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Gay Western
Last night I fell asleep while watching Tom McCarthy's new film Spotlight, about the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation in 2002 into the priest pedophilia scandals and subsequent cover-ups within the Catholic Church. It had been on my ''to do'' list since I've got the Oscar fever. The only thing strong about the movie was its subject, and that perhaps got people to the theater, other than that a drag, with absolutely no story line. The movie is incredibly boring. If you want to feel the emotional power of the story, read the novel. I think Spotlight, which has been nominated for six Oscars, is one of the most over hyped movies of the 2015 award season. Will Spotlight win best picture at the Oscars tomorrow? Maybe, who knows.
Let’s go back to the 2006 Oscars ceremony, when Ang Lee became the first Asian to win an Academy Award for best director, for the movie Brokeback Mountain. John Wayne may be rolling over in his grave, but director Ang Lee has made the epic American western, a history-making ''gay western'' that changed the cinematic vocabulary of the American western, and America herself, forever. When Brokeback Mountain won three Academy Awards in 2006, critics saw this official approbation as a sign of a radical breakthrough in the representation of homosexuality on screen and commended Hollywood for its boldness in humanizing love between two men in a mainstream film for the very first time.
Brokeback Mountain is the story of two cowboys, as portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, who fall in love almost by accident, beginning a furtive, frustrated romance that spans two decades. Ledger earned an Academy Award nomination for best actor as the tight-lipped Ennis Del Mar, who at first doesn't seem to know what's happening to him. Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist has become the new poster boy of the gay world. Such former heartthrobs as Brad Pitt and the very heterosexual Tom Cruise should start shopping for middle-aged daddy roles.
Set in Wyoming, the movie was actually shot in Alberta. It all begins one night when Ledger's campfire dies, and he's shivering in the biting cold. The spark is lit when he enters Jack's tent. That spark turns into an undying flame that will last beyond the grave. In the shadows of a cramped little tent, Jack makes overtures to Ennis who at first resents him. Then, in a sudden outburst of long-suppressed desires, he takes to gay sex as if he were born to do so. Jack quickly becomes his ever-loving bottom, as this handsome cowboy discovers an ecstasy he never dreamed possible. Once inside Jack, he wants to stay there forever. Of course, there is the inevitable morning after and the usual denials.
Ennis: ''I'm no queer.''
Jack: ''Me neither.''
We sensed what a powerful movie this would make when we first read Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain. Her story, which contains a character who is killed in a Wyoming gay-bashing, was published in The New Yorker in 1997, almost exactly one year before the real-life murder of gay Wyoming man Matthew Shepard. (Download The Matthew Shepard Story HERE!)The 21-year-old student was beaten to death 30 miles from Proulx's home. The author was called for jury duty on the murder case, but she didn't have to serve. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana also recognized the possibilities and adapted it for the screen. But their screenplay went begging for eight years. McMurtry knows about the loneliness and despair of George W. Bush's America. His novel, The Last Picture Show, was made into a movie 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich. No major studio would touch this gay love story until Ang Lee came along. The rest is cinematic history.
When this film began in 1963, the word ''gay'' had not made it into the vocabulary of the people of Wyoming. When Jean Bullis, the real-life editor of a small-town newspaper we knew back in the early 1960's, first learned that men make love to each other, her first response was, ''that’s impossible. For a man to make love, he's got to have a hole to stick it into. Women have holes. Men don't have holes.'' Surely the world has grown a little more sophisticated than when this yokel made such an utterance.
The homoerotic strain in American culture has existed, of course, long before Brokeback Mountain. Leslie Fiedler, an American literary critic, nailed it in his classic essay ''Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!'' published back in 1948. The writer characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.
There are other examples. The Lone Ranger and Tonto. There was that buddy movie, Red River, with John Wayne and gay actor Montgomery Clift. Openly gay author James Leo Herlihy once admitted that Midnight Cowboy was secretly a gay love story. It was the first X-rated movie ever to win an Oscar for best picture of the year, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as the hustler cowboy who descended on Times Square.
