Topic: Reviews ---- Newspapers

[brokebackmountain]

This topic is created for reviews from newspapers.

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'Brokeback' is a timeless love story -- with a twist

Rene Rodriguez
Miami Herald
Published: Friday, December 16, 2005

The best movie romances -- the ones that bruise us, that leave a permanent mark -- are always the sad ones. Happily-ever-after is fine if you're Julia Roberts or Hugh Grant, but in the real world, true love is much more fleeting and difficult and elusive. It's not the storybook romance that is most common, but the lingering, persistent ache of heartbreak -- a pain everyone feels at some point or another.

Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's ineffably sad drama about two Wyoming ranch hands who unexpectedly fall in love, arrives not as just a film, but a pop culture event. The ''gay cowboy movie,'' as it has been called since shooting began last year, has already amassed a trunkload of awards and nominations, been the subject of three separate spoofs on Saturday Night Live -- even inspired a Top Ten list from David Letterman.

But this poignant, wise and subtle picture -- which, yes, happens to be the best movie of the year -- should be approached with humble expectations. Lee's approach to this delicate material is suffused with melancholy, metaphors and small, telling touches that favor subtlety over exclamation points and rough-hewn simplicity over grandiloquence. Instead of clamoring to be let in, Brokeback Mountain sneaks into your heart.

Expanded from Annie Proulx's 1997 short story with great care by Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove) and Diana Ossana, the movie has the intimacy of a character study and the sweep of an epic. It begins in 1963, when Wyoming ranch hands Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet during a summer spent herding sheep beneath the shadow of the titular mountain.

Neither Jack, raised by a domineering father, nor Ennis, an orphan, are talkative sorts. They are descendants of their culture, the American West and its cowboy mythology -- taciturn, stoic and marked by what Willie Nelson once described as ''their own brand of misery/from being alone too long.'' But as the weeks stretch on, Jack and Ennis strike up a quiet, easy friendship, and one night, while sharing a tent, a bout of fumbling, groping sex erupts.

The spark comes as a shock to both of them (''You know I ain't queer.'' ``Me neither.''), but with no one around to inhibit them, they pursue their mutual attraction until summer's end. Then they part -- Ennis back home to small-town Wyoming to marry his fiancée (Michelle Williams), Jack to the rodeo circuit in Texas, where he, too, marries (Anne Hathaway plays his wife). They both start families and prove dutiful husbands. But the memory of their summer together refuses to fade.

The rest of Brokeback Mountain tracks Jack and Ennis over the course of two decades as they periodically reunite for a few days -- always in secret -- then once again reluctantly, painfully separate. Lee, whose movies often focus on people whose personal situations render them outcasts within their own societies (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Hulk, The Ice Storm), shows us how Jack and Ennis' frustration blooms with the passage of time, tainting not only their two lives, but those of everyone around them.

Central to the film is the revelatory performance by Ledger, who plays Ennis as a closed fist of a man, torn between what he knows and what he feels, prone to fits of violence and so guarded against the world that when he speaks, his words sound like they barely escape his throat. Gyllenhaal's Jack, who is freer and more open, embodies the youthful optimism that comes with falling in love: Part of the story's tragedy is his gradual realization that perseverance and patience may not always win out in the end. And both Williams and Hathaway leave deep impressions as the men's wives, who are by turns confused, suspicious, terrified and angry (Hathaway is particularly good in one crucial scene late in the film, shot entirely in close-up, in which her face conveys an array of conflicting emotions).

Because of its subject matter and the themes it evokes -- gay marriage, homophobia, Matthew

Shepard -- Brokeback Mountain is destined to become the subject of much political discussion as it opens around the country over the next few weeks. That's all fine and good, but it should not distract from the film's biggest triumph: injecting startling new life into that hoariest of genres, the four-hankie weeper, and illustrating, in a heartrending manner, the immeasurably tragic toll of a life, and a love, denied.

[brokebackmountain]

"Brokeback" gallops past stereotypes

http://www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_3309513

Video Clip of Interview with Ang Lee at Denver Film Festival

http://www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_3309513#

[brokebackmountain]

"Brokeback Mountain": Epic story of enduring love   By Moira Macdonald

Seattle Times movie critic

From the spare, elegant tinder of Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," director Ang Lee and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have created a quietly roaring fire. This is an epic love story told in few words; like Lee's masterful Jane Austen adaptation "Sense and Sensibility," it takes place in a world with a strict code of behavior, populated by people who cannot say what they really mean. Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) are cowboys in 1960s Wyoming. They are in love, and they cannot tell the world, or even each other.[/size]

Complete review here

[brokebackmountain]

Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love

Link

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: December 9, 2005

THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.

One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.

The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.

The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting."

That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.

This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.

In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from "Red River" to "Midnight Cowboy" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.

Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire.

So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider.

When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business.

Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery. The reunited lovers rush to a motel.

So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame.

Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.

The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self.

"Brokeback Mountain" is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in "Brokeback" territory. Another recent film, "Jarhead" (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.

Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.

Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."

One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.

