Brokeback Mountain Forum @ ennisjack.com
The Movie & Story => News Coverage, Reviews & Awards => Topic started by: Jennis on Jul 05, 2006, 11:11 AM
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THE BIG-SCREEN SCENE: 07/04/2006
Diane Ladd reports she's begun preproduction on "All God's Children," an indie film she's producing, and in which she expects to co-star by summer's end.
"It's about a guy who's gay who has to take over his sister's kids after she gets in an auto accident coming to visit him. And he has a relationship with another guy."
The ever-outspoken Ladd — who's been touring the country promoting her new motivational book, "Spiraling Through the School of Life" — says "All God's Children" is "probably what 'Brokeback Mountain' wanted to be in that their (Heath Ledger's and Jake Gyllenhaal's characters) relationships with other people are clearer, and they really care about other people.
"Don't get me wrong — 'Brokeback Mountain' is a great film. Ang Lee is a magnificent director, and the performances were unbelievable, but the fault I had was in the people themselves. Did they really care about each other, who they saw for, like five minutes once a year, or did they care about their children or their wives?
You know, it was all about 'me.' In 'All God's Children,' the guy is concerned about his sister, the kids and his own involvement in the relationship he's trying to have."
http://www.dailynews.com/celebrities/ci_4008853
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Thanks for posting this and starting the new thread Jennis ^f^
Not sure I agree with Dianne Ladd on this one - she seems to be saying that Jack and Ennis were more selfish than the characters in her story, yet she's not taking into consideration the different circumstances behind the choices they made.
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Did they really care about each other, who they saw for, like five minutes once a year
The answer is YES. They did!
Thanks Jennis for sharing.
Thanks for posting this and starting the new thread Jennis ^f^
yet she's not taking into consideration the different circumstances behind the choices they made.
I agree with you on this one
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(https://ennisjack.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi69.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fi73%2FJennis1%2Fjgyllenhaal.jpg&hash=4128802ad69a4d3531aa2507f2bc09627cc2d8e6)
Ledger and Gyllenhaal in 2005 Photo by: MarionCurtis / startraks
Jake, Heath & Dakota Invited to Join Academy
WEDNESDAY JULY 05, 2006 04:35PM EST
By Stephen M. Silverman
Oscar may be almost 80, but he's still young at heart – enough to keep company with Heath Ledger and even Dakota Fanning.
On Thursday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hands out the Oscars each year, invited 120 artists and executives to join its ranks – including such young actors as Ledger, 27, Fanning, 12, Keira Knightley, 21, and Jake Gyllenhaal, 25.
"Most people who aren't really aware of the Academy think it's probably a bunch of elderly people," AMPAS director Bruce Davis told the Associated Press. "They're not thinking Scarlett Johansson and Maggie Gyllenhaal, they're thinking really old guys. That's a hard perception to overcome."
"Two years ago the Academy decided to slow membership growth, and to become even more selective in choosing members," Academy president Sid Ganis said in a statement. "Instead of inviting every proposed person who has achieved the minimum qualifications for his or her branch, the membership committees are selecting the most exceptionally qualified names from those lists."
The Academy will welcome new members on Sept. 20 at a reception at its Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills.
http://people.aol.com/people/article/0,26334,1210413,00.html
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They mention Maggie Gyllenhaal in the above article so i am assuming she is already an AMPAS member.I wonder if she was allowed to vote for her brother?
J.x
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"Brokeback"ers Corral Academy Invite
by Natalie Finn
Jul 5, 2006, 5:00 PM PT
A couple of gay ranch hands, the Incredible Hulk and a Jane Austen heroine have finally been given the right to vote.
Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Eric Bana and Keira Knightley were among the 120 actors, directors, producers, technicians and executives to receive invitations Wednesday to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the only such offers that the organization will extend in 2006.
But while the existing members of the Academy have laid out the welcome mat for Edward R. Murrow, a hustlin' pimp, a preteen phenom (Dakota Fanning) and Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix), among many others, we're left with one question:
Who throws a party for Heath Ledger and leaves Michelle Williams off the guest list?
(Answer: the same people who make Deuce Bigalow stay home for the third consecutive year. Sorry, again, Rob.)
Although Williams, Ledger's Brokeback Mountain costar and the mother of his child, will no doubt be a welcome guest at the--what else?--invitation-only reception to honor this year's new inductees (should they choose to accept, of course), she was not on the list of thespians offered Academy membership, despite her Oscar nod for Brokeback and her growing list of impressive indie film credits.
Full article here:
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,19427,00.html
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Thanks for the articles Jennis. :-*
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Thanks for the articles Jennis. :-*
You're welcome sweetie ;)
J.x
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Glad Heath and Jake get to vote- But it doesnt matter since I wont ever be watching the Oscars again thanks to the BBM snub.
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Glad Heath and Jake get to vote- But it doesnt matter since I wont ever be watching the Oscars again thanks to the BBM snub.
Me either - first AND last time for me. :X
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Never say never, that may come back to haunt you., I'm glad they both can vote now. Who knows? They may do another movie together, since they have such good onscreen chemistry together ;)
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If it were me, I wouldn't want anything to do with AMPAS, but I guess in their case it's an honor and important in the Hollywood system. Still, they'll be keeping some pretty odd company if they join. I don't think I'll watch the Oscars again after last year - too much became obvious about how and why and by whom they're given.
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Straight Spouse Network
Fri 07/07/2006 -
Local help for individuals who experience an unexpected turn in their marriage.
For possibly millions of Americans, the film Brokeback Mountain is not just a work of fiction…it is a stark reality for married couples whose spouse is gay.
A local group is now attempting to pick up the pieces when a marriage shatters. The Straight Spouse Network is an organization aimed at supporting that spouse, and helping them come to terms with the reality of their marriage.
“The point of the straight spouse network is that from our perspective after finding out about our spouses, its a huge shock, most of us become depressed, I mean medically depressed," says Sarah Smiley of Central Wisconsin.
According to a New York Times article, an estimated 1.7-to-3.4 million women are, or have been, married to men who have sex with men.
Saturday the Straight Spouse Network will be holding a picnic at Mendota Park from 12 to 6pm. Anyone is welcome to attend.
http://www.wkowtv.com/index.php/news/story/p/pkid/24383
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Don't know how relevant this is but today's Sunday paper has a long think-piece about a new book coming out on American concepts of the masculine. Among all the verbiage is a section on BBM, saying that it has been a part of the re-envsioning of male roles, as it shows gays in a macho environment being "real men" ( whatever a real man is).
The idea isn''t new; what fascinates me is how often BBM is used as a cultural reference-point and how soon its significance to the culture has been taken for granted.
The Academy got it wrong, as subsequent events have shown.
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Don't know how relevant this is but today's Sunday paper has a long think-piece about a new book coming out on American concepts of the masculine. Among all the verbiage is a section on BBM, saying that it has been a part of the re-envsioning of male roles, as it shows gays in a macho environment being "real men" ( whatever a real man is).
The idea isn''t new; what fascinates me is how often BBM is used as a cultural reference-point and how soon its significance to the culture has been taken for granted.
The Academy got it wrong, as subsequent events have shown.
welshwitch,what paper is it?Maybe the article is online?
Jennis.x
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It's in the "Observer" today. Main section or review, I think.
Relevant para reads:
"Even BBM has not escaped the male backlash. Once seen as a gay breakthrough movie, there is now a school of thought redefining its cultural significance." [NB the terrrible syntax here is nothing to do with me.] " Instead of gay cowboys being seen as a token of a more sensitive nation, the film may have showed that even gay men have had to become more butch. Now they are huntin', shootin', fishin' types, just like their straight counterparts. In modern America even gay men like to chew tobacco and go to the rodeo. 'You can make an argument for it either way and each is perfectly valid,' said Professor Robert Thompson, a popular culture expert at Syracuse University, New Jersey."
I make no comment on the attitudes displayed by the writer( one Paul Harris from NY),the stereotypes, generalisations and apparent lack of knowledge of the movie. However, I will say that this Thompson, whoever he is, has the usual academic's knack of saying nothing worthwhile, sitting on the fence and generally justifying my feeling that anyone who's involved in popular culture is a charlatan. Harris's views on BBM might have been interesting if they hadn't been voiced elsewhere; the general thrust of the article is rather more interesting.
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Thanks for posting welshwitch,it's an interesting article :)...
Jennis.x
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i think they did care about there wife and children but they were just in love i think ennis really did care about his kids like in the scene after they divorce he doesnt go with jack cause he got his kids and in the end of the movie he is gunna miss his job to go to alma jr wedding but i think jack didnt care i think he was really in love
ennis_lover
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I just want to inform the forum that I am now in possession of the pup tent. :) After 3 agonizing weeks and fearing that it was lost in transit, it has finally arrived.
Jack was clearly exaggerating: it does not smell of cat piss. It has the cold and invigorating smell of the mountain. And it is definitely unwashed...
Thanks all. I shall have to set it up sometime and take a pic. :)
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I just want to inform the forum that I am now in possession of the pup tent. :) After 3 agonizing weeks and fearing that it was lost in transit, it has finally arrived.
Jack was clearly exaggerating: it does not smell of cat piss. It has the cold and invigorating smell of the mountain. And it is definitely unwashed...
Thanks all. I shall have to set it up sometime and take a pic. :)
Yeeehaaaw. &**) Finally the tent found it way home. <^(
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I just want to inform the forum that I am now in possession of the pup tent. :) After 3 agonizing weeks and fearing that it was lost in transit, it has finally arrived.
Jack was clearly exaggerating: it does not smell of cat piss. It has the cold and invigorating smell of the mountain. And it is definitely unwashed...
Thanks all. I shall have to set it up sometime and take a pic. :)
Yeeehaaaw. &**) Finally the tent found it way home. <^(
Thank you so much Twisted. I am very relieved and happy that it finally did arrive. :) I owe the forum a pic of the tent -- I must set it up sometime in the park. Perhaps when some friends from this forum join me later this August?
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Magic! &**)
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Magic! &**)
Black, gray, or white, I am glad it finally arrived. :) But 3 weeks going through the US Postal system?
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I just want to inform the forum that I am now in possession of the pup tent. :) After 3 agonizing weeks and fearing that it was lost in transit, it has finally arrived.
Jack was clearly exaggerating: it does not smell of cat piss. It has the cold and invigorating smell of the mountain. And it is definitely unwashed...
Thanks all. I shall have to set it up sometime and take a pic. :)
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank god, that;s good news!!
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After 3 agonizing weeks and fearing that it was lost in transit, it has finally arrived.
Glad your agony's just ended!
So happy for you, Professor.
Great to know about the lack of smell too ;)
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Thanks Froggy. Thanks Frances. :)
Unlike soup boxes, the tent is easy to pack: it would fit nicely in a small carry-on luggage. I could bring it to Europe for the meeting. :) I will probably hand-carry it, to be sure!
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Thanks Froggy. Thanks Frances. :)
Unlike soup boxes, the tent is easy to pack: it would fit nicely in a small carry-on luggage. I could bring it to Europe for the meeting. :) I will probably hand-carry it, to be sure!
Yes, that might be best!!! lol
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And I could bring a contribution from the cats with which to sprinkle it.
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I just want to inform the forum that I am now in possession of the pup tent. :) After 3 agonizing weeks and fearing that it was lost in transit, it has finally arrived.
Jack was clearly exaggerating: it does not smell of cat piss. It has the cold and invigorating smell of the mountain. And it is definitely unwashed...
Thanks all. I shall have to set it up sometime and take a pic. :)
Aww Thomas!!!!Thank goodness.I was living every agonising moment with you.So glad it arrived.I know you feared the worst at one stage so i'm really pleased for you.So it doesn't smell? LOL.What's it like owning a piece of BBM history? 8)
Hugs
Jennis.x
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Aww Thomas!!!!Thank goodness.I was living every agonising moment with you.So glad it arrived.I know you feared the worst at one stage so i'm really pleased for you.So it doesn't smell? LOL.What's it like owning a piece of BBM history? 8)
Hugs
Jennis.x
Thanks Jennis! You know how nervous I was and have really strated to give up. It doesn't smell bad at all. And the fact that everything is unwashed makes pretty much a relic, no? I have nir unrolled the canvas, but I hope to find some pine needles, perhaps?
I am having an antique chest from Asia sent to me within the next 6 months (difficult to find a suitable one when one is far away.) It will serve as a nice tabernacle, no?
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tpe, is this the actual pup tent used in the movie, or a facsimile? :s)
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Aww Thomas!!!!Thank goodness.I was living every agonising moment with you.So glad it arrived.I know you feared the worst at one stage so i'm really pleased for you.So it doesn't smell? LOL.What's it like owning a piece of BBM history? 8)
Hugs
Jennis.x
Thanks Jennis! You know how nervous I was and have really strated to give up. It doesn't smell bad at all. And the fact that everything is unwashed makes pretty much a relic, no? I have nir unrolled the canvas, but I hope to find some pine needles, perhaps?
I am having an antique chest from Asia sent to me within the next 6 months (difficult to find a suitable one when one is far away.) It will serve as a nice tabernacle, no?
Aww so happy for you :-*..Yes,you were in fear of it being lost in transit,understandable.I love the fact it's in it's original state,unwashed.The chest sounds ideal for storage.
Jennis.x
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tpe, is this the actual pup tent used in the movie, or a facsimile? :s)
Hello dirtbiker. It's the original pup tent. And it seems that there was only one used in the production.
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Aww so happy for you :-*..Yes,you were in fear of it being lost in transit,understandable.I love the fact it's in it's original state,unwashed.The chest sounds ideal for storage.
