We Can't Ignore the Subject Much Longer.... BROKEBACK MOUNTA

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joequinn
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We Can't Ignore the Subject Much Longer.... BROKEBACK MOUNTA

Post by joequinn » 01-26-2006 05:40 PM

Well, late this afternoon, just as soon as my schedule could allow it, I slipped into an afternoon matinee of Brokeback Mountain at my favorite local theater, you know, the one with the extra-comfy chairs. I refused to go this evening, not merely because I hate as a rule being among large crowds at the movies, but also because I did not want to hear the local youths acting macho in front of their girlfriends by shouting remarks like, “Yo, cowboys, if you’re gonna DO it, then DO it, for Chrissake!” I have a nasty temper, as many of you know, and I was afraid that I would make the obligatory “Shut up, asshole!” response to such a statement. Since I have enough trouble in my life as it is, why bother to look for more, huh?

But I did go to the movie in a rather apprehensive mood. You see, I knew that Larry McMurtry was both an Executive Producer and a scriptwriter for this film, and I know that I have to be REAL careful, emotionally, around Larry McMurtry. I am a tough old bird, as many of you know; I have no tolerance for maudlin sentimentality; and sometimes I respond quite violently to it. But on certain rare occasions, a movie grabs me by the throat, stabs me in the heart and turns me to jelly. It happens VERY rarely to me, but it DOES happen. It happened to me, real sharp and real sudden, when Cal Jarrett asked his wife Beth in ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980) why she cared so much what he wore to their son Buck’s funeral. It happened again when the SS doctor asked Sophie Zawistowski in SOPHIE’S CHOICE (1982) which one of her children she wanted to keep. And it happened a third time when Celie stood on the porch in THE COLOR PURPLE (1985) and saw her sister Nettie coming up the walkway to her house for the first time in many, many years. I am not aware that it has happened since --- but I do remember when it happened to me for the first time.

It was in 1971, when I watched the last scene of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, the scene where Timothy Bottoms sits across the table from a distraught Chloris Leachman and helplessly tries to comfort her. That scene is where I first lost it in a movie theater and where I first came across Larry McMurtry. I have never forgotten him since: in fact, I have read almost all of his books in the years since. I knew, for example, even before it was lucky enough to receive the best cinematic rendering a novel has ever had (with the possible exception of THE LORD OF THE RINGS), I knew immediately that LONESOME DOVE is one of the masterpieces of contemporary American literature. And I am bewitched by his characters, his style, his themes and his tone. For Larry McMurtry, you see, is one of THE supreme exemplars in modern American fiction of what Aldous Huxley once called “the whole truth,” the perspective which knows that life is far beyond laughter and tears. Life just IS, and the task of the artist is to represent that “isness” (that “quidditas,” as James Joyce would put it), beyond laughter and beyond tears.

I know that Anne Proulx wrote the short story upon which BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was based for THE NEW YORKER in 1997. Since the publishers are trying to release the collection of Western stories which “Brokeback Mountain” headlined, I cannot get an online copy of the short story at the present time and thus cannot know for sure where Proulx leaves off and where McMurtry takes over. But let me tell you, folks, McMurtry’s smell, his unmistakable smell, is all over BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. However gifted a writer Proulx may be --- and I have absolutely no doubt that she is an absolute genius with a pen --- she alone could not have made BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN into the movie that it is. I am absolutely sure of it…

So was I sobbing in the comfy theater seat while popping gumdrops into my mouth? (I like to eat gumdrops while I watch a movie in the theater!) No, folks, I was not. You see, I am so old now and have suffered such soul-shattering heartache in my own life that I can look, dry-eyed, at the most appalling tragedies on the screen. I can sympathize; I can understand; I can wish that life were something other than what it is; but I hold my ground, I look --- and I don’t turn away. I can’t fix it, folks, so I know that I gotta stand it. I do, and I did this afternoon. And if you want to know the real honest truth, the thought that rolled through my mind as I was driving home from the theater was that I DID stand it. That fact DOES bother me, folks, but it cannot be helped. For that too is part of “the whole truth” of things…

I completely fail to understand, from the gossip I read and I hear, what movie some other people saw. It certainly was not the movie that I saw. To hear some people tell it, Ennis and Jack are a pair of rhinestone cowboys dressed in their chaps (and only their chaps), snorting hotly on poppers before taking on the entire West in the last toilet stall in the men’s room at the honky tonk at the edge of town. Where did they get that idea? Yes, there is about 60 to 90 seconds of homosexual love-making in this film, but I was so caught up in the emotional agony of the whole situation that the thought that I was witnessing a homosexual act did not seriously cross my mind until after it was over. Indeed, that’s part of the shock of the story: the sensitive viewer discovers what happened as soon as --- and no sooner than --- Ennis and Jack discover it. Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans, folks, and gay sex on Brokeback Mountain is just one of those things. Nothing more, nothing less.

