Brokeback hits $31 million with no end in sight!!!- Page 3

[celticmage2]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 3:33pm

Haven't seen the movie yet, planning on it this week, will buy it when it comes out on DVD also. Heath and Jake playing gay lovers, I can die happy now. :)

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 3:45pm

"the new tabula rasa on which one can project anything."

You can say THAT again.

[Auggie27]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 5:57pm

Oh Namo, I set ya up for that one. You have committed your own grafitti to the tabula rasa, and snippy indifference to the movie has evolved into an icy loathing. If it wins an Oscar, you'll have to take out an ad in Variety to denounce it for the sham you've uncovered it to be.

But did you read your *friend* Mr. Goldstein's take on it in this week's NATION? He has some interesting observations, including the story's schematic use of a cliche--cold, distant fathers to define emotional neediness in both Jack and Ennis (while admitting that the film plays no games with the idea of their gayness being a "choice." He touts its fair use of 'force of nature.') He strains to compare it to KING KONG -- a thesis that feels like he had a deadline he didn't want to make. Finally, my spin: He comes off as one of those people who wanted to hate it, but sniffled all the way up the dark theater, throwing shades over his pink eyes as he faced the cold, *truly* gay culture awaiting him on the Manhattan street.

Back to the thread: It reached about 31 million as of Sunday, and made the top ten, with the highest per screen average in the top ten, 8,000 plus. Lousy week, though -- the Queen Latifah debacle and Hoodwinked.

[eslgr8]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 7:42pm

Good to know that it's doing as well as predicted!!!

[Broadwayboobs]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 7:44pm

I saw a 4 o'clock showing yesterday and it was SOLD OUT.

[Luscious]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 7:53pm

So... what did you think boobs?

Updated On: 1/16/06 at 07:53 PM

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 7:54pm

I shall finally see it next weekend. Finally.

[Broadwayboobs]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 8:22pm

Luscious...I loved it for some many reasons...especially the acting. So many wonderful performances.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 8:59pm

Aug, ask Jose if I've "read" Richard Goldstein's essay. I think I've actually gone from icy indifference to snippy loathing.

If BM wins the Oscar, I fully expect a certain person who's screen name ends in "8" to start a thread:

Brokeback takes The Oscar: Gays now Free

I think time and some distance will bear me out on this. In hindsight, people will be asking, "What were we so excited about."

And remember, "The Birdcage" made 124,000,000 1996 dollars. Of course, without it ending in tragedy it didn't get "us" the victim pity vote that so many seem to be hoping BM delivers.

[MasterLcZ]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:15pm

The best article by a British gay writer who likes the film, yet is decidedly NOT on the breathless Brokeback hayride - and who places the film securely in the conservative Hollywood tradition.

Johann Hari: TO HOLLYWOOD, GAYS MUST BE TRAGIC OR SISSY

There is an unspoken, unconscious equation : gay lust leads to misery and death

Published: 03 January 2006

After millennia of persecution and decades of civil rights struggles, gays have finally clambered to the top of the Hollywood Hills. The message from the Homintern is clear: rejoice, rejoice! But - wait - what is the reason for this glee? This week, a movie is released - BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN - that depicts us as pitiful self-hating victims, doomed to loneliness and despair. Victory?

Ang Lee's BROKEBACK has been hailed as Hollywood's coming-out-of-age, the film that finally shows gay people have been accepted into the American mainstream. And it is indeed a film almost as beautiful as its lead actors, Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger. They play a pair of ranchers who meet and fall in love, but are so pickled in rural homophobia that even as they have impressively athletic anal sex, they mutter, "I'm not a fag." Although Heath begs Jake to settle down (and who wouldn't?), it is never an option. They are doomed. As Annie Proulx summarises their situation in the original short story, "Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved."

The film is tender and sensitive and (most important) tragic. And that's why, far from being a radical break, it actually fits into a long pattern of Hollywood's very constrained acceptance of gay people. The rules are simple, and stretch back to the first backlot MGM ever built. There are two types of Acceptable Gay Man: you can be a sexless sissy who is fairly happy with his female friends and waspish one-liners, or you can be masculine and actually have a sex drive - in which case you will die.

Let's look at the sissies first, because one of the reasons Brokeback seems like an advance is in contrast to this other, more high-pitched Hollywood tradition. When D.W. Griffith was making his first movie in 1913 - the Biblical epic JUDITH OF BETHULIA - he faced a dilemma. One of the characters was a eunuch, but nobody knew how eunuchs behaved - so Griffith decided to make him act like a "pansy" gay man, with bent wrists and wiggling hips. The audience found it hilarious.

Without realising it, Griffith set the pattern for how gay men would be depicted right up until the present: as licensed court-jesters, whose homosexuality consists solely of comic mannerisms, rather than (whisper it) sexual attraction to men.

Even in films made by people who imagine they are pro-gay, this is still - in the Noughties - the most popular way of depicting gay men. Look at MEAN GIRLS, the terrific 2004 high school movie that was congratulated by much of the gay press for having a sympathetic gay supporting character, Damien. He is described as "too gay to function", which means he is an expert on lip gloss, is nice to women, and has a barbed wit.

He never mentions being attracted to men - not once. In the final scene, when all the movie's characters are pairing off, he is left dancing alone, and it's not meant to be sad. Damien - and the majority of Hollywood's gay characters, even today - could have walked out straight of D.W. Griffith's harem of eunuchs.

