I’ve written so much about this movie I thought it might be good to utilize the resources I’ve collected and put them all in one place.
Please feel free to add your own reviews and thoughts about the movie in the comments. Off-topic and offensive comments will be deleted.
Brokeback Mountain [Official Site]
Brokeback Movie Trailer
Close Range : Wyoming Stories
[Buy the Story on Amazon]
Watch the LOGO Brokeback documentary.
Brokeback One-Sheet movie poster.
Wikipedia: Brokeback Mountain.
The Movie City News awards scoreboard (keeps track of this year’s film honors).
A collection of parodies of the Brokeback movie poster.
BUY the gorgeous soundtrack featuring Rufus Wainwright, Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, Mary McBride, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and the haunting Gustavo Santaolalla score on Amazon
Buy the AUDIOBOOK narrated by Campbell Scott on iTunes.
REVIEWS
The Secret Lives of Cowboys
The Towleroad review of Brokeback Mountain.
Brokeback Mountain shines in Venice.
Report on the Venice Film festival with Variety and Hollywood Reporter excerpts.
Thoughts on the Brokeback Trailer [tr]
Newsweek: “Forbidden Territory — Inevitably, the longing and frustration, the years of repression, lead to a devastating conclusion.”
NY Observer: “Chokeback Mountain — Closer to home, the tales of crusty Manhattan critics spending two hours weeping in the screening rooms are flooding the city; while at a screening yesterday a few could be heard sniffling, one of New York’s most jaded reporters admitted afterward that he found it impossible to be cynical about the film—and this admission was somehow even more shocking than tears.”
Village Voice “Blazing Saddles — Brokeback Mountain is the most straightforward love story—and in some ways the straightest—to come out of Hollywood, at least since Titanic.”
Gary Indiana: “‘Love,’ an opaque if many splendored quantity, isn’t much of an antidote to the kind of ignorant attitudes movies like Brokeback Mountain seem determined to change. Some people are just shits, as the wise old drag queen told William Burroughs. The more pointlessly fecund our species, the more shits we are likely to have.”
New York Times rave for Brokeback Mountain: “…Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal’s sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.”
MTV’s Kurt Loder: “This is a beautiful movie, and a brave one — and not in a grandstanding, PC kind of way…”
Catholic News Service: “Looked at from the point of view of the need for love which everyone feels but few people can articulate, the plight of these guys is easy to understand while their way of dealing with it is likely to surprise and shock an audience.”
Salon review by Stephanie Zacharek
“Brokeback Mountain” takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.”
Film Stew by Anderson Jones
“If that’s true and it’s just a love story between two men, then gay people are halfway there. If two men f*cking in a tent and french kissing in Wyoming isn’t gay, then same-sex unions should pose no threat. Some women aren’t feeling it. I suspect that’s because women are not internal creatures.”
Movies Online Review by The Dude
“The film is not exploitation, and it is definitely not what people would expect. I expect there will be a lot of nervous, juvenile giggling by audiences who are uncomfortable watching a love story between two men. It’s their loss, as they’re missing out on a great story of love that can be applied to everyone, regardless of sexual preference.”
Blog The Bloody Red Carpet gives it a thorough once-over and has “disparate feelings” about the love affair:
“One, we just loved seeing the boys rustle up some cowbooty and swap spit, and two, we hated feeling that they were justified in hiding their love. We had to step back and realize that yes, indeed this was a period piece – sadly with some present day equivalents, but still and all not indicative of a modern gay lifestyle. Rural Wyoming was probably not a safe haven for the gays in the mid 1960s. And ultimately, this film isn’t about the right to self expression, it’s about the inability for some men to express themselves at all.”
From Black Table:
“The largely gay audience I was with at first seemed to expect (or hope) that Brokeback Mountain would parody the rugged machismo of the Western genre by exposing the buried homoeroticism underneath. (It was as if some patrons saw Brokeback as a means to get revenge on that most manly — and straight — of genres.) But Lee doesn’t see his homosexual lovers as revolutionaries or gay-right liberators or anything so grandiose, and he isn’t here to reinvent genre clichés. In truth, Brokeback Mountain returns to the same thematic terrain as The Ice Storm — the complete and utter unhappiness that is the modern world.”
From The Simon:
“In Brokeback Mountain, everyone suffers because of manly western myths, and no one suffers more acutely than Ennis. Yes, antihero Jack does meet one of the time-honored antihero ends at the hands of the vile side of civilization that simply cannot abide his “natural” identity. But our hero Ennis, our upstanding frontier man who stays close to the land but resists nature’s temptations, and who wants—but mostly fails—to do right by his adoring daughters has an arguably more painful fate (and Ledger makes you feel that pain).