Brokeback Mountain
By the way, I don't know if you heard about it, but Annie Proulx's story has been the focus of a fracas down in Austin, Texas. Here's an editorial from The Daily Texan about it all:
Viewpoint: Censorship money is not worth it
The use of "Brokeback Mountain," a tale of homosexual lovers in Wyoming, as an optional reading selection for a senior English class at St. Andrew's Episcopal School has the school's community in an uproar.
Cary and Kate McNair, who had pledged $3 million to the school, were formally released from their donor agreement after finding a teacher's refusal to remove the book from the non-mandatory list objectionable.
Cary McNair, who could not be reached for comment, was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman from an Aug. 17 letter that said "an apparent agenda at the Upper School is developing that is detrimental to [St. Andrew's School's] future."
Detrimental to the future of an educational institution?
Perhaps it's just the changing times, but it seems that attempting to understand or at least familiarize oneself with other lifestyles and cultures is one of the best means of developing a society.
Former President Lyndon Baines Johnson seemed to think so.
"Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance," he once said.
Unfortunately, this idea seems to lack prevalence in America's relationship with 'deviant' ideas - and by deviant, we mean anything straying a hair from the Christian right 'norm.'
Teenagers are free to watch educationally-valueless MTV videos with nearly naked actors all but having sex on the screen - but give them access to a Pulitzer Prize-winning author's emotional short story on gay love, and all of a sudden it's "pornographic" and morally-corrupting.
Some of the most influential and celebrated books in history have come under fire over similar issues. The banned book debate is hardly a new development. Works by Voltaire, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Paine, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger and Maya Angelou have all been brought under harsh fire, just to name a few.
Since 1982, the American Library Association has held a Banned Books Week, as a reminder to Americans not to take the democratic freedom to read for granted.
"Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: First, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate; and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information," reads a statement on the ALA Web site. "Intellectual freedom implies a circle, and that circle is broken if either freedom of expression or access to ideas is stifled."
This year's Banned Books Week lasts from Sept. 24 to Oct. 1.
In 2004, childhood reads such as "The Giver," "Lord of the Flies," "Flowers for Algernon" and "The Face on the Milk Carton" all made the Top 100 Most Challenged Books list.
Of course, it's publications such as these that are eroding the morals of today's youth with their perspectives on the dangers of conformity and anarchy and the difficulties of mental retardation and adoption.
The "Brokeback Mountain" battle shouldn't even be an issue. Students are not required to read the text, and once the motion picture premieres this winter, it won't even be on the list at all. Of course, it's always better to start a witch hunt before the problem gets out of hand.
At least the parents of St. Andrew's haven't yet started burning the offensive material in bonfires.
Viewpoint: Censorship money is not worth it
The use of "Brokeback Mountain," a tale of homosexual lovers in Wyoming, as an optional reading selection for a senior English class at St. Andrew's Episcopal School has the school's community in an uproar.
Cary and Kate McNair, who had pledged $3 million to the school, were formally released from their donor agreement after finding a teacher's refusal to remove the book from the non-mandatory list objectionable.
Cary McNair, who could not be reached for comment, was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman from an Aug. 17 letter that said "an apparent agenda at the Upper School is developing that is detrimental to [St. Andrew's School's] future."
Detrimental to the future of an educational institution?
Perhaps it's just the changing times, but it seems that attempting to understand or at least familiarize oneself with other lifestyles and cultures is one of the best means of developing a society.
Former President Lyndon Baines Johnson seemed to think so.
"Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance," he once said.
Unfortunately, this idea seems to lack prevalence in America's relationship with 'deviant' ideas - and by deviant, we mean anything straying a hair from the Christian right 'norm.'
Teenagers are free to watch educationally-valueless MTV videos with nearly naked actors all but having sex on the screen - but give them access to a Pulitzer Prize-winning author's emotional short story on gay love, and all of a sudden it's "pornographic" and morally-corrupting.
Some of the most influential and celebrated books in history have come under fire over similar issues. The banned book debate is hardly a new development. Works by Voltaire, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Paine, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger and Maya Angelou have all been brought under harsh fire, just to name a few.
Since 1982, the American Library Association has held a Banned Books Week, as a reminder to Americans not to take the democratic freedom to read for granted.
"Intellectual freedom can exist only where two essential conditions are met: First, that all individuals have the right to hold any belief on any subject and to convey their ideas in any form they deem appropriate; and second, that society makes an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information," reads a statement on the ALA Web site. "Intellectual freedom implies a circle, and that circle is broken if either freedom of expression or access to ideas is stifled."
This year's Banned Books Week lasts from Sept. 24 to Oct. 1.
In 2004, childhood reads such as "The Giver," "Lord of the Flies," "Flowers for Algernon" and "The Face on the Milk Carton" all made the Top 100 Most Challenged Books list.
Of course, it's publications such as these that are eroding the morals of today's youth with their perspectives on the dangers of conformity and anarchy and the difficulties of mental retardation and adoption.
The "Brokeback Mountain" battle shouldn't even be an issue. Students are not required to read the text, and once the motion picture premieres this winter, it won't even be on the list at all. Of course, it's always better to start a witch hunt before the problem gets out of hand.