Nor do Ennis and Jack strike me as being haloed poster boys for the gay liberation movement. In the first place, I am not sure that you could call either man a stereotypical homosexual. Maybe, just maybe, Jack can be viewed as a gay man who is capable of a heterosexual response, but Ennis definitely strikes me as a true bisexual who ends up being asexual because sexuality is an agony that he cannot bear. And neither man is a saint. Neither one can fix it, but neither one can really stand it either. Yes, they function in a time and a place that makes it impossible for them to live happy and fulfilled lives, but they try to escape their fate by hiding behind conventional mainstream identities. One can sympathize with them in their intense fear and their desperate loneliness, but one DOES realize that they HAVE harmed other people in their frantic, and ultimately futile, attempts to hide from the pain. Much of the power of Michelle Williams’s performance (which is briefer than I thought it would be) rests upon our awareness of her as a genuinely and truly wronged woman, and the same can be said --- to a lesser extent --- for the character portrayed by Anne Hathaway. Ennis and Jack have our deep, deep sympathies, but we know --- and both Proulx and McMurtry want us to know --- that they are not the only ones who are suffering as a result of the raw deal that life has dealt them. The fundi complaint that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN celebrates adultery is absolutely off-the-wall. The adulteries which spread Ennis and Jack’s pain beyond themselves to other people --- much to their shame and unhappiness --- are but the inevitable and intensifying consequence of their failure, not merely to live their lives in the way that they want, but also to see what lives are right for them in the first place. For the basic theme of the movie --- at least, as I see it --- is that the worst thing that you can do in life is to fail to be true to your deepest self.

I have dwelt at length on the characters of Ennis and Jack because, obviously, they are the fulcrum around which the entire movie turns. And if the movie had NOTHING but that relationship to offer, then it would still be one of the most interesting films of the year. But there are so many other things to discuss about this film, far too many for me to include in this essay: perhaps some of them can come out in the discussion. But there is ONE point that I do want to stress --- the haunting, utterly haunting, beauty of the film. That too has the smell of Larry McMurtry all over it, but not even McMurtry could have pulled the trick off without the directorial genius of Ang Lee.

Call me a racist, but I simply cannot believe that any white director --- with the distinctly possible exception of Robert Redford --- could have directed this movie as well as Ang Lee has directed it. In the latter half of my life, as I come to realize that the great planetary civilization of the 21st century is going to have an Oriental --- NOT Occidental --- foundation, I have set aside my immense knowledge of and feeling for the great Western tradition and have sought, quite diligently, to think, to feel and to sense in the Oriental way. This has been VERY hard for me to do, and I doubt very much that I will ever get it right, at least in this lifetime. But when I saw those magnificent vistas of the great American (actually Canadian) West --- which call out so deeply to me --- when I saw them serve as the background to seminal events in a tragic love story, I could not help but think of Oriental scroll paintings, where mountains arise out of the mist through the magic of a few master brushstrokes and where people carry out the joys and sorrows of their lives even as those misty mountains look down upon them in the sympathetic, but serene and detached, knowledge of “the whole truth.” What white man --- with the distinctly possible exception of Robert Redford --- could physically structure a film in such a way? The ding-dongs who mumble that there are far too many sheep-herding scenes in the film completely fail to understand what Ang Lee is trying to do. Quite aside from building up the characterization of his two leads, he is showing how what happens between them is a function of the natural forces that surround them. He is showing that “love is a force of nature,” as the movie announcement proclaims --- and as Taoist philosophy has always known.

There is so much more that I can say about this film, surely the Best Picture of 2005, but I might as well pause here… What do you think? Have you seen it? If so, what did you think of it? If you haven’t seen it, do you plan to do so? And if not, why not? I think that we would really want to know…

And for you homophobes out there, I’m only telling you once to stay away: I have a tire iron of my own, you see, and I know how to use it. Real well…
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Post by dotcosm » 01-26-2006 10:00 PM

Joe, nice post, you write so well. I also saw it at a matinee for the very reasons you mentioned.

I can understand why you felt the way you did about the things you mentioned. I also am a fan of McMurtry's film work (or work turned into film).

SPOILER ALERT! DON'T LOOK DOWN








I do have one question, and I'm almost embarrassed to ask:

It was confusing to me how Jack died. It wasn't clear to me if that scene showing the beating was real or imagined. My inclination was to think he was beaten to death, but the possibility was that Ennis just imagined that based on what Jack had told him about his childhood experience.