Jennis.x
I should keep the packaging box as it has Ken Wills' name and address on it. This would be sufficient for documentation... :)
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Aww so happy for you :-*..Yes,you were in fear of it being lost in transit,understandable.I love the fact it's in it's original state,unwashed.The chest sounds ideal for storage.
Jennis.x
I should keep the packaging box as it has Ken Wills' name and address on it. This would be sufficient for documentation... :)
Ooh yes,keep that.Makes it official ;)...Hope he has love tent lurking somewhere.Will keep a look out for it.You need the matching pair.lol
J.x
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Ooh yes,keep that.Makes it official ;)...Hope he has love tent lurking somewhere.Will keep a look out for it.You need the matching pair.lol
J.x
I cannot imagine the mother tent going cheaply. It will be a wonder to own. Even the blanketswould be enoogh to throw the Angels into a tizzy...
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Ooh yes,keep that.Makes it official ;)...Hope he has love tent lurking somewhere.Will keep a look out for it.You need the matching pair.lol
J.x
I cannot imagine the mother tent going cheaply. It will be a wonder to own. Even the blanketswould be enoogh to throw the Angels into a tizzy...
True.It will go for megabucks,but we could start a forum fund and all chip in a little bit and maybe we could afford it then and it can be kept with your other one.I wouldn't mind.
J.x
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Ooh yes,keep that.Makes it official ;)...Hope he has love tent lurking somewhere.Will keep a look out for it.You need the matching pair.lol
J.x
I cannot imagine the mother tent going cheaply. It will be a wonder to own. Even the blanketswould be enoogh to throw the Angels into a tizzy...
True.It will go for megabucks,but we could start a forum fund and all chip in a little bit and maybe we could afford it then and it can be kept with your other one.I wouldn't mind.
J.x
In the long run, I do think they should be donated to a place that will take care of them and preserve them, no? If we do chip in, we should decide on a suitable long term custodian and see if they are interested.
It would be great to see the all the BBM props all under one roof. That would be beautiful.
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Here's a short take on Jake & Maggie in their siblings feature:
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/siblings/
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I just want to inform the forum that I am now in possession of the pup tent. :) After 3 agonizing weeks and fearing that it was lost in transit, it has finally arrived.
Jack was clearly exaggerating: it does not smell of cat piss. It has the cold and invigorating smell of the mountain. And it is definitely unwashed...
Thanks all. I shall have to set it up sometime and take a pic. :)
Remarkably cool! I'm so glad that things like this will be treated like the cultural artifacts they are to us. I know you'll take good care of it, and I do think it would be cool to someday have a collection and exhibit of items like this.
Cheers to you for acquiring and saving this!
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Here's a short take on Jake & Maggie in their siblings feature:
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/siblings/
Thank you very much dirtbiker. This is a treat. :)
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Remarkably cool! I'm so glad that things like this will be treated like the cultural artifacts they are to us. I know you'll take good care of it, and I do think it would be cool to someday have a collection and exhibit of items like this.
Cheers to you for acquiring and saving this!
Thanks dalemidex. I will definitely donate it in the near future to a place that will take good care of it. Hope it can join other material from the movie in the not too distant future...
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Here's a short take on Jake & Maggie in their siblings feature:
http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/2006/siblings/
Thank you very much dirtbiker. This is a treat. :)
Maggie, 28 on Jake, 25: "Jake is more honest with me than anyone else in my life."
I hope Peter does not see this... ;)
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tpe said...
In the long run, I do think they should be donated to a place that will take care of them and preserve them, no? If we do chip in, we should decide on a suitable long term custodian and see if they are interested.
It would be great to see the all the BBM props all under one roof. That would be beautiful.
Yes,i think so too.If the tent does ever show up for sale we shall have to hope it doesn't hit the high proportions of the shirts :( as we will never be able to afford it.Tom could though ;)...
J.x
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Yes,i think so too.If the tent does ever show up for sale we shall have to hope it doesn't hit the high proportions of the shirts :( as we will never be able to afford it.Tom could though ;)...
J.x
I admire Gregory for his tenacity. His ability to buy is dwarfed by his enthusiasm for BBM. :)
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LOL..Sounds like a good way to get fit.
http://gearlog.com/blogs/gearlog/archive/2006/07/11/15231.aspx
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Legislators propose film incentive
By The Associated Press Tuesday, July 11, 2006
SARATOGA, Wyo. (AP) -- State lawmakers hope a proposed $2 million incentive would prevent more missed opportunities like the estimated $12.75 million the state lost out on when two films set in Wyoming were shot in Canada to save money.
Those films were "Brokeback Mountain" and "An Unfinished Life."
"Wyoming is not competitive in the game," the state's tourism director, Diane Shober, told a legislative committee Monday.
Shober and Rep. Rosie Berger, R-Sheridan, presented a draft bill that would establish a $2 million biennial film rebate for production companies filming in the state. A similar bill failed to win introduction in the Wyoming House earlier this year; the 39-20 vote was one short of the two-thirds needed for non-budget bills.
The Joint Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee decided to further study the idea at its November meeting.
Berger said the amount of the rebate would depend on to what extent the film involves Wyoming. "It sweeps across so many businesses," she said. "It's a broader way of marketing to your audience."
The department has estimated that travel features written about Wyoming after "Brokeback Mountain" equaled $3.5 million in newspaper, radio, television and magazine advertising.
When the 1997 film "Starship Troopers" was shot on location in Hell's Half-Acre west of Casper, the total expenditures on hotels, local crew and hiring extras, as well as the costs of transportation and rentals, topped $4.2 million.
Shober said New Mexico enacted incentives in 2003, boosting its benefit from filming from $8.8 million in 2002 to $297.4 million so far this year.
"This creates jobs while at the same time it markets the state," Berger said. "I believe that we will benefit many times over."
Clay Miller of the Paradise Ranch in Buffalo told the committee that dude ranches across the West operated at or near full capacity for five years after "City Slickers."
"It's not rocket science," he said.
Information from: Wyoming Tribune-Eagle, http://www.wyomingnews.com
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I am glad that they are learning from this. Had they ahd the incentives in place in 2004, perhaps the story of the making of BBM would have been very different.
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I am glad that they are learning from this. Had they ahd the incentives in place in 2004, perhaps the story of the making of BBM would have been very different.
Perhaps it's the nature of the movie, but $$$ talks, ultimately...
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I am glad that they are learning from this. Had they ahd the incentives in place in 2004, perhaps the story of the making of BBM would have been very different.
Perhaps it's the nature of the movie, but $$$ talks, ultimately...
So so true.
I was just talking about a similar thing with Theresa regarding CANDY...
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Us Angels are just waiting for those blankets to show up. Every now and again we get time off for good behavior. Bring on the tizzy, maybe if we all send up prayers, the location of the mother tent, will be revealed. I wonder if Heath has it......
Ooh yes,keep that.Makes it official ;)...Hope he has love tent lurking somewhere.Will keep a look out for it.You need the matching pair.lol
J.x
I cannot imagine the mother tent going cheaply. It will be a wonder to own. Even the blanketswould be enoogh to throw the Angels into a tizzy...
#)
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Article about same sex marriage and the New York ruling.Brokeback gets a small mention.
J.x
http://www.washblade.com/2006/7-13/view/columns/foreman.cfm
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Don't know if this article's been already posted
"Brokeback Mountain"
a film review by Gary Chew
It's just a year after the film "Ride the High Country" was released in 1962 that two fictional cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist fall in love in Ang Lee's new movie, "Brokeback Mountain." Ennis and Jack---played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal---have no idea who Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea are; or for that matter, who the hell Sam Peckinpah is. Neither do Ennis and Jack know that they're two young, masculine characters who leap from the closet into each others arms; thereby giving us the opportunity to explore the shadows of a male relationship that so many other movies have only allowed but a slender ray of illumination, i.e. "Ride the High Country" or, the considerably more blatant 1969 film, "Midnight Cowboy," directed by John Schlesinger.
The hook for Lee's motion picture, plain and simple, is its tender, sad story about something that's probably as common as an old boot, but seldom if ever revealed, unless a man wants to get his ass whupped or killed by some other "good old" homophobic boys. Conversely and curiously, what we also have here is a movie that will deeply affect young women, especially straight women. That's because two young, straight women are pretty much victimized by their plight with these men as their husbands are victimized by society to "Don't tell!"
The men disagree on how to handle the future. Jack wants to let it all hang out, terminate other associations, get a little spread out in the middle of nowhere and settle down with Ennis. But Ennis, much less outgoing, is more pragmatic. He knows living such a life with Jack would be a terrible mistake. When Ennis was a child, his father shows him the battered remains of a sod-buster who took up with another man and paid the "price."
Annie Proulx's short story is opened up considerably by Ang Lee's two screenwriters: Diana Ossana and the legendary Larry McMurtry, a guy who's given us some really great moments of Western lore. Remember "The Last Picture Show," "Lonesome Dove" and "Hud?"
The exposition and development of the bond between Ennis and Jack take up the first third of "Brokeback Mountain."And although we get a really stunning dose of the natural beauty of the Wyoming Rockies (shot in Alberta), where their love affair blossoms, almost in an adagio tempo, the rest of their story begs an earlier entrance. Lee's film would seem less self indulgent with about a quarter hour removed, most of which would easily be edited from the film's first third.
After Ennis and Jack establish their concealed association, both head off in different directions and start living the straight life. Almost, that is, except for occasional surreptitious "fishing trips" together. On their first reunion after being together on Brokeback, the pair's effusive and passionate embraces are accidently and covertly observed by Ennis' wife (Michelle Williams). She is devastated and very confused for a rural wife of the mid 60's. Meanwhile, down deep in the heart of Texas, Jack's wife (Anne Hathaway) hasn't the foggiest notion that her husband really doesn't like fishing that much.
The love scenes with Ledger and Gyllenhaal are not gratuitous, but there isn't any doubt left as to what's going on between them physically. And for those who find such cinematic situations unpleasant to watch, there are also, if you will, other moments of heterosexuality which give the film, I guess, a sense of balance. As Ennis might be heard to utter in his resonate ranch hand vernacular, "Ya pays yur money and ya takes yur churse."
That doesn't make any sense to me. How about all those thousands of straight love stories, seriously unbalanced because of the lack of some homosexual lovemaking?
The acting is solid all the way around, especially with Ledger and Hathaway, but they have the best parts to play, too. Veteran good old boy, Randy Quaid gives a quick turn as the taciturn and very stern sheep owner who hires on Ennis and Jack to keep summer watch over his sheep up on Brokeback. Later on, Randy gets a glimpse of the young shepherds carrying on in the wild, allowing for some very good old boy moments on the part of the hefty Quaid.
"Brokeback Mountain," indeed, isn't a picture for good old boys, whatever their age, because it's about an aspect in the natural order of things that also includes, much to their chagrin, good old boys. They believe they should be excluded and may well be acting out their real life roles as good old boys to insure that that's just what most folks think they are.
If Sam Peckinpah were alive today, he would make a great guest on The Larry King Show. If he could stay sober long enough, Sam could talk about what has become of the Western and, maybe, how he would've directed "Brokeback Mountain" differently. I would definitely watch and maybe even call CNN.
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Yes , Armstrong does not have the best sense of humour:
http://people.aol.com/people/article/0,26334,1213340,00.html
Lance Gets Bawdy at the ESPY Awards
THURSDAY JULY 13, 2006 09:55AM EST
By Stephen M. Silverman
Armstrong hosting the ESPYs July 12
(https://ennisjack.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.timeinc.net%2Fpeople%2Fi%2F2006%2Fnews%2F060724%2Flance_armstrong.jpg&hash=e9714ed34c86013e699040fbd6374ef5b1d1aa61)
Photo by: Kevin Winter
Lance Armstrong raised eyebrows – and got laughs – as host of Wednesday night's ESPY Awards, where he cracked crude jokes about new best friends Jake Gyllenhaal and Matthew McConaughey.
The actors, who've been photographed recently clad in Spandex and biking with Armstrong, were in the audience at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre. Armstrong, in a reference to Gyllenhaal's Brokeback Mountain role, asked why Gyllenhaal was sitting in the front when Armstrong thought he preferred to be "in the rear … of the theater."
Then, referring to McConaughey's recent PEOPLE honor, Armstrong said, "The Sexiest Man Alive is here, Matthew McConaughey. We don't all have to turn and look – we all know what he looks like. Jake, eyes up here!"
(Backstage, Armstrong told reporters, "Matthew I've known for the past seven or eight years now, and the last couple of years we've gotten closer. We just enjoy hanging out. Cycling is a sport that he doesn't know – it's a sport that I introduced him to. … We've been doing a bunch of riding. He's a true sportsman.")
From the podium, Armstrong also joked about his testicular cancer, bashed the French (a French newspaper had erroneously accused him of doping after one of his seven Tour de France victories) and was shown in a doctored photo catching Britney Spears's falling son, Sean Preston
He also picked up his fourth consecutive male athlete of the year award. "It wasn't rigged, I promise," he told the audience after receiving his silver trophy from Mariah Carey.
Backstage, Armstrong described how he's been handling life since quitting professional cycling last year. "I'm still trying to be retired," he said. "Life is busy, life is hectic – I suppose that's the way I like it."
At the afterparty at the Mondrian Hotel's Skybar, Armstrong, McConaughey and Gyllenhaal hung out with actors Cole Hauser and Matthew Perry, while Arizona Cardinals footballer Matt Leinart stuck with Nick Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo. Other guests included Ashley Judd, Brandy, Venus and Serena Williams and Kiefer Sutherland.
The ceremony will be broadcast Sunday night on ESPN.
