Published Reviews -- Discuss

[pinoy]

you have to check out the guardian review ... the guardian is a big U.K. broadsheet, its the most liberal paper in the U.K. a counter to the daily mail

You havn't a link to that site?

Dave's Ultimate Brokeback Mountain site's review section has a link to a The Guardian review from Sept 2005. Here's the url:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1576188,00.html?82%3A+Film+features

[PetterG]

you have to check out the guardian review ... the guardian is a big U.K. broadsheet, its the most liberal paper in the U.K. a counter to the daily mail

You havn't a link to that site?

Dave's Ultimate Brokeback Mountain site's review section has a link to a The Guardian review from Sept 2005. Here's the url:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1576188,00.html?82%3A+Film+features

Thanks - I am very embarrased that I didn't check on the new ultimate BBM site.  :-[

[sotoalf]

Smart dissent:



Well, Heath Ledger isn't better than the best of Marlon Brando, and you can find things to dislike in it without being "an insecure idiot." But it's a very strong movie, one of the year's best in a way - restrained, graceful, and moving, at once spacious and intensely personal. The initial summer on Brokeback Mountain, I thought, was the weakest section, perhaps because it's extremely difficult for any filmmaker, lacking the luxury of interiority, to dramatize how two essentially uncommunicative people fall in love. But once you accept that Ledger's Ennis and Gyllenhaal's Twist are in love, the rest of the pieces of the story fall into place, and the long unhappiness of their post-Brokeback lives - and the lives of their wives - is one of the more effective stories of personal tragedy that I've seen onscreen of late. (Though with Capote and The Squid and the Whale, this has been a good year for the cinema of intimate tragedy.) In a sense, the people who say that this isn't a "gay movie" are right - insofar as it's a story of love found and then partially denied, and the human costs of that denial, its themes are universal. Indeed, it's just a sign of how few impediments the modern world places in the way of romantic passion that this kind of story can basically only be told about homosexuals - and perhaps not even about them anymore.

But of course it is a gay movie, too, in the sense that it's a movie that doesn't just tell the story of two men in love, but advances certain ideas about the nature of that love. There isn't a political agenda in Brokeback Mountain, exactly - it isn't a brief for hate crimes laws or domestic partnerships, except by implication - but there's unquestionably a moral and philosophical agenda, and one that's more radical, I think, than most critics are likely to acknowledge. The film is a study in the contrast between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and the former is - almost without exception - presented as preferable to the latter, as purer and more beautiful, and ultimately as more authentically masculine. Critics have noted, rightly, how Ang Lee portrays his heroes' wives sympathetically - particularly Michelle Williams's Alma - and this is true, so far as it goes. But while the film invites the audience to like them and pity their plight, it also trades in the darkest stereotypes of domestic life - the squalling babies, the tiny apartments and the mounting bills, the domineering in-laws and the general claustrophobia that almost any man feels, at one point or another, in his married life, but that Brokeback Mountain portrays as being the whole of it.

To a certain extent, the drama of the movie necessitates this kind of contrast, but it's significant, I think, that the film doesn't offer any model of successful heterosexual masculinity, or of successful heterosexual relationships in general. The straight men are all either strutting oafs, bitter bigots like Jack Twist's father, or "nice-guy" weaklings like Alma's second husband, whose well-meaning effeminacy contrasts sharply with Ennis's rugged manliness. Jack and Ennis are the only "real men" in the story, and their love is associated with the high country and the vision of paradise it offers - a world of natural beauty and perfect freedom, of wrestling matches and campfires and naked plunges into crystal rivers - and a world with no girls allowed. Civilization is women and babies and debts and fathers-in-law and bosses; freedom is the natural world, and the erotic company of men. It's an old idea of the pre-Christian world come round again - not that gay men are real men too; but that real men are gay.

[adamblast]

What's that from, sotoalf??

[sotoalf]

Sorry – it's Ross Douthat on Andrew Sullivan's website.

Here's another one: http://www.nationalreview.com/hibbs/hibbs200601060725.asp

[lynn]

http://www.thenewstribune.com/24hour/entertainment/story/3048443p-11742742c.html

Glowing review from Tacoma, Washington. I like some of the fresh insights into the characters:

Ennis, in utilitarian ranching clothes, mostly looks down and shuffles his feet, whereas Jack, who doubles as a rodeo rider, is more flashy. Sporting a flattering denim shirt and black cowboy hat he keeps tilted just so, he lounges artfully against his beat-up pickup, so that Ennis - and anyone else who happens by - will notice how authentic he is.

