Posted on 01/27/2006 11:45:30 AM PST by Daralundy
When "Brokeback Mountain" opened last month, it was universally praised by critics, though the public seemed to think of it as "the gay cowboy movie."
But that label seems to be falling by the wayside as the film piles on awards and heads for the top of the box office, according to The Early Show entertainment contributor and People magazine Editor at Large Jess Cagle.
He says "Brokeback" was considered a major financial risk, but has raked in close to $45 million dollars so far, more than triple its modest budget.
And what's most surprising, Cagle observes, is who's driving the film's ever-growing popularity.
"Brokeback" is the story of a doomed love affair between two Wyoming cowboys.
Star Heath Ledger was drawn to the role despite the film's sensitive subject matter because "the story was so heavy and beautiful, and (because of) the opportunity to investigate this character, this incredibly complex figure."
After winning four Golden Globes last week, including best drama, "Brokeback Mountain" ticket sales soared.
You might think big cities are driving the film's success, but it goes much deeper than that, Cagle notes.
"What's driving the astonishing grosses for this movie," says Focus Features Co-President James Schamus, "is the numbers coming out of places like Little Rock (Ark.) and Billings, Mont. and Salt Lake City and Columbus (Ohio) and Pittsburgh. The film is doing business in every corner of America."
City slickers and country dwellers alike are lining up for "Brokeback," despite concerns that some moviegoers would shun the film because of its untraditional theme.
Now, it's arguably become the country's hottest date movie, Cagle says.
"It has become," Schamus says, "officially uncool as a guy to say 'No' to your girlfriend to this movie.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
And because he is a closet homo. John Wayne would NEVER have played a sissy-boy, gay sheephearder.
What other films does she like?
Can't say I've seen all the brokedown threads, but this seems to be one where some Conservatives actually like the thing.
Like, hell! Everybody has their limits, and ain't no "girlfriend" worth compromising everything over.
Mark Steyn's review (caution: language):
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
“You know I ain’t queer,” Ennis Del Mar says to Jack Twist. “Me neither,” says Jack. Then they get back to having sex with each other, high up in the hills of Wyoming.
I would have liked to see Brokeback Mountain with a Wyoming crowd, or at any rate an audience of rugged laconic men in tight jeans, such as Jack and Ennis. Unfortunately, Brokeback doesn’t appear to be playing in any rural districts other than, er, the Hamptons and Provincetown. So I had to go and see it in Montreal, where its author, Annie Proulx, once attended Sir George Williams University. The joint was packed, and you could have heard a pin drop when Jake Gyllenhaal’s pants dropped.
I like Ms Proulx’s books not because of the characters or the plots but because she’s spent much of her life roaming the same turf I have – Vermont, Quebec, Newfoundland – and she’s got a tremendous ability to capture the essence of the land, and in particular the way a harsh land shapes the character of its people. She began writing fiction in the Seventies, for Gray’s Sporting Journal, which wanted hunting stories about men called Zack, and she co-founded a local newspaper in my part of the world called Behind The Times (“All The News That’s Kept Till Now”), and in both she did a better job than most liberal progressive artsy types do of accepting country folk as they are. “I lean toward realism, not myth,” she says.
But when you take a short story and make a movie of it realism turns all mythic. For a start, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar become two rising male stars – Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. You get a big orchestral score and tag lines on the posters (“Love Is A Force Of Nature”) and, though the western literary tradition is not just Zane Grey and Bret Harte but also Willa Cather, when you put your fellows up on screen in cowboy hats on horses against the big sky of Wyoming, it looks far more explicitly like a gay take on the manliest of Hollywood genres: Queer Eye For The Straight-Shootin’ Guy .
Ang Lee’s opening is very good: two young men who don’t know each other wait outside a shabby trailer to be called in and offered a sheep-herding job, in the summer of ‘63. They say nothing, because they’re from a culture where to be a man is to be taciturn. So they stare into the distance, kick a little dust, lean against the truck, and steal an occasional glance at the other.
They don’t really talk much for the rest of the movie. But one chilly night, alone up on Brokeback Mountain, in the early hours in a pokey tent, something clicks. I’m no expert in gay seduction but I found this scene oddly unpersuasive: they go from opposite ends of the tent to penetrative anal sex in about six seconds.
Four years later, Ennis is a fitfully employed ranch-hand married to Alma (the sweetly affecting Michelle Williams) and they live above a laundromat with their two girls, and Jack is a tractor salesman down in Texas married to the boss’ cowgirl daughter Lureen (Anne Hathaway) and the father of a little boy. They hook up again, and, as Jake gets out of the truck, they fall on each other hungrily in the shadow of the steps to Ennis’ apartment. And upstairs Alma happens to look down and see them kissing, and in one bewildered moment the assumptions of her life crack apart. The guys depart on a “fishing trip”, the first of many over the years, from which Ennis never brings home any fish.
And from that point on the film settles down into not so much a “gay western” but a gay version of Same Time Next Year: the kids get older, the Sixties become the Seventies, Ennis divorces, Jack grows a moustache, but they still go up the hill thrice a year for “a couple of high-altitude f***s”, as he puts it. Which, to be honest, is a better summation of their relationship than “Love Is A Force Of Nature”.
In fact, across two-and-a-quarter hours, there’s not a lot of evidence of “love”, as opposed to a much-needed sexual release. For its urban audiences, Brokeback is a new wrinkle on one of the oldest gay fantasies: the masculine man who likes sex with men. So it’s a gay love story with ungaylike protagonists – Straight Eye For The Queer Guy. In the distaff answer to lezzie porn for het men, for the gals it’s a gabby chick flick with uncommunicative tough guys.
But by the end of a bleak portrait of failed lonely lives, with one of the lads cheating on the other with ranch-managers and Mexican rent-boys, you’re not even sure how gay-friendly the thing is: are the men bad uninterested parents because society’s forced them to live a lie or because they’re the sad self-destructive prisoners of their sexual appetites? And, if it’s such a “bold” “courageous” “ground-breaking” film, isn’t it a little ridiculous that a gay male love story has Miss Williams and Miss Hathaway both baring their breasts with straight abandon while Messrs Ledger and Gyllenhaal’s penises remain discreetly tucked away? Instinctively, Ang Lee seems to understand that even this film’s audience wants to keep some things closeted.
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We're intelligent, that's why. The movie may be a good story, but you can't ignore that this film is ALSO gay propaganda, and leftist (ignores the commitment of marriage). It is possible to separate the two and still say it was a good film, but...
That's debatable, but beside the point. In Brokeback, the protagonists repeatedly cheat on their wives.
You poor bastard. No amount of sex or good cooking is worth that. If she wants you to go to live theater do you do you go? If she jumps off a bridge, do you?
My girlfriend wanted to see "The Notebook", so i bought tickets..for her and her mom.
Another thing - I doubt if the Internet Movie DataBase (IMDB) statistics I posted earlier are pro-rated for rising ticket prices. As you go down the list of all-time top grossing flicks, the quality gets worse and the films are more recent. Some films like Gone with the Wind from 1937 are still on the list, when ticket prices were 25 cents, as compared to today's average $7.50. So unless the scores are weighted for inflation, they are false. Even so, BM didn't get near the top 350 mark, by half.
He is not gay, he is bi.
Wusses.
Very cool idea! Go, steve8714!
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