"Brokeback Mountain" is rated R. It has mild violence and sexual situations.

Brokeback Mountain

Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Directed by Ang Lee; written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor; music by Gustavo Santaolalla; production designer, Judy Becker; produced by Ms. Ossana and James Schamus; released by Focus Features. Running time: 134 minutes.

WITH: Heath Ledger (Ennis Del Mar), Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack Twist), Linda Cardellini (Cassie), Anna Faris (Lashawn Malone), Anne Hathaway (Lureen Newsome), Michelle Williams (Alma), Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre) and Kate Mara (Alma Jr.).

[brokebackmountain]

Another article from NY Times

Big Changes, Mostly for the Good

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 25, 2005

Below is an excerpt

"If Heath Ledger has attracted so much attention for his performance in "Brokeback Mountain" it's partly because he has finally made good on his early overhyped promise and partly because his character in Ang Lee's romantic tragedy, Ennis Del Mar, represents a kind of impacted masculinity that a lot of us recognize: I don't know a single straight woman who hasn't been involved with a man as emotionally thwarted as Ennis, the man who can't tell you how he feels because he may not honestly know. And because the film is, in many respects, about how difficult it is to live in a culture that punishes men who give the appearance of being too soft, too weak and too feminine, I imagine that a lot of men, gay and straight, recognize Ennis, too.

Unlike Ennis, Jake Gyllenhaal's doe-eyed Jack Twist wears desire as openly as pain. Without his sensitive performance, without his ache and yearning, "Brokeback Mountain" wouldn't work half as well as it does. The beauty of the performance is fully evident in the scene in which the older Jack remembers when Ennis gently wrapped his arms around him during the men's first summer together. It's a devastating moment both because it juxtaposes the men's idyllic past with their difficult present, and because it reminds us of how memories live inside us as promises, rebukes and ghosts. When the scene returns to the present, you see in this man's face a lifetime of hope blur together with a lifetime of disappointment, as well as the beginning of the lovers' end."

Complete article here

[brokebackmountain]

An interesting article from NY Times today.

"Like other reviewers of "Brokeback Mountain," Steven Isaac was impressed by the quality of the filmmaking. But for Mr. Isaac, who reviews movies for the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family, the movie, about a love affair between two male ranch hands, posed other critical challenges.

"When Ang Lee brings his considerable talents to a film that promotes homosexuality, which I believe personally hurts our culture, you get a movie that sells its message more effectively than one by someone less talented," Mr. Isaac said in a telephone interview. In a review that acknowledged the film's virtues, published on the Focus on the Family Web site pluggedinonline.com, he objected that it portrayed the characters' tribulations as consequences of an intolerant society rather than of "the destructiveness of acting on homosexual temptations."

Read the complet article HERE

[*Froggy*]

http://www.sltrib.com/outdoors/ci_3351722

Mountain of 'Brokeback' praise doesn't faze humble Ledger -The Salt Lake Tribune

WASHINGTON - The year 2005 has been a turning point for Heath Ledger.

   He moved to a new home in Brooklyn, N.Y. He became a father, welcoming daughter Matilda into the world with Michelle Williams, his girlfriend and co-star in ''Brokeback Mountain,'' which opens Friday in Salt Lake City. And his emotional work in that film, directed by Ang Lee, announced his presence as a serious, Golden Globe-nominated actor, and one who may be headed toward his first Academy Award nomination.

   Ask which of these developments made the biggest impact on him, and the Australian native just chuckles.
   ''What do you think?'' he asks rhetorically. ''Look, Michelle and I are forever in debt to Ang, in a much smaller sense for giving us this movie, but on a grander scale for kind of putting us together and giving us this beautiful life and this little friend of ours we have floating around.''

   Ledger, who met Williams last year when the two were filming ''Brokeback,'' teeters on the edge of giddiness as he says this, a reaction that might be nausea-inducing if it didn't seem, well, so darn heartfelt. In fact, ''heartfelt'' is a word that could easily be used to describe Ledger's performance as Ennis Del Mar, a tortured loner who falls in love with fellow cowboy Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) despite his belief that homosexuality is wrong. Some other words that effusive critics have used to describe his ''Mountain'' transformation: ''breathtaking,'' ''astonishing'' and ''extraordinary.''

   Despite the flattering adjectives and aura of Oscar buzz, Ledger, 26, seems to have his head in the right place. Or so it sounded during a recent phone interview from a New York hotel where he was making the requisite press-junket rounds. ''The only time [the Academy Award talk] surrounds my day are on days like today,'' Ledger says. Though he's honored by the notion of a nomination, he realizes a golden statuette isn't the only definition of outstanding work.

   ''The thing that strikes me as strange is that we're all in the same race, but none of us are performing the same sport,'' he says of his fellow actors. ''None of us started at the same spot nor do we finish at the same spot. But we all get compared and thrown into a mix. It all feels a little manufactured and filled with false senses of success and false senses of failure.''

   Ledger is equally candid when asked about ''Brokeback Mountain's'' controversial subject matter even as a recent Entertainment Weekly cover story suggested that he and Gyllenhaal were risking their careers by playing gay cowboys, something the actor dismisses.