At least the parents of St. Andrew's haven't yet started burning the offensive material in bonfires.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
This piece appeared in The Guardian last week. I can't believe I have to wait 3 months to see this movie - although it should give me a chance to dig out the short story first.
Hello cowboy
Ang Lee's award-winning gay western is the most important film to come out of America in years, says B Ruby Rich
Friday September 23, 2005
The Guardian
Wyoming, 1963. Two young drifters turn up at a remote office and get hired to spend the summer together, herding sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain. Suspicious, laconic, stunned by cold and hardship, they don't seem a natural pair - until, drunk one night, enforced intimacy turns to sexual contact. It's a contact that is just as unexpected and unacceptable to them as it remains to some today, especially in the rural American west. In a stunning reversal, though, the drifters fall emotionally and physically in love. Up on idyllic Brokeback Mountain, far from social approbation, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) luxuriate in a rough-and-tumble idyll as Edenic in spirit as it is in setting. The mountain seems to bless their union, but inexorably the air begins to chill, they come down off the mountain, and they part. Five years later, they meet again - now married with children - and Ang Lee's extraordinary saga, Brokeback Mountain, advances through the decades with them.
Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it. Think of Thelma and Louise or Chungking Express, Blow-Up or Orlando - all big films that taught us to look and think and swagger differently. Brokeback Mountain is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon - from Mala Noche and Poison to High Art and Boys Don't Cry - it's a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era.
A fortnight ago, Ang Lee flew to Venice to accept the Golden Lion grand prize at the Venice film festival. Last week, Ledger and Gyllenhaal flew to Canada to accept the wild ovations of the crowds at the Toronto International film festival. Quite simply, despite the long careers of Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Patricia Rozema, or Ulrike Ottinger, there has never been a film by a brand-name director, packed with A-list Hollywood stars at the peak of their careers, that has taken an established conventional genre by the horns and wrestled it into a tale of homosexual love emotionally positioned to ensnare a general audience. With Brokeback Mountain, all bets are off.
The vast majority of New Queer Cinema works were gritty urban dramas, set in New York or Chicago, Portland or London. Firmly grounded in the realities of gay life, they sought a new vocabulary for a post-Aids experience. Its film-makers prioritised a new kind of storytelling geared to the unprecedented narratives filling their lives and lenses. These were usually sidebar films, not galas; they were most often Directors' Fortnight or Sundance films, not Cannes or Venice main competitions - not at least until Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven and Kimberly Pierce's Boys Don't Cry. They were festival films through and through, not multiplex movies.
Now, Brokeback Mountain has blown this division wide open, collapsing the borders and creating something entirely new in the process. With utter audacity, renowned director Ang Lee, aided and abetted by legendary novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it.
Peering down through the years at the power of that Brokeback Mountain summer on the lives of Ennis and Jack, Lee delivers a virtually forensic vision of desire, denial and emotional cost. The depth of Ennis and Jack's attachment to one another gives their lives meaning and drains all other meaning out of them, rendering the men both enriched and destitute emotionally. If Brokeback Mountain never shies away from the sexual truth of that attachment, it doesn't settle for the merely explicit either. It's a great love story, pure and simple. And simultaneously the story of a great love that's broken and warped in the torture chamber of a society's intolerance and threats, an individual's fear and repression.
In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a grand romantic tragedy, joining the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema. Tuning into the gay experience in all its euphoric and foreboding chords, Lee has brought the skills he honed in Sense and Sensibility for etching heartache, and those he found in Crouching Tiger for conveying emotion through action. Setting the film in 1963 places it squarely before Stonewall, a gay-liberation movement, or the identity politics of modern queer identities.
As Brokeback Mountain moves the men's story forward through the decades, as they escape from their wives and pursue each other through fishing trips (nope, those will never be innocent again) in an effort at recapturing the rural bliss of their primal scene, the isolation of setting and frozen emotional boundaries of the love preclude any intrusion of more modern accepting attitudes. If that seems an artificial excision concocted to heighten drama, consider that Proulx's story originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, the year before University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered for being gay. Shepard was tortured and killed in October 1998, just outside Laramie, in cowboy country, just shy of his 22nd birthday. Oh yes, among his other interests, Shepard loved to fish and hunt. His cruel fate for the simple sin of homosexuality was a horrific reminder of exactly how provisional and geographically specific contemporary tolerance remains.
Now, however, the first wave of critics to see the film have already begun to build on the obvious, informing readers that westerns were already gay; there has already been a rush of wanton nomination as genre favourites are reconsidered. It's irresistible, I suppose, but it's all wrong. Ever since the dawn of feminist film criticism and theory in the 1970s, film scholars have analysed the homoerotic subtexts in the homosocial world of the classic western. But Brokeback Mountain goes much further, for it turns the text and subtext inside out and reads the history of the west back through an uncompromisingly queer lens. Not only does the film queer its cowboys, but it virtually queers the Wyoming landscape as a space of homosexual desire and fulfilment, a playground of sexuality freed from judgment, an Eden poised to restore prelapsarian innocence to a sexuality long sullied by social shame.
