Brokeback Mountain

[klavel]

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@north_star: where have you read brokeback mountain? I asked for a copy from one of the people in my yahoo group but it didn't come I wanted to read it. Can I have a copy?

i read it online. i first heard about the movie last october 2005 and started getting curious so i tried searching for sites where i could find the story. i started reading reviews and sharings from people who have seen the movie or have read the story. it's so amazing to realize that i wasn't alone who felt the way i did. many people out there, gay or straight felt the same thing about ennis and jack's story.Â*i've been moved, devastated and touched. actually i cried after reading the story. i just can't help it.

okay, enough of that. i will be sending you private message containing the link where you can read the story. in the link, it says excerpt but it's actually the full text of the short story. i guess they meant that the whole story is just an excerpt from the book. brokeback mountain is just one of the stories found in the book called close range by annie proulx. the book is a collection of stories.

As for Transamerica, yes it's about a transsexual. I don't know much about the story but Felicity Huffman (the lead) won best Actress (or should it be Actor? ) in the Golden Globes.

Check this out na lang about Transamerica from IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407265/plotsummary

made some online research about transamerica. i wasn't really intrigued about the plot but i think it would be nice to watch it. i doubt if it will be released here though. the transexual role is played by a female, felicity hoffman. :mrgreen:

@north_star..do you have an electronic file of the story?..i've been trying to locate the book (e-file) of "Brokeback Mountan" but can't find one..I'd like to read the book edition before watching the film..(have read the film summary in the internet)..

FYI: The book was written by Annie Proulx..who also wrote "The Shipping News", which was also made into a movie starred by Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore..

[north_star]

@north_star..do you have an electronic file of the story?..i've been trying to locate the book (e-file) of "Brokeback Mountan" but can't find one..I'd like to read the book edition before watching the film..(have read the film summary in the internet)..

FYI: The book was written by Annie Proulx..who also wrote "The Shipping News", which was also made into a movie starred by Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore..

i don't have an e-book but i found a link where the full text of the story is found. if you want, i can send you the link by PM.

As for Transamerica, yes it's about a transsexual. I don't know much about the story but Felicity Huffman (the lead) won best Actress (or should it be Actor? ) in the Golden Globes.

Check this out na lang about Transamerica from IMDB http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407265/plotsummary

i saw the trailer na from the official website: www.transamericathemovie.com

i am definitely watching this movie.

[slakker]

unsa man position ipakita sa love scene? kiwaw man siguro kung missionary. just wondering how they pulled this off artistically.

i'm not attacking the love scenes, i was just wondering. i think it's a legitimate question. sobra ra mu ka defensive.

[iamdede]

kita ko ug softboung copy anang libroha sa borders.. nipis ra man siya.. mura 20ish dollars man tu... not worth it man guro...

[north_star]

Author Annie Proulx discusses the origins of her 'Brokeback Mountain'

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

December 15, 2005, 4:12 PM EST


LOS ANGELES -- Annie Proulx figured no magazine would touch her short story "Brokeback Mountain," the tale of two Wyoming cowboys whose romance is so intense it sometimes leaves them black and blue.

But The New Yorker published it in 1997, and it went on to win an O. Henry prize and a National Magazine Award. Now the movie version is a leading Oscar contender, with starring performances from Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist.

In a telephone conversation with The Associated Press from her home in Wyoming, Proulx, a 70-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner, declined to discuss the origins of her two roughneck lovers, citing an upcoming book written with screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Instead, she spoke about homophobia, her fascination with rural life and the process of making Twist and Del Mar live and breathe.

AP: You've said 'Brokeback Mountain' began as an examination of homophobia in the land of the pure, noble cowboy.

Proulx: Everything I write has a rural situation and the Wyoming stories, in the collection 'Close Range,' which includes 'Brokeback Mountain,' did contain a number of those social-observation stories, what things are like for people there. It's my subject matter, what can I say.

AP: Were you trying to accomplish something specific with this story?

Proulx: No. It was just another story when I started writing it. I had no idea it was going to even end up on the screen. I didn't even think it was going to be published when I was first working on it because the subject matter was not in the usual ruts in the literary road.