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(Jake the dog...LOL)
J.x
July 15th 2006
THREE FOR THOUGHT WHAT YOU NEED TO READ ABOUT . . . COWBOYS
Don't fence me in
Everyone wants to be a cowpoke at Calgary Stampede time, PETER SHAWN TAYLOR says, but life in the saddle is a solitary one
PETER SHAWN TAYLOR
It's Stampede time again in Calgary. And that means everyone from TV personalities to oil-industry lawyers are wearin' big hats and pointy boots and lookin' like cowboys.
You should never underestimate the sartorial aspects of cowboy life. Debates over how to wear your pant cuffs can be as hard fought as anything experienced in high school. But the most significant characteristics of being a cowboy are, by my own experience, far more ascetic.
In 1987, I spent the year working as a wrangler at a ranch south of the Wyoming town of Cody. Because I lacked a work permit, I couldn't get a guide's licence; so while my fellow wranglers spent hunting season trekking through the Absarokas looking for deer and elk with rich American hunters, I was the one packing out their dead meat on a four-hour ride to the highway. My other job was to chop wood and guard the hunting camp from predators between hunts.
As experiences go, it seemed rather authentic. And it was damned sure solitary. Jake the dog, my only companion in camp, wasn't much of a conversationalist. So whenever a new group of hunters and guides would show up, my mouth seemed to take on a life of its own, jawboning the newcomers before they even had a chance to dismount. And my ride back to civilization was such a long, slow plod that I would occasionally fall asleep in the saddle, only to wake up when my horse stopped at a gate that needed opening. You don't get that kind of alone at the Stampede. It's noisy, messy and crowded. The midway might be a good time, but it's no place to learn about being a cowboy.
To discover the practical foundations of the cowboy, start with James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales (Library of America reprint in two volumes, 1985). A series of five books written between 1823 and 1842 and set in pre-American Revolution New York and Ontario -- the most famous of which is probably The Last of the Mohicans -- may seem a strange beginning. But Cooper's Natty Bumppo --a.k.a. Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Deerslayer or any of the other names that Cooper called his most famous character, consistency not being his strong point -- is the unquestioned archetype for the traditional cowboy hero.
Bumppo's home is the wilderness, and he's uneasy when walls and rules get too close. His actions are guided by a personal code, what Cooper mysteriously calls "the white man's gifts," that covers honour and bravery and respect for nature.
Cooper's hero also forsakes conventional female companionship, preferring the company of his Mohican sidekick Chingachgook and his never-miss rifle Killdeer. In The Deerslayer he is aghast at the advances of the beautiful Judith Hutter: "What you've offered can never come to pass!" he says when she suggests they hook up.
The Leatherstocking Tales were the first recognizably distinct works of American fiction, and they gave birth to the cowboy figure of Hollywood movies and pulp novels. To find this mythology in full bloom, Jack Schaefer's novel Shane (Houghton Mifflin, 1949) and the faithful 1953 movie version are as good a place as any to look.
Often listed as young adult fiction because of the spare writing style, Schaefer's Shane was once voted the best Western novel of all time. Again, our hero is mysterious in name and origin. He appears from the mountains, lives by a code that only he understands and departs when civilization threatens to swallow him up.
After cleaning up a Wyoming town, Shane refuses to indulge in any softer pleasures. The famous final words that echo across the valley at the end of the movie as the boy narrator shouts to Shane, "My mother wants you . . . wants you . . . wants you," serve as another reminder of the sacrifices required to live the cowboy life.
There's no shortage of works on the tail end of the myth, where the traditional cowboy is finally crushed by society's advance. Annie Proulx's recent collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Scribner, 1999) features 11 short stories set largely in the 20th century with the solitary pursuit of the modern cowboy serving as its unifying theme. "There was nobody in his life to slow him down with love," she writes of an itinerant rodeo rider in The Mud Below.
The best-known of the stories is a certain Oscar-winning tale about the cowboy love that dares not speak its name. But even in Brokeback Mountain, it is the sacrifice and solitude of cowboy life that drives the story. The simultaneous attraction and loneliness of working with livestock in the hills pushes Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist into their unconventional relationship. And even as Brokeback Mountain provocatively pricks traditional cowboy mythology, it is still remarkable for its close-eyed observations on life in the saddle.
Proulx makes it even plainer than Cooper or Schaefer how important desolation in both landscape and personal space is to the Western myth. Being an authentic cowboy is a choice that entails living outside conventional boundaries and pleasures. The poverty -- and sex -- in her stories is rough and grinding. Emotional connections few and far between. Freedom has its price.
And perhaps that's why the cowboy myth has always shone brightest on the screen. It's the kind of life that can seem quite appealing for two hours at a time. Or maybe even 10 days a year. Stretch it out over a lifetime, however, and it gets powerful lonely.
Peter Shawn Taylor is a freelance writer based in Waterloo, Ont. If he had to, he could probably find his big belt buckle.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060715.BKREAD15/TPStory/Entertainment
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Frances,thanks for the BBM review by Gary Eschew.(I'm a poet,and i didn't know it)Ok,i'll stop now.Where was i?Oh,yes thankyou.Is there a date for it?I don't know if i have read it or not but my mind always boggles at reviews of this nature.I have to wonder if i was watching the same film?I know it would not do for everyone to have the same opinion,but certain things that Gary points out are just so way off the mark.Still,i like to read all the differing reviews.Thanks again.
Jennis.x
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Proulx makes it even plainer than Cooper or Schaefer how important desolation in both landscape and personal space is to the Western myth. Being an authentic cowboy is a choice that entails living outside conventional boundaries and pleasures. The poverty -- and sex -- in her stories is rough and grinding. Emotional connections few and far between. Freedom has its price.
And perhaps that's why the cowboy myth has always shone brightest on the screen. It's the kind of life that can seem quite appealing for two hours at a time. Or maybe even 10 days a year. Stretch it out over a lifetime, however, and it gets powerful lonely.
Peter Shawn Taylor is a freelance writer based in Waterloo, Ont. If he had to, he could probably find his big belt buckle.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060715.BKREAD15/TPStory/Entertainment
A very nice article. Thanks Jennis.
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Frances,thanks for the BBM review by Gary Eschew.(I'm a poet,and i didn't know it)
LOL
Is there a date for it?
Just checked. January, 6.
And yes.I like to read all the differing reviews too.
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A very nice article. Thanks Jennis.
...and so true :
And perhaps that's why the cowboy myth has always shone brightest on the screen. It's the kind of life that can seem quite appealing for two hours at a time. Or maybe even 10 days a year. Stretch it out over a lifetime, however, and it gets powerful lonely.
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Saturday, July 15
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
N.C. MUSEUM OF ART--Before Brokeback Mountain rides off into the sunset of parody, let's spend some time with Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. You can't beat the great outdoors of the museum as a setting for these two lonesome cowboys with a lot of docile sheep to watch and nothing to do out there on the range. Well, not much, anyway. See it Saturday at 9 p.m. Bring $3. --David Fellerath
http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A34155
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Sydney Star Observer - Issue 825 - Published 20/07/2006
MYLES WEARRING REVIEWS THE DVD OF ONE OF THE YEAR'S MOST HYPED CINEMATIC RELEASES.
When released in cinemas here in January, Brokeback Mountain was one of the most hyped movies of the last few years – not only because of the stellar cast and the fact Ang Lee directed it, but because it was lauded as the first realistic big screen gay love story to come out of Hollywood.
Not surprisingly the hype was especially strong in the gay community, with many people thrilled to have at last a feature film that helped express to a mainstream audience what it can be like to struggle with one’s sexuality.
Deemed an instant “classic”, it was generally loved by the critics and audiences alike, and the hype grew when it won three Oscars for best director, best adapted screenplay and best original score.
As a result the DVD is bound to do well when it hits the shelves this week.
On the small screen Brokeback Mountain doesn’t have quite the same epic feeling it did at the cinema, nor the same emotional impact.
Bonus features include interviews with the key cast members, the director and screenwriters Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry. Most interesting are Ossana and McMurtry, who described how they “fleshed out” the short story by Annie Proulx into a feature film.
They discussed how the script then famously sat on a shelf for seven years because Hollywood was too scared to touch it. It became known as “the greatest unproduceable screenplay ever written”.
Once renowned director Lee showed interest, so did Hollywood. The project got the green light from Focus Features and everyone Lee asked to take part said yes. Lee said Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were his first choices to play Ennis and Jack, and the screenwriters said they always imagined Ledger playing Ennis.
Ledger and Gyllenhaal explain how they went to “cowboy boot camp” to learn how to ride horses properly, how to handle sheep and how to live on the land. There’s also a making-of documentary which looks at how difficult it was shooting on location in the mountains of Calgary, Canada.
http://www.ssonet.com.au/display.asp?ArticleID=5572
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Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain
Movies
How the western was won
B Rauby Rich
19 July 2006 05:44
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. Ang Lee’s story of two contemporary cowboys who fall in love, Brokeback Mountain, is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon, it’s a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era.
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, a new kind of storytelling geared to the unprecedented narratives filling their lives and lenses. 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, Lee, aided and abetted by novelist-screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and master storyteller Annie Proulx, on whose story the film is based, have taken on the most sacred of all American genres, the western, and queered it.
Brokeback Mountain is a great love story, pure and simple. It is also a great romantic tragedy, the story of a great love broken by a society’s intolerance.Tuning into the gay experience in all its euphoric and foreboding chords, Lee has used the skills he honed in Sense and Sensibility for etching heartache, and those he found in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for conveying emotion through action. Setting the film in 1963 places it squarely before the gay liberation movement and the politics of modern queer identities.
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, Wyoming, in cowboy country, just shy of his 22nd birthday.
Since the dawn of feminist film criticism in the 1970s, scholars have analysed the homoerotic subtexts in 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.
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.
Andy Warhol certainly had noticed their appeal -- and danger. His 1968 feature, Lonesome Cowboys, was a hip version of aberrance -- and was widely denounced by outraged citizens.
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 enduring male friendships.
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 misstep 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 screenwriter James Schamus 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 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. Lee has done nothing less than reimagine the United States as shaped by queer experience and memory. Alas, it cannot be a sunny picture. -- © Guardian Newspapers 2006
http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/arts/arts_movies/&articleid=278100
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A little old man who would be king
Philippine News, Jul 19, 2006
A DEMAGOGUE can be one of the deadliest threats to any fledgling democracy. In the case of our homeland, the Republic of the Philippines, it is sad to note that one such character has risen to the top precisely because he is a demagogue of the worst kind.
He has been around for close to five decades, languishing very briefly in prison during the martial-law years for which he has since anointed himself as a hero in the same league as Ninoy Aquino.
Very recently, this person used his column in a newspaper to take a below-the-belt potshot at homosexuals.
His newspaper is reportedly the third largest in the Philippines (though he himself would insist it is No. 1). But it is big enough to warrant using its clout to feed his massive ego on a regular basis. Thus, a slur at the homosexual community is no big deal for him.
In his words, “somebody influential in Malacañang whom I can only describe as belonging to the ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Gang, has recently been moving heaven and earth, and perhaps even hell, to grab the appointment to the Washington post just vacated.
"I wouldn't mind too much if he were gay...”
It’s interesting how a few well-chosen words can inflict so much damage to an innocent segment of society, one that continues to become more and more accepted by the mainstream with each passing decade.
Sad to say, he was simply being true to his nature. Gays are not the only ones he has attacked. Not too long ago, he insulted Muslims, all because some Moro traders – who were doing business near a business owned and run by his wife – dared request that a small mosque be constructed in the area.
Notice that we do not care to mention this person’s name. Suffice it to say that he considers himself God’s gift to Philippine media. Without the benefit of being elected or even appointed to any public position, he feels that he can partake of the spoils of political victory of whoever is in power.
Since the fall of the martial law regime more than 20 years ago, he has been enjoying every possible perk that he can wrangle out of anyone in power. He has even managed to get his spouse a diplomatic passport.
The man’s lust for spoils is legendary. He feels himself entitled to globetrot regularly, but never at his own expense. And always he must travel first class. As a journalist, he was able to build a mansion in one of the country’s toniest subdivisions. We need not guess how he was able to afford such a magnificent edifice.
There have been reports that he has been “exercising” his imagined authority over the Philippines’ foreign affairs department, and was extraordinarily gleeful when a professional ambassador to Washington was relieved of his post.
This publisher is engaged in a variety of businesses. For reasons known only to himself, he has become a bosom buddy of a relative to one of the conjugal dictatorship who declared martial law in the Philippines. That good friend is also a columnist in his paper. Nothing wrong with this except for one fact – the relative is also a public relations practitioner who has been eyeing the fat contracts that the Philippines unfortunately pays lobbyists in Washington to give the Philippines and its industries a positive image.
How tragic that a gay-bashing, Muslim-hating media practitioner continues to do damage to the industry he dominates. He very literally uses all the power in his command to attack those who do not do his bidding, or who merely do not see eye to eye with him.
One would think that given his long career he should know that bigotry has no place in journalism. He should stop attacking gays, Muslims and other hapless folks that don’t have as powerful a medium as he has.
Or if he really wants to pick a fight, then he ought to find somebody his own size. Figuratively, that is.
http://www.philippinenews.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=12f827f83647642a7320409d3191c56f
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Sydney Star Observer - Issue 825 - Published 20/07/2006
MYLES WEARRING REVIEWS THE DVD OF ONE OF THE YEAR'S MOST HYPED CINEMATIC RELEASES.
***
On the small screen Brokeback Mountain doesn’t have quite the same epic feeling it did at the cinema, nor the same emotional impact.
***
I have yet to watch my dvd copy, but when I was watching it for the first time at the Montreal gathering, I was struck by the clarity and sharpness of certain scenes -- particularly the one where Ennis visits Jack's parents.
