Bought a car today
It's a 2005 Corolla with 27,000 miles on it. It was a rental. I'm pretty happy with it. Hello car payments. Hellooooo insurance payments. Goodbye, frivilous spending. Hello can of tuna.
So I just got back from Brokeback Mountain, and it might have been a mistake to see such a stressful movie after a stressfull day of buying a car. I absolutely loved the movie, but I don't necessarily every want to see it again. Ang Lee is all about using slow, almost tedious pace to introduce you to ever more awful situations. It reminded me a lot of Ice Storm, and I really think Lee uses the dinner table for his most comically awful situations.
Anyway, the few bad reviews of the movie are by people who don't get it. It's a brilliant movie. Here's what I realized as I was watching. 1) Dudes are weird. Scratch the surface, and dudes are wierd. 2) We talk about other cultures having bizarre, codified, stratified, codes of behavior that is totally foreign to outsiders... ladies and gentlemen, the western cowboy. The straight ones, the gay ones... absolutley bizarre.
I was a little surprized at the plainness of the cinematography, until I realized it was a choice. And I was shocked that I was shocked by the gay sex, until I realized that it was a choice, and I was supposed to be shocked. There's a scene in Icestorm that's so shocking it's almost unbearable, very very uncomfortable.
I'm not as keen as H is to see Syriana, especially after the d keeps saying that I'll want to set myself on fire. Is there a greek word for that reaction?
3 comments:
you can try a type of cinematic immersion therapy to get over the dread: brokeback, syriana, munich (then, for dessert, a little squid & whale. ick.)
my roomie was in a packed elevator while a young woman was complaining loudly, to no one in particular, that she had just seen the worst and longest movie ever - brokeback mountain. roomie, who was grumpy anyway, said 'maybe it was too sophisticated for you.' so yeah, i think the reviews who were confounded by it totally didn't get it.
(though i thought the sex scenes were rather tame...)
It wasn't the sexiness of the sex scene that made it shocking... It was the brutality of it. I knew it was coming (here comes the pup tent scene!) but then I wasn't sure if they were going to be intimate or if they were going to beat each other to a pulp.
At first I thought, gee that was more animal than it had to be. But then I realized, if it had been all candlelight and slowdancing to saxaphone music, it would be a different kind of movie. They are awkward, desparate, lumpy characters, and most of all, they are dudes. Eroticising them would be out of character.
Anyway, it occurs to me that I watched the entire movie with dread. At first, I was thinking, 'oh no, here come the gay cowboys,' but later, I was dreading that they would get caught, and then i was dreading the way the women were treated, and then... well, you get the idea, dread dread dread.
Even the comic relief... the scene with electric carving knife... that was classic Ang Lee, and he did it to show Jack's maturing assertiveness. But he built up a sense of dread with the whole do-si-do over to the Zenith tv. (My cousins had that tv, by the way...awesome).
Actually, at once point in the movie I thought it was over, and when the next scene started, I thought, aw dammit, there's more.
Luckily, there was that tender, understated father-daughter scene, very Eat Drink Man Woman, and it was the only non doomed relationship we were allowed to enjoy. It was a nice way to finish off the 90 previous minutes of impending doom.
Anyway, it was just a movie. Too bad the girl in the elevator had to telegraph her own mental density. Good for roomie.
you're right about the dread. even jack's death made my stomach tense. i kept thinking, is his wife saying it's a car accident because she's in denial or is ennis thinking jack was killed like that gay rancher in his childhood?
weird how i kept expecting violence to happen to them. like you, dreading it.
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