But Brokeback Mountain has a lineage to which it can lay claim. Consider, for instance, Giant, the 1955 film starring James Dean in his final role as the black sheep of a Texas cattle-ranching family. Given the tales of Dean's bisexuality and his claims to have worked as street hustler, his cowboy duds in that final posthumous role were frosting on the cake. Cowboys had long been a gay fantasy, anyway, as their manly ways and absence of womenfolk allowed fantasies of desire to run free.
Andy Warhol certainly had noticed the appeal of hunky cowboys for the gay imagination - and the dangers they courted. He had his early feature film, Lonesome Cowboys, shot in 1968 in Oracle, Arizona, utilising a movie-ready Main Street constructed nearly 30 years earlier for use in westerns. But Warhol became a target of an FBI investigation after locals and tourists complained of immoral goings-on on set.
Lonesome Cowboys won the best-film award at the San Francisco film festival at the end of the year. It was 1968, after all, and the counter-culture was taking over the mainstream. Morality was up for grabs, and Warhol's hip version of aberrance was wildly appealing - and widely denounced by outraged citizens with the FBI at their disposal. Consider that, in Lee's film, 1968 is the year in which Jack and Ennis reunite, the year in which Ennis begins his long refusal even to consider Jake's pleas to live out their days together.
In 1969, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight would rocket to superstardom with Midnight Cowboy, an urban vision that explicitly followed Warhol's lead in ascribing queerness to cowboy's duds and physique and enduring male friendships. Through Voight's education regarding what fantasies he's come to New York City to serve, he also glimpses the true love that can simmer in a buddy in jeans.
Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight Cowboy cemented the cowboy-hustler motif in the popular imagination and lifted a subculture to the surface, writing the cowpoke into the book of gay desire for decades to come. But Lee also knows something else, from his years of making films that tread with exquisite delicacy on the suffering of the human heart. He knows that great love and suffering are sometimes packaged together. He knows that self-denial is as finely tuned a punishment as the damage any posse could inflict. He knows that the death of the heart, to add Elizabeth Bowen to these citations, knows no bounds of gender, nationality, or era.
It is fascinating indeed that after his green mis-step in The Hulk, Lee has returned to the subject matter of his first triumph, The Wedding Banquet, released more than a decade earlier to great critical praise. And it's noteworthy that Lee's longtime producer and scenarist James Schamus (co-president of Focus Features, the company that produced and will release Brokeback Mountain), also executive-produced many of the New Queer Cinema films, often alongside the legendary Christine Vachon. He's credited on Poison, Swoon, and Safe.
Times have changed, and unlike the sunny upbeat Wedding Banquet, this new film carries the burden of a crushing societal threat that will not be solved by a turnabout of forgiving parents. Brokeback Mountain, by raising the stakes, merits far greater praise. Ang Lee has done nothing less than re-imagined America as shaped by queer experience and memory. Alas, it cannot be a sunny picture.
· Brokeback Mountain is released on December 30.
Hello cowboy
Ang Lee's award-winning gay western is the most important film to come out of America in years, says B Ruby Rich
Friday September 23, 2005
The Guardian
Wyoming, 1963. Two young drifters turn up at a remote office and get hired to spend the summer together, herding sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain. Suspicious, laconic, stunned by cold and hardship, they don't seem a natural pair - until, drunk one night, enforced intimacy turns to sexual contact. It's a contact that is just as unexpected and unacceptable to them as it remains to some today, especially in the rural American west. In a stunning reversal, though, the drifters fall emotionally and physically in love. Up on idyllic Brokeback Mountain, far from social approbation, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) luxuriate in a rough-and-tumble idyll as Edenic in spirit as it is in setting. The mountain seems to bless their union, but inexorably the air begins to chill, they come down off the mountain, and they part. Five years later, they meet again - now married with children - and Ang Lee's extraordinary saga, Brokeback Mountain, advances through the decades with them.
Every once in a while a film comes along that changes our perceptions so much that cinema history thereafter has to arrange itself around it. Think of Thelma and Louise or Chungking Express, Blow-Up or Orlando - all big films that taught us to look and think and swagger differently. Brokeback Mountain is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon - from Mala Noche and Poison to High Art and Boys Don't Cry - it's a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era.
A fortnight ago, Ang Lee flew to Venice to accept the Golden Lion grand prize at the Venice film festival. Last week, Ledger and Gyllenhaal flew to Canada to accept the wild ovations of the crowds at the Toronto International film festival. Quite simply, despite the long careers of Derek Jarman, Gus Van Sant, John Waters, Gregg Araki, Todd Haynes, Patricia Rozema, or Ulrike Ottinger, there has never been a film by a brand-name director, packed with A-list Hollywood stars at the peak of their careers, that has taken an established conventional genre by the horns and wrestled it into a tale of homosexual love emotionally positioned to ensnare a general audience. With Brokeback Mountain, all bets are off.
The vast majority of New Queer Cinema works were gritty urban dramas, set in New York or Chicago, Portland or London. Firmly grounded in the realities of gay life, they sought a new vocabulary for a post-Aids experience. Its film-makers prioritised a new kind of storytelling geared to the unprecedented narratives filling their lives and lenses. These were usually sidebar films, not galas; they were most often Directors' Fortnight or Sundance films, not Cannes or Venice main competitions - not at least until Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven and Kimberly Pierce's Boys Don't Cry. They were festival films through and through, not multiplex movies.
