Beth Winter

Ha~! Brokeback still hasn't premiered here officially. I watched it on 'special screening' last month. Only one showing, on one cinema. XO

Have you watched The Wedding Banquet? It's also by Ang Lee, and I love it. Very realistic, very down-to-earth, and yet so culturally bound to Asia. ^^

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winter

Alas, I haven't seen it - I'm really behind on watching higher-class movies ^^; I need about two years off to catch up on everything :S

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winter

Oh yes. It's perfect Wyoming tourist propaganda, just like LOTR is an advertisment for New Zealand :) It looked a lot like our Tatry mountains, only larger scale and with cowboy hats instead of górale.

I still have to watch his S&S, alas. For some reason, it totally passed me by.

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winter

Awww :D

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Aww... Well, if you can find the DVD (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107156/), do watch it! ^^ It's even made into a Broadway musical. XD

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Anybody who intends to trek down to Wyoming because of this movie is going to be seriously disappointed. The pretty landscapes are apparently shot in Canada.

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smtfhw.livejournal.com

I have to point out that Ang Lee's work is normally a lot more like this and a lot less like Hulk, which should be regarded as a transformation - and I assume not a good one - really. Certainly it's the only one of his films I have no desire to see.

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winter

Sort of like the "beautiful Chinese forest" in House of Flying Daggers being shot in Lithuania, then :> Someone should really sue these people for false advertising...

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winter

I know - but Hulk's one of the very, very few movies where I seriously wanted to walk out of the cinema. It takes a lot to make up for that.

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winter

I really need to find a video rental that stocks more ambitious stuff than action movies ~_~

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I tried to look for torrents for you, but found nothing. T___T

...I can always send the pirated DVD to you by post. >=D

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winter

I think that with the success of Brokeback Mountain, it's only a question of time before some newspaper or other comes bundled with every Ang Lee movie in existence :> That's one good thing about living in Poland - the $1.5 artsy DVDs!

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I hope so too! ^^ People need to watch Wedding Banquet to 'cure' Brokeback's angst. ^^;

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Actually it's perfect Alberta propaganda, as that's where it was filmed. (Although since most people probably aren't aware of that, Wyoming will no doubt get most of the benefit.)

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Ennis is afraid. It's not quite the same thing as being dumb (although no doubt he's not Einstein).

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Actually, both Jack and Ennis were dumb. Since Ennis wasn't exactly like a respected member of his society, he had nothing to lose by running away with Jack after his divorce. I don't see the point of his angst. On the other hand, Jack was dumb to suggest Texas or New Mexico as potential destinations. My friend and I were going, "Excuse me, ever heard of San Francisco?"

Anyhow, I suppose I'm in the very minority of people who are not rightwing, conservative, religious, homophobic nutcases but just happen to find this movie terrible.

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winter

That, and the fact Jack's parents weren't exactly the pitchfork kind. The one bit I liked was the "so you're Ennis... now why did we have to wait 20 years to meet you?" scene. But the one serious issue was the custody of the kids, though after he knew Alma knew anyway, he could have put two and two together and see she wouldn't keep the girls away from him.

I liked the beginning and the ending much more than I liked the middle, I guess. Though I appreciated Heath's portrayal of a Typical Male Emotional Cripple.

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winter

With the dumbness, I mostly meant the emotional stuff. I know personally the kind of guys who can't express or acknowledge any emotion except anger, and I know just how much trouble it can be. Ennis makes inroads on that issue, mostly because Jack has the patience of a saint, but it's still a knee-jerk reaction when he's feeling just about anything to lash out instead, because anger is simpler.

My mother's theory is that some guys just lack several connections between their frontal lobes ~_~

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I don't think custody was an issue, or if it was then the movie failed to convey that totally.

I see Ennis as the type of character who refuses to take responsibility for his life. He takes the easy route of avoidance instead of facing his commitments. Wife not happy? Fine, divorce. Daughter wants to move in? Make up some excuse about being away most of thet ime. Barslut interested in him? Stay non-committal until she finds somebody else. Throughout the movie, he kept repeating the same excuse that he's needed at some ranch and he can't move out to town (he was kinda railroaded into the decision by his wife)/run away with Jack/meet Jack more often etc. The final scene with his daughter was supposed to show that he's changed. Ennis was about to use the same excuse to avoid attending his daughter's wedding when he suddenly decided that his daughter was important.

