Brokeback Mountain

[matt35mm]

My God.

sorry, bad joke.  

Oh, no need to apologize.  I just imagined how that whole thing would go down, and "My God" were the words that came to my head.

[MacGuffin]

Kung Fu Oscar-Winner Tackles Other Genre

Ang Lee, the Taiwanese-born director of mega-hit "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," has leaped into another genre, the American western, but his "Brokeback Mountain" is no classic cowboy tale.

His new film, with hot young male stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, has sweeping Western vistas, lonesome roads, lonesome men, bucking broncos, smoldering campfires and as many sheep as can fit on a screen. It also has explosive sex scenes between two men whose lives are changed, disturbed and entwined after being hired as sheep tenders for a summer in the Wyoming back country in the early 1960s.

Lee knows he was treading on delicate ground in two ways: making a Western outside the conventional formulas, and telling a romance outside social conventions.

"The love story has good vibes. I hope it will penetrate prejudices," Lee told reporters Friday, a few hours before the premiere to the public of the movie at the Venice Film Festival.

Setting the story in the 1960s in the conservative West "helped set up the obstacles, especially to gay love, affection."

Lee said that more difficult than interpreting a love story between men virile cowboys at that was getting beyond cliche perceptions about the American West.

"My biggest enemy was the (cowboy) movie genre which was invented," said the director, who met with ranch hands and cowboys in preparing his work.

The sexual, romantic story is stitched onto an authentic rendering of small town, often bleak, American West lives, complete with people who also eke out a living stocking grocery shelves and not just by lassoing steers.

The stars spoke openly of their nervousness of having to make love on the screen the first sex scene is a sudden rush of passion in a tent on a frigid hillside.

"I just knew that the theme of sexuality would be secondary and that the primary theme would be that of love...the real idea of love, not cliche. I knew Ang would protect us," said Gyllenhaal.

Ledger told APTN: "I was really lucky that my character was uncomfortable with it and knew it too. So I could use my own level of discomfort, because it was new and strange for me, and that worked for me."

Said Gyllenhaal in the APTN interview: "When it came time to doing it, it was, like, 'Are you ready?' 'Yeah, are you ready?' and then 'Jump.'"

"There was definitely anxiety involved," Gyllenhaal recalled.

The film by the maker of Oscar winner "Crouching Tiger," the most popular foreign film in U.S. history, is one of 19 contenders for the Golden Lion, the top festival prize which will be awarded on Sept. 10, the closing day.

The film is based on the 1997 short story in the New Yorker by Annie Prouxl.

"Brokeback Mountain" cowboys cry, trade bloody punches, marry, have children, dance to country music, swig from the bottle and wrestle with what is true and what lies they can live with.

Across a span of a generation, Ledger, as man of few words Ennis Del Mar, and Jake Gyllenhaal (of cult classic "Donnie Darko" fame), as ex-rodeo rider Jack Twist, keep their bond. But one is more willing than the other to risk bucking conventions, and the emotional and psychological toll of that unevenness lends the story a workable tension.

Asked about homophobia, producer James Schamus said the film was not made to be a political statement.

"We are using the codes and conventions of romance that are applied to straight people," Schamus said.

That "Brokeback" is about love between two men "makes it all the more romantic, if you're willing to take that fall," said Lee.

The movie lasts 2 hours and 15 minutes, with a lot of that time, it seems, spent on the men's packing for the old-fishing-buddy trips they tell their wives they are taking.

The majestic mountain that becomes a kind of "Same Time, Next Year" rendezvous venue for the cowboys is actually in western Canada, and not in the Wyoming Big Horn Mountains as in Prouxl tale. The movie was filmed in Canada because of financial incentives and a better exchange rate.

[RegularKarate]

I'm disgraced to be from Texas and to have ever gone to a Houston Texans game, and I am very much looking forward to seeing this in the theatre.

Fine, we don't want you.

You should be proud.  The school didn't back down.  

If these dudes have a problem with homosexuality, maybe they should stick to the backwoods... Austin probably isn't the place to be.