Now, Brokeback Mountain has blown this division wide open, collapsing the borders and creating something entirely new in the process. With utter audacity, renowned director Ang Lee, aided and abetted by legendary novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it.
Peering down through the years at the power of that Brokeback Mountain summer on the lives of Ennis and Jack, Lee delivers a virtually forensic vision of desire, denial and emotional cost. The depth of Ennis and Jack's attachment to one another gives their lives meaning and drains all other meaning out of them, rendering the men both enriched and destitute emotionally. If Brokeback Mountain never shies away from the sexual truth of that attachment, it doesn't settle for the merely explicit either. It's a great love story, pure and simple. And simultaneously the story of a great love that's broken and warped in the torture chamber of a society's intolerance and threats, an individual's fear and repression.
In the end, Brokeback Mountain is a grand romantic tragedy, joining the ranks of great literature as much as great cinema. Tuning into the gay experience in all its euphoric and foreboding chords, Lee has brought the skills he honed in Sense and Sensibility for etching heartache, and those he found in Crouching Tiger for conveying emotion through action. Setting the film in 1963 places it squarely before Stonewall, a gay-liberation movement, or the identity politics of modern queer identities.
As Brokeback Mountain moves the men's story forward through the decades, as they escape from their wives and pursue each other through fishing trips (nope, those will never be innocent again) in an effort at recapturing the rural bliss of their primal scene, the isolation of setting and frozen emotional boundaries of the love preclude any intrusion of more modern accepting attitudes. If that seems an artificial excision concocted to heighten drama, consider that Proulx's story originally appeared in the New Yorker in 1997, the year before University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered for being gay. Shepard was tortured and killed in October 1998, just outside Laramie, in cowboy country, just shy of his 22nd birthday. Oh yes, among his other interests, Shepard loved to fish and hunt. His cruel fate for the simple sin of homosexuality was a horrific reminder of exactly how provisional and geographically specific contemporary tolerance remains.
Now, however, the first wave of critics to see the film have already begun to build on the obvious, informing readers that westerns were already gay; there has already been a rush of wanton nomination as genre favourites are reconsidered. It's irresistible, I suppose, but it's all wrong. Ever since the dawn of feminist film criticism and theory in the 1970s, film scholars have analysed the homoerotic subtexts in the homosocial world of the classic western. But Brokeback Mountain goes much further, for it turns the text and subtext inside out and reads the history of the west back through an uncompromisingly queer lens. Not only does the film queer its cowboys, but it virtually queers the Wyoming landscape as a space of homosexual desire and fulfilment, a playground of sexuality freed from judgment, an Eden poised to restore prelapsarian innocence to a sexuality long sullied by social shame.
But Brokeback Mountain has a lineage to which it can lay claim. Consider, for instance, Giant, the 1955 film starring James Dean in his final role as the black sheep of a Texas cattle-ranching family. Given the tales of Dean's bisexuality and his claims to have worked as street hustler, his cowboy duds in that final posthumous role were frosting on the cake. Cowboys had long been a gay fantasy, anyway, as their manly ways and absence of womenfolk allowed fantasies of desire to run free.
Andy Warhol certainly had noticed the appeal of hunky cowboys for the gay imagination - and the dangers they courted. He had his early feature film, Lonesome Cowboys, shot in 1968 in Oracle, Arizona, utilising a movie-ready Main Street constructed nearly 30 years earlier for use in westerns. But Warhol became a target of an FBI investigation after locals and tourists complained of immoral goings-on on set.
Lonesome Cowboys won the best-film award at the San Francisco film festival at the end of the year. It was 1968, after all, and the counter-culture was taking over the mainstream. Morality was up for grabs, and Warhol's hip version of aberrance was wildly appealing - and widely denounced by outraged citizens with the FBI at their disposal. Consider that, in Lee's film, 1968 is the year in which Jack and Ennis reunite, the year in which Ennis begins his long refusal even to consider Jake's pleas to live out their days together.
In 1969, Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight would rocket to superstardom with Midnight Cowboy, an urban vision that explicitly followed Warhol's lead in ascribing queerness to cowboy's duds and physique and enduring male friendships. Through Voight's education regarding what fantasies he's come to New York City to serve, he also glimpses the true love that can simmer in a buddy in jeans.
Lonesome Cowboys and Midnight Cowboy cemented the cowboy-hustler motif in the popular imagination and lifted a subculture to the surface, writing the cowpoke into the book of gay desire for decades to come. But Lee also knows something else, from his years of making films that tread with exquisite delicacy on the suffering of the human heart. He knows that great love and suffering are sometimes packaged together. He knows that self-denial is as finely tuned a punishment as the damage any posse could inflict. He knows that the death of the heart, to add Elizabeth Bowen to these citations, knows no bounds of gender, nationality, or era.
It is fascinating indeed that after his green mis-step in The Hulk, Lee has returned to the subject matter of his first triumph, The Wedding Banquet, released more than a decade earlier to great critical praise. And it's noteworthy that Lee's longtime producer and scenarist James Schamus (co-president of Focus Features, the company that produced and will release Brokeback Mountain), also executive-produced many of the New Queer Cinema films, often alongside the legendary Christine Vachon. He's credited on Poison, Swoon, and Safe.