...you notice that despite his gruff baritone and closed-off manner, Ennis is really just a kid. His demeanor is a form of self-protection.

Jack finds a woman who's more of a peacock than he is (a spirited Anne Hathaway), a rich Texan with whom he can take a subservient role. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams), who adores him and who, like Jack, sees the lonely little boy beneath the inexpressive ranch hand.

[WLAGuy]

Well, Heath Ledger isn't better than the best of Marlon Brando

I'm going out on a very short limb here (a nubbin, really) and disagree with this statement by the reviewer.  I've seen Brando's work, and it has never moved me to tears.  And I've certainly never seen Brando's work move a straight man to tears, as it did the straight, married friend of mine who saw it with me and his wife, and had tears rolling down his face during the final scene. 

[Luckie Starchild]

I've seen Brando's work, and it has never moved me to tears.

I almost cried (and threw up) when Brando kissed Larry King on the mouth.  Does that count? 

[Alijoon]

Well, Heath Ledger isn't better than the best of Marlon Brando

I'm going out on a very short limb here (a nubbin, really) and disagree with this statement by the reviewer.  I've seen Brando's work, and it has never moved me to tears.  And I've certainly never seen Brando's work move a straight man to tears, as it did the straight, married friend of mine who saw it with me and his wife, and had tears rolling down his face during the final scene. 

well said

[mountain boy]

Well, Heath Ledger isn't better than the best of Marlon Brando

I'm going out on a very short limb here (a nubbin, really) and disagree with this statement by the reviewer.  I've seen Brando's work, and it has never moved me to tears.  And I've certainly never seen Brando's work move a straight man to tears, as it did the straight, married friend of mine who saw it with me and his wife, and had tears rolling down his face during the final scene.

Yeah I was thinking, this Heath / Jake thing is such a treasure, as if we had a film of Brando and James Dean in love. We love you guys pleeease take care of yourselves and your health and don't have awful things happen to you like James Dean!!!!!!!!

[ottoblom]

^^ What a moron!  Gene Shalit needs to retire already.

I agree.  I don't know anything about the man's private life, and believe me I don't wanna know, but I get the sense ol' Gene has some issues he should work on.

[PetterG]

I don't know how many non-americans we are here - so I send the question out in the blue:

how do You think BBM will be received in Your country?

[peteinportland]

Folks, there are others who love this movie who think Jack Twist could be a sexual predator. Remember, he takes the hand of a drunk and sleeping Ennis (who he made come into the tent with him), and he places it on his penis. Legally, that is a crime. Gene Shalit, a movie critic, called it as he saw it. He did not call gay people sexual predators. He did not call gay men who pursue relationships with one another sexual predators. He called a fictional character in a movie a sexual predator because that is what he saw. If BBM is to stand alone as a movie then we must allow critics to criticize it. Frankly, I think it is an outrage for anyone to refer to Shalit (the loving parent of a gay son) as a homophobe for his isolated comments about the fictional Jack Twist.

IMO, this could be the most serious threat BBM will have to its Oscar frontrunner status and box office. Already, Poland has went to town with this story, and The Oscarwatch has posted a warning on its front page that anyone calling their site homophobic was not welcome and would be banned. These are both daily stops for industry watchers and many Academy members. People get turned off by this sort of hypersensitive and boorish behavior. Let's hope this goes away very quickly (like tomorrow) so BBM is not hurt. Frankly, I wish everyone at this site would email GLADD and ask them to please, please, please stop making BBM about them and let the movie alone.

[peteinportland]

This is one of the best things I have seen about BBM:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=SCANNERS

It is a piece called "Riding Brokeback" and it looks (in a very funny manner) at some of the reactions to and buzz about BBM.

Very fun. A must read for all you BBM fans.

[Carissa]

THINGS GET HAIRY: Mustachioed Today-show film critic Gene Shalit has drawn fire from GLAAD for his Thursday review of Brokeback Mountain, in which he characterized Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack as a "sexual predator" who "coaxes" Heath Ledger's Ennis into "sporadic trysts." Deeming Shalit's commentary "gratuitously offensive," "defamatory, ignorant and irresponsible," GLAAD is asking for an apology from both him and Today.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Entertainment/

Here's the link to the GLAAD action alert: http://www.glaad.org/action/alerts_detail.php?id=3849