[NEON MERCURY]

i dont mind watchign gay stuff.  like um, my own private idaho..or stuff like that..btu seriously, this film looks fuckign stupid.  haha, exspecially w/ gyllenhaal and ledger....and i dotn think an oriental director is capable of handling the gay cowboy sex western genre

[ono]

and i dotn think an oriental director is capable of handling the gay cowboy sex western genre

New marquee.  Get to it.

[Pubrick]

i dont mind watchign gay stuff.  like um, my own private idaho..or stuff like that..btu seriously, this film looks fuckign stupid.  haha, exspecially w/ gyllenhaal and ledger....and i dotn think an oriental director is capable of handling the gay cowboy sex western genre

i think it looks pretty brilliant. then again, i hav no hang ups about gay ppl, or oriental ppl for that matter.

if this really is a great movie, it will be the one to judge ppl's character by. the previews are already doing that as Pozer noted with the various reactions.

[polkablues]

I'm heartened by how awful the trailer is.  

The awful trailer suggests the marketing department didn't know how to sell the movie, which suggests the movie doesn't fit into a tidy little box, which suggests that Ang Lee didn't puss out on the subject matter, which suggests a lot of people I don't like and don't understand are going to be very angry about this movie, which suggests that I will like it quite a great amount.

If the trailer had been really, really good, I would be convinced it's going to be "Pearl Harbor" with implied sodomy.

[Pwaybloe]

You guys realize how bad this movie is going to bomb, don't you?  The only thing that this movie has got right now is the "controversy," so maybe that will help at the box office.  

Who will go see this movie but us?

[Pubrick]

Who will go see this movie but us?

[Pas]

Who will go see this movie but us?

I won't see it though so he is just replacing me

[MacGuffin]

Better quality Quicktime Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

Ang Lee's gay cowboy film wins Venice Golden Lion

Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," a tale of homosexual love in the wilds of Wyoming, won Venice's Golden Lion on Saturday, beating film festival favorite George Clooney in the race for the top prize, festival officials said.

The latest film by the director of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" is adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx and stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as love-struck cowboys whose forbidden affair begins in 1963 and ends 20 years later.

Critics had predicted Clooney's black-and-white McCarthy-era tale of broadcasting courage, "Good Night. And, Good Luck," would win the Golden Lion, beating the 19 other films in the main competition.

Clooney, adored in Venice, did not go home empty-handed, winning an award for best screenplay while his star     David Strathairn won the best actor prize for his intense portrayal of journalist Edward R. Murrow.

Italy also took home a consolation prize thanks to Giovanna Mezzogiorno winning the best actress award for her role in Cristina Comencini's "La Bestia nel Cuore" ("Don't Tell"), a moving tale of adult siblings scarred by child abuse.

She beat France's     Isabelle Huppert, a frontrunner for her role in the emotionally intense "Gabrielle," and     Gwyneth Paltrow, a contender for her performance as the daughter of a mentally unstable mathematician in     John Madden's "Proof."

Huppert was instead given a special Lion for her "outstanding contribution to cinema."

U.S. director     Abel Ferrara won the Jury Grand Prix for "Mary," starring     Juliette Binoche as an actress haunted by the figure of Mary Magdalene after having played her on screen.

Ferrara told reporters this week that his film was possible thanks to the interest in religion generated by     Mel Gibson, who struck gold with the ultra-realist "The Passion of Christ."

France's Philippe Garrel won the Silver Lion prize for best director with his "Les Amants Reguliers" ("Regular Lovers"), an austere story of love in bohemian Paris after the May 1968 riots.

The three-hour film, which also won a prize for its photography, was well received by critics but little appreciated by the public at the Lido.

[modage]

The three-hour film

[matt35mm]

The three-hour film

Wow.  That's possibly a greater stigma to general audiences than the gay thing.  I mean, it's more than twice as long as Deuce Bigelow.

But hey, the award is proof that the "crappy-trailer-equals-movie-gold" theory was true in this case.

[Ghostboy]

The three-hour film

That's in reference to Les Amants Reguliers, not Brokeback Mountain, which is like 2:15 or so.