One forum member a long time ago (in one of the dvd threads, I think) noted this astonishing refinement in some of the scenes of the dvd version. I did not realize this until my first viewing of the dvd version.
The epic feel one gets seeing BBM on a big screen is perhaps lacking. But I disagree that the emotional impact is any less. In fact, with the scene showing Ennis visiting Jack's parents, I would claim that the dvd is superior to the theatre version.
I had watched BBM in the big screen 31 times. I beg indulgence when I pronounce this opinion.
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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. Ang Lee’s story of two contemporary cowboys who fall in love, Brokeback Mountain, is just such a film. Even for audiences educated by a decade of the New Queer Cinema phenomenon, it’s a shift in scope and tenor so profound as to signal a new era.
Than you Jennis for all the articles
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Sydney Star Observer - Issue 825 - Published 20/07/2006
MYLES WEARRING REVIEWS THE DVD OF ONE OF THE YEAR'S MOST HYPED CINEMATIC RELEASES.
***
On the small screen Brokeback Mountain doesn’t have quite the same epic feeling it did at the cinema, nor the same emotional impact.
***
I have yet to watch my dvd copy, but when I was watching it for the first time at the Montreal gathering, I was struck by the clarity and sharpness of certain scenes -- particularly the one where Ennis visits Jack's parents.
One forum member a long time ago (in one of the dvd threads, I think) noted this astonishing refinement in some of the scenes of the dvd version. I did not realize this until my first viewing of the dvd version.
The epic feel one gets seeing BBM on a big screen is perhaps lacking. But I disagree that the emotional impact is any less. In fact, with the scene showing Ennis visiting Jack's parents, I would claim that the dvd is superior to the theatre version.
I had watched BBM in the big screen 31 times. I beg indulgence when I pronounce this opinion.
I could actually hear a lot more on my dvd then i did in the cinema.I think it transfers to the small screen very well.(How can you not watch your dvd?) 31 times on the big screen.Incredible :-*
J.x
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Sydney Star Observer - Issue 825 - Published 20/07/2006
MYLES WEARRING REVIEWS THE DVD OF ONE OF THE YEAR'S MOST HYPED CINEMATIC RELEASES.
***
On the small screen Brokeback Mountain dozen’t have quite the same epic feeling it did at the cinema, nor the same emotional impact.
***
I have yet to watch my DVD copy, but when I was watching it for the first time at the Montreal gathering, I was struck by the clarity and sharpness of certain scenes -- particularly the one where Ennis visits Jack's parents.
One forum member a long time ago (in one of the DVD threads, I think) noted this astonishing refinement in some of the scenes of the DVD version. I did not realize this until my first viewing of the DVD version.
The epic feel one gets seeing BBM on a big screen is perhaps lacking. But I disagree that the emotional impact is any less. In fact, with the scene showing Ennis visiting Jack's parents, I would claim that the DVD is superior to the theater version.
I had watched BBM in the big screen 31 times. I beg indulgence when I pronounce this opinion.
I could actually hear a lot more on my DVD then i did in the cinema.I think it transfers to the small screen very well.(How can you not watch your DVD?) 31 times on the big screen.Incredible :-*
J.x
I have three copies of the DVD, including one I pre-ordered. And yet I've never watch it through on DVD either. I saw it 26 times in the theater, and it's just not the same on the small screen. Each time I've started watching it on DVD there has been a reason I had to stop (for example, my plane landed) so it's not like I lost interest. But there's an aspect missing for me on the small screen, and I'm almost afraid to try again for fear I'll be disappointed.
Sorry that this is getting off topic...perhaps it's a question for its own thread.
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Thanks dalemidex and Jennis for your thoughts here.
I think I don't watch the dvd because I'm SCARED to watch it alone? Am I like a child here?
I'm having an out of town guest tonight through the weekend, so maybe I WILL finally get to see it.
dalemidex, you may be right: would you or Jennis want to start as separate discussion: dvd vs threatre versions? Will the different regions have the same dvd?
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Thanks dalemidex and Jennis for your thoughts here.
I think I don't watch the dvd because I'm SCARED to watch it alone? Am I like a child here?
I'm having an out of town guest tonight through the weekend, so maybe I WILL finally get to see it.
dalemidex, you may be right: would you or Jennis want to start as separate discussion: dvd vs threatre versions? Will the different regions have the same dvd?
Yes,all regions will be the same.Umm,wasn't there a thread before?Or was that about widescreen versus full screen?I'm probably going mad and you would know if there was one.Ok,yes i don't mind,or Dalemix if you want to start one sweetie.
J.x
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Yes,all regions will be the same.Umm,wasn't there a thread before?Or was that about widescreen versus full screen?I'm probably going mad and you would know if there was one.Ok,yes i don't mind,or Dalemix if you want to start one sweetie.
J.x
We certainly have the thread that lists all the dvd versions available. And we do have the widescreen vs full screen thread. I forgot which thread contained the comment about some dvd scenes being better than the theatre version (subtle but very noticable differences).
I think this would be a fascinating thread...
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Forgive me if i have taken things the wrong way,but in Midnight Cowboy,John Voight was not gay,he allowed one man to have oral sex with him for money (which he never got) and him and Dustin Hoffman weren't gay together (they were more or less homophobic) I don't like how people think that that was the '1st gay cowboy movie' there has not been a gay cowboy movie yet (not counting pornos). AM I THE ONLY ONE that gets mad when someone doubts the love between Jack and Ennis? I get really tricked when people say 'it was just lust' in my school Newspaper,a girl did a 'review' of BBM,it was terrible. She didn't get it at ALL!!! i was so mad when i read it,i just wanted to complain to her about how she missed the whole point,but strangely it was the last newspaper for the year, sorry for ranting about my problems :)
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Forgive me if i have taken things the wrong way,but in Midnight Cowboy,John Voight was not gay,he allowed one man to have oral sex with him for money (which he never got) and him and Dustin Hoffman weren't gay together (they were more or less homophobic) I don't like how people think that that was the '1st gay cowboy movie' there has not been a gay cowboy movie yet (not counting pornos). AM I THE ONLY ONE that gets mad when someone doubts the love between Jack and Ennis? I get really tricked when people say 'it was just lust' in my school Newspaper,a girl did a 'review' of BBM,it was terrible. She didn't get it at ALL!!! i was so mad when i read it,i just wanted to complain to her about how she missed the whole point,but strangely it was the last newspaper for the year, sorry for ranting about my problems :)
There have been many movies on gay themes. But I think BBM is something special, perhaps unique. I can't seem to put my finger as to why this is so. It's a play on many things, many emotions, many associations. It's not simple, I guess.
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I don't think I saw a thread started yet on DVD versus theater, so I'll start one.
And as long as we're talking about theatrical showings, is there a place to post or otherwise track theater screenings? I think sites like IMDB no longer have a showtimes link because it is out of general release, but it seems to periodically show up here and there. If planned showings are listed perhaps some people can make travel plans to attend.
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I don't think I saw a thread started yet on DVD versus theater, so I'll start one.
And as long as we're talking about theatrical showings, is there a place to post or otherwise track theater screenings? I think sites like IMDB no longer have a showtimes link because it is out of general release, but it seems to periodically show up here and there. If planned showings are listed perhaps some people can make travel plans to attend.
dalemidex, you referring to ongoing showings of BBM around the world, such as the one in the Chicago area on August 28, correct? I know Jennis and a few others ahave been posting various showings of BBM on different threads. We could start a thread where people can post such showings around the world.
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I don't think I saw a thread started yet on DVD versus theater, so I'll start one.
And as long as we're talking about theatrical showings, is there a place to post or otherwise track theater screenings? I think sites like IMDB no longer have a showtimes link because it is out of general release, but it seems to periodically show up here and there. If planned showings are listed perhaps some people can make travel plans to attend.
dalemidex, you referring to ongoing showings of BBM around the world, such as the one in the Chicago area on August 28, correct? I know Jennis and a few others ahave been posting various showings of BBM on different threads. We could start a thread where people can post such showings around the world.
Yes,i was thinking along similar lines as dalemidex as the way it is now BBM showings/events/exibits etc just get put in news and by the time members get around to reading it the event might be over?Sorry for o/t but as you are mentioning it here,thought i might as well too.lol.
Jennis.x
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Yes,i was thinking along similar lines as dalemix as the way it is now BBM showings/events/exibits etc just get put in news and by the time members get around to reading it the event might be over?Sorry for o/t but as you are mentioning it here,thought i might as well too.lol.
Jennis.x
Well, these are news-related, no? So it can't be too OOT.
Jennis, would you want to create a thread for this?
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Yes,i was thinking along similar lines as dalemix as the way it is now BBM showings/events/exibits etc just get put in news and by the time members get around to reading it the event might be over?Sorry for o/t but as you are mentioning it here,thought i might as well too.lol.
Jennis.x
Well, these are news-related, no? So it can't be too OOT.
Jennis, would you want to create a thread for this?
Ok,will do sweetie :-*
J.x
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dalemidex, you referring to ongoing showings of BBM around the world, such as the one in the Chicago area on August 28, correct? I know Jennis and a few others ahave been posting various showings of BBM on different threads. We could start a thread where people can post such showings around the world.
YES! Chicago on 8/28? Where?? What time?? Is it public?? Are there tickets available??
Can you tell I'm exicted about seeing it again the theater?? :t)
A central place to post this sort of information would be wonderful!
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dalemidex, you referring to ongoing showings of BBM around the world, such as the one in the Chicago area on August 28, correct? I know Jennis and a few others ahave been posting various showings of BBM on different threads. We could start a thread where people can post such showings around the world.
YES! Chicago on 8/28? Where?? What time?? Is it public?? Are there tickets available??
Can you tell I'm exicted about seeing it again the theater?? :t)
A central place to post this sort of information would be wonderful!
dalemidex, the thread for the Chicago meet is here:
http://www.ennisjack.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=75f01fbe8a6203314bfd27cb35e71acb&topic=5289.msg196206#msg196206
It is closer to you than you think. It will be in the Waukegan Public Library. FlwrChild found out that seating is for about a hundred.
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dalemidex, you referring to ongoing showings of BBM around the world, such as the one in the Chicago area on August 28, correct? I know Jennis and a few others ahave been posting various showings of BBM on different threads. We could start a thread where people can post such showings around the world.
YES! Chicago on 8/28? Where?? What time?? Is it public?? Are there tickets available??
Can you tell I'm exicted about seeing it again the theater?? :t)
A central place to post this sort of information would be wonderful!
I have also cross posted it in the new thread.BBM Events 2006.Just to get it started ;)
dalemidex,will you be going?Yes,it's free.
J.x
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Brokeback Mountain for real
By Steven Fosbery, Elizabeth Meryment
July 21, 2006
STANDING beside a surging, curving river at the foot of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains, I'm surrounded by deep green forests of fir, spruce and aspen. It's raining, cold and altogether miserable, but I hardly notice.
I've come to this little-known corner of the Canadian wilderness to follow in the footsteps of two celluloid cowboys, hoping the astonishing scenery in the film Brokeback Mountain is the work of nature and not a special effects team. I quickly have my answer and smile with pleasure at the rugged beauty around me. As I turn back towards the road where my car is parked, three nervous white-tail deer appear and hop across the road. I stand stock still and observe these delicate creatures as they disappear into the thick forest.
This is Kananaskis Country, one of Canada's great secrets, an unheralded collection of provincial parks only an hour's drive west of the booming, oil-rich city of Calgary in southern Alberta.
Bart, my attentive guide, suggests a dignified retreat to the car. "It's raining and it's cold," he says, in a tone that suggests I may not have noticed. As I gaze at the avalanche paths appearing like grey ribbons hanging from the snowy peaks, I find my tolerance for inclement weather has suddenly increased.
We ascend Moore Mountain, one of a number of mountains used to make a composite Brokeback in the film, and drive higher and deeper into K Country, as it's called. The summer tourist season hasn't started and we have the place to ourselves, only the road evidence that others have preceded us here.
Over the mountain, we descend into Kananaskis Valley and spend the night at the upmarket Delta Lodge near Kananaskis Village. The next day we pass glistening, pristine lakes, including the Upper Kananaskis. In the background looms Mt Indefatigable, one of 39 mountains in K Country named after Royal Navy admirals and warships. The British Empire may be gone, but its fingerprints remain. The encircling trail I follow offers spectacular views of the lake, the forests and the Rockies. I'm snapping pictures, convinced each one will look like a postcard; how could they not?
I sight more deer. These are a little bigger, darker and, curiously, appear to be wearing the ears of a much larger animal. "They're called Mule Deer," Bart explains. Before they disappear into the forest, I notice they bound, rather than run, with all four feet landing together.
The forest is so dense that the only way each tree can receive direct sunlight is to grow straight and end in a point. The massed effect is breathtaking. Snap.
I ask Bart to conjure a moose and around the next bend, presto, I see two. These are ugly animals and standing knee-deep in a bog, drinking bog water, does nothing to enhance their appearance.
The day remains cold and wet, and walking is restricted, but there's always something to see, from the grand, sweeping views to a group of big-horned sheep defying gravity on the side of a steep hill, small, nervous red squirrels and the ubiquitous pink Wild Rose, Alberta's official flower. We spend the next night out of K Country at a working farm that has survived by opening a B&B called the Bloomin' Inn, run by Francis and Lorraine Cyr. Old-fashioned in look and style Bloomin' Inn is packed with rural memorabilia, and its warm atmosphere makes it like being in a friend's home.
Much of what we eat is produced on the farm, including steak, sausages, eggs, vegetables and Lorraine's home-made syrups and sauces. It's all delicious. That night I sleep like a farmer's baby.