AP: You've said this story took twice as long to write as a novel. Why?

Proulx: Because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men, and that takes some doing if you happen to be an elderly female person. I spent a great deal of time thinking about each character and the balance of the story, working it out, trying to do it in a fair kind of way.

AP: How did you feel about seeing it on the big screen?

Proulx: It was really quite a shock because I had had nothing to do with the film. So for 18 months, I had no idea what was happening. I had no idea if it was going to be good or frightful or scary, if it was going to be terribly lost or sentimentalized or what. When I saw it in September, I was astonished. The thing that happened while I was writing the story eight years ago is that from thinking so much about the characters and putting so much time into them, they became embedded in my consciousness. They became as real to me as real, walk-around, breathe-oxygen people. It took a long time to get these characters out of my head so I could get on with work. Then when I saw the film, they came rushing back. It was extraordinary, just wham, they were with me again.

AP: What did you think of the performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall?

Proulx: I thought they were magnificent, both of them. Jake Gyllenhall's Jack Twist ... wasn't the Jack Twist that I had in mind when I wrote this story. The Jack that I saw was jumpier, homely. But Gyllenhall's sensitivity and subtleness in this role is just huge. The scenes he's in have a kind of quicksilver feel to them. Heath Ledger is just almost really beyond description as far as I'm concerned. He got inside the story more deeply than I did. All that thinking about the character of Ennis that was so hard for me to get, Ledger just was there. He did indeed move inside the skin of the character, not just in the shirt but inside the person. It was remarkable.

AP: Would you characterize the story as groundbreaking?

Proulx: I hope that it is going to start conversations and discussions, that it's going to awaken in people an empathy for diversity, for each other and the larger world. I'm really hoping that the idea of tolerance will come through discussions about the film. People tend to walk out of the theater with a sense of compassion, which I think is very fine. It is a love story. It has been called both universal and specific and I think that's true. It's an old, old story. We've heard this story a million times, we just haven't heard it quite with this cast.

AP: Have you gotten any response from gay organizations?

Proulx: No. When the story was first published eight years ago, I did expect that. But there was a deafening silence. What I had instead were letters from individuals, gay people, some of them absolutely heartbreaking. And over the years, those letters have continued and certainly are continuing now. Some of them are extremely fine, people who write and say, 'This is my story. This is why I left Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa.' Perhaps the most touching ones are from fathers, who say, 'Now I understand the kind of hell my son went through.' It's enormously wonderful to know that you've touched people, that you've truly moved them.

AP: Is that why you write?

Proulx: It's not why I write. I had no idea I was going to get any response of this sort. I wrote it from my long-term stance of trying to describe sections of rural life, individuals in particular rural situations and places, well, first the places. That it came out this way it just happened to touch certain nerves in people. I think this country is hungry for this story.

AP: Why?

Proulx: Because it's a love story and there's hardly much love around these days. I think people are sick of divisiveness, hate-mongering, disasters, war, loss and need and want a reminder that sometimes love comes along that is strong and permanent, and that it can happen to anyone.

AP: Do you think straight men will watch this movie?

Proulx: They are watching this movie. Of course, why wouldn't they watch it? Straight men fall in love. Not necessarily with each other or with a gay man. My son-in-law, who prides himself on being a Bud-drinking, NRA-member redneck, liked the movie so much he went to it twice. Straight men are seeing it and they're not having any problem with it. The only people who would have problems with it are people who are very insecure about themselves and their own sexuality and who would be putting up a defense, and that's usually young men who haven't figured things out yet. Jack and Ennis would probably have trouble with this movie.

AP: Do you think Jack and Ennis will come back?

Proulx: They're not coming back. There's no way. They're going to stay where they are. I've got other things to write.

:mrgreen:

[tolstoi]

i luv to see VILMA [of scooby-doo] doing mature acts in this film....she looks sassy

[iamdede]

ewwww vilma santos!

[north_star]

i found this video from youtube.com:
http://www.youtube.com/w/brokeback-m...0missing%20you

i read this wonderful review. i don't know who wrote it but the person takes good interpretation on the importance of the closet in the movie.