The beat goes on, notably with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, both looking gorgeous in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Of course, all this male bonding did not explore its shadow side. Ang Lee had the balls to do that in Brokeback Mountain.
Both men come from tragic backgrounds, Ennis raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash. Brought up in the rodeo, Jack is more talkative than the taciturn and bottled-up Ennis. His father, a bull rider, was the last kind of Wyoming father a gay man needs to bring him up. Jack’s father, when he is finally introduced at the end of the film, is a stunning portrait of Gothic America and all its horrors. He’s more frightening than Freddy Kruger in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
At the end of their summer of bliss on Brokeback Mountain, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways. Instead of a hug and a kiss, Ennis delivers a tight-lipped farewell: ''See you around.''
At that point, not even conceiving that it was possible to pursue a gay lifestyle as a spiritually married couple, the two handsome men drift into straight relationships. Ennis marries his girlfriend. Alma (played by Michelle Williams) delivers a stunning performance as his wife that will push those of borderline preferences quickly to the gay side of the fence. Less brilliant, but also effective in a lesser role, is Lureen (played by Anne Hathaway), a Texas rodeo queen, who falls for Jack.
It is four long, painful years before Jack and Ennis link up again. Now living in Texas, Jack sends a postcard to Ennis marked general delivery. He’s planning to return to Wyoming on a visit. Held intact all these years, Ennis's passion for Jack explodes when they reunite in a spontaneous clinch. Tongue down the throat. Hot, throbbing cock pressed against hot, throbbing cock. This kissing scene is so powerful that Ledger nearly broke Gyllenhaal’s nose while filming it. Even though four years have passed, Jack remembered the bond he had created with Ennis that previous summer on Brokeback. In the words of Ms. Proulx, he fondly recalled when ''Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.''
In the film, the love between Jack and Ennis may be pure, but the secrecy of the relationship is a poison that visits itself on the two men and their families. Although the film is about two gay cowboys, it's not really a gay film of the genre that came to prominence in the 1970's. It's too honest, too real for that type of exploitation. The characters as played by Ledger and Gyllenhaal become so real that even a homophobe might come to view them as two human beings in love - not two cowboys fucking each other. But perhaps that would give homophobes too much credit. The film came as a disappointment to many gay fans who had hoped that after that night in the tent the two handsome actors, Heath and Jake, would make it permanent and set up housekeeping. Alas, we can dream, can't we?
The movie contains a nude scene in which Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall jump into a cold lake. Ang Lee intended to edit out any actual frontal nudity from the film. But a paparazzo caught photos of Ledger with a digital camera. The photos have appeared on the internet and in some press publications.
Why not Gyllenhaal nude as well? For the film's ''official'' nude scene, a body double was enlisted. That’s not because Gyllenhaal has anything against nudity. Jake is a very sophisticated young man. He grew up in a household where Liza Minnelli could be found in the kitchen cooking steaks. He is familiar with the homosexual lifestyle, if not for himself, then for others around him. ''I grew up in a family where many of our close friends were gay couples'', he told the press. I'm sure you still remember a shower scene from Jarhead, where Jake goes the full monty, but it's only for a glimpse and in shadows. Nonetheless, it's a most tantalizing glimpse.
Brokeback Mountain is not about sex. It's about love. Love discovered. Love frustrated by society. Love held forever in the sorrowful heart of Ennis who missed out on his own chance to find happiness and meaning in life and ends up alone in a bleak trailer to live out his days with the loving memory of Jack dooming him to sorrow, with longing in his heart for what is gone forever. The life-long bond formed by the two men is by turns ecstatic, bitter, and conflicted. The complications, joys, and tragedies of the relationship provide a testament to the endurance and power of love.