Times have changed, and unlike the sunny upbeat Wedding Banquet, this new film carries the burden of a crushing societal threat that will not be solved by a turnabout of forgiving parents. Brokeback Mountain, by raising the stakes, merits far greater praise. Ang Lee has done nothing less than re-imagined America as shaped by queer experience and memory. Alas, it cannot be a sunny picture.
· Brokeback Mountain is released on December 30.
Do. It's a marvelous, beautifully written, extraordinarily moving story, one of the finest I've ever read.kooyah wrote:Now I might go ahead and read Proulx's short story - might.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
Invoking Anthony Mann and calling it Lee's best film since Sense and Sensibility are high praise indeed.
Not to mention Lee Marshall's comparison of it to Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven.
The cast, though, seems a bit light-weight. Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Williams and Hathaway are not Wayne, Clift, O'Hara and Taylor, but this could be a breakthrough for all of them.
Do you mean light weight in terms of talent or star power?
And, in case anyone here hasn't already gone there, be very careful of reading the review thread at OscarWatch. A blog review was posted and in the review the writer actually spoiled the ending. Quite infuriating. Now I might go ahead and read Proulx's short story - might.
Edited By kooyah on 1127980671
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'Brokeback Mountain' Wins Top Venice Award 2 minutes ago
VENICE, Italy - Ang Lee's tale of love between two cowboys set in the conservative West of the 1960s took the Venice Film Festival's top award Saturday.
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"Brokeback Mountain," starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, bested 19 other candidates, including favorite "Good Night, and Good Luck," George Clooney's black-and-white movie set in the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
However, one of the stars of that film, David Strathairn, captured the top acting award for men. Strathairn played American broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, who systematically scrutinized the methods of McCarthy's quest to "out" communists and their sympathizers.
The top acting award for a woman's role went to Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno for her role in the movie "La Bestia nel Cuore," (the Beast in the Heart).
VENICE, Italy - Ang Lee's tale of love between two cowboys set in the conservative West of the 1960s took the Venice Film Festival's top award Saturday.
ADVERTISEMENT
"Brokeback Mountain," starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, bested 19 other candidates, including favorite "Good Night, and Good Luck," George Clooney's black-and-white movie set in the McCarthy era of the early 1950s.
However, one of the stars of that film, David Strathairn, captured the top acting award for men. Strathairn played American broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, who systematically scrutinized the methods of McCarthy's quest to "out" communists and their sympathizers.
The top acting award for a woman's role went to Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno for her role in the movie "La Bestia nel Cuore," (the Beast in the Heart).
Grumpy Gus Mike D'Angelo weighs in with a solid 66!
[Pretty much the best adaptation of Proulx's story imaginable -- I just don't happen to think cinema is the right medium to depict an impossible romance spanning almost two decades. Petty though it may seem, verisimilitude is a real problem: Jake Gyllenhaal with a '70s porn mustache is still Jake Gyllenhaal, and makeup's increasingly desperate attempts to age Anne Hathaway would probably make for a hilarious documentary short subject. Even if I make allowances, though, I find that, with very few exceptions (e.g., Citizen Kane), movies tend to falter the further they stray from the Aristotelian unities. I have the same complaint about The Age of Innocence, and this is essentially a gay-cowboy rendition of Wharton's tragedy of accommodation; those who love Scorsese's film should upgrade their expectations accordingly. Heath Ledger: Actor of the Year.]
[Pretty much the best adaptation of Proulx's story imaginable -- I just don't happen to think cinema is the right medium to depict an impossible romance spanning almost two decades. Petty though it may seem, verisimilitude is a real problem: Jake Gyllenhaal with a '70s porn mustache is still Jake Gyllenhaal, and makeup's increasingly desperate attempts to age Anne Hathaway would probably make for a hilarious documentary short subject. Even if I make allowances, though, I find that, with very few exceptions (e.g., Citizen Kane), movies tend to falter the further they stray from the Aristotelian unities. I have the same complaint about The Age of Innocence, and this is essentially a gay-cowboy rendition of Wharton's tragedy of accommodation; those who love Scorsese's film should upgrade their expectations accordingly. Heath Ledger: Actor of the Year.]
"How's the despair?"
I've been ruminating on whether to post this, but since I went ahead with my current predictions, I just thought I'd throw this in here as well....
My mother has read Annie Proulx’s story and so I’ve been keeping her abreast of the developments with the film. With the recent rave reviews, I also mentioned that there was speculation on various message boards on how well the film would perform at the box-office, with the predictions in the $25 million to $40 million range. Mom looked at me with that disbelieving look only she can do, and said, “This movie is going to be a blockbuster.”
