Brokeback Mountain

[north_star]

---

i just can't wait to see this movie. yes, i'm gay, that is why. regardless of the fact that the movie involves gay love, this movie is still dealing with what is uiversal and that is love. the intimate and unfathomable bond between two people, regardless of age, ***, color, gender/sexuality or status. i heard it was already approved by the MTRCB without cuts with an r-18 rating and it's going to be shown on february 15. wohoo!

i'm definitely bringing with me a hankie when i go inside the theater. gusto na ko muhilak. i've read the short story already fro which the movie was based. i'm just so excited about it.

[north_star]

[img width=201 height=303]http://www.hometown.aol.com/pinoymovies1/images/brokebackmountainbookcover.jpg[/img]

[img width=450 height=150]http://hometown.aol.com/pinoymovies1/images/broke6.jpg[/img]

http://www.brokebackmountain.com/home.html

[obemon]

Would you like a cookie?

[north_star]

Would you like a cookie?

...and what you're trying to say is?

[nindotkanon]

I'm not sure if I will watch this movie but who knows...

[klavel]

i heard of the critically acclaimed movie over the net many times and it's been receiving good reviews from the press..Can't wait to see the film! (knowing that Jake Gyllenhaal is one the main casts, ehehe)..

[BURN_BaD]

no interest whatsoever in seeing it, even if it is critcally-acclaimed or possibly the best gay movie out there. dont get me wrong though; i have nothing against homosexuals. I have a homosexual cousin and quite a few homosexual friends but this movie draws the line for me, hehehe...

[north_star]

...well, if you are sensitive enough, it's a movie with a universal theme and it's not just a plain gay movie. but anyway, i am not obliged to explain that to you. to each his own and i respect your opinion.

it's actually good that you already decided not to watch this movie rather than playing dumb and actually going to the theater once this movie will be showing in theaters. and once you're in there you realized it wasn't your thing and walked out of the movie halfway. that would be plain stupid if you ask me.

[vanceloma]

oh my!

it

is




sooo...




GAYYYY!!

lol

[north_star]

here's a clip of jay leno's interview with heath ledger (ennis del mar in 'brokeback mountain')

http://www.youtube.com/w/BROKEBACK-...=HEATH%20LEDGER

...and here's a very looong but nice review about the movie.

January 21, 2006

Brokeback Mountain is a quiet film about ordinary people - and a towering triumph, writes Peter Craven.

SO THIS IS THE kissin' cowboys film at last. Brokeback Mountain, directed by the great Ang Lee from the story by Annie Proulx and with a script by Larry McMurtry, no less. This is the film where the gay love is not only centre stage in a Hollywood movie, but the two lovers are not Queer Eye luvvies; they are played by two big young stars, Jake Gyllenhaal and Australia's Heath Ledger.

Brokeback Mountain is a very fine film indeed - moving, tough and scathingly realistic. And it represents a marvellous return to form on the part of Ang Lee (after Hulk). It is in fact a testament to both the lyricism and the mastery of a world of different idioms on the part of the Taiwan-born director who can jump from America in the '70s (The Ice Storm ) to Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, to boy warriors in the American Civil War (Ride with the Devil) to the knock-out and fantastical aerial delights of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Ang Lee is one of those virtuoso directors who can create a world in a film, as if from scratch, as if no one had been there before him.

In Brokeback Mountain he takes on the hard, scraping-for-a-living world of the late-20th century, nearly contemporary West, of masculine laconic men who know hardship like the backs of their hands, who have been dragged up into the world without much affection. Life's losers from the start who get by, with the animals they tend, for small wages in the face of the great natural beauty that stands behind them like a backdrop or a compensation.

The difference in Brokeback Mountain is that this lonesome world is punctuated with the erotic flame of two men who would scarcely know the word "homosexuality" and who fall into each other's arms like a dictate of nature. And then - because this is realism, not romance - suffer the drawn out pain of not being able to act on their love for each other except at agonising intervals, on supposed fishing trips, as they wrench themselves away from their lives with their wives and children.

Ang Lee films Annie Proulx's story as if it were The Grapes of Wrath, as if it had always been there, staring at America from the rugged beauties and harsh deprivations of these valleys and mountains and grazing places.

Some would say that it always had been. Back in the 1960s, Leslie Fiedler argued in Love and Death in the American Novel that the great American books - Moby-**** and no less than Huckleberry Finn - were not only boys' books in the obvious sense that they enlivened childhoods, but that they were homoerotic to their core, that the deepest bonds of feeling in the mythic America that stalks through literature, was man on man.

Of course Fiedler would never have denied that this gay essence of the American Dream (or nightmare) was camouflaged with all the trappings of repression.

And - whatever you make of the literature - Hollywood (which has in practice been intimate with homosexuality for as long as it has existed) has never been very interested in depicting the boy-on-boy thing.