It also wasn't clear to me what Jack's father's disposition was--I have read very little about the film, and haven't discussed it with anyone, but the one thing that I did read said that Jack's father was being a real jerk when Ennis came by. I didn't especially think so -- I thought in his own way that he had accepted his son; it sounded to me like the only thing he was bitter about was that Jack never did move back there with *whoever* to take care of the ranch. I didn't think the comment he made about "the other fella" was a dig to Ennis as much as him resenting that Jack just didn't actually move home.

I could be waaaay of base, of course.

As for the beauty of the film itself, yes, you expressed it very well.

I wasn't as impressed overall as I thought I would be. I had some issues with how the characters behaved (for example the kiss that the wife witnessed--I just couldn't imagine them risking what they did the way they did, no matter the emotion involved).

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Post by joequinn » 01-26-2006 10:51 PM

Dotcosm, here’s my take on what I saw… You must understand that I will need a couple of weeks to turn this film over in my subconscious mind and that my final judgment on it might end up being somewhat different than my present, raw impressions…

The desperate hunger of the kiss --- a kiss that, allegedly, came close to breaking Gyllenhaal’s nose from its intensity --- is a manifestation of Ennis’s desperate hunger to engage the other side of his emotions and his sexuality. You must remember that Ennis was engaged to Alma before he met Jack and before he was aware of what that vague disquiet deep in his soul might signify. Ennis knows, right when he is nothing more than a fading figure in Jack’s rear view mirror, that Jack has triggered something in him that Alma never has, and that realization is the reason why he crumbles up weeping in the alleyway. But despite his shocking self-discovery, his confusion, his terror and his sense of decency make him honor his commitment to Alma, and we see just how hard he tries to be a good husband and father for a couple of years. But that denied hunger within him is so intense that the moment that he gets Jack’s post card fishing-trip invitation, he spontaneously --- and compulsively --- begins to lie to his wife, and he even ends up sitting by the window, drinking himself silly and twitching convulsively, as he waits for Jack to show up. By this point in time Ennis is an explosive bundle of pent-up need, and that need begins to jet out of him so wildly when he sees Jack that discretion is the very last thing that he is thinking about when he grabs Jack in that bear-hug. And we have no reason to believe that Ennis EVER discovers that Alma has watched it all and suddenly realizes, not merely that she does not know her husband anywhere as well as she thought she did, but that she can never have had the central place in his heart that she blithely assumes that she had. A faultlessly played scene by both Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams…

Jack’s death is --- purposely and mercifully --- left sketchy at the end of the film. We know what Laureen tells Ennis when he calls her to find out what happened to Jack, but I for one believe that the violent scene that we glimpse momentarily in the meadow is exactly what happened to Jack, that Laureen knows that it is exactly what happened to Jack behind the appearance-saving story, and that she suspects Ennis can also figure it out for himself --- Ennis, the man whom she also has suspected for a long time is the one who has set her husband on the road to destruction. And the preceding action of the film makes it highly plausible that Jack HAS become increasingly reckless in his sexual behavior. His last meeting with Ennis (where he screams that he cannot be satisfied with “a high-altitude **** twice a year”), his frequent trips to Mexico (which arouse Ennis’s rage), his increased willingness to **** where he eats in Texas, and his ultimate desire to make his Texas co-worker fulfill the ranch fantasy upon which he had pinned his hopes for Ennis, all indicate a man at sea without a life preserver and getting ready to go under for the third time. And this scenario explains why I regard Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as being just as good as Heath Ledger’s and Ann Hathaway’s performance as being just as good as Michelle Williams’s. All four make the film, and all four deserve the highest praise for their acting excellence…

The scene at Jack’s home near the end of the film is one of Ledger’s best scenes. The three people at the table know exactly what has happened, although nobody is willing to talk about it honestly. The father knows that he is sitting with the man who helped push his son over the edge into the abyss. He is just as furious with Ennis for “corrupting” his son as he is furious with his son for being “corrupted” by him, and he knows that the best way to punish them both is to make sure that Jack’s ashes are buried in the family plot and not scattered on Brokeback Mountain. Ennis sits there helplessly as Jack’s last wish is denied, but in the end, Jack’s mother shows pity on him when she lets him view Jack’s room and then when she lets him take their shirts as a remembrance, with Ennis’s shirt neatly coathangered under Jack’s in a hidden place in Jack’s closet. I remember Ledger’s quick and short nod of gratitude when Jack’s mother produces a paper bag in which Ennis can place the shirts. Unforgettable performances are made of microscopic gestures like this one…

I hope that my take has turned out to be helpful to you. Of course, I need to brood over much of this in the weeks to come before I come to a final judgment. But that’s all that I have for you tonight…
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Post by dotcosm » 01-26-2006 11:16 PM

Thanks Joe. Those were wonderful descriptions of those scenes. I guess I should go see it again.