 ''I never really felt I had anything at risk,'' he says. ''If, at the end of the day, it is a risk to create a love story . . . if, in fact, that is a crime and that's something that's worth judging someone for, then quite frankly I don't want to be in an industry that restricts creativity in that way.''

   Ledger has been an active player in that industry for the past six years, making his American film debut in 1999's "10 Things I Hate About You," a teen satire of ''Taming of the Shrew.'' After serenading Julia Stiles in a football stadium, Ledger moved into more dramatic territory, appearing in such movies as ''The Patriot,'' ''Monster's Ball'' and ''The Four Feathers.'' But none of those performances hinted at Ledger's ability to disappear so deeply into a character.

   Asked whether he would define Ennis - who is married to Alma, the long-suffering wife played by Williams, during part of the film - as gay, bisexual or straight but confused, Ledger is reluctant to categorize.

   ''I generally don't think most situations can be labeled as black or white,'' he says. ''He's obviously gay in the sense that he has fallen in love with another man, and this seemed to ignite something within his soul. But whether or not he had sought to find that in another man before, I doubt it.''

   Working on ''Brokeback Mountain'' meant new territory for Ledger and Gyllenhaal, too: Filming love scenes with another man, including an intense initial encounter in a tent on an exceptionally chilly night. Ledger admits to having been nervous but says he used his anxiety, an emotion Ennis shares during that moment, to make the scene more genuine.

   ''No matter what, when you're shooting love scenes, it's kind of uncomfortable, and this was certainly going to be one of those,'' he admits. ''But it's also like, [expletive] it, we're not kids. We're professionals. We have a responsibility to tell it like it is.''

   Telling it like it is may mean that moviegoers uncomfortable with gay themes will avoid the film altogether, something Ledger accepts.

   ''The only people who are truly going to hate this film are the people who won't go see it,'' he says. ''And that's fine. That's their own personal issues they have to deal with.''

   But Ledger doesn't accept the suggestion that he is daring or brave for playing a gay man.

   ''In my opinion, New York City police officers are brave. It takes courage to be a firefighter,'' he says. ''We're just acting.''

[brokebackmountain]

http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/documents/05146032.asp

"Controversy" sells tickets, as long as it’s not controversial. Such hot-button films as the recent Syriana and the upcoming Munich purport to take on tough issues but in fact merely tart up generic fare with innocuous pretenses. Brokeback Mountain, the "gay cowboy movie," has built up a saucy reputation, moving the suddenly prim Madonna to declare it "shocking." But by the time viewers realize that it has less sex than the average PG-13 movie about heterosexual love, they’ll be drawn to it as a tearjerker. Credit a consummate performance by Heath Ledger and limpid, unmanipulative direction by Ang Lee for the year’s most affecting romantic movie.

Figuring, no doubt correctly, that more people will identify with loss than with gay lust, Lee gets the icky parts over quickly. Not only is it the love that dare not speak its name, it doesn’t speak at all. The film’s opening five minutes present a wordless mating dance as cocky kid Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a worried-looking Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) wait to apply for a job herding sheep for the winter. It’s 1964 and Wyoming, so Jack’s attraction to Ennis is limited to sidelong glances in his pick-up’s rear-view mirror, and Ennis’s shrunken body language screams repression. Later, tending the flock on the title peak, the pair eat beans and swap bits of their lives. Lee plays coy with the cliché’d lead-in to their first clinch. Will it be the nursing-of-the-wound scene or the campfire-has gone-out-come-share-the-tent moment? When it does arrive, it’s as blunt and sexless as a two-by-four, and during the rest of their idyll, they exchange more blows than blow jobs. The film seems to take a Rick Santorum approach to sexuality: if they hadn’t turned to each other, maybe they’d have resorted to the sheep. Nothing to upset that big Red State Market.

Once off the mountain they part, and real life begins. Ennis marries pretty Alma (Michelle Williams), who gives him daughters, bills, and non-comprehension. Jack appears to fare better, hitching up with cowgirl Lureen (Anne Hathaway) and landing an emasculating sinecure in her father’s company. The years pass, and Jack’s callowness deteriorates into dandyism; mustachio’d and duded up, he looks like a weedy version of Rock Hudson in Giant. And except for the occasional explosion of rage and frustration, Ennis shrivels up like a weathered saddlebag.

They have their get-togethers over the years, "fishing trips" that arouse the unstated suspicions of their spouses. These serve mostly to remind them, and the viewer, of the hopelessness of love and the inevitability of loss. Although he does indulge in the occasional, obligatory reference to The Searchers (tiny figures on horseback dwarfed by landscape; doors opening from dim interiors into radiant wilderness), Lee remains as laconic as his heroes. The simple authenticity of the gestures — the gift of a shirt near the end of the film will tear up the most hardened or homophobic — almost compensates for the lack of anything to back them up.

Members of the cast have been playing down their character's sexual inclinations. Jake Gyllenhaal, who portrays Jack, the more assertive of the two, told Details he didn't think his character is gay at all.