I don't begrudge the message; I begrudge the tormentous boredom I had to sit through to get there.

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I think Ennis also thinks anger's safer. I figure his upbringing was the emotional equivalent of Chinese foot binding; his ability to acknowledge (let alone express) what he's feeling has been unnaturally stunted. He does make some progress, as you say, but I suspect he'd never find expressing "weak" feelings (meaning ones that make him feel vulnerable) an easy thing to do.

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Since Ennis wasn't exactly like a respected member of his society, he had nothing to lose by running away with Jack after his divorce.

Run away to where?

Ennis has a grade-school education, no skills apart from stock handling, and has never been anywhere outside of Wyoming. To him, the whole world IS Wyoming. He simply doesn't believe the situation would be different anywhere else he might go. And to him, a town of 10,000 people is "the big city". He'd be as psychologically capable of moving to San Francisco or New York City as you or I would be of emigrating to Uzbekistan.

(I think that's one of the functions of those gorgeous wide-screen views of the countryside Ang Lee keeps showing the viewers; they serve as a sad contrast to the constricted horizons of the characters' lives.)

On the other hand, Jack was dumb to suggest Texas or New Mexico as potential destinations. My friend and I were going, "Excuse me, ever heard of San Francisco?"

No, he hadn't. For one thing, at the time most of the film was supposedly taking place, SF wasn't yet known as a gay Mecca - that was New York City. More importantly, what Jack would know about gay life in such places would be sketchy - people in his part of the country prior to the 1980s simply didn't talk about homosexuality, period - and unappealing. He wouldn't be hearing rumors of certain big cities being places where he could live openly with his male love; he'd be hearing them described as places where he could engage in semi-clandestine sexual encounters with lots of other men without too much risk of arrest. Not exactly the sort of thing Jack was looking for.

An enormous sea change has taken place in the United States over approximately the last 15-20 years with regards to homosexuality (largely because of the forcible 'outing " of the gay community as a result of the AIDS epidemic). Unfortunately for Jack and Ennis, their story ends just before those changes in attitude begin to take place.

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Oh, Alma might well have kept the girls from him if his "perverted" sexuality became a matter of public knowledge. The social pressures she would have been facing if she hadn't would have seen to that.

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Actually Wyoming looks a lot like that part of Alberta, so people who go there in under the misimpression that's where the film was shot won't be too disappointed. They're both right in the heart of the northern Rockies.

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Run away to where?

Well, Jack did suggest that scary ranch run by his old pop. According to the Jack's parents, Jack even brought his new boyfriend down once. While I don't see that new guy (well-dressed and all) dirtying his hands at the ranch, Ennis should have felt right at home.

For one thing, at the time most of the film was supposedly taking place, SF wasn't yet known as a gay Mecca - that was New York City.

A gay counterculture in SF was already beginning to emerge in the 1950s. Even if it wasn't quite the gay mecca in 1963, where the story of BBM begins, it was already there in the 70s where the bulk of the story after Ennis' divorce took place. Gays were likely more tolerated (though not necessarily accepted) prior to the discovery of AIDS. In fact, AIDS fanned the flames of homophobia because of the public's misconception that AIDS is a gay disease.

Anyhow, Jack isn't a simple country hick like Ennis. He meets people, including other gay "cowboys", and from what we've seen, he isn't totally ignorant of gay culture.

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Would you be from Wyoming? I've heard complaints from Wyoming fans of the movie that the Wyoming mountains look nowhere as lush with vegetation as those seen in the movie. They would be the first to make jokes about Brokeback tourists.

Geographically, Wyoming and Alberta are not even bordering each other.

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I'm in Nebraska (oddly enough, another state Alberta often stands in for).

Wyoming and Alberta don't border each other, but they both sit smack on the Rockies, which look fairly similar from Colorado north. Not identical, but similar; I suspect the degree of lushness depends a lot on whether you're sited on the rainier side of the mountain range or on the drier side.

(If you know an area really well, it's always amusing to watch a movie that's supposedly sited there - but is actually filmed somewhere else - and see the small ways the film gets things wrong. Most films that are supposedly set in the Great Plains, for instance, show scenery that is far too flat, because that's the image the general public has in their minds, but in fact large portions of the plains are rolling hills. What's your favorite example of wierd movie geography?)

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