Compared to this army of asexual queens, the square-jawed Marlboro Men of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN are a step (in a well-heeled cowboy boot) forward. But they are firmly rooted in an alternative Hollywood tradition: if you don't want to be limp-wristed, you can be tragic instead.

This school of Hollywood gays was founded in 1970, on the set of THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Written just before the Stonewall riots, it now seems like a strange time-capsule from the closet, the story of a group of depressed, self-loathing gay New Yorkers who gather to celebrate their friend Harold's birthday. They spend the night fetishising Judy Garland and wistfully muttering lines like, "If we can only learn to stop hating ourselves ..." The school motto emerges when one character, Michael, says, "You show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse."

That line would fit perfectly into Jake Gyllenhall's mouth in BROKEBACK. There is an unspoken, unconscious equation in Hollywood: gay lust leads to misery and probable death. Look at the first achingly hip films to hint at gay love: in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, Sal Mineo is clearly in love with James Dean - and he is gunned down by the final reel.

The first "gay" movie to be showered with Oscars, PHILADELPHIA, shows its central character wasting away throughout the film. BROKEBACK belongs to an old, old pattern.

Most of the time, I'm sure these rules are unconscious, simply gut feelings about what audiences are prepared to take. But occasionally film and TV writers openly admit that they are unwilling to push their gay characters beyond these settled boundaries because they are scared of a homophobic backlash.

The co-creator of the sitcom WILL AND GRACE, Max Mutchnick, was asked recently why the gay central character has gone through eight seasons without even the hint of a boyfriend. He said, "I'd rather keep a show like Will and Grace on the air than put Will in a relationship where he's going to be expressing himself physically and turn off a large part of the audience."

Since Will can't be tragic - this is Sitcom-Land - he has to be chaste. It's the rules. We wouldn't want to upset viewers by hinting that our gay characters actually have a gay sex drive, would we?

This might all seem trivial, but as the great gay novelist Armistead Maupin says, "For many young gay men and women, the subliminal message [from the movies] is that being gay means despair, self-destruction and death." Sure, BROKEBACK takes us inches forward by being far more graphic than its tragic predecessors: it can only be a good thing for teenagers in mini-malls in Kansas to see undoubtedly cool men making out, even if it ends in misery. And if the film was part of a balanced diet of gay movies - some ending happily, some badly - I would champion it with a megaphone for its stunning direction, script and acting. But it's not. BROKEBACK-style tragedies are all young gay people have as a cinematic picture of their future, apart from the Damiens and Wills.

But - out here in the real world - changes are happening that will force themselves onto the big screen sooner or later. The chronic instability of the closet - the world of BOYS IN THE BAND - is being replaced, in Europe at least, with social acceptance, embodied in the beautiful burst of civil partnerships we have seen over the past month. These de facto marriages are creating a world where it is considered normal for gay people to settle down and stay together - a world beyond BROKEBACK.

So if you want an cinematic excuse for a party, wait until you finally see a Hollywood movie where the boy gets the boy and they live happily ever after.
Independent

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:20pm

Remember how I've been saying "fundamentally conservative" since I saw it (and basically the oevre of Mr. Lee as well) and people here were just like that chorus from Jesus Christ Superstar, "How can you say that? How can you say that? How CAN you say that? How CAN YOU SAY THAT?"

Updated On: 1/16/06 at 09:20 PM

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:40pm

What happened to the missing $2million?

Wasn't that number the "expected" goal of the original title of this thread?

Did Jack A*hem*off abscond with the missing $2mil, or did that go to Queen (everytime you turn around it's gay, gay, gay) Latifah?

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:42pm

p.s.

I will have to read the article in The Nation by Mr. Goldstein. I've been too busy reading Gay City (I think that's what it's called) and RLS's "Kidnapped."

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:48pm

Quien es el hombre en su icon?

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:48pm

There are two types of Acceptable Gay Man: you can be a sexless sissy who is fairly happy with his female friends and waspish one-liners, or you can be masculine and actually have a sex drive - in which case you will die.

~~Johann Harl, The Independent

Sounds familiar.

[MasterLcZ]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:59pm

"I Love My Dead Gay Cowboy!"

Posted: 1/16/06 at 9:59pm

"You've Got Mail."

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 10:01pm

I love you Master, and it's a love that will never grow old!

[Auggie27]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 10:55pm

'Least the cowboys enjoyed their d--ks while alive, and didn't obsesse on window treatments.

Posted: 1/16/06 at 10:57pm

Did you ever know a cowboy who was obsessed with window treatments?

[Broadwayboobs]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 11:04pm

I would have made some great meals with those beans though. Maybe that's why Ennis didn't want to go in the tent that 1st night...Jack was probably tooting from all those beans...do you think he tooted when Ennis shoved...well, you know.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 11:05pm

What's the difference between a gay man and a freezer?

[Kringas]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 11:05pm

That's disgusting. You rob BM of its power with comments like that.

[Broadwayboobs]

Posted: 1/16/06 at 11:07pm

I know Namo.....a freezer doesn't grunt and fart when you pull the meat out...hee hee.

Posted: 1/16/06 at 11:07pm

Well, I don't know.

What's the difference between a gay man and a freezer?