I hope Mom is right. And she might be...did y'all see this from Yahoo (ok, I'll confess, I've been checking out the OscarWatch threads to keep track of the situation; they're a bit excessive [I can certainly sympathise, however] but also very, very helpful):
Top of the Mountain
Friday September 09, 2005 11:00AM PT
Brokeback Mountain
Looks like director Ang Lee has regained his footing since The Hulk. The oldest film festival in the world is underway, and already the buzz over his film Brokeback Mountain has eclipsed all others at the Venice International Film Festival, which runs through this week. Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger (+69%) and Jake Gyllenhaal (+99%), is being described as the first homosexual cowboy movie. Well, at least, the first overtly gay film about guys who hang out together wearing chaps. Searches on the hotly anticipated flick are up 192% over the last week, and we've seen a corresponding spike in "brokeback mountain trailer," up 356%. Two-thirds of Brokeback searches are from males intrigued by the cowboy tale, which is based on a story by E. Annie Proulx.
My mother has read Annie Proulx’s story and so I’ve been keeping her abreast of the developments with the film. With the recent rave reviews, I also mentioned that there was speculation on various message boards on how well the film would perform at the box-office, with the predictions in the $25 million to $40 million range. Mom looked at me with that disbelieving look only she can do, and said, “This movie is going to be a blockbuster.”
I hope Mom is right. And she might be...did y'all see this from Yahoo (ok, I'll confess, I've been checking out the OscarWatch threads to keep track of the situation; they're a bit excessive [I can certainly sympathise, however] but also very, very helpful):
Top of the Mountain
Friday September 09, 2005 11:00AM PT
Brokeback Mountain
Looks like director Ang Lee has regained his footing since The Hulk. The oldest film festival in the world is underway, and already the buzz over his film Brokeback Mountain has eclipsed all others at the Venice International Film Festival, which runs through this week. Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger (+69%) and Jake Gyllenhaal (+99%), is being described as the first homosexual cowboy movie. Well, at least, the first overtly gay film about guys who hang out together wearing chaps. Searches on the hotly anticipated flick are up 192% over the last week, and we've seen a corresponding spike in "brokeback mountain trailer," up 356%. Two-thirds of Brokeback searches are from males intrigued by the cowboy tale, which is based on a story by E. Annie Proulx.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
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Mister Tee
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Poland is indeed out on a limb by himself in disliking this one (and, characteristically, acting as if anyone who disagrees with him must be deluded). The reviews to date are truly stellar.
I'd actually felt the filmmakers must have thought they had the goods with this one, or they wouldn't have opened it to so many festivals so far ahead of the release. If it's bad, you want it under wraps as along as possible; only if it's good do you want it out there.
As far as the Oscars... My first thought was, isn't this subject matter a bit out there for alot of audiences? How many young women are going to be able to talk their sexually insecure boyfriends into taking them to a movie that will inevitably be described as about "gay cowboys"? And if it can't draw a wide audience, is it really best picture material? (Something the reviews otherwise clearly suggest)
But then, there is the Philadelphia precedent. Philadelphia famously eschewed almost all physical contact, but it did obliterate the gay = not mainstream principle. And maybe, 12 years on -- 12 years of Will & Grace and Queer Eye and lots else -- we're ready to take another step...especially with a notoriously tactful director like Ang Lee at the helm.
I mean, there was a time when classical filmmaking combined with tastefully liberal context was considered the prime Oscar formula. Maybe that'll be the case here.
I'd actually felt the filmmakers must have thought they had the goods with this one, or they wouldn't have opened it to so many festivals so far ahead of the release. If it's bad, you want it under wraps as along as possible; only if it's good do you want it out there.
As far as the Oscars... My first thought was, isn't this subject matter a bit out there for alot of audiences? How many young women are going to be able to talk their sexually insecure boyfriends into taking them to a movie that will inevitably be described as about "gay cowboys"? And if it can't draw a wide audience, is it really best picture material? (Something the reviews otherwise clearly suggest)
But then, there is the Philadelphia precedent. Philadelphia famously eschewed almost all physical contact, but it did obliterate the gay = not mainstream principle. And maybe, 12 years on -- 12 years of Will & Grace and Queer Eye and lots else -- we're ready to take another step...especially with a notoriously tactful director like Ang Lee at the helm.
I mean, there was a time when classical filmmaking combined with tastefully liberal context was considered the prime Oscar formula. Maybe that'll be the case here.
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Filipe Furtado
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The only negative review I've found so far is David Poland's and it's one of those weird reviews by him where he is tring so hard to settle his objective credentials one can't stop but feels he has a hidden agenda (in this case probably wishing that everything on Focus fall line up flops, so they got stuck with The Constant Garden as their big oscar movie).
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Sonic Youth
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You just beat me Sonic!
Wow. It's all I can see or feel right now. Wow. And I haven't even seen the movie yet.
Wow. It's all I can see or feel right now. Wow. And I haven't even seen the movie yet.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
-
Sonic Youth
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Someone on this board asked several months ago if we would go see a film that would depict two men kissing on screen. I said, what do I care?... as long as the film was GOOD! And going by these reviews, it looks as if Brokeback Mountain is going to give us a verrrrry interesting Oscar season this year.
Brokeback Mountain
Lee Marshall in Venice 05 September 2005
Screendaily
Dir: Ang Lee. US. 2005. 133mins.
No newly-arrived Martian would ever guess that the same person had directed Sense & Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Hulk. The most impressive thing about Ang Lee’s creative take on the multiple personality syndrome is the way that each successive experiment feels like the work of a pro that has been mining that genre for years.
