenings in Detroit, but when I do see one, I generally file them in one of two categories:

• The first is the trailer that attempts to lure us in by showing us every funny or exciting scene. This often sends people out of the movie feeling cheated: "Every good scene was in the trailer!" they huff.

• The other is the trailer that attempts to deceive. One recent example would be "Proof," which tried to convince audiences that the film was a romance as opposed to a drama about mental illness and math. You can understand the logic: Who wants to see a movie about those subjects, even if it is as good as "Proof" turned out to be?

Another is "Rent," whose trailer would make you believe it's the feel-good movie musical of the holiday season. And it is, as long as you can feel good about marginalized young people with AIDs and heroin addictions. Hey, if they can sing about it, why can't you?

A couple of weeks ago, I got a crash course in current trailers, having been asked to show some to the Adcraft Club, some of whose members are responsible for creating and selling movie advertising.

Together we watched the trailers for nearly all the holiday movies and, for the most part, we liked them.

There was, however, one trailer that drew a mixed reaction. It was for "Brokeback Mountain," a movie that presents one of the greatest marketing challenges of all time.

It is about two cowboys in 1960s Wyoming, played by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. The men begin an emotional and physical relationship that surprises and even initially shames them but continues, sporadically, for decades -- even after both have married and moved hundreds of miles away.

Though the film has been styled as a "Giant"-like epic by director Ang Lee, with sweeping vistas and other conflicts, the trailer does not shy away from what the movie is about.

One person in the Adcrafters audience told me he could hear people murmuring and shifting uncomfortably in seats, and a theater manager told me that a powerful scene in which a frustrated Gyllenhaal tells Ledger, "I wish I knew how to quit you" is eliciting giggles from audiences.

It might be impossible to keep the movie from becoming a late-night punch line.

Still, for once, a studio has released a trailer that does what it should: It honestly reflects the theme and content, and it doesn't reveal its mysteries or give away its heart. If it fails to fill seats, well, maybe we just can't handle the truth.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

Yeah, it was posted last month.
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Post by anonymous1980 »

Ed Gonzalez gives it **1/2

Brokeback Mountain
Cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Linda Cardellini, Anna Faris, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Randy Quaid, Scott Michael Campbell, Kate Mara, Peter McRobbie and Roberta Maxwell
Directed by: Ang Lee
Screenplay by: Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana
Distributor: Focus Features
Runtime: 134 min
Rating: R
Year: 2005

he gay cowpokes from Ang Lee's drawn-out adaptation of Annie Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain hunger for the mountain retreat where they first made love in much the same way Scarlett O'Hara longs for Tara in Gone With the Wind. Both are places of utopian solace and freedom—one a shield from the Civil War, the other a closet refuge from a pre-Stonewall environment of shaming gay oppression. The film begins with Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) cruising each other like two horned-up animals discharging pheromones into the air. Lee's actors plant the seeds of their characters' bourgeoning, decades-long relationship around a sexy series of stolen glances, a premeditated peek through a car's sideview mirror, and an awkward handshake. Later in the film, when a similar ritual plays out between Jack and his future wife Lureen (Anne Hathaway) at a cowboy bar, the effect isn't quite the same. One scene evokes the rapture of history being born, the other resignation. For Jack, it's obvious he'd rather be back at Brokeback Mountain with his buddy Ennis.

Though Brokeback Mountain's progressivism isn't daring when compared to something like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Whity, the film is very much a milestone for a mainstream Hollywood production. Lee and co-screenwriters Larry McCurty and Diana Ossana haven't corrected the western so much as they have shown us its backside. In essence, what was subversively hinted at in Howard Hawks's Red River and Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar has been brought to the fore, with an intense preoccupation for the heartbreaking tumult that registers on the faces of its lonesome doves. No longer are Montgomery Clift and Matthew Garth admiring each other's guns—they're reaching for and grabbing them. But Proulx's story is a model of economy the movie unnecessarily stretches out, pumped by what J. Hoberman rightfully recognized as "lyrical Marlboro-man imagery." If the film succeeds at all it's not because of Lee's suffocatingly polite direction but for its expressive performances and intrinsic sadness of Ennis and Jack's ritual of hiding.

Though Ennis and Jack's love may not be replaceable, Lee's camera looks to the Brokeback Mountain range no differently than it might any other hilly terrain. The undistinguished titular locale is supposed to be an effigy to Ennis and Jack's past and thwarted future but Lee's banal aesthetic dulls what is vibrant and uniquely evocative in the hearts of its characters. Luckily the actors are only too happy to pick up the slack. The story scrupulously casts Jack as a nagging woman to Ennis's alpha male, but Gyllenhaal and Ledger ensure the gender roles they're forced to act out aren't phony. Gyllenhaal is solid throughout, and though Ledger at first appears to communicate his character's frustrations almost entirely through the gruffy inflection of his voice, the final scenes in the film allow him to more unequivocally and credibly express Ennis's grief. But Michelle Williams, as Ennis's wife Alma, may be the true standout here, fascinatingly spiking her unspoken resentment for her sham of a marriage with a hint of compassion for Ennis's secret suffering.