After all, men could pine after James Dean as much as they liked. Carey Grant and Rock Hudson could feign to pine after their leading ladies - Doris Day, Audrey Hepburn or whoever. After all, acting was feigning anyway.

There seemed no need to represent gay love or ***, at least in a mainstream way. And in an odd way this attitude has persisted and has outlived the conditions that brought it into being.

It's 30 years since homosexuality started becoming mainstream, but the way America has represented the phenomenon has always been guarded.

Even a massive - and very impressive - representation of gay experience and the AIDS scourge such as the Mike Nichols film of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, made for HBO and shown by the ABC last year, perpetuated some of the stereotyping - at least in the sense that a couple of the central characters were homely, faggy and effete in a manner that seems to bring comfort to the American psyche.

In that respect it was interesting to see Queer as Folk transposed from British to American TV. The American version, retained the beautiful young blond boy (the Charlie Hunnam character in the British original), but the two main characters were presented as gay and faggy-looking before they were presented as attractive.

Of course there are no rules about this sort of thing, but the residual stereotyping seemed obvious. When it had been dropped in the past - say in a formidable film like Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho - it tended to be in a context of prostitution and fallen worlds.

And in some respects this persists. Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Mysterious Skin burns up the screen - he smoulders and stretches with an attractiveness that is likely to arrest the attention of anyone - but he is playing a nihilistic gay hustler and a profoundly damaged character.

None of which is surprising. After all, 40 years ago Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton could make their film of Anouilh's Becket, which is all about how Henry II (O'Toole) never loved any of the girls he womanised the way he loved his Saxon friend Becket (Burton), whom he makes Chancellor of England and then Archbishop of Canterbury.

Of course Anouilh's Becket is not about homosexuality. No one imagined that for a moment. At a time when the subject was unspeakable, this very expensive, very literate costume drama was about - among other things - the intensities of Platonic love, what the Old Testament refers to as (this is David to Jonathan) "a love passing the love of women".

Five years after this, Burton went on to make a film of Charles Dyer's play The Staircase, in which he played a whiney, squat, middle-aged hairdresser who spent most of the film with his hair in a towel (perhaps it was a net) and who was connubially attached to Rex Harrison.

Colin Bennett, The Age film writer at the time, remarked that when there was finally a representation of everyday homosexuality on screen - admittedly in a very British, post-kitchen sink way - the chaps in question had to be played by two of the most famous womanising stars in the world.

Of course it makes sense. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are said to be labouring a bit under the weight of all the attention they're receiving for playing the two cowboys who are in love with each other in Brokeback Mountain.

And perhaps the fuss is bound to be excessive given the contrast between the realism of the story and the whole atmosphere of commercial caution and self-consciousness that Hollywood can manifest.

It's doubly odd in the case of this Annie Proulx story, which Ang Lee and the script-writing team of McMurtry and Diana Ossana have brought to the screen with a skill that dazzles the mind and wrings the heart.

Brokeback Mountain is the story of two young men who come together tending sheep.

Ennis (Ledger) has been put out to fend for himself (his parents are dead), and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) has a brutal, full-of-himself father and a dirt-poor home. They come together without thinking what they're doing, but with a force they can't resist. Neither of them has ever talked to anyone in this way before.

Ennis knows what can be done to a man in the West who people think is queer. He remembers when he was nine, his father showing him an old man who was suspected of it and was genitally mutilated. Lord, his father might have done it. Ennis knows that he's going to marry his girl and that he won't see Jack for the longest while even if - and he knows this - no one else will really make that fire light. And so he does marry and his wife produces daughters. A note comes from Jack and he writes back, "You bet."

They rut, they tumble, like men by water. Life goes on. Ennis won't accept Jack's offer that they make their lives together.

How can he, he's poor, there are the girls to support. His wife knows in her heart what has been going on, she's seen how these guys hug, how they kiss, the passion that's not there for her.

There are separations and sadnesses. There are stormy scenes between husbands and wives, stony scenes as well as stormy, between two men who love each other like rocks, but who can't find a way to make it work as a way of life.

There's a lot of stoical stuff, plenty of pulled-back tears on every side and a nearly overpowering credibility about the whole thing.

Annie Proulx is capable of sentimentalism when she writes a full-scale novel, but there is nothing sentimental about this heartbreaking son-of-a-***** story, written in prose like stone and with a deep sense of how human life can hit, time and again, against tragedy.

It's not Huckleberry Finn. It's a story of the hardness of life and a kind of spirit that has nothing much to do with intelligence, though it involves every kind of sensitivity.

Brokeback Mountain seems, not so many years after it was first published in the New Yorker (1997), as if it has always been part of the American landscape and the American sense of what warmth there is in the face of desolation.

No doubt that's why the doyen of literary Westerners, The Last Picture Show man himself, Larry McMurtry, has done this adaptation and done it with his longtime collaborator Diana Diana Ossana, with all his heart and all his soul and all his mind. Pinter, at the height of his powers, working with Joseph Losey, did not produce better screenplays.