Take Brokeback Mountain: the director’s most complete and accomplished film to date comes across as the late masterpiece of an auteur dedicated to chronicling the demise of the American Dream.
A moving, measured, humane love story – and only incidentally a gay one – Brokeback Mountain derives its considerable emotional charge from its eye for details, from its laconic dialogue, from its careful dosing of small but devastating revelations, and from the bravura performances elicited by Lee from his cast – including a revelatory Heath Ledger.
Brokeback Mountain, which plays Toronto after it screening in competition at Venice, demands a certain patience and attention from its audience. But star appeal and Oscar murmurings should propel the film to the top of the indie box-office tables both at home and abroad, while upbeat critical word should draw the attention of more mainstream audiences. The film opens in the US on Dec 9 and in the UK on Dec 26.
The film is a surefire bet for a roster of Oscar nominations, which in addition to nods in one or both of the Best Film and Best Director slots are likely to include Best Actor for Ledger, Adapted Screenplay for Ossana and Schamus’s sensitive adaptation of Anne Proulx’s short story, Art Direction for Judy Becker’s painstakingly researched evocation of the sad provincial underbelly of America in the 1960s and 1970s, and Cinematography for Rodrigo Prieto’s still-photo take on the American West, which turns even the shabby interiors into impersonal landscapes, indifferent to their human inhabitants.
Composer Gustavo Santolalla, another close associate of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, provides a spare score that caresses the action, sentimentally but mostly effectively, with Cooder-like guitar breaks.
Given the assured result, it’s difficult to understand why the project spent over seven years in development hell before Focus Features took it on: could it really be because a drama about two cowboys in love is still considered a delicate subject for a major studio?
Paradoxically, it is the lack of overt man-on-man action that makes Brokeback Mountain so magnificently subversive: not since Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together has the fact that this love story happens to be between two men been so tangential to a film’s emotional interests or impact.
Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) meet one summer on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming, hired by local ranch boss Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) to protect his sheep from wolf and coyote attacks in their remote upland pasture.
Jack is the fiery one, the impulsive Texan Rodeo rider who is as surprised by his emotions as Ennis but far more open to their consequences. It’s Ennis, though, who is the really memorable character: tough but shy, taciturn, unable to open up or really express his emotions.
But it’s the details that make the writing so spot-on: the way a playful tussle between the two men, after their sexual bonding, turns to a fist-fight as Ennis attempts to slug it out with a part of himself that he is afraid of; the wound-up excitement in the body and face of Ennis on the day he waits – at home, in the company of a wife (Williams) he loves – for Jack’s first visit after a four-year absence.
Rhythmically, the film takes its cue from the slow rhythms of life around these parts: the passing of the seasons, harvest and planting, the time to take the herds up the mountain and the time to bring them down. One is reminded, at times, of Terence Malick’s Days Of Heaven – another nature-soaked film which takes its time, and forces the audience to do the same.
And yet it rarely drags, or seems too long, as there is drama embedded in the apparently inconsequential dialogue, and the way that so much is unsaid, and touches of wry social humour: the increasingly fluffy, dyed hairstyles of Jack’s wife Lureen (Hathaway), the dogged way an ineffectual electric carving knife, as advertised on TV, whirrs away as a token of bourgeois normalcy when everything is so far from normal, or comfortable, or even bearable.
Brokeback Mountain
Lee Marshall in Venice 05 September 2005
Screendaily
Dir: Ang Lee. US. 2005. 133mins.
No newly-arrived Martian would ever guess that the same person had directed Sense & Sensibility, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Hulk. The most impressive thing about Ang Lee’s creative take on the multiple personality syndrome is the way that each successive experiment feels like the work of a pro that has been mining that genre for years.
Take Brokeback Mountain: the director’s most complete and accomplished film to date comes across as the late masterpiece of an auteur dedicated to chronicling the demise of the American Dream.
A moving, measured, humane love story – and only incidentally a gay one – Brokeback Mountain derives its considerable emotional charge from its eye for details, from its laconic dialogue, from its careful dosing of small but devastating revelations, and from the bravura performances elicited by Lee from his cast – including a revelatory Heath Ledger.
Brokeback Mountain, which plays Toronto after it screening in competition at Venice, demands a certain patience and attention from its audience. But star appeal and Oscar murmurings should propel the film to the top of the indie box-office tables both at home and abroad, while upbeat critical word should draw the attention of more mainstream audiences. The film opens in the US on Dec 9 and in the UK on Dec 26.
The film is a surefire bet for a roster of Oscar nominations, which in addition to nods in one or both of the Best Film and Best Director slots are likely to include Best Actor for Ledger, Adapted Screenplay for Ossana and Schamus’s sensitive adaptation of Anne Proulx’s short story, Art Direction for Judy Becker’s painstakingly researched evocation of the sad provincial underbelly of America in the 1960s and 1970s, and Cinematography for Rodrigo Prieto’s still-photo take on the American West, which turns even the shabby interiors into impersonal landscapes, indifferent to their human inhabitants.
Composer Gustavo Santolalla, another close associate of Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, provides a spare score that caresses the action, sentimentally but mostly effectively, with Cooder-like guitar breaks.