Heath Ledger, touted as a possible Oscar nominee for his portrayal of Ennis, the uptight other half of the couple, addresses the issue. "I think it's a touchy subject. If we say that they're not, there will be a lot of disappointed people who want it to be. But essentially it's two men that fall in love. I think maybe that's what Jake meant. Certainly with my character, I wanted to tell a story of just someone who transcends the label of gay or straight. He's just purely a human being whose soul falls in love with another soul that is in the vessel of a man."

Ang Lee is less evasive. "To me they are gay. Whether they admit it or not. I think that as actors who play them and as filmmakers who make the movie we need to know that. We need to know their hearts and physically what arouses them. They are sexually aroused, they are attracted to each other."

That aspect of the characters has kept actors from committing to the film since Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana wrote a screenplay based on the Annie Proulx story in 1997. Seven years ago, Gus Van Sant had the project and couldn't get anyone to say yes, including the then-18-year-old Gyllenhaal. What's changed?

"Maybe the time is right for actors," Lee says. He thinks each film with gay characters is a step in a process to normalize them. "I am talking about mainstream-movie territory, not gay cinema, and now actors are more willing to do it. Not all of them, and I think at this point they are still hesitant to do two in a row. But now one movie they will be a lot more willing to do."

As for the actual acting, Ledger found it no big deal.

"Everyone asks, 'What was the most difficult aspect of the movie for you?' 'Making out with Jake Gyllenhaal' is the really obvious answer to give. At the end of the day, once we got the first take out of the way, it was like, 'Oh okay, whatever. Let's finish the day. All the mystery has been taken away and we're still acting, it's a movie.'

"Is he a good kisser? Yeah. He's a really good kisser."

[*Froggy*]

As for the actual acting, Ledger found it no big deal.

"Everyone asks, 'What was the most difficult aspect of the movie for you?' 'Making out with Jake Gyllenhaal' is the really obvious answer to give. At the end of the day, once we got the first take out of the way, it was like, 'Oh okay, whatever. Let's finish the day. All the mystery has been taken away and we're still acting, it's a movie.'

"Is he a good kisser? Yeah. He's a really good kisser."

Luv you even more Heath!

Thanks Ethan 

[sweetlilg]

"Is he a good kisser? Yeah. He's a really good kisser." 

[*Froggy*]

 New Film Brokeback Mountain Tells Story of Unexpected Love Between Two Men

extract...
 Based on a novella by Annie Proulx first published in The New Yorker magazine, Brokeback Mountain co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist.
"All I really had to do was be present. The story is filled with so much subtext already," he says. "If you read the script, just like if you read the book, there's a real description that's untold between these two people. I know sounds very 'actorly' and annoying, but I really just had to show up. The words and the people involved and just the idea underneath it drove us. I think if we tried to do anything more than what we do in the movie, I think it would have been overdoing it."

 Australian-born Heath Ledger is Ennis, a man of strong convictions, but excruciatingly few words.
"Because of that I really had to do a lot of investigation into what exactly he was fighting against ... what his battle was, within ... why he had such an inability to express and to love," explains Ledger. "Once I discovered that, I then wanted to physicalize it. I wanted his inabilities to express and love to come through his body and his speech. Any form of expression had to be painful for him and I wanted him to be a clenched fist. Essentially, I discovered more and asked more questions about Ennis than he would have in his entire life. That was his problem: he didn't even understand that he had these battles."

[*Froggy*]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/movieawards/goldenglobes/2005-12-13-golden-globes-noms_x.htm

[chameau]

This from the Mercury News in San Jose.

Full review:  http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/13598790.htm

I Know there are  lot of Ladies on this forum.  A lot of males too, not all gays, not at all.  Not all is bad, there is a good quote: 

Talk about something being worth the price of admission! For women, ``Brokeback Mountain is kind of like a vacation from our own brains,

I loved that line but would have skipped ''For women''.  It's about the only one good line.   :o  Go see for yourself...

[tpe]

Pretty good one! 

[bubu]

"But he said the fishing trips taken by the film's two lead characters — they never catch any fish — puts more pressure on sportsmen.

"I like to go on fishing trips and hunting trips with my friends," he said, laughing.

"Now if you don't come back with some fish, they're going to wonder what the hell were you doing?"

I agree with that statement from a moviegoer ....

here is a link to the full review of the DesMoines Register...

http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060114/ENT03/60115002/1049

[hidesert]

ROCKY MOUNTAIN BULLHORN  (Fort Collins, Colorado)
January 26, 2006

by Louis Fowler


Brokeback Mountain (R)
Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams
Directed by Ang Lee
Focus Features


Once a week, on my radio show, I get a call from a guy who tells me to “quit playing that faggot shit.”

If I, a straight man, get a nice little bit of hate speech for playing some Madonna or Wham!, imagine what a gay couple would get for just walking down the street holding hands.

And they say we’ve come a long way as a society.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I see at least one or two films a week that feature graphic gay sex, but Brokeback Mountain—only recently brought to Fort Collins—is not this hardcore shocker that everyone would have you think. Sure, it’s got a sex scene or two, but I think that most people are using that as a distraction from the real issue.