Brokeback Mountain runs at least 30 minutes too long, which wouldn't be so bad if Lee had dedicated himself to the project as obsessively as his actors, but the story is at least tuned into the way social mores effect personal behavior. Over and over again Ennis and Jack return to Brokeback Mountain, trying to transcend the fling-like nature of their relationship. Jack once suggested they could build a life together but Ennis rejected the idea, recalling how his father once showed him the corpse of an ostensibly gay cowboy dragged by his penis until it was torn from his body. Fear eats the soul in the film, but via a series of subtle glimpses into the home of Jack's parents, the filmmakers make it easy to imagine a happier life for Ennis and Jack under a different set of circumstances. Just as Ennis is haunted, so is the story by the crippling specter of the proverbial "what if." In this case: What if Ennis's parents had lived and an understanding mother—like Jake's—gave him the guts to one day say "yes" to impossible love? Even in its bleakest hour, the film is filled with an aching sense of possibility—a feeling of regret Ledger works hard to make palatable.

Loyal as this film may be to its source (the only significant differences I noticed were a string of home-on-the-range puns like "there are no reins on this one" the script applies to the state of Ennis and Jack's relationship), it doesn't quite share its grit. Take, for example, the story's two significant sex scenes. Lee gets the first one right: Jack grabs Ennis's erect ####, a gesture Ennis reciprocates by effortlessly penetrating Jack with the help of a little spit. Proulx describes this instinctual act as "nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed," and there's a matter-of-fact vitality to this moment in both the book and the film. But a future sex scene between Jack and Ennis in a Texas motel illustrates a self-effacing Lee's desire to please the middlebrow. Proulx describes a room that stinks of "semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, #### and cheap soap," but if it were possible to scratch and sniff Lee's vision of Ennis and Jack locked in each other's arms, it'd probably smell of incense, which is—come to think of it—what an Oscar stage might smell like. So much for down and dirty.

Ed Gonzalez
© slant magazine, 2005.
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Post by Damien »

Despite J. Hoberman's mixed review (he's straight, Sonic), the Voice did give Brokeback Mountain the front cover this week. The accompanying copy was "Homos On The Range." (Which calls up a precious memory: some 30 years ago there was a gay porn movie with a western setting called Homo On The Range.)
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Post by Penelope »

By the way, Owen Gleiberman's EW review is up (he gives it an A), if you're curious.

You know, I'm almost Brokeback'd out...I'm almost fearful that when I finally DO get to see it (I'll have to wait until January), it'll be an anti-climax...oh, who am I kidding, I'm going to swoon like mad.
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Post by Sonic Youth »

J. Hoberman of the Village Voice has the same complaints Ed Gonzales has: sanitized and tasteful to a fault. I don't know if Hoberman is also gay, but he's a big leftie, and I think we'll be seeing the same sort of criticisms from the so-called "fringe".

I don't think there are important spoilers, but I'm too sleepy to check.

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Stable relationship: Gay frontier weepie is Hollywood's straightest love story in years

by J. Hoberman
November 29th, 2005 11:56 AM


Brokeback Mountain, which opens (finally) next week, is less a movie than a chunk of American landscape, or perhaps, as director Ang Lee suggests, a pioneering settlement on Hollywood's "one last frontier." Are those storm heads massed around Lee's conveniently designated "gay western"—or is it only a radiant cloud of hype?

As all media savants know, Brokeback Mountain has transformed Annie Proulx's 1997 New Yorker short story into a sagebrush Tristan and Isolde in which Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are the tragic loves of each other's lives. The Drudge Report has already managed to dredge up a playwright from the land of Matthew Shepard, claiming that she never met a homosexual cowboy and accusing Brokeback Mountain of ruining the state's image. Focus, which finally financed a script (by professional westerner Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana) that had been languishing for eight years, must be hoping that some higher-powered culture warriors will attack their movie as a manifestation of the Antichrist—or, at least, the anti–Mel Gibson.

Hysteria can only help: From the opening scene of semiconscious cruising to the final scene of ultimate bereavement, Lee's accomplishment is to make this saga a universal romance. Brokeback Mountain is the most straightforward love story—and in some ways the straightest—to come out of Hollywood, at least since Titanic. (Several websites offer the posters for comparison.)

One summer, chatty Jack and taciturn Ennis are hired to watch some curmudgeon's flock. It's a boy's-life Eden, camping out in a tent under the stars in a national park environment (actually Alberta), and one cold, liquor-lubricated night the thing just happens. Are these tough yet tender shepherds fighting or ####ing or just doing what comes naturally? Wouldn't you know that would be the night the coyote picks off a sheep? And that soon after, their boss (Randy Quaid) spies them wrassling?

A last tussle, a farewell of unspoken regret, and a venture toward normality. Ennis takes a wife (Michelle Williams); Jack meets a nice cowgirl (Anne Hathaway) who is both sexually forward and born rich. Both men father children. But a nervous reunion washes away the sand castles of their current lives in a raging tide of feelings, and sends them hightailing for the nearest motel, the vulnerable Mrs. Ennis sobbing quietly in the background.