Brokeback Mountain is just one example of a US film that is set in the States, but filmed in Canada. As far back as 1954, when Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum starred in the "reckless, roaring adventure", River of No Return, and Monroe had to be saved from drowning when her boots filled with water, American films – and more lately television shows – have been shot north of the border. In Los Angeles, Canada is known as "Hollywood North". US film technicians, angry at losing work, unkindly refer to their Canadian counterparts as "Mexicans with sweaters".
Based on the short story by American writer E. Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain tells the story of Ennis Del Mar (played by Australia's Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), two cowboys who fall in love while herding sheep on the harsh, high grasslands of Wyoming. It was filmed in southern Alberta (as was River of No Return).
Much has been made of the film's Canadian location, specifically the spectacular mountain scenery, which at times threatens to upstage the story. But Canadians, I discover, are also proud of the roles that other, less glamorous locations played in the film.
When I arrange to visit the locations where Brokeback was shot, it's the mountains that interest me. My kind hosts, from Tourism Calgary and Tourism Alberta, interpret this to mean every location they can find – proving that English and Canadian are similar but different languages.
So it is that my first stop is booming, oil-rich Calgary in southern Alberta, followed by a number of small Alberta towns. Over several days I'm shown many locations: a living room that looks exactly as it did before being remodelled for the film's Thanksgiving scene; an alleyway, not unlike the one near my Sydney office, which in the film was a seedy Mexican street; the bar where Jack meets his future wife; the pub where Ennis meets his girlfriend; and the diner where he meets her again after they break up. I'm also taken to the factory where the cowboy boots for the film were made.
I'm shown walls, stairs, verandas, parking lots, a plot of land where a trailer park was created and the hamburger bar favoured by director Ang Lee, whose favourite food is fast.
We drive through prairie country, east of the Rocky Mountains, a vast, flat expanse where "you can watch your dog run away for three days". This is ranching and farming country, with lots of "pumping jacks" (small oil derricks) on both sides of the road.
We pass several communities of Hutterites who, like the Amish and Mennonites, largely shun the modern world, but unlike them employ modern farm machinery and mobile phones.
On a prairie farm I'm shown an old, collapsing wooden house which doubles, in the film, as the home of Jack's parents. The house proves as interesting as an empty garden shed, but Larry Hixt, the farmer on whose property it stands, is a humorous, slightly odd, middle-aged man who pulls off his baseball cap and replaces it with a cowboy hat when we arrive.
Hixt is dedicated to preserving all things western and has created what he calls his "Grand Ole West Villa Ranche".
He has bought, dismantled and reassembled on the farm a number of old wooden buildings to create a short wild west street of three houses on each side and one at the end. The houses are all slightly off kilter, so it's both a familiar and eccentric scene. It's fun but not authentic enough for the purists or big enough for a general audience.
Hixt suggests I walk to the end of the short street and turn right. My jaw drops at the sight of a wide western street with about 15 buildings on each side, including a saloon, haberdashery, barber shop, stable, hotel and bath house.
Each building is appropriately furnished and as I walk slowly down the middle of the street it's suddenly High Noon, I'm Gary Cooper and the town's future depends on me and my six shooter.
After I save the town, Hixt hands me his card and says, "Tell your upside-down friends in Australia about this place." Sure, pardner.
Calgary is our base for two nights and three days during this forensic examination of film locations. One day we're even joined by the film's location manager, Daryl Solly. Just what we need, I groan inwardly. But Solly, who drove 35,000km in six months in search of the right locations for Brokeback, is a mine of interesting film anecdotes and after a day in his company I understand how a talented crew with a good budget can transform a rainforest into a desert, or an ocean floor, or an early 1960s suburban living room.
Finally, on the evening of the third day we turn off the highway into Kananaskis Country. This sublime wilderness is a playground for Calgarians who are close enough for day tripping and prefer to avoid the crowds at the famous Banff National Park on K Country's northern border. Otherwise, inexplicably, it remains little known.
The 20-year love affair and relationship between Jack and Ennis was never going to end happily, but it could have been worse; they at least had Brokeback Mountain.
Steven Fosbery was a guest of Tourism Calgary and Tourism Alberta.
http://escape.news.com.au/story/0,9142,19861458-27985,00.html
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Thanks so much for these news update, Jennis.
BBM continues to amaze me. I love Brokeback Mountain
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dalemidex, you referring to ongoing showings of BBM around the world, such as the one in the Chicago area on August 28, correct? I know Jennis and a few others ahave been posting various showings of BBM on different threads. We could start a thread where people can post such showings around the world.
YES! Chicago on 8/28? Where?? What time?? Is it public?? Are there tickets available??
Can you tell I'm exicted about seeing it again the theater?? :t)
A central place to post this sort of information would be wonderful!
I have also cross posted it in the new thread.BBM Events 2006.Just to get it started ;)
dalemidex,will you be going?Yes,it's free.
J.x
Oh my gosh yes! I'll ask for the day off from work tomorrow. Not sure if my partner Brian will want to come or not, but maybe. Might be fun for some members to get together in conjunction with this showing, too.
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BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Sydney Star Observer - Issue 825 - Published 20/07/2006
MYLES WEARRING REVIEWS THE DVD OF ONE OF THE YEAR'S MOST HYPED CINEMATIC RELEASES.
***
On the small screen Brokeback Mountain doesn’t have quite the same epic feeling it did at the cinema, nor the same emotional impact.
***
I have yet to watch my dvd copy, but when I was watching it for the first time at the Montreal gathering, I was struck by the clarity and sharpness of certain scenes -- particularly the one where Ennis visits Jack's parents.
One forum member a long time ago (in one of the dvd threads, I think) noted this astonishing refinement in some of the scenes of the dvd version. I did not realize this until my first viewing of the dvd version.
The epic feel one gets seeing BBM on a big screen is perhaps lacking. But I disagree that the emotional impact is any less. In fact, with the scene showing Ennis visiting Jack's parents, I would claim that the dvd is superior to the theatre version.
I had watched BBM in the big screen 31 times. I beg indulgence when I pronounce this opinion.
I agree that it feels different watching it at home as opposed to the theater. But the emotional impact increases with each viewing for me. I'm still in severe pbs after watching it in Montreal. IMO the emotional impact is with the story itself it doesn't matter if one is viewing it on the big screen or on the small screen.
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Thanks for the articles Jennis. :-*
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Sat, July 22, 2006
Geared up for Brokeback tour
By SHAWN LOGAN, CALGARY SUN
The sweeping Alberta vistas and rural locales made famous by the movie Brokeback Mountain will be retraced by a father and son from Indiana who'll tour the areas in a vintage truck used in the film.
Bob Welsh, who hails from West Harrison, Ind., paid $2,300 in an eBay auction for the weekend tour in a 1950 GMC pickup truck featured in the award-winning film, which was acquired by Bragg Creek resident Rob Freeman for $70,000 in another online auction.
Starting tomorrow, Welsh and his 44-year-old son Jeff, will hit the Alberta backroads for three days in search of some of the locations that captured the imagination of movie-goers.
Freeman, who secured the Brokeback truck on eBay in March, said he and two friends extensively toured the locations used in the film to create a website, www.findingbrokeback.com.
"The three of us spent six days in a rented SUV and we drove about 3,000 km," said Freeman, who splits his time between Bragg Creek and London, Ont.
Freeman said he auctioned off the tour for a charity he heads in Burlington, Ont.
Welsh said he bid on the prize because he is both a fan of the film and as a young man purchased the same model of truck for $1,100 brand new.
"We just plan to relax for three days and we're looking forward to seeing some of the sites and buildings used in the movie," he said.
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/Alberta/2006/07/22/1697197-sun.html
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Thanks Jennis. I must say i admire that guy for saying they will be relaxing on the tour. ^*() I would be a bit more excited than that lol. :i
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Brokeback Mountain DVD Launch Party Monday, July 24, 2006
The team at Village Roadshow pulled out all the stops to celebrate the DVD release of Brokeback Mountain. The Stonewall Hotel in Sydney became the hottest cowboy hangout for the launch.
Hosted by Rob from Big Brother 2006, the night included dancing cowboys, DVD giveaways and Rob celebrating his birthday.
The night got even better with a surprise visit from house mates Michael and Dino and Penny D. Check out these exclusive photos on queer planet.
http://www.queerplanet.com.au/moxie/entertainment/24-7-06-1.shtml
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Brokeback Mountain truck perfect vehicle to see Alberta scenery
Mon, 24 Jul 2006
CBC Arts
The scenery featured in the 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain continues to win rave reviews, this time from two American men on a tour of Alberta in the truck featured in the film.
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The truck from Brokeback Mountain. (CBC)
Bob and Jeff Welsh, a father and son from Indiana, won an auction on eBay for a tour of the Brokeback Mountain sites in the 1950 pickup truck used in the movie.
"Great scenery ... lot of friendly people and absolutely stunning," Jeff Walsh said after spending Saturday touring the Kananaskis area where the mountain scenes were shot.
"It was really interesting now that on some of the scenes we've looked at how close they were to the roads. So you know there was just a couple of scenes where we had to walk off on a trail and not for a great distance," he told CBC Radio.
Rob Freeman of Bragg Creek bought the vintage truck driven by Jake Gyllenhaal in the movie from a teenager from Pincher Creek, Alta., for $70,000.
He restored it and offered to take two people on a tour of all the spots in Alberta where the movie was shot.
'Trying not to have an obsession'
"I got thinking about it. You know what? Maybe I'll do one trip. And put it on eBay. And we'd do a trip in the actual Brokeback truck and visit all the different places where the movie had been filmed," he told CBC Television.
Freeman spent painstaking days seeking out each authentic location.
He even contacted the movie crew and eventually found all the sites.
Freeman said he's "trying not to have an obsession, but it won't be hard to develop one, that's for sure."
Bob Welsh said the best part of the tour has been the truck.
"I'm a little 76-year-old guy. In 1950, I had a truck just like that ... brand new ... $1,100. But at any rate, I enjoyed riding in the truck — I enjoyed driving the truck — brought back old times."
Going behind the scenes
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Jeff Welsh, left, Robert Freeman, centre, and Robert Welsh. (CBC) The tour was also the perfect way to spend time with his movie-loving son.
On Sunday, they visited the Rockyford and Carseland areas, where the bank, rodeo and bar scenes were filmed.
"It's really interesting to see how they've done some of the shots because I like to see what they do with the magic behind the movies," said Jeff Walsh.
"So you can see what they've done in the movie and then see how the (real) scene is different."
Their three-day tour wraps up Monday in the Fort Macleod area.
Freeman doesn't expect to pull out the truck too often in future, but he is willing to share what he knows with other tourists wanting a glimpse of the backdrop from the famous movie.
The money from the tour is going toward raising funds for cancer and HIV research.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/arts/national/2006/07/24/brokeback-truck.html
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Perhaps we can do this one day? Visit most of the actual locations where scenes from the moview were shot.
Perhaps others have already visited some of the sights.
I would spare no expense.
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Perhaps we can do this one day? Visit most of the actual locations where scenes from the moview were shot.
Perhaps others have already visited some of the sights.
I would spare no expense.
It would be wonderful if we could one day do this and of course the lovely coguaro has already done it and relayed his amazing story to us.Here's hoping we make it happen in the future.Maybe we can arrange a viewing of the truck as well ;)
J.x
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Perhaps we can do this one day? Visit most of the actual locations where scenes from the moview were shot.
Perhaps others have already visited some of the sights.
I would spare no expense.
It would be wonderful if we could one day do this and of course the lovely coguaro has already done it and relayed his amazing story to us.Here's hoping we make it happen in the future.Maybe we can arrange a viewing of the truck as well ;)
J.x
Thanks Jennis. Time is unfortunately the current enemy. But I hope he does not give up too soon on his idea. I find it quite lovely.
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Personally i don't find BBM jokes or parodies funny.Here is an article about it.
Jennis.x
Today's Comedians More Queer Eye than Homophobic
by Bob Smith, July 26, 2006
Comedians are itinerant prospectors always panning for new sources of fool's gold, but it's unlikely that ten years ago straight male comedians would have predicted they'd hit pay dirt with queer comedy.
A random survey of recent comedy reveals that the leading heterosexual male stand-ups have more gay bits in their acts than a go-go boy at a queer bar.
While some straight comedians are comfortable in their sexuality and can make gay jokes without being homophobic, others bring back memories of the dark ages of comedy--the eighties and early nineties when Andrew Dice Clay, Sam Kinison and Eddie Murphy made virulently homophobic jokes about gay men and lesbians.
One easy way to illustrate the various styles of straight male comedians is to compare what each of them did with what became a rich, if short-lived vein of laughs: Brokeback Mountain. For a short time late last year, and up until this year's Academy Awards, it seemed that Brokeback Mountain was a horse ridden by every working comic.
Before Brokeback Mountain had even opened in theaters, David Letterman and his writers on The Late Show came up with a list of the Top Ten Rejected Titles for the Upcoming Gay Western. The list varied in quality, as do all Top Ten Lists, ranging from the obvious and not so funny--The Good, The Bad and The Hunky and How The West Was Redecorated--to the genuinely funny, Dances with Men and The Magnificent Seven Inches.
Letterman's most elaborate tribute to Brokeback Mountain was a fully staged, acted and sung parody of a proposed Brokeback musical that Nathan Lane suggested that he wanted to do with Matthew Broderick. Nathan offered to give Dave a preview so he would consider becoming a backer. He even had a cover of Playbill made up: Brokeback! The Musical.