And why? People are scared because this is a tender love story between two men.

Two über-macho, John Wayne stereotypes fall in love, and this makes you shift uncomfortably in your seat. These guys could have been your dads. These guys could be you.

Ranch-hands Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet while on a sheep-herding job and fall in love. It’s that simple. Over the years, they get married to women, have kids and go through the typical paces of life, getting together every so often for “fishing trips.” These trips seem to be the only time these two are truly happy, being able to be who they are and in love with who they want, away from the judgment of the times.

What makes Brokeback Mountain so emotionally enthralling—and ultimately draining—is the fact that you know that Ennis and Jack could never be happy. Even in today’s day and age, these guys would be harassed and, as we are constantly reminded, possibly have their skulls beaten in, as was a socially acceptable way to deal with gays in the day (probably just as much as it is today—is it any coincidence that the film is primarily set in Wyoming, where the Matthew Shepard murder occurred?). It’s heartbreaking to know that they’re doomed from the start. It’s even more heartbreaking to have those fears confirmed.

The film’s biggest surprise is Heath Ledger. Who really took him seriously in the past? He was a pretty boy best known for A Knight’s Tale, but his characterization of the brooding Ennis is a sullen, quiet work of art that will change the way he’s seen as an actor. Jake Gyllenhaal, who also has never really impressed me, does here what he failed to do in Jarhead. The requisite female parts play like a list from my fantasies—Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Linda Cardellini and Anna Faris—and all deliver credible jobs with their scant screen times.

Ang Lee’s direction is slow and languid, tediously paced with a masterful eye for emotion without ever resorting to melodrama, as any other director would have. I definitely see an Oscar win for him.

Brokeback Mountain is a masterpiece that will leave you questioning yourself in many respects. Some viewers will have a revelation that questions their sexuality, some will have a revelation about what an asshole they’ve been to people because they didn’t meet their “moral standards.”

And for me? I’m going to play “that faggot shit” louder than ever.
 

[chameau]

ROCKY MOUNTAIN BULLHORN  (Fort Collins, Colorado)
January 26, 2006


Brokeback Mountain (R)
Starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams
Directed by Ang Lee
Focus Features


Once a week, on my radio show, I get a call from a guy who tells me to “quit playing that faggot shit.”

If I, a straight man, get a nice little bit of hate speech for playing some Madonna or Wham!, imagine what a gay couple would get for just walking down the street holding hands.

And they say we’ve come a long way as a society.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I see at least one or two films a week that feature graphic gay sex, but Brokeback Mountain—only recently brought to Fort Collins—is not this hardcore shocker that everyone would have you think. Sure, it’s got a sex scene or two, but I think that most people are using that as a distraction from the real issue.

And why? People are scared because this is a tender love story between two men.

Two über-macho, John Wayne stereotypes fall in love, and this makes you shift uncomfortably in your seat. These guys could have been your dads. These guys could be you.

Ranch-hands Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) meet while on a sheep-herding job and fall in love. It’s that simple. Over the years, they get married to women, have kids and go through the typical paces of life, getting together every so often for “fishing trips.” These trips seem to be the only time these two are truly happy, being able to be who they are and in love with who they want, away from the judgment of the times.

What makes Brokeback Mountain so emotionally enthralling—and ultimately draining—is the fact that you know that Ennis and Jack could never be happy. Even in today’s day and age, these guys would be harassed and, as we are constantly reminded, possibly have their skulls beaten in, as was a socially acceptable way to deal with gays in the day (probably just as much as it is today—is it any coincidence that the film is primarily set in Wyoming, where the Matthew Shepard murder occurred?). It’s heartbreaking to know that they’re doomed from the start. It’s even more heartbreaking to have those fears confirmed.

The film’s biggest surprise is Heath Ledger. Who really took him seriously in the past? He was a pretty boy best known for A Knight’s Tale, but his characterization of the brooding Ennis is a sullen, quiet work of art that will change the way he’s seen as an actor. Jake Gyllenhaal, who also has never really impressed me, does here what he failed to do in Jarhead. The requisite female parts play like a list from my fantasies—Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Linda Cardellini and Anna Faris—and all deliver credible jobs with their scant screen times.

Ang Lee’s direction is slow and languid, tediously paced with a masterful eye for emotion without ever resorting to melodrama, as any other director would have. I definitely see an Oscar win for him.

Brokeback Mountain is a masterpiece that will leave you questioning yourself in many respects. Some viewers will have a revelation that questions their sexuality, some will have a revelation about what an asshole they’ve been to people because they didn’t meet their “moral standards.”

And for me? I’m going to play “that faggot shit” louder than ever.
 

There we go froggy

[*Froggy*]

Brokeback Mountain is a masterpiece that will leave you questioning yourself in many respects. Some viewers will have a revelation that questions their sexuality, some will have a revelation about what an asshole they’ve been to people because they didn’t meet their “moral standards.”