Brokeback Mountain evoked memories of James Dean in Giant for many critics, including Manohla Dargis of The New York Times. In Brokeback, when Ennis pushes his Stetson down to obscure his face, his gesture recalls James Dean pushing down his Stetson in the 1956 film, Giant. Based on a story by Edna Ferber, it costarred gay actor Rock Hudson and the world’s most gay-friendly actress, Elizabeth Taylor.
As the film progresses, to indicate the passage of time, Jake Gyllenhaal sprouts a mustache to show that he’s reached middle age. Even so, he still ''looks like a refugee from a high school production.'' The ''aging'' of Heath Ledger and Gyllenhaal evokes the so-called aging of James Dean and Rock Hudson in Giant. Silver hair and painted-on wrinkles didn't really age Dean and Hudson either.
Like the characters in Brokeback Mountain, actors Hudson and Dean were forced to live in the closet of the 1950's. Dean was still in the closet when he died. Even today, so-called ''close friends'' deny that he was gay, in spite of hundreds of witnesses who relate up-close and personal encounters to prove the opposite. Hudson was only forced out of the closet by his battle with AIDS.
Well, the rumor is this, that James Dean and Rock Hudson had sex while filming Giant, supposedly because of a bet Rock had with Elizabeth Taylor to see who could bed Dean first. And Rock supposedly said that Taylor didn't have a chance since Dean was gay. Is this true? I have no clue, but it's a great story, nonetheless.
Dargis indulges in some fascinating speculation. ''James Dean was about the same age as Mr. Gyllenhaal when he made Giant. It would be nice to think that if Dean and Hudson were alive today they would be out of their respective closets and would be enjoying the kind of marquee muscle that could get a project like Brokeback Mountain off the ground and into the theaters.''
Note: While you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, ''why he didn't post this movie to the forum.'' I'm sorry to disappoint you, but our ''great place to share your favorite gay themed movies'' has a rule, which says: Please do not post any major Hollywood releases.
Last night I fell asleep while watching Tom McCarthy's new film Spotlight, about the Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation in 2002 into the priest pedophilia scandals and subsequent cover-ups within the Catholic Church. It had been on my ''to do'' list since I've got the Oscar fever. The only thing strong about the movie was its subject, and that perhaps got people to the theater, other than that a drag, with absolutely no story line. The movie is incredibly boring. If you want to feel the emotional power of the story, read the novel. I think Spotlight, which has been nominated for six Oscars, is one of the most over hyped movies of the 2015 award season. Will Spotlight win best picture at the Oscars tomorrow? Maybe, who knows.
Let’s go back to the 2006 Oscars ceremony, when Ang Lee became the first Asian to win an Academy Award for best director, for the movie Brokeback Mountain. John Wayne may be rolling over in his grave, but director Ang Lee has made the epic American western, a history-making ''gay western'' that changed the cinematic vocabulary of the American western, and America herself, forever. When Brokeback Mountain won three Academy Awards in 2006, critics saw this official approbation as a sign of a radical breakthrough in the representation of homosexuality on screen and commended Hollywood for its boldness in humanizing love between two men in a mainstream film for the very first time.
Brokeback Mountain is the story of two cowboys, as portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, who fall in love almost by accident, beginning a furtive, frustrated romance that spans two decades. Ledger earned an Academy Award nomination for best actor as the tight-lipped Ennis Del Mar, who at first doesn't seem to know what's happening to him. Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist has become the new poster boy of the gay world. Such former heartthrobs as Brad Pitt and the very heterosexual Tom Cruise should start shopping for middle-aged daddy roles.
Set in Wyoming, the movie was actually shot in Alberta. It all begins one night when Ledger's campfire dies, and he's shivering in the biting cold. The spark is lit when he enters Jack's tent. That spark turns into an undying flame that will last beyond the grave. In the shadows of a cramped little tent, Jack makes overtures to Ennis who at first resents him. Then, in a sudden outburst of long-suppressed desires, he takes to gay sex as if he were born to do so. Jack quickly becomes his ever-loving bottom, as this handsome cowboy discovers an ecstasy he never dreamed possible. Once inside Jack, he wants to stay there forever. Of course, there is the inevitable morning after and the usual denials.