Other straight comedians did their own parodies of Brokeback Mountain. Carlos Mencia on his Comedy Central show Mind of Mencia did a film parody called, Wetback Mountain. He was smart enough to hire as his love interest the hunky actor Mario Lopez, but the parody's humor is about as clever as its name.
The joke here is that two employees at an office mislead their fellow employees by pretending to be Caucasian when secretly they're eating burritos and dancing to mariachi music because they're-gasp!--Mexicans. The sketch doesn't seem stereotypically gay or particularly homophobic but MAD, Mexicans Against Defamation, should consider lodging a protest against the network for turning an entire nation into a comedy piñata.
Stephen Colbert on his show The Colbert Report announced he had no intention of seeing Brokeback Mountain. He'd heard that it struck a chord in much of the country but claimed, “It didn't strike my chord. My chord remained untouched!”
Then he went on, “When it comes to the people whose opinions I care about, there's only one thing I've heard about this movie.” What follows is a montage of clips of right wing pundits and nutcases ranging from Bill O'Reilly, President Bush, Don Imus, Pat Robertson and assorted other Fox regulars saying repeatedly, “I haven't seen it. Haven't seen it. Don't want to see it.”
Colbert then adds, “See, it can't be that good of a movie.” He goes on to claim to be a fan of the old manly westerns such as Red River with Montgomery Clift. Then viewers are shown the famously over-the-top homoerotic scene from the movie in which one cowboy asks Montgomery Clift if he can see his pretty pistol and then the other generously offers to show him his.
It's a brilliant piece of satire that completely undermines the idea that the Old West was a queer-free zone while skewering the close mindedness of right wing homophobes who seem to be afraid to even watch a gay movie because it might recruit them.
Recently another late-night straight comedian, Jay Leno of The Tonight Show was accused of being homophobic because of his seemingly relentless Brokeback Mountain jokes including a sketch he did in which a horse was done up in a “gay” way.
In his widely circulated letter published on the internet, Jeff Whitty, the creator of the musical Avenue Q tells Mr. Leno, “Gay people, to you, are great source of material. When I think of gay people, I think of suicide. When I think of gay people, I think of centuries of suffering.”
Mr. Whitty is an acclaimed comic playwright, but in his letter he frequently sounds melodramatic. His blanket statements make him sound strangely narrow-minded as if he can't imagine gay people in the past ever having a moment of joy, receiving a kiss or, God forbid, cracking a joke in a lull from their sad and lonely lives.
Of course, humor is subjective and a joke that brings joy to one person may burn someone else. Nonetheless, it seems unfair for Mr. Whitty to point his middle finger at Jay Leno accusing him of homophobia when it's clear that every heterosexual stand up comic also thinks of gay people as a great source of material.
In fact, I think that Jay Leno's sketch might not have been homophobic as much as it might have the real H-word in comedy: hacky.
Hacky is a term professional comedians use with disdain, meaning jokes or a manner that has no originality or wit. Great comics tell jokes that make other comics think “I wish I'd thought of that!” while a hack is a comic who tells jokes that anyone could think of.
One of the most popular comics on the circuit today, Larry the Cable Guy, is a quintessential hack. Larry is a character created by David Whitney, although it seems hard to claim that his unattractive, out of shape, Southern, lunkhead of a character is original when it's clearly a reincarnation of Junior Semples from Hee-Haw.
As part of his routine, Larry tells his sold-out audiences in stadium sized venues, "I was more pissed than a queer with lockjaw on Valentine's Day" or "There'll be a new show out next week called Black Eye on the Queer Guy."
His jokes are fart jokes wearing a dab of cologne. They aren't virulently homophobic, but they're completely predictable.
Homophobic jokes are invariably the sign of a hack at work. One of the most hacky bits about gay people on a recent television program was Jimmy Kimmel's correspondent Pablo Suzuki's live report from Los Angeles' gay pride parade. In it, Pablo interviewed the freakiest gay people he could find, two of them having--get this--foreign accents, a sure-fire laugh for hack comedians for the past hundred years.
The sketch is interminable with fake news reports about Rosie O'Donnell getting kicked in the face by a horse. A gerbil cage is literally thrown in the failing sketch, a comedy reference that's not just tired, but was dead, embalmed, and buried back in 1980.
Speaking in general, however, it seems that most critically acclaimed straight comedians no longer feel they must use homophobia in their acts--a definite sign of progress. Indeed, homophobic jokes have become such a cliché, they ought to be dumped in the rubbish bin along with worn out bits about the original Star Trek, the awfulness of airplane food, and how women and men just don't understand each other.
Even better, it has become more and more common for comedians to be pro-gay and for the homophobes to be the ones joked about.
During his stand-up shows, Chris Rock has remarked, "Whoever you hate WILL end up in your family. If you're homophobic, you gonna have a gay son." Or “Everybody's so homophobic--everybody in this room has at least a gay cousin! All of you, think about it right now. Some of you got gay daddies! I got a gay uncle--I call him 'Aunt Tom'. I love my Aunt Tom. I know right now, if I was in a fight, Aunt Tom would come in here, take off his pumps and whoop some ass!”
Both Joe Rogan, host of NBC's Fear Factor, and Dave Attell, the star of Comedy Central's Insomniac with Dave Attell have bits on their latest standup albums entitled "Homophobia".
Attell's comic persona is a hard-drinkin' heavy smokin' slacker. He has figured out a way of carefully crossing the line into the homophobic, but then pulling himself back. He'll joke about guys who go to see the Blue Man Group as "partly queer with a chance of fag." But then he'll make a joke implying that he might not be 100% straight himself. Or he'll acknowledge his jokes might offend by saying, "Was that homophobic? I think it was. I hear that a lot. 'Dave, you're talking about being gay, you're probably secretly gay', and I say, 'Listen voice in my head, I'm not!'"
Attell wants the laughs that homophobic jokes still bring, but he doesn't want to be branded as a homophobe.
Today even the audiences of Larry the Cable Guy hear an alternative viewpoint in the hugely popular Blue Collar Comedy Tour. In addition to Larry, one of the other three comics is the smart and incisive Ron White. Part of his act is mocking homophobic men.
In his act, White talks about a friend who is a homophobe. He starts by asking the audience, “Is being afraid of gay people not the most useless thing you can be?”
White then explains how he informed a friend that everyone's gay to some extent. Of course, the friend emphatically denies this, leading White to offer to prove it. He does so by asking his friend if he watches straight porn. “Yeah, I love it!” says the friend. White then asks, “Now do you like seeing the guys in straight porn with small half-flaccid penises?” “No!” the doofus hollers. “I like'em big, hard, and...” Well, let's just say he proves Larry's point. (You can see the clip here).
But the most brilliant recent gay comedy done by straight comedians hasn't been a monologue or a sketch or a Top Ten list. It is two interviews done by talk-show hosts Jon Stewart and David Letterman.
Stewart's was an interview about gay marriage on The Daily Show with Bill Bennett, self-proclaimed morals czar and notorious hypocrite, while David Letterman's was with Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of the vice president. Both men relentlessly pressed each of his guests, pointing out the inconsistencies in their sometimes homophobic positions, mercilessly mocking the contradictions in their statements while the audience laughed and cheered.
You can watch Stewart here and Letterman here. It's not gut-busting comedy, but it is awfully funny watching the homophobes being the ones made fun of.
You can email Bob at BobScomedy@aol.com.
http://www.afterelton.com/TV/2006/7/comedy3.html
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Thanks Jennis for a really interesting article. You are truly brilliant at finding these gems. Thanks ^f^
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You can watch Stewart here and Letterman here. It's not gut-busting comedy, but it is awfully funny watching the homophobes being the ones made fun of.
Very interesting reading, "Ms News" Jennis!
And Jon Stewart was brilliant :
Bennett Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.
Stewart: I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.
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Depp and Bloom voted top gay couple for 'Brokeback' casting!
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Washington: Readers of an American gossip magazine have voted ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ co-stars Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp as the stars they would love to see as gay lovers in a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ sequel.
The US magazine, Jane had conducted a poll asking the readers to name the cast they would love to see as homosexual lovers in a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ sequel to which the readers unanimously voted the Pirates actors to the top, reports Contactmusic.
Depp had earlier confessed that his ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ character Captain Jack Sparrow, had a gay quality in him and that pirates were mostly gay.
He feels that the ambiguity is very fitting as he suspects that the living situations of real life pirates may have encouraged them to experiment in same sex situations.
"I like the idea of [Jack] being ambiguous because women were thought to be bad luck on ships and these pirates would go out for years at a time. So, you know, there is a possibility that one thing might leads to another. You're lonely. Pirates went to sea for years at a time. You're lonely... you have an extra ration of rum... 'Cabin boy!,'" Depp said
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Thanks Jennis for a really interesting article. You are truly brilliant at finding these gems. Thanks ^f^
Yes, I agree. That was a pretty comprehensive article to boot.
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Depp and Bloom voted top gay couple for 'Brokeback' casting!
(https://ennisjack.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimagecache2.allposters.com%2Fimages%2Fpic%2FPF%2FPF_862224_999%7EPirates-of-the-Caribbean-Johnny-Depp-Orlando-Bloom-Posters.jpg&hash=3a5c543762b2fd0b1b6cac13b2b20cd50586a8a6)
Washington: Readers of an American gossip magazine have voted ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ co-stars Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp as the stars they would love to see as gay lovers in a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ sequel.
The US magazine, Jane had conducted a poll asking the readers to name the cast they would love to see as homosexual lovers in a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ sequel to which the readers unanimously voted the Pirates actors to the top, reports Contactmusic.
Depp had earlier confessed that his ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ character Captain Jack Sparrow, had a gay quality in him and that pirates were mostly gay.
He feels that the ambiguity is very fitting as he suspects that the living situations of real life pirates may have encouraged them to experiment in same sex situations.
"I like the idea of [Jack] being ambiguous because women were thought to be bad luck on ships and these pirates would go out for years at a time. So, you know, there is a possibility that one thing might leads to another. You're lonely. Pirates went to sea for years at a time. You're lonely... you have an extra ration of rum... 'Cabin boy!,'" Depp said
Hehehehe... Go Johnny! :)
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Thanks Jennis for a really interesting article. You are truly brilliant at finding these gems. Thanks ^f^
You're Welcome sweetie :-*
J.x
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You can watch Stewart here and Letterman here. It's not gut-busting comedy, but it is awfully funny watching the homophobes being the ones made fun of.
Very interesting reading, "Ms News" Jennis!
And Jon Stewart was brilliant :
Bennett Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.
Stewart: I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.
Ms News.I like it.lol...Thanks for the JD article.Very funny and so true.
J.x
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A beautifully written article on the power of silence in cinema. It references the first scene in BBM as one of the examples (in boldface; see below).
This article goes a long way in explaining one of the great strengths of BBM.
From http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d182bf0a-1d38-11db-bf06-0000779e2340.html
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Seen but not heard
By Nigel Andrews
Published: July 28 2006 15:47 | Last updated: July 28 2006 15:47
In broadcasting it is “dead air”. In Trappist monasteries it is a vow. In school exam rooms it is the law. In poetry it is eternity (or a favourite symbol of it). In cinema it is the past that the talking picture moved beyond, 80 years ago, with the arrival of synchronised sound.
On urban streets and on transport systems it is something we keep at bay with our iPods (for the unformed din of a city is sometimes the worst “silence” of all). In soccer stadiums people can hardly stand it either. A two-minute silence for a dead footballer seldom has a prayer. Someone - some terrace-dweller appalled by that virgin vacancy - must yell something out.
Silence is like water. Yesterday it was taken for granted, today it is in crisis. We are urged to conserve and cherish it, yet lots of people want to pour it down the drain. Meanwhile art, culture, movies and that modern phenomenon we could call “found iconography” - the making-over of real events as cultural artefacts or foundries of modern myth - are becoming obsessed with it.
I think of the now famous photo of the Falling Man, the unknown soldier of 9/11. That jumper no one can identify hangs upside down in the air, frozen in space and time, with no noise around him, on the most exclamatory day in modern history. Does his silence sanitise the horror of the World Trade Center tragedy or megaphone it? I am not sure. I am not sure anyone is sure.
For living witnesses, though, what response is possible in the immediacy of an atrocity but silence? In the film United 93 the most dramatic moment is that in which a control tower’s officials watch the second plane hit the second skyscraper. Total silence, with a couple of numbly murmured expletives. And there is silence again (bar some ill-advised music) when United 93 hits the earth in Pennsylvania, a moment when the unspeakable has to remain just that.
Then there is the silence deep at another core, the core of a suicide bombing. It is in danger of becoming, if something so ugly and horrendous could be, a cliche of artistic or filmic perception: that moment of white-out, those after-seconds when the detonator has been pulled, the destruction has been wrought and the world swims for seconds in a deafened nothingness. Bleached. Serene. Purged of life, choice, hate, violence. A moment almost beautiful.
For that is the power of silence. It is the best and worst thing. It is comfort and fear. It is the peace of mind that converts everything to serenity. Yet it is the negation of all things.
In cinema the use of silence is so central to every movie (if it is only the silence to punctuate non-silence, to make counterpoint and meaning) that we have come to disregard it completely. This binary heartbeat of sound and silence - on/off, on/off, on/off is so important that its management, manipulation or artful disruption can dictate our entire response to a movie.
The knowledge of silence and non-silence is what makes a great director. It is true today on the 80th anniversary of sound cinema, which though born as a popular success with The Jazz Singer in 1927 was actually delivered a year earlier. (The first synchronised-sound feature was Warners’ Don Juan, which premiered on August 6 1926). It was equally true before film sound even existed.