And for me? I’m going to play “that faggot shit” louder than ever.

Thank you v.much!

[chameau]

Thank you so very much hidesert for posting this!

WOW!

Terrific! 

[hidesert]

Thank you v.much!

Thank you so very much hidesert for posting this!

WOW!

Terrific! 

You're welcome - it's a great review, direct but sensitive.  Fort Collins, Colorado is the home of Colorado State University, the state's aggie college so the area is not a liberal bastion.

 

[hidesert]

This is a review from rural Texas.  It's obvious that religion is an important factor there.


[size=14]‘MOUNTAIN’ IS NOT A MOLEHILL[/size]


Denton Record-Chronicle, Denton, Texas    January 29, 2006
By Lucinda Breeding

A man who posted a message on a large Internet movie site had a problem with Brokeback Mountain. It was another example, he said, of the higher profile gays and lesbians enjoy in the media. It seemed that everywhere he looked lately — on television and in film — he saw a gay character. It felt, he said, like homosexuals were sort of “taking over” Hollywood.
 
Hyperbole? Sure. But the poster wasn’t all wrong. Television viewers and moviegoers are encountering gay characters more often, and they are seeing their stories play out more completely than ever.

Years back, MTV started the reality television revolution with The Real World, and from early on, the show included gay people in an experiment that put seven people under one roof and asked them to live together.

Fast forward a decade or so, and cable networks upped the ante, adding documentaries, films and even prime-time series about gay communities. Showtime just retired Queer as Folk, a prime-time drama about the lives and loves of a group of gay men in Pittsburgh. The network debuted The L Word, a prime-time series about the lives and loves of a group of lesbians in West Hollywood, three years ago.

There have been important and award-winning films be¬fore that dealt with gay characters and gay themes. Hillary Swank won her first Oscar in Boys Don’t Cry, a movie based on the murder of Teena Brandon, a young woman living as a man in a rural town.

Brokeback Mountain is different. The movie, which tells the story of two cowboys who meet and fall in love in the Wyoming mountains, is devastating. It’s an eloquent meditation on desire, and the corrosive power of shame.

Brokeback Mountain has started emotional debates partly because it challenges a cherished ideal shared by the whole of Western civilization. That ideal is that, either by biology or God’s blessing, heterosexual men are naturally inclined to lead, and to determine the moral code by which we should all live. “Good” heterosexual men are masculine, and invulnerable. The film challenges that notion by the mere suggestion that two very masculine men can love one another deeply, completely. The men might be disabled emotionally, but their masculinity is enduring, and that’s not supposed to be possible.

Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, the two cowboys, aren’t presented as pure — they betray wives and families with their 20-year affair. But their homosexuality is not presented as pathological, either. As it turns out, Ennis and Jack gain sympathy from the audience, regardless of viewers’ sexual orientation.

The consensus is that the movie is effective and well done, not to mention superbly acted by Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, and Jake Gyllenhaal, who plays Jack. Predictably, reactions have fallen mostly on two sides. There is revulsion at the depiction of gay male sex (though what little we see is discreetly filmed) and differing levels of discomfort with the rising visibility of gay people in the media, in politics and in our lives.
 
On the other side, there is real-life empathy and agony of gay people and those who love them, verbalized around the suffering of the lovers in the film. There is also moral outrage on the part of those who feel gay men and women are treated as diseased, and a little less than human.

In the best of worlds, Brokeback Mountain could be a catalyst for a renewed discussion about human rights for homosexuals. That discussion should make room for the honest discomfort so many of us feel about the issue, and about gay men. A seminary student at a United Methodist conference about homosexuality held in Denton years ago explained it well. He said everyone has a personal story attached to the word “homosexual.” For some, the story is rich and enriching.

For others, it’s a frightening story. The seminary student suggested people tell their stories, without varnishing them or even apologizing for them. There, he said, we can learn to have a real discussion about something that makes many nervous.
 
For gay viewers, it is a painful reminder that, though big cities grant them their pride parades, there still might not be an America for them. Gay men especially are as refugees in their country, seeking a safe place to do something as pedestrian as having a family. State by state, election by election, gay men and women are being told that their families are not and cannot be real. They are too often told that they are incompatible with a world created by a loving God.
 
Jack and Ennis can’t change the world for real men in the same situation, but they might get some people thinking about reframing the whole debate in a more compassionate or thoughtful tone.
 
They might give some viewers pause, and remind them that the Jacks and Ennises of the world are living among us, and can’t be relegated to some mountain range conveniently far from ourselves.

[glacier1]

A gay columnist from Mason City, Iowa contributes the following (April 27, 2006)

Brokeback Mountain fever (My Turn)   
 
By FRANK D. MYERS, Of The Globe Gazette
 
   You know that movie about those two gay cowboys, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist? Darned embarrassing at my age, but I’ve got me a bad case of Brokeback Mountain fever. Joined the Ultimate Brokeback Mountain Forum a while back. May look for a Brokeback Mountain support group before long, too.