I agree mostly with your (very well described) interpretations on all 3 scenes, although I still have issues with the kiss scene that the wife saw. I just can't get over the carelessness which was out of character for Ennis, notwithstanding all of the obvious pent up emotion and passion.

I also might differ slightly on Jack's father's disposition. It seemed to me that his resentment lay fully with the fact that Jack never moved back to the ranch, and in fact he partially held Ennis responsible for that as well. I took that as the reason he denied the last request, not the gay issue.

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Post by joequinn » 01-26-2006 11:25 PM

I will think carefully about what you have said, Dotcosm. Let me tell you flatly, right at the start, that ART, by definition, is neither SCIENCE nor ETHICS. Science deals with truth; ethics deals with goodness; and neither one can afford to be slip-shod about what is and is not real and desireable. But Art deals with beauty, which the philosopher Maritain has called "the forgotten transcendental." Art has a wisdom that science and ethics may not have in the end --- precisely because it embraces SO MUCH. You may be right, DotCosm; I may be right --- but the odds are that the wise person will weigh carefully what we BOTH say before making up his or her mind. :D :D :D

If what you and I say to one another about this film stirs people to see it and to judge it --- not as a cultural phenomenon, but as a work of art --- then you and I have done it all! :D :D :D
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Post by dotcosm » 01-27-2006 12:16 AM

:)

Joe, the scene from Sophie's Choice is also at the top of my similar list as you described. Whenever I want to put myself emotionally into the worst hell I can imagine (and who doesn't??), I think of that scene.

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Post by joequinn » 01-27-2006 12:31 AM

Believe me, Dotcosm, the novel is ten times worse... <SIGH>

The older I get and the more that I appreciate television, movies and the Internet, the more that I appreciate literature. We live in a post-literate age, and you know very well that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is ---- a freak! Our whole culture is going right down the tubes with a vengeance, and there are times when only the literary classics can bring my mind back from this chaos to Truth, Beauty and Goodness, the bottom line of all bottom lines. <SIGH>

There were only fifteen people in the theater late this afternoon for the film, and all but two of them were women. I got the impression that many of these people were retired teachers. No inappropriate laughing or sobbing during the movie --- just intense attention! The film is #10 in popularity in my neck of the woods: HOSTEL, by comparison, is #7. <SIGH>

I can understand how many straight men can be DEEPLY threatened by this movie. This movie does not present gay people as an outside invading force ready to carry off "normal" people to the Land of Sexual Inversion. Even worse from a straight man's point of view, it presents real flesh-n-blood, "normal" people who, at the right time, in the right place, and under the right circumstances can do what they themselves would consider to be "unthinkable" otherwise and --- as Ennis grimly warns Jack --- get killed for it. Yes, that is very frightening; its pedestrian realism is very frightening.

Everything is falling apart now all around us, very quickly and massively too, and yet --- even now --- works of art are still being produced. That is a very consoling thought to me, Dotcosm...
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Post by dotcosm » 01-27-2006 12:38 AM

Joe, not to get too far offtrack, but I watched a film last night called "Rabbit Proof Fence" that I think you would appreciate. Have you heard of it, or seen it? Has nothing to do with anything else we've discussed in this thread, just a powerful film that was on my mind.

Oh now I realize where the connection was, it has a similar scene as that in Sophie's Choice (takes place in Australia during the (prolonged) period when aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their families as part of a eugenics program, to be raised by the church to be domestic help...grrrrrrrrrrrrrr)

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Post by joequinn » 01-27-2006 12:42 AM

No, Dotcosm, I have not seen the movie. It's just another one of the scores of gems that my video store, here in God's country, certainly does not carry and that I will get to see someday only when I am living on the West Coast... <SIGH>

You know, Dotcosm, I honestly did not think that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN would ever be shown commercially in Orange County, NY. As it is, the film is in only two theaters, both near the Hudson River. It will probably disappear soon because the audience for it quite clearly is not here. Which is why I moved fast to make sure that I could see it at all...
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Post by dotcosm » 01-27-2006 01:10 AM

joequinn wrote: No, Dotcosm, I have not seen the movie. It's just another one of the scores of gems that my video store, here in God's country, certainly does not carry and that I will get to see someday only when I am living on the West Coast... <SIGH>
Oh! You're moving out here?? :)

If you love films and cannot get them locally, you might try something like NetFlix.