Brokeback Mountain is one of those adaptations of a literary work that is both absolutely faithful to the original and a freestanding work of art.

It doesn't have any of the inert stiffness that can sometimes come from the literal adaptation of book to film. In that respect it adheres to the Susan Sontag principle that you can make a better film from a short story than you can from a full-length novel.

Ang Lee has taken Annie Proulx's story and filmed it with a spare brilliance that allows exactly the right amount of weight to each of its parts and McMurtry and Ossana have rarely chosen to dolly up the material, choosing instead to put the odd bit of narration into direct speech but keep very close to the laconic tonality of the original, its sense of the gaps and wounds in the heart.

It's something of a dream collaboration and McMurtry's dialogue - which is, after all, superbly "overheard" in his own novels - is a superb realisation of Proulx, not least, one suspects, because it has no hint of anachronistic modishness or feyness.

Ledger and Gyllenhaal never sound remotely like the camp cowboys of popular imagining. They have absolutely nothing in common with whatever our contemporary celluloid imaginaire of both-ways-boys is.

Both characters are presented as dorkishly, lumberingly masculine. Ledger's Ennis is, by turns, mulish, sensitive and with plenty of old-fashioned "weight". He looks - a little amazingly - like a man who was 20 in 1963. He's the kind of guy who stares into the wind, with narrowed eyes, who expects to be hit and to hit back as hard as he can.

Heath Ledger has blossomed extraordinarily as an actor and this is a remarkable characterisation of a simple man who nevertheless has seas of turbulence inside him.

He's terrific at registering the emotion behind a facade of reserve and the performance is consistently pulled back without for a moment being wooden.

Brokeback Mountain is everywhere faithful to the gritty particulars of this world, as when Ledger explains to Gyllenhaal that he can't afford to lose his job to see him on their next scheduled holiday. Or, in the way he upbraids him for his sexual tourism in Mexico.

Jake Gyllenhaal is just as good in the Jack Twist role. He's a hayseed, but a smart and subtle one. Gyllenhaal brings out the boyishness and the cunning but also the simple willingness to make a life out of their love which is not available to Ennis.

It's a performance that would be hailed as bravura if it were not so convincing that it is likely to be taken for granted. It is a million miles from the performances which have made Jake Gyllenhaal famous as various versions of an alienated imaginative fruitcake youth.

Part of the deep poignancy of this film is that it is a portrait of two men who have never had time to be young, so that the bond between them is this thing which co-exists with a set of responsibilities that they tend to embrace unquestioningly as a form of slavery. Ang Lee has turned his back on razzle dazzle Youth Culture America so decisively that Brokeback Mountain looks like the product of another time.

Apart from anything else Ledger and Gyllenhaal are expected to age, in the course of the film, the better part of 20 years and they manage this - in a way the film manages to make look effortless - by the way they are weighed down by the constancy of their sorrows and their unswerving sense of something so central to them that it would be sentimental to call it happiness.

I should add that Ang Lee's film is full of epiphanies of landscape - of nature in implicit contrast with the dusty austerities of the Wyoming towns the characters inhabit - but it also rustles with a different kind of vivacity whenever women and children come into the action.

And the women in this film - Michelle Williams as Ennis' squirrel of a wife, Alma, and Anne Hathaway in a superb performance as Lureen, Jack's wife - so brittle, so deadly, so human - are marvels to behold.

And so too are the daughters and the woman who would like to be Ennis' girlfriend. Ang Lee has a wonderfully animate sense of society, and it whispers - and even sings - in the corners of this remarkable film about two people who are isolated by their passion.

Brokeback Mountain was produced with Canadian money and filmed in Alberta. The fact that it was co-written (co-adapted) by one of the most assured popular writers in America, from a novel by the queen of homespun feeling, and directed by the maestro of Crouching Tiger is an irony worth pondering.

The central performances - by two towering young dreamboats - are as good as anything Paul Newman or Montgomery Clift did at the same age. This is a quiet film and - in an admirable way - a resolutely unglamorous one. It brings credit on everyone involved in it.

In many ways it is closest to Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil (his Civil War film made with Tobey Maguire before Maguire was a star), which is also a kind of anthem for doomed youth.

Ennis and Jack are doomed to have no youth or to have only the epiphany of youth, hugged to their bosoms like a premonition of death.

Everyone should see this gay Western, which makes a mockery of that description.

It glamorises nothing. It serves no cause. It is a stark and sad film from a great director with two superb performances, and a slow and encompassing sense of the sap and sorrow of life. It creates a truer image of things than you expect to see these days. It's a story about little people, ordinary people, who are mowed down like grass by the thing that makes them individuals, and are not less heroic or less tragic for the choices they make.

oh my!

it

is




sooo...


GAYYYY!!

lol

exactly. you are not mistaken.