When F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) pitches its hero Jonathan Harker into the vampire’s realm, the film’s caption-filled, garrulous opening scenes give way to a long passage of virtual silence. It begins with the crossing of a sinister, symbolic bridge. A mute coachman escorts Harker to the castle. Nosferatu greets him with a curt one-liner about unpunctuality. Then silence extends through half of dinner until a striking clock (its sound evoked by its image) startles the hero into cutting his thumb. Jolted back to the earthly, he is instantly transported to the unearthlier-than-ever: the Count puts his tongue to the wound. The coming of Hell is done with that single sound fracturing extended soundlessness.
(To make the point again: pre-sound movies are seldom silent and often downright noisy. Captions, close-ups, declamatory cuts, capital-A Acting. Early cinema can hector us like a street orator. Only the greatest “silent” directors knew how to achieve moments of silence.)
Another example: at the beginning of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, the silence of death - the instant of that silencing - is the touch that entrances the entire film. “Rosebud!” comes the whisper. Then the dying man lets fall the snow-filled glass globe which shatters into wordlessness, mystery. The miniature landscape inside the globe, huge in closeup, becomes a country of the beyond, annihilating all to that last spoken word whose enigma resonates on.
Then there is the first meeting between the heroes in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
For a whole scene they say nothing. There is that long, gravel-scratching silence - a stand-off or a courtship? - while they wait to be interviewed for a job guarding sheep on high mountains, a job no man could want unless silence and solitude are at the core of his needs. A blank sonic canvas is presented, upfront, to the viewer. He is told: “Fill this in. All the colours are at your disposal. The story starts here.” But the story is, of course, being told already.
Is silence the hidden resource of all great performed art? Is it the point reached by movies, or by drama, when the veil lifts and we gaze at the realities beyond language?
Stephen Greenblatt’s wonderful book about Shakespeare, Will in the World, pinpoints the essence of his achievement as a tragic playwright. Shakespeare took old and tested plots - the cause-and-effect yarns that were the templates for Hamlet, King Lear and Othello - and purged them of explanation. Shakespeare’s Hamlet no longer has a clear reason for hesitating to punish Claudius. Shakespeare’s Lear has no reason for the last-minute catechising of his children with which the play begins: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” (He has already divided the kingdom.) Shakespeare’s Iago has no reason for destroying Othello. In fact his last words swear eternal silence on the subject. “From this time forth I never will speak word.”
Why is Goldblatt’s perception so telling? Because a single or predominant explanation of events is dull, finite, deadly. It closes off speculation. It diminishes the acoustic of possibility. It says to the audience’s brain, “Don’t bother. Here is the answer.”
By contrast the unexplained, like silence, opens everything up. And silence, like the (non) colour black, needn’t be nothing; it can be and often is composed of everything. In German director Philip Groning’s recent feature documentary Die Grosse Stille, about a Carthusian monastery, the silence of the monks is scrupulously observed by the filmmaker while the visuals provide a code, a thesaurus to the occupations and preoccupations that speak - without language - for the monks’ lives and ideas.
Even when silence is nothing - of a kind - it can have power and import. Ingmar Bergman made a film about speechlessness that is like an extended scream. Persona, the story of a theatre actress (Liv Ullmann) taking an unexplained vow of silence after mysteriously abdicating from the stage, questions the efficacy of words as human communication. The actress and the anxiously voluble psychotherapist (Bibi Andersson) challenge each other’s roles, swap them, confound them. The film asks “Who is truly silent, the mute woman or the one who can’t stop talking?”
In Antonioni’s L’Avventura, the greatest film about the mocking silence of existence, a girl from a yachting party goes missing on a volcanic island. She never reappears, on the island or anywhere else, though friends search and continue to search. What follows is, spiritually if not literally, a silent movie. For all its prattle of the rich and educated, its strained nothings of couples anxious to adorn or camouflage their failing love, it is a study in answerlessness. The girl who doesn’t come back is the same as the echo that doesn’t come back, when a world seeking explanations shouts into the darkness.
In cinema, silence literal and silence metaphysical interlock and interchange. Just as silent movies can be noisy, talky movies can be silent. Cinema’s basis in image rather than word enfranchises silence on every level and in every layer of meaning - it allows silence to be played with and explored as reality and metaphor - in a way impossible with stage drama even in Shakespeare’s hands. (In terms of “reality silence”, the closest theatre dares to get is the Pinteresque pause).
Cinema’s fascination with silence is evident from the way the word rings like a cash till in movie titles. Over and over. The Silent World, Run Silent Run Deep, Silent Running, Silence and Cry, Silent Movie, The Silence of the Lambs.
Forget the arthouse crowd for a moment. What does silence mean for the multiplex moviegoer? It can conjure fear. It can create suspense. It can instil anxiety. (”It’s too quiet,” say western characters waiting for an ambush). It conjures helplessness: the mute girl of The Spiral Staircase who cannot speak or scream. It conjures awe of the unknown. What are those silent lambs, or that black slab in 2001, if not a symbol of the universe’s silence?
Yet in keeping with the notion of silence as a system of opposites it can also stand for strength and assurance. It speaks for a self-belief that needs no words. The strong silent hero of westerns lives out Thomas Carlyle’s maxim: “Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.” John Wayne in Stagecoach, Gary Cooper in High Noon, Alan Ladd in Shane offer actions not words. They are as noble in their distrust, as granite-like in their integrity, as the Red Indian for whom “white man speak with forked tongue.”
In Tom Horn, Steve McQueen adopts silence as a moral commitment. It is a hero’s heroic statement of faith. Condemned for a crime he didn’t commit, he refuses to speak at his kangaroo trial. As McQueen’s penultimate film, Tom Horn was omega to the alpha of his career start. In his first performances he was a hyperkinetic, motor-mouthed Method actor, interchangeable with half a dozen others. Doing everything he conveyed nothing. It was silence that made him. It was the courage to let the weathered face, blue eyes, wry jut of jaw, striating smile-lines, boyish-yet-manlike strut do the work, tell the story.
Silence as strength isn’t confined to males. Holly Hunter’s mute heroine in The Piano makes up in indomitability for what she lacks in verbal eloquence. She also comes empowered by writer-director Jane Campion to decouple silence from emotional repression. Her character sexualises, almost singlehanded, an entire swathe of the male population in backwoods-colonial 19th-century New Zealand.
Silence as strength is not confined even to humans. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg in The Terminator has, famously, a mere 16 lines of dialogue. They are less conventional speech, more the creations of some cosmic soundbite machine (”I’ll be back”). Yet the Schwarzenegger taciturnity won him superstardom while co-actor Michael Biehn, talking himself hoarse as the film’s nominal hero, remains filed in Hollywood under W for “Who?”
Silence is the great bipolar force in film. It enhances the sinister. Yet it weaponises the good. It strips the filmgoer’s nerves for scenes of terror and suspense. Yet it reassures him when a hero refuses to speak, steadfast against betrayal or self-betrayal. (Isn’t “he didn’t talk” a torture victim’s great badge of courage?) Silence extends the horizon of possibility in both directions.
Go further. In nearly every great moment in screen history silence is integral to the magic. I mean those moments when time is arrested and narrative is held still, when an epiphany paints itself like a swift, indelible stroke on the viewer’s mind.
I think of those split seconds in The Wild Bunch when the mute exchange of looks between the outlaws - men about to surrender their lives in an atoning blaze of violent justice - choreographs a decision beyond words. I think of Jean-Pierre Leaud in the last shot of Les Quatre Cents Coups gazing at the camera in a gnomic, challenging freeze-frame that says to the audience, “Now you give some answers.” I think of Klaus Kinski at the end of Aguirre, The Wrath of God, adrift on a raft, whirlpooling into cosmic inconsequence, his only companions a bunch of monkeys mutely scampering in a world without speech.
Silence in great films is a far frontier. We peer over the lip of existence, as if over the edge of a waterfall. The makeshift of words is drowned by the roar of the infinite. We are presented with something unearthly, unworldly: something that urges us to enter the work of art, to inhabit it, to be remade by it. Or be rendered, in some cases, powerless by it. (Perhaps we are the monkeys at the end of Aguirre).
One of my favourite movies - in the mad-but-beautiful class - is Guy Maddin’s Careful. A Canadian obsessed with silent cinema, Maddin fashioned this pastiche of a pre-talkie melodrama. The difference between imitation and reality is that where silent cinema combated its silence, shovelling in substitute “noise” where it could (inter-titles, music accompaniment, close-ups of bells or pistons), for Maddin silence is the drama and enthralment. The inhabitants of his alpine village, filmed in faux-primitive black-and-white studio sets, dare not speak loudly for fear of setting off an avalanche. They walk softly, talk softly, quarrel softly, love softly. Yet the quieter life is on the surface, the more turbulent and unappeasable become the underlying realities and emotions, from incestuous passion to family feuds to conflicts of faith to murder.
The same principle - less is more - explains Hitchcock’s fascination throughout his career with scenes that take place out of earshot of the audience. So often, we see but do not hear a vital conversation. It may be two men talking behind an office’s glass door, their animated silhouettes our only clue to what they are saying. It may be apartment-dwellers framed in their windows as they make out-of-range chatter in Rear Window. It may be Julie Andrews in Torn Curtain, listening to an all-important explanation from Paul Newman, which we cannot hear, on a studio hillock. Hitchcock knew that the word “suspense” implies suspension: that of the audience’s ability to know everything. If you starve the viewer’s appetite you increase his hunger, curiosity and engagement.
Mystery lies at the heart of it. Not just mystery in its parochial and plural sense (plot riddles, character enigmas) but mystery singular and momentous - mystery “religious”. The wonder of the unknowable. When we follow Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot around the mazes of the ultramodern world in Playtime, or watch Brigitte Helm metamorphose into a robot amid the fiery aerial rings in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or find ourselves teleported to a neoclassical bedroom, chill and eternal, on Jupiter in 2001, we have gone so far beyond words that cinema establishes its own space-station. It is far from Planet Theatre or Planet Literature. It is out there in the starry dark where true filmgoers live.
A picture tells a thousand words? Those and more. And silences speak forever, to those ready to hear.
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For that is the power of silence. It is the best and worst thing. It is comfort and fear. It is the peace of mind that converts everything to serenity. Yet it is the negation of all things.
Just printed! Thank you, Tpe.
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You're welcome, frances. I have so much admiration for the writer. It is so beautifully written.
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Thanks tpe for the article. I love the part of us having this canvas to paint. We've said it many times before- that is part of what makes this movie so wonderful- what is not said is just as important as what is said.
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Don't know if this has already been posted
That Brokeback Got Me Good
Brokeback Mountain / Jeremy C. Fox
For a lot of people I know, both gay and straight, Brokeback Mountain is the most anticipated film of the year. Since it was first announced in 2003, it’s generally been known as “that gay cowboy movie” — the film in which, for the first time, two handsome Hollywood stars on the rise would appear in an honest-to-God gay romance, the movie that would give us both the love that dare not speak its name and the sex scenes that Tom Hanks (in Philadelphia) and Colin Farrell (in both A Home at the End of the World and Alexander) dare not shoot — but calling Brokeback Mountain “that gay cowboy movie” is about as reductive as calling The Godfather “that mafia movie.” It contains aspects of Westerns, gay coming-of-age films, and romantic melodramas, but to apply a facile label would be to underestimate its majestic sweep and its heartening and heartrending depth. It is, at its base, a film about the conflict between what a man is and what he needs.
The movie’s source is the final story in Annie Proulx’s book Close Range: Wyoming Stories, a collection of narratives about difficult lives lived in difficult circumstances by people who mostly don’t expect better. Her characters tend to be of two types: the dreamers who either buy into the romance of the West or can’t wait to escape it and the realists who accept their lot with stoic resilience. Brokeback Mountain has one of each: Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), starry-eyed and caught up in heroic myths, and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) a pragmatist who just lives his life the only way he knows how. In outline, the film is simple: Boy gets boy; boy loses boy; boy gets and loses boy over and over again across a lifetime — but there’s a whole world of suffering and grief in all that getting and losing, a permanent sense of loss, of possibilities forever forestalled, happiness perpetually found and then denied, lessons learned too late.
Over the past year or so, Heath Ledger has been involved in a project of rejiggering his career, eschewing the fluffy, audience-pleasing “blond-haired bimbo” roles that made him famous and saying f*** you to the Hollywood establishment, taking flaky character parts or leads that other young actors considered too risky. Here he confirms a suspicion that I developed after seeing Lords of Dogtown last summer and realizing that he’d played a sizable role without my ever recognizing him — he’s a startlingly gifted actor. He’s playing a character who’s superficially a throwback to the days of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, and he outwardly embodies the quintessential Western hero, squinting his eyes into black creases and murmuring his words through drawn lips, with an accent that’s a little bit Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade and a little bit Sam Elliott in everything (though with a lighter timbre). But Ennis doesn’t have it in him to be an icon. Having lost his parents as a child, he was early prepared for a hard life full of disappointments; he’s uncomplaining and compliant, willing to work any shit-job he can get, willing to perform any task unquestioningly.
While Ennis begins the film shambling like a young man whom life has already beaten, Jack struts around like a stud horse, intoxicated with the idea of being a rodeo star and proving his worth to his disapproving father and, by extension, the world. Gyllenhaal’s performance at first seems a little out of place; everyone around him (at this point, essentially Ledger, Randy Quaid, and some sheep) seems entirely at ease and unactorish, but on a second viewing I realized that what I was watching wasn’t Gyllenhaal’s performance — it was Jack’s. Jack is constantly trying to fill the role of Western hero, trying to impress; when we first see him, waiting with Ennis outside Joe Aguirre’s trailer-office, he leans against his truck in an exaggeratedly casual posture, with a “hey, cowboy” leer. The pose seems tentative here, but when he strikes it again later, after he knows he’s won Ennis, it’s triumphant. Unlike Ennis, Jack knows what he wants and is willing to go after it, though he may be only a little better at understanding it.