This is the truth that Heath Ledger, who plays Ennis, clearly understands—"Fear was instilled in him at an early age, and so the way he loved disgusted him," the actor has said—and that is so brilliantly conveyed by his deservedly acclaimed performance. On screen, Ennis's self-repression and self-loathing are given startling physical form: the awkward, almost hobbled quality of his gait, the constricted gestures, the way in which he barely opens his mouth when he talks all speak eloquently of a man who is tormented simply by being in his own body—by being himself

So much, at any rate, for the movie being a love story like any other, even a tragic one. To their great credit, the makers of Brokeback Mountain—the writers Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, the director Ang Lee—seem, despite the official rhetoric, to have been aware that they were making a movie specifically about the closet. The themes of repression, containment, the emptiness of unrealized lives—all ending in the "nothingness" to which Ennis achingly refers—are consistently expressed in the film, appropriately enough, by the use of space; given the film's homoerotic themes, this device is particularly meaningful. The two lovers are only happy in the wide, unfenced outdoors, where exuberant shots of enormous skies and vast landscapes suggest, tellingly, that what the men feel for each other is "natural." By contrast, whenever we see Jack and Ennis indoors, in the scenes that show the failure of their domestic and social lives, they look cramped and claustrophobic. (Ennis in particular is often seen in reflection, in various mirrors: a figure confined in a tiny frame.) There's a sequence in which we see Ennis in Wyoming, and then Jack in Texas, anxiously preparing for one of their "fishing trips," and both men, as they pack for their trip—Ennis nearly leaves behind his fishing tackle, the unused and increasingly unpersuasive prop for the fiction he tells his wife each time he goes away with Jack— pace back and forth in their respective houses like caged animals.

The climax of these visual contrasts is also the emotional climax of the film, which takes place in two consecutive scenes, both of which prominently feature closets—literal closets. In the first, a grief-stricken Ennis, now in his late thirties, visits Jack's childhood home, where in the tiny closet of Jack's almost bare room he discovers two shirts—his and Jack's, the clothes they'd worn during their summer on Brokeback Mountain—one of which Jack has sentimentally encased in the other. (At the end of that summer, Ennis had thought he'd lost the shirt; only now do we realize that Jack had stolen it for this purpose.) The image —which is taken directly from Proulx's story—of the two shirts hidden in the closet, preserved in an embrace which the men who wore them could never fully enjoy, stands as the poignant visual symbol of the story's tragedy. Made aware too late of how greatly he was loved, of the extent of his loss, Ennis stands in the tiny windowless space, caressing the shirts and weeping wordlessly.

In the scene that follows, another misplaced piece of clothing leads to a similar scene of tragic realization. Now middle-aged and living alone in a battered, sparsely furnished trailer (a setting with which Proulx's story begins, the tale itself unfolding as a long flashback), Ennis receives a visit from his grown daughter, who announces that she's engaged to be married. "Does he love you?" the blighted father protectively demands, as if realizing too late that this is all that matters. After the girl leaves, Ennis realizes she's left her sweater behind, and when he opens his little closet door to store it there, we see that he's hung the two shirts from their first summer, one still wearing the other, on the inside of the closet door, below a tattered postcard of Brokeback Mountain. Just as we see this, the camera pulls back to allow us a slightly wider view, which reveals a little window next to the closet, a rectangular frame that affords a glimpse of a field of yellow flowers and the mountains and sky. The juxtaposition of the two spaces—the cramped and airless closet, the window with its unlimited vistas beyond—efficiently but wrenchingly suggests the man's tragedy: the life he has lived, the life that might have been. His eyes filling with tears, Ennis looks at his closet and says, "Jack, I swear..."; but he never completes his sentence, as he never completed his life.

[gareb]

the reviews are nice. gonna watch this one.

[r/brey]

just watched it. the ending just breaks you up. ang lee has a truly distinctive style. the pacing is slow which is perfect for dramas like these. i'm gonna have to get subtitles though, i always miss out on the dialogue because of that cowboy accent. or my copy just sucks.