Fact is, that’s me and my first Jack up there on Brokeback around 1963 and I already knew every word, every move, every touch and every whisker. Painful to watch the first time. A kick in the gut. I just sat down and bawled about it. Coming home after 40 years away. Hard thing to do.

It seems to affect most of my people that way.

I was late seeing Brokeback. Gave up on theaters long time ago, so waited for Wal-Mart. Was rewarded by the DVD checkout gal’s little smirk: “Are you sure you’re at least 17?” Lots older than that, ma’am; earned every wrinkle and every spot.

Maybe she didn’t mean anything by it, but that sure did take me back to when you had to be real careful about what you bought and where you got it ’cause you didn’t want anybody to guess you might be queer — even though they always did and let you know it.

Here’s HOW it goes: Ennis and Jack, both 19 and dumb like all us country boys were then, get jobs together herding sheep on an allotment up on Brokeback somewhere in Wyoming during 1963, fall in love, love a lot, then come off the mountain that autumn, part, get married and have kids.

We were all supposed to get married and have kids back in those days. Remember? Find a good woman, boy, and you’ll get over it. Lots of good women out there with big holes in their hearts because of that. Ennis and Jack didn’t get over it, either.

Jack was the starry-eyed one, ready to give love a chance. Ennis was the practical one: “If you can’t fix it, you gotta stand it,” he says. And so they stood it for 20 years, Ennis in Wyoming and Jack in Texas, getting together a couple of times a year, fishing up in the mountains. You damn well know those fishing lines never got wet.

Then Jack dies, and Ennis, long divorced, has daughters he adores but an otherwise empty heart. Closing scene in a banged up old trailer. Ennis walks to a closet where two bloodied-up shirts saved by Jack from that first Brokeback summer nestle one inside the other, hanging beside a cheap postcard view of the mountain. “I swear, Jack,” he says. Fade out.

Seems like simple stuff. But Annie Proulx’s short story is a wonder. She’s straight, you know, and how she got it so right I don’t know. Maybe it really is that universal love story they talk about.

Film’s a wonder, too. Beautifully made by Ang Lee, it moseys along like most cowboys I’ve known, but under everything there’s something and behind what you see the first time is something else. Dead-on acting, even if Heath Ledger (Ennis) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack) are straight boys not used to simulating gay sex and kissing men. You’d never know it. Dead-on to the way it was back then, too. I swear.

Thing is, it’s so good the line between fiction and fact isn’t there. That’s the power. I’m not qualified to talk about how straight people see it, but every gay male I’ve run into and a good share of lesbians, too, see themselves in it, or reflected. My people have never had anything this good before.

Like I said, that’s me up there. Not nearly so good-looking, damn it. But my Jack was and he grew up Wyoming cowpoke and dirt poor, too. I grew up farm boy. Brokeback mountain wasn’t ours, so we didn’t go up it. We went down Ten Sleep instead. A big piece of my heart’s still somewhere in that red canyon, not far off the road over the Big Horns from Buffalo to Worland.

After Vietnam, my Jack came back to Wyoming and tried wrangling dudes for a while. Couldn’t take it, did that Jack thing and moved to Denver. Good life there, but AIDS came along and got him. No fix for that then, so he did it the cowboy way with a clean shot through the head, just like he’d done it for an old horse with a broken leg up in the high country years before. We left him scattered in the mountains, too.

After Vietnam, I did the Ennis thing: Came back to Iowa. Still here. Still alive. Transfixed by places, hooked on people. A couple of other Jacks after that, an Ennis or two, some damnfoolishness in between.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve gotten love, given love and have no more regrets than anybody else I know, gay or straight. But man it was hard to go back to the beginning and watch it all again. So I started talking about it, mostly with people like me, mostly riding the online range. Thousands of us out there doing that.

Here’s some of the stuff I heard. No way scientific but a fair account I think.

A lot of us, especially the younger ones, start blaming Jack and Ennis for the troubles those two had back then. Why they should have just rode off into the sunset, found that little ranch and settled down together.

In a way this blame game’s good, because it means things have gotten better and lots of us are doing just that nowadays. But I’m here to tell you it was real hard to do back then, especially in the country. If you wanted to stay alive. Can’t forget that, boys and girls.

A lot of us see our own screwed up relationships and missed opportunities in Jack and Ennis. Some of us beat ourselves up pretty bad. Shouldn’t do that. Others start making resolutions and promises to themselves not to let it happen again. Good. Just remember to carry through when that DVD wears out and you have a hard time getting another one.

A lot of us blame you straight folks and we’re still mad. But you know, you did do your best to make us miserable when we were kids and you knew we were vulnerable. You called us names, beat us up, kicked us out, fired us when we got older, spit on our relationships, killed us if you felt like it and then, when we got AIDS, said for a long time that we deserved it. That’s why a hell of chunk of my generation’s dead. That takes a lot of getting over, cowpokes.

A lot of the folks I’ve talked to identify as Christian. Now isn’t that funny? The church as a whole is not our friend. There’s the United Church of Christ and those Unitarian Universalists, bless ’em, plus a few specifically gay outfits. Yeah, there are some friendly people behind some church doors. But the majority just figure they’re in charge of that old express bus to glory and maybe they’ll let us sit in back or maybe they won’t let us on at all.