Ennis: ''I'm no queer.''
Jack: ''Me neither.''
We sensed what a powerful movie this would make when we first read Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain. Her story, which contains a character who is killed in a Wyoming gay-bashing, was published in The New Yorker in 1997, almost exactly one year before the real-life murder of gay Wyoming man Matthew Shepard. (Download The Matthew Shepard Story HERE!)The 21-year-old student was beaten to death 30 miles from Proulx's home. The author was called for jury duty on the murder case, but she didn't have to serve. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana also recognized the possibilities and adapted it for the screen. But their screenplay went begging for eight years. McMurtry knows about the loneliness and despair of George W. Bush's America. His novel, The Last Picture Show, was made into a movie 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich. No major studio would touch this gay love story until Ang Lee came along. The rest is cinematic history.
When this film began in 1963, the word ''gay'' had not made it into the vocabulary of the people of Wyoming. When Jean Bullis, the real-life editor of a small-town newspaper we knew back in the early 1960's, first learned that men make love to each other, her first response was, ''that’s impossible. For a man to make love, he's got to have a hole to stick it into. Women have holes. Men don't have holes.'' Surely the world has grown a little more sophisticated than when this yokel made such an utterance.
The homoerotic strain in American culture has existed, of course, long before Brokeback Mountain. Leslie Fiedler, an American literary critic, nailed it in his classic essay ''Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!'' published back in 1948. The writer characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.
There are other examples. The Lone Ranger and Tonto. There was that buddy movie, Red River, with John Wayne and gay actor Montgomery Clift. Openly gay author James Leo Herlihy once admitted that Midnight Cowboy was secretly a gay love story. It was the first X-rated movie ever to win an Oscar for best picture of the year, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight as the hustler cowboy who descended on Times Square.
The beat goes on, notably with Paul Newman and Robert Redford, both looking gorgeous in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Of course, all this male bonding did not explore its shadow side. Ang Lee had the balls to do that in Brokeback Mountain.
Both men come from tragic backgrounds, Ennis raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash. Brought up in the rodeo, Jack is more talkative than the taciturn and bottled-up Ennis. His father, a bull rider, was the last kind of Wyoming father a gay man needs to bring him up. Jack’s father, when he is finally introduced at the end of the film, is a stunning portrait of Gothic America and all its horrors. He’s more frightening than Freddy Kruger in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
At the end of their summer of bliss on Brokeback Mountain, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways. Instead of a hug and a kiss, Ennis delivers a tight-lipped farewell: ''See you around.''
At that point, not even conceiving that it was possible to pursue a gay lifestyle as a spiritually married couple, the two handsome men drift into straight relationships. Ennis marries his girlfriend. Alma (played by Michelle Williams) delivers a stunning performance as his wife that will push those of borderline preferences quickly to the gay side of the fence. Less brilliant, but also effective in a lesser role, is Lureen (played by Anne Hathaway), a Texas rodeo queen, who falls for Jack.
It is four long, painful years before Jack and Ennis link up again. Now living in Texas, Jack sends a postcard to Ennis marked general delivery. He’s planning to return to Wyoming on a visit. Held intact all these years, Ennis's passion for Jack explodes when they reunite in a spontaneous clinch. Tongue down the throat. Hot, throbbing cock pressed against hot, throbbing cock. This kissing scene is so powerful that Ledger nearly broke Gyllenhaal’s nose while filming it. Even though four years have passed, Jack remembered the bond he had created with Ennis that previous summer on Brokeback. In the words of Ms. Proulx, he fondly recalled when ''Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.''