Ennis and Jack first meet in Signal, Wyoming, in 1963, when they take summer jobs tending sheep on Brokeback Mountain for Joe Aguirre (Quaid). Up on Brokeback, they endure harsh weather, minimal provisions, and predator attacks on the sheep, and gradually, over a period of days and weeks, they reveal themselves to each other and become close. When a night of too much whiskey and too much cold confines them to the same small tent, Jack, who’s clearly had it on his mind for a while, makes his move and they consummate their relationship. Early reports on the film suggested that the physical affection between Ennis and Jack would be downplayed; that perhaps they wouldn’t even kiss onscreen, but this encounter is treated no more or less gingerly than their later encounters with women. There’s no ambiguity about the sex, no discreet fade to black, but neither is it played for titillation or shock value. The connection between Ennis and Jack is powerful, even elemental, and sex is what cements it, a factor it would be dishonest to exclude, but there’s far more to it than that. Ennis gives Jack the tenderness and affection that he craves, offers him the acceptance that his father denied him, but what Jack gives Ennis is understanding; he’s the one person in the world around whom Ennis can drop his guard, though even with Jack it falls only so far. But what this relationship means to them, the powerful hold they have over each other, is something they have little means to express. Like many men, their feelings come out most clearly through aggression. The physical violence between Ennis and Jack is more than just a metaphor for the emotional violence of their connection, it’s the only way these inarticulate men are able to express the strength of their feelings. Though it’s tacitly clear in their every interaction, and though they often speak of the grip “this thing” has on them, throughout the film’s two and a quarter hours neither dares to say the word “love.”
Like many a homosexual encounter, theirs begins in drunkenness, when their inhibitions are lowered, and like many people after their first homosexual encounter, Ennis would like to believe that it’s a fluke, no big deal. “This is a one-shot thing we got goin’ on here. … You know I ain’t queer,” he tells Jack the next afternoon, hoping and perhaps still believing that it’s true. Ennis plays the “masculine” role and tries to preserve his image of himself as a man. He tries to separate sex from emotion, to convince himself that Jack is no more to him than a vehicle for his sexual drive, a partner better suited to the purpose than his hand but only marginally preferable to the sheep. Initially he can’t admit to himself that he’s getting anything more from Jack than a sexual release; when Jack wants to be treated as a lover, an equal, to be kissed and to be held, Ennis is terrified of the implicit suggestion that indeed he is queer, of surrendering his masculine prerogative, of assuming an ambiguous role. But need and regard for Jack overpower his fears and he relents. When the sheep-tending job is ending and they must separate, the full force of Ennis’ emotion comes down on him and he’s wrecked.
Ennis returns home and marries his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams), attempting to return to his old life with little success. Separated from Jack, he tries to make a Jack of Alma, wrestling with her in the snow as he’d wrestled with Jack up on Brokeback, too rough for a woman half his size, assigning her the sexual role Jack had assumed eagerly but which she accepts with grim marital devotion. Ennis becomes a caring father and he loves Alma as best he can, but his unfulfilled desires isolate him from his family. As the years pass, he increasingly draws away from them.
Jack moves to Texas for rodeoing but has little success. Though he’s drawn to men and looks for opportunities for hookups, he’s impressed when he meets a pretty young barrel-racer named Lureen Newsome (Anne Hathaway), though it’s suggested that her family’s wealth may have as much to do with her appeal as her personal charms. They marry and settle in Childress, Texas, where they both work for Lureen’s father, a big-time farm-equipment dealer. After four years have passed since that summer on the mountain, Jack finally heads back up to Wyoming and finds Ennis. When they meet again, their passion overtakes them, and they resume their relationship, planning several hunting or fishing trips a year so that they can be together, Jack driving 14-hour stretches at every opportunity to spend time alone with Ennis.
Ledger and Gyllenhaal inhabit their characters with powerful realism. As the years pass, the actors age subtly but persuasively. Jack grows a Dennis Weaver moustache and develops a beer gut; Ennis, who seemed old even when he was young, changes only in the hardening of his face, his skin growing more dry and taut, getting crepey around the eyes. The makeup artists have done great work here, but it’s Ledger and Gyllenhaal who have to carry these scenes off, and they do so admirably. Even in the latter part of the film, when Ledger is playing father to a young woman who can’t be more than a few years his junior, you don’t question it.
For those who care about a film adaptation’s faithfulness to its literary forerunner, the situation of Brokeback Mountain’s production — adapting a brief but thematically rich and emotionally resonant story — is perhaps ideal. The nature of film — its reliance on the visual and the active over the contemplative, its necessary brevity — makes it almost impossible to do full justice to a novel, but a short story doesn’t make such demands on a screenwriter. Rather than reducing or eliminating themes and events, he can use what was in the original and expand upon it, taking ideas that were only hinted at and exploring them at greater length, bringing out new meanings and enriching existing ones. This is what Brokeback Mountain’s screenwriters, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, have done; they know that Proulx’s story wasn’t broke, and they don’t try to fix it. They simply take it and allow it to sprawl out, to fill up the edges of the film with carefully observed details. McMurtry, a Texan and author of both contemporary and period novels and screenplays about the West, understands this world as well as anyone might; Ossana has lived much of her life in New Mexico and Arizona and has collaborated with McMurtry on novels and screenplays for over a decade. Their elaborations on Proulx’s story are keyed perfectly to her pitch. They’ve made the chronology more linear — an esthetically neutral decision in this case — but nothing of substance is missing, while some useful context and character motivations are added. They expand the story into other points of view, strengthening Proulx’s insights, giving a greater sense of the impact that Ennis and Jack’s love has on those around them, and adding such small but meaningful touches as a brown paper sack offered at just the right moment.
This is the first film Ang Lee has directed since Hulk, and he seems to have learned from that considerable misfire. He’s playing to his strengths here, and they are remarkable. Like many of the canniest observers of American life, Lee is an outsider who has adopted the American culture and who continues to see our society with a clearer eye than we may have ourselves. A native of Taiwan who has lived much of his adult life in the United States, Lee is adept at immersing himself in new cultures (New York Times critic Stephen Holden once called him “a kind of cinematic anthropologist”), recreating the world of his characters and examining it with a thoughtful, critical eye without resorting to parody. Lee has sometimes been accused of being too clinical, of keeping his subjects at an objective distance, but there’s none of that here. His empathy with these characters — each of them trapped in his or her own particular way — is palpable, yet he never tips over into sentimentality or lugubriousness.
Lee and his cinematographer, the versatile Rodrigo Prieto (21 Grams, Alexander), capture the feeling that runs through all of Proulx’s Wyoming stories, a sense of the permanence of the land and the transience of individual human lives. Their Wyoming (played with picture-postcard beauty by Alberta, Canada) is a painterly landscape of craggy mountains; rich, verdant grasslands; and a gorgeous, endless sky above, that serves as half of a metaphor for the characters’ dual lives; it’s the idyllic Eden where Ennis and Jack first meet and later find temporary escape, the place they can be together and be themselves without fear of judgment, contrasted against the constricted feel of the dusty, squalid cow towns and tacky, middle-class, southwestern suburbs where they spend most of their lives.
Lee takes the classic contrast between nature and civilization and uses it in a new way, as an implicit argument that the love between Ennis and Jack is a natural thing subverted by the arbitrary rules and definitions of manhood of their society. This might sound pretentious, and in many other hands it could be, but the beauty of Lee’s technique is its simplicity, its directness and lack of pretense, its ability to suggest without overplaying. He’s assisted by the somber elegance of Gustavo Santaolalla’s guitar-and-fiddle score, which evokes Country-Western music without quite entering its twangy domain and fits the moods Lee creates without overselling them.
Brokeback Mountain bears some similarities to Lee’s 1993 film The Wedding Banquet, in which a gay Chinese man living in New York with his lover must get himself a nice Chinese wife to appease his traditional parents back in Taiwan. Lee isn’t gay, but in films like The Wedding Banquet, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon he’s shown an understanding of gay men and straight women — the disenfranchised of patriarchies — that’s greater than just about any other straight male director I can think of; as much as I admire Gus Van Sant (who is gay and who at one point expressed interest in directing Brokeback Mountain) I can’t imagine anyone doing this story better. As far as I know, none of the principals involved in the production is gay, yet they’ve constructed a story of love between men that surpasses all but the greatest films made by gay filmmakers, such as Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. Lee’s fascinated with people whose desires are thwarted by the strictures of society and the sacrifices demanded by tradition. And, in America, no tradition is more venerable than the notion of the laconic, stalwart western hero, the icon that Jack wishes he were and that Ennis falls to by dint of circumstance. It’s part of Ennis’ appeal to Jack that he embodies the cowboy archetype Jack aspires to.
Lee’s aware that he’s playing with myth, but he doesn’t muck about with it capriciously. Westerns are always about the end of a way of life, and Lee seems ambivalent about the changes that time has wrought. If Ennis and Jack were 20 years old in 2003 rather than 1963, their relationship would be easier but the West they knew would be gone. Brokeback Mountain uses the West as a backdrop, but it’s not structured like a Western, and it’s not intended as a criticism of the genre like McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Unforgiven, films that took the Western hero and made him either a buffoon or a sociopath; rather it’s a film that employs selected genre elements for their resonances, their associations. The mythic quality of the landscape and the lonesome figures moving through it only serves to emphasize the difficulty of these men playing the roles they’ve been given, the impossibility of living up to a myth.
The filmmakers have the guts to allow for the moral ambiguity of Ennis and Jack’s situation and explore the toll their secret takes on their families. No matter how powerful or natural their desires, by following them they’re hurting the women they married in their misdirected search for the passion they find only with each other. While I’d enjoyed Michelle Williams’ performances in small roles in recent films like Imaginary Heroes and The Baxter, until now my concept of her was essentially “that girl from ‘Dawson’s Creek.’” Those days are over. Her performance here is so deeply felt, authentic, and adult that it wipes away all my preconceived notions about her — not to mention blowing her former co-star Katie Holmes, whose recent performances haven’t strayed far from the Creek, right out of the water. When Williams’ Alma first witnesses her husband embracing a man, kissing him, her face expresses about 10 kinds of alarm, confusion, heartbreak, and horror. And Anne Hathaway, who plays Jack’s wife Lureen, might have forever been Mia Thermopolis to me but for her role here. She’s given less to play than Williams, but she makes the most of every moment. Her silent triumph when Jack finally stands up to her bullying father is exhilarating, and the slight catch in her throat that disturbs her frosty demeanor when she speaks to Ennis for the first and last time, the subtle suggestion that she’s finally learned her husband’s secret, completely transforms the way we see her character. Even the actors in roles that count for little more than cameos, such as the tiny part played by an unrecognizable Anna Faris, or the slightly larger role given to Linda Cardellini, hit home. It’s as if Lee had been asked to prove that every B-list actress in Hollywood under 30 had unplumbed depths. There’s not a performer in the film who doesn’t stretch (well, maybe Randy Quaid, but it’s nice to see him in a respectable role again), and there’s not one who fails.
Lee is aware of his film’s place in the world, that no one will approach it as just a romance and that much more attention will be given it than if the actors were nobodies, and his approach is, I think, the best possible one, low-key and matter-of-fact, making the story feel genuine and simple and true. Brokeback Mountain is a film of great subtlety and precise observation, a film for which the best descriptors are words like “rich” and “authentic” and, possibly, “perfect.” After three viewings and some careful consideration, I’m damned if I can find a significant flaw. There are one or two lines of dialogue that I might change, and Gyllenhaal’s early scenes made more sense to me upon the second viewing, but these are quibbles. In a medium where the important decisions are almost always dictated by commerce rather than art, Brokeback Mountain is as close to perfection as we are likely to get.
Jeremy C. Fox is the managing editor of Pajiba and a member of the Online Film Critics Society
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I don't recall it?Thanks Frances,nice long article.Was it announced in 2003?I didn't know that.
Jennis.x
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I don't recall it?Thanks Frances,nice long article.Was it announced in 2003?I didn't know that.
Jennis.x
I know...LOL...
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Thanks LJBN.
Thanks, frances, for the article. Not so sure if it was ever posted before.
I found this beautiful:
Lee and his cinematographer, the versatile Rodrigo Prieto (21 Grams, Alexander), capture the feeling that runs through all of Proulx’s Wyoming stories, a sense of the permanence of the land and the transience of individual human lives.
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Source Movie.com
Brokeback Mountain is one of the " 35 Greatest Moments of Movie Sex." http://movies.go.com/sextimeline
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Source Movie.com
Brokeback Mountain is one of the " 35 Greatest Moments of Movie Sex." http://movies.go.com/sextimeline
Thanks Frances,
They saved the best till last ;)
J.x
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Source Movie.com
Brokeback Mountain is one of the " 35 Greatest Moments of Movie Sex." http://movies.go.com/sextimeline
closer for 2004 and BBM for 2005...they have good tastes!!
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Johnny Depp is funny, and i'm glad to know he's so open with his sexuality
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Johnny Depp is funny, and i'm glad to know he's so open with his sexuality
Wait, is Johnny gay? :s)
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Johnny Depp is funny, and i'm glad to know he's so open with his sexuality
Wait, is Johnny gay? :s)
I don't know that either, but certainly wouldn't be surprised. Either way, he's okay with me.
I did see a silly quote in some US magazine or some such, from Orlando Bloom, who said something like: "Johnny keeps wanting to kiss me. I tell him just no tongue."
kathy