Thing is I guess, Jesus isn’t like that. Jack and Ennis watched out for those sheep, and He’s out there on old Brokeback with us now. Found a lot of us a long time ago and He’s looking for the rest. He made us like this, you know, and never gives up calling. Just stands there with wide open arms hollering something like, “Jack Twist, I swear.” Doesn’t pull a Bible and fire point-blank. Just grabs ahold and hangs on tight. Real easy to talk to. So many of us call ourselves Christians because of that and figure what goes on between Him and us is nobody’s business but ours.

That‘s where epiphany comes in, that big word that just means sometimes all of a sudden, probably when you’re not even looking, grace knocks you flat, floods in and you know you’re home.

Lots of gay men, especially us older ones, gave up on happy endings long time ago. So a lot of guys who look at that last scene in Brokeback and see Ennis standing there at that closet, about 40 now, looking at those two old shirts and that postcard, saying, “I swear, Jack,” figure that’s all there is; the end.

But neither the short story nor the movie specifies that; both leave it to us to write the rest of the story — just like life does.

“I swear, Jack,” Ennis says, and that hard old conflicted heart of his cracks wide open and begins to fill. At least that’s the way I see it.

My first Jack rode off into the sunset long ago, and there goes Ennis now —  another good man beside him I’ll damn well bet.

Kind of hope I don’t get over Brokeback fever. But whatever happens, buckaroos, gay and straight, I hope grace finds you and that you find your Jack or Ennis, too. That’s all there is, you know.

And that’s about as straight as this queer old wrangler can tell it. Cowboy up!
— Frank Myers is a copy editor/designer for the Globe Gazette. He lives in Mason City.

 

 

[chameau]

Thank you for posting this glacier1, my eyes are full of tears  :'(

[frances]

Thing is, it’s so good the line between fiction and fact isn’t there. That’s the power. I’m not qualified to talk about how straight people see it, but every gay male I’ve run into and a good share of lesbians, too, see themselves in it, or reflected. My people have never had anything this good before.

They see it the same way, Mr Myers.

Beautiful review. Thanks, glacier1

[BBBOY]

Mr. Myers got it right on. I'm sittin here now in tears. Thank you for posting that Glacier1 and thank you jerasjr for steering me here.

[hpv]

Brokeback Mountain Lobby Card

The December 2005 issue of Vogue has an article by John Powers entitled ‘Lonesome Cowboys’ with their take on the highly-anticipated Brokeback Mountain. I should add there is a terrific Annie Leibovitz portrait of Jake Gyllenhaal, Ang Lee and Heath Ledger that accompanies the piece. Among the notable quotables:

    –”About halfway through Brokeback Mountain, a heartbreaking romance based on the acclaimed story by Annie Proulx, there’s a kiss destined to become a cinematic landmark. What makes it unforgettable isn’t simply that the ardent lovers are both men. Or even that they’re cowboys. It’s that they’re cowboys played by two rising young stars, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.”

    –”As recently as ten years ago nobody in Hollywood would have dared bankroll such a project, a love story that not only explodes clichés about gay men but radically challenges the mythology of our most iconic genre, the Western–this is the first fresh take on the subject since Unforgiven.”

    –”And it speaks eloquently of today’s cultural fluidity that this groundbreaking movie was directed by Ang Lee, the soft-spoken, t’ai chi-practicing Taiwanese who’s seemingly unafraid to try his hand at anything–the period romance of Sense and Sensibility, the 1970s suburban craziness of The Ice Storm, the martial-arts poetry of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee’s work is defined by its fascination with powerful emotion.”

    –”In Brokeback Mountain, he tells me, the key was to keep things simple and put faith in the complementary chemistry of his actors.”

    –”Jake and Heath are very different,” he [Lee] says. “Heath is a kind of natural cowboy or ranch hand–he naturally carries the whole Western thing. Jake’s aura is more city-like, more knowing–less elegaic.”

    –”Still, the performance that will forever change his [Ledger’s] image is his lacerating brilliantly soulful turn as Brokeback Mountain’s lonesome cowhand Ennis Del Mar, a decent, limited, fearful man so emotionally impacted that his face barely moves when he speaks.”

    –”This year alone he’s been Gwyneth Paltrow’s ambitious math-geek suitor in Proof and the sniper hero of Jarhead. But neither role is as bold as that of Jack Twist, the smarter and more feminine of the lovers in Brokeback Mountain–a role Gyllenhaal endows with generosity and grace.”

    –”When I ask if he’s [Gyllenhaal] is worried about playing a gay cowboy, he just smiles. ‘I grew up around gay couples, ‘ he says. ‘Now, I know that some people will have a bad response to it. And there was some anxiety while we did the love scenes, the anxiety of hoping we were doing it the right way, the way people who actually do it, do it. But for me, there was no larger anxiety. Of course,’ he jokes, ‘I probably won’t go walking into cowboy bars anytime soon.’”