Given the assured result, it’s difficult to understand why the project spent over seven years in development hell before Focus Features took it on: could it really be because a drama about two cowboys in love is still considered a delicate subject for a major studio?
Paradoxically, it is the lack of overt man-on-man action that makes Brokeback Mountain so magnificently subversive: not since Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together has the fact that this love story happens to be between two men been so tangential to a film’s emotional interests or impact.
Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) meet one summer on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming, hired by local ranch boss Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) to protect his sheep from wolf and coyote attacks in their remote upland pasture.
Jack is the fiery one, the impulsive Texan Rodeo rider who is as surprised by his emotions as Ennis but far more open to their consequences. It’s Ennis, though, who is the really memorable character: tough but shy, taciturn, unable to open up or really express his emotions.
But it’s the details that make the writing so spot-on: the way a playful tussle between the two men, after their sexual bonding, turns to a fist-fight as Ennis attempts to slug it out with a part of himself that he is afraid of; the wound-up excitement in the body and face of Ennis on the day he waits – at home, in the company of a wife (Williams) he loves – for Jack’s first visit after a four-year absence.
Rhythmically, the film takes its cue from the slow rhythms of life around these parts: the passing of the seasons, harvest and planting, the time to take the herds up the mountain and the time to bring them down. One is reminded, at times, of Terence Malick’s Days Of Heaven – another nature-soaked film which takes its time, and forces the audience to do the same.
And yet it rarely drags, or seems too long, as there is drama embedded in the apparently inconsequential dialogue, and the way that so much is unsaid, and touches of wry social humour: the increasingly fluffy, dyed hairstyles of Jack’s wife Lureen (Hathaway), the dogged way an ineffectual electric carving knife, as advertised on TV, whirrs away as a token of bourgeois normalcy when everything is so far from normal, or comfortable, or even bearable.
"What the hell?"
Win Butler
Win Butler
Geoffrey McNab in The Guardian singles out both Ledger and Gyllenhaal. There are some (very minor) spoilers.
Brokeback Mountain
Four stars (out of five)
Hollywood westerns have often had a homoerotic undertow; think, for example, of Montgomery Clift comparing weapon sizes with fellow gunslinger John Ireland in Howard Hawks's Red River. But there is nothing covert about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Based on an Annie Proulx story, this is an epic, slow-burning romance in which the protagonists simply happen to be men.
Young cowboys Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) meet one summer in the early 1960s when they are hired to tend a huge flock of sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They begin an affair, but then go their separate ways. Both marry. When they are thrown together four years later, they resume their relationship behind their wives' backs.
With its plaintive country music soundtrack and shots of beautiful but forbidding Wyoming landscapes, the film strikes a self-consciously elegiac note. We guess almost from the outset that the relationship between Jack and Ennis is doomed. The richness lies in the painstaking attention to period detail and the two immensely moving central performances.
There is little hint of kitsch or camp here, even if Lee does enjoy himself recreating the trashy look of 1970s Wyoming, where the women have Sue Ellen hairstyles and the men wear fat sideburns beneath their 10-gallon hats. Jack and Ennis are men out of time. Both struggle to cope with work and marriage. In the red-blooded, homophobic west, they know that their relationship will never be accepted.
Brokeback Mountain takes a while to click into gear - the film takes its tempo from the lugubrious country ballads we hear now and again. None the less, the slow build-up ultimately adds to the pathos. In hindsight, it becomes apparent that the reason Lee dwells in such fetishistic detail on that first summer in the mountains is that it represents a moment of innocence and happiness that Jack and Ennis will never recapture.
Brokeback Mountain
Four stars (out of five)
Hollywood westerns have often had a homoerotic undertow; think, for example, of Montgomery Clift comparing weapon sizes with fellow gunslinger John Ireland in Howard Hawks's Red River. But there is nothing covert about Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. Based on an Annie Proulx story, this is an epic, slow-burning romance in which the protagonists simply happen to be men.
Young cowboys Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) meet one summer in the early 1960s when they are hired to tend a huge flock of sheep high up on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They begin an affair, but then go their separate ways. Both marry. When they are thrown together four years later, they resume their relationship behind their wives' backs.
With its plaintive country music soundtrack and shots of beautiful but forbidding Wyoming landscapes, the film strikes a self-consciously elegiac note. We guess almost from the outset that the relationship between Jack and Ennis is doomed. The richness lies in the painstaking attention to period detail and the two immensely moving central performances.
There is little hint of kitsch or camp here, even if Lee does enjoy himself recreating the trashy look of 1970s Wyoming, where the women have Sue Ellen hairstyles and the men wear fat sideburns beneath their 10-gallon hats. Jack and Ennis are men out of time. Both struggle to cope with work and marriage. In the red-blooded, homophobic west, they know that their relationship will never be accepted.
Brokeback Mountain takes a while to click into gear - the film takes its tempo from the lugubrious country ballads we hear now and again. None the less, the slow build-up ultimately adds to the pathos. In hindsight, it becomes apparent that the reason Lee dwells in such fetishistic detail on that first summer in the mountains is that it represents a moment of innocence and happiness that Jack and Ennis will never recapture.
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filmgabber
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