Although, this film was on IFC (Indy Film Channel); I don't use NetFlix anymore because I already have more than enough with cable.

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Post by joequinn » 01-27-2006 01:15 AM

Yep, either to Portland or to Seattle, the Rose City or the Emerald City! And once I get there I will raise a slave rebellion against the Evil Empire --- I saw SPARTACUS too when I was a kid! And I won't let Dubya do to us what Charles Laughton did to Tony Curtis in that steambath scene which has subsequently disappeared from prints of the film!

Lemme tell ya, Dotcosm, it didn't start in Riverton, Wyoming. Not by a long short! :D :D :D :D
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Post by joequinn » 01-27-2006 12:13 PM

The cast of BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Ann Hathaway) will be the featured guests on OPRAH today.

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Post by Live365 » 01-27-2006 12:32 PM

joequinn wrote: If what you and I say to one another about this film stirs people to see it and to judge it --- not as a cultural phenomenon, but as a work of art --- then you and I have done it all!

You two have indeed!

Even though it kept cropping up everywhere I looked, I initially had no interest in this movie. Not because of *that* certainly, but because I thought it was about "cowboys". Much the same way I thought (the original classic) "Rocky" was about "boxing", until someone finally gave me a clue. Thank you for giving me a clue on this movie.

Unlike you guys, I have long since lost any ability I once had to tolerate movie theaters of any kind. But when I'm able to watch it in the calm and quiet privacy of my own living room, I absolutely intend to. Hell, as I have the day off, I'll even watch Oprah this afternoon!

Thank you for a very interesting conversation.
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Post by joequinn » 01-27-2006 12:55 PM

Live365, if you go to the website where I got the photo, then you will find the short story on which the movie is based. You'd better do it fast before it's gone, but don't let anybody know, OK? As another one of my favorite movies once put it, it's "off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush"! :D :D :D

http://www.outspokenclothing.com/brokeback.html
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Post by joequinn » 01-27-2006 08:15 PM

Well, I finally read “Brokeback Mountain,” Annie Proulx’s 1997 short story on which the movie was based. At first I thought that the story was too sketchy and that it should have been worked into a novel, even if only a short one. But by the time that I finished the story, I realized that Proulx’s judgment was correct. It should be exactly what it was, a short story, a haunting one indeed, and one just crying for cinematic treatment!

Having said that, I must add that Proulx’s short story --- which the movie follows faithfully a good 95% of the time --- needed the genius of Larry McMurtry to become the romantic Western epic of longing and loss that we rightly perceive it to be. There were a couple of very minor occasions where the movie fails to stress a point that the story clearly does. The most important of these --- at least from my point of view --- is Ennis’s surprise when he discovers his own shirt hanging neatly within Jack’s in the corner of Jack’s closet. Maybe I was not paying proper attention at some point in the movie, but I failed to realize that Ennis had lost the shirt and was looking for it in August of 1963 before he gave it up for lost. Ennis’s discovery that his shirt was never lost at all helps to explain the overwhelming impact that the shirts have on him when he discovers them in Jack’s closet.

In almost every single other way, however, the movie’s screenplay is a solid improvement on the short story. The women are shadowy characters in the short story, and one gets the distinct impression from it that Ennis married Alma only out of obligation while Jack married Lureen only for an easy life. The movie, of course, brings the wives much more fully into the action, thereby complexifying the relationships all around, and it emphasizes the point that I made in an earlier post, viz. that Lee and McMurtry want to stress how the situation disturbs the lives, not merely of the lovers themselves, but also those of their wives and children as well. This, I think, is a very significant alteration in the short story --- and one improves the movie immensely and that is typical of McMurtry’s work.

By the way, I wish to mention that I can certainly see NOW where Dotcosm got the view that Jack’s hard-hearted and selfish father was merely annoyed at the end that Jack had disappointed him by dying and thereby falling through on yet another promise to divorce his wife and to bring a friend up to the Twist ranch to work it with him. I certainly stand by my particular take on the relationship, based strictly on my viewing of the movie, but I must acknowledge the justice of Dotcosm’s take on it, a take that is clearly rooted in the short story. But here again the movie screenplay goes the extra mile. The seconds-long, but immensely moving, encounter in the film between Ennis and Jack’s mother over the shirts is completely missing in the short story: in the story one gets the impression that Ennis simply steals the shirts, whereas the film makes their gift a good woman’s sudden and compassionate insight into the desolate grief of her son’s friend. This moment of sheer magic is McMurtry, not Proulx, and it is shattering. But then so many of McMurtry’