Graduating from weird adolescent roles to bronc-bustin' cowboy here and combat-primed marine in Jarhead, Gyllenhaal is a throwback to the (relatively) sensitive, if not androgynous, male stars of the late '60s and early '70s—the period during which Brokeback is ostensibly set. But moony as Gyllenhaal is, he's only barely able to hold up his side of the equation; it's the self- contained Ledger's repression and scary, sorrowful, hard-luck rage that fuel the movie. (While a $13 million production like Brokeback Mountain will have to make some real money to lasso any Oscars, Ledger and Williams, the real-life mother of his child, seem a cinch for nominations.)

The western has always been the most idyllically homosocial of modes—and often one concerned with the programmatic exclusion of women. This is hardly a secret and thus the true cowboy love between tight-lipped Ennis and doe-eyed Jack precipitates the not-so-latent theme of early-'70s oaters like The Wild Rovers and The Hired Hand—not to mention Andy Warhol's hilarious disco western Lonesome Cowboys and its more conventional Hollywood analogue Midnight Cowboy. (Conventional up to a point, that is: Midnight Cowboy not only made a gay fashion statement but included Joe Buck's incredulous cri de coeur, "Are you telling me that John Wayne is a fag?!")

Inflated with Marlboro Man imagery and pumped with pregnant pauses, Brokeback Mountain is, like most Lee films, a good half-hour too long. The director wrings as much pathos as he can out of every Same Time, Next Year "fishing trip," but the guys' first reunion and parallel Thanksgivings aside, the real handkerchief moment comes late in the day, when forlorn Ennis visits Jack's parents and sees his life pass before his eyes.

The sex scenes may be hot, but it's difficult to believe that Madonna found them "shocking." All is tasteful, and far more convincing than the movie's representation of passion is its only-the-lonely evocation of a punishing social order. The closet has never seemed more cruelly constricting than in comparison to the wide open spaces of what Americans are pleased to call "God's country."
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Post by Eric »

Re: the site's music section.

That doesn't sound like the Gap Band I'm familiar with.
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Post by Penelope »

The movie website is live! "Enter Here" in upper left corner.

Sorry...I'm all giddy--something exciting after getting home from the doctor--I've got pinkeye--can you believe it? I made it all the way through childhood, only to get pinkeye just before my 36th birthday!
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Post by Reza »

I came across this news report. Now is this for real or is this actor just saying it as publicity for this upcoming film?


Bisexual Rumors Flatter Gyllenhaal

Actor Jake Gyllenhaal is flattered by rumors he is bi-sexual, even though he insists he is only attracted to women. Gyllenhaal, who plays a homosexual cowboy in new movie Brokeback Mountain alongside Heath Ledger, has never had a gay experience - but he isn't afraid of the possibility of having a sexual relationship with another man. He says, "You know it's flattering when there's a rumor that says I'm bisexual. It means I can play more kinds of roles. I'm open to whatever people want to call me. I've never really been attracted to men sexually, but I don't think I would be afraid of it if it happened."
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Post by Penelope »

I shoulda remembered Shamus' comment. He's right, of course.

Besides, one positive way to look at it is this: of all the trailers that played, this is probably the one the audience will most remember!
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Post by OscarGuy »

Well, at least you've gotten the preview. I saw History of Violence and Constant Gardener here (likely well after any of you saw/received them) and we had no trailer for Brokeback Mountain. They are afraid of the conservative midwest. I live in the hometown of crapwads John Ashcroft, Roy Blunt and current Missouri governor Matt Blunt. The national headquarters of the Assemblies of God is here. I have a feeling that Brokeback with show for one week, be protested and shut out again (Priscilla Queen of the Desert came for one week and then was gone again despite being an outstandingly funny movie). If it's not mainstream, it doesn't come here. If it's not straight it better be funny...

I can't imagine the response I'd hear here watching the preview.
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Post by Big Magilla »

I agree with Damien. Consider the source. Those giggly girls and boys are immature.

What's with the audience for Walk the Line? I saw it at a sparsely attended 10:30 A.M. showing with the usual rude patrons, albeit fewer than usual. There was an elderly Filipino couple a few rows behind me for which the man had to translate in Tagalog for the hard of hearing woman in a loud voice every once in a while. It was very distracting, but what took the cake was this 60ish woman with long white hair in jeans seated in the second row in the balcony with her bare feet planted on the arm rests of the seat in front of her, an image I may ever forget.
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Post by Damien »

Pen, sorry you had to deal with those cretins (I'm sure Johnny Cash would have been embarrassed to have them as his fans).

There is an article in this week's Newsweek which states, "When the trailer plays in theatres where there are a lot of young men in the audience, it's often met wirh snickers and outright laughter."

Producer James Shamus's response: "If you have a problem with the subject matter, that's your problem, not mine. It would be great if you got over your problem , but I'm not sitting heretrying to figure out how to help you with it."
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