In the film, the love between Jack and Ennis may be pure, but the secrecy of the relationship is a poison that visits itself on the two men and their families. Although the film is about two gay cowboys, it's not really a gay film of the genre that came to prominence in the 1970's. It's too honest, too real for that type of exploitation. The characters as played by Ledger and Gyllenhaal become so real that even a homophobe might come to view them as two human beings in love - not two cowboys fucking each other. But perhaps that would give homophobes too much credit. The film came as a disappointment to many gay fans who had hoped that after that night in the tent the two handsome actors, Heath and Jake, would make it permanent and set up housekeeping. Alas, we can dream, can't we?
The movie contains a nude scene in which Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhall jump into a cold lake. Ang Lee intended to edit out any actual frontal nudity from the film. But a paparazzo caught photos of Ledger with a digital camera. The photos have appeared on the internet and in some press publications.
Why not Gyllenhaal nude as well? For the film's ''official'' nude scene, a body double was enlisted. That’s not because Gyllenhaal has anything against nudity. Jake is a very sophisticated young man. He grew up in a household where Liza Minnelli could be found in the kitchen cooking steaks. He is familiar with the homosexual lifestyle, if not for himself, then for others around him. ''I grew up in a family where many of our close friends were gay couples'', he told the press. I'm sure you still remember a shower scene from Jarhead, where Jake goes the full monty, but it's only for a glimpse and in shadows. Nonetheless, it's a most tantalizing glimpse.
Brokeback Mountain is not about sex. It's about love. Love discovered. Love frustrated by society. Love held forever in the sorrowful heart of Ennis who missed out on his own chance to find happiness and meaning in life and ends up alone in a bleak trailer to live out his days with the loving memory of Jack dooming him to sorrow, with longing in his heart for what is gone forever. The life-long bond formed by the two men is by turns ecstatic, bitter, and conflicted. The complications, joys, and tragedies of the relationship provide a testament to the endurance and power of love.
Brokeback Mountain evoked memories of James Dean in Giant for many critics, including Manohla Dargis of The New York Times. In Brokeback, when Ennis pushes his Stetson down to obscure his face, his gesture recalls James Dean pushing down his Stetson in the 1956 film, Giant. Based on a story by Edna Ferber, it costarred gay actor Rock Hudson and the world’s most gay-friendly actress, Elizabeth Taylor.
As the film progresses, to indicate the passage of time, Jake Gyllenhaal sprouts a mustache to show that he’s reached middle age. Even so, he still ''looks like a refugee from a high school production.'' The ''aging'' of Heath Ledger and Gyllenhaal evokes the so-called aging of James Dean and Rock Hudson in Giant. Silver hair and painted-on wrinkles didn't really age Dean and Hudson either.
Like the characters in Brokeback Mountain, actors Hudson and Dean were forced to live in the closet of the 1950's. Dean was still in the closet when he died. Even today, so-called ''close friends'' deny that he was gay, in spite of hundreds of witnesses who relate up-close and personal encounters to prove the opposite. Hudson was only forced out of the closet by his battle with AIDS.
Well, the rumor is this, that James Dean and Rock Hudson had sex while filming Giant, supposedly because of a bet Rock had with Elizabeth Taylor to see who could bed Dean first. And Rock supposedly said that Taylor didn't have a chance since Dean was gay. Is this true? I have no clue, but it's a great story, nonetheless.
Dargis indulges in some fascinating speculation. ''James Dean was about the same age as Mr. Gyllenhaal when he made Giant. It would be nice to think that if Dean and Hudson were alive today they would be out of their respective closets and would be enjoying the kind of marquee muscle that could get a project like Brokeback Mountain off the ground and into the theaters.''
Note: While you're reading this, you're no doubt asking yourself, ''why he didn't post this movie to the forum.'' I'm sorry to disappoint you, but our ''great place to share your favorite gay themed movies'' has a rule, which says: Please do not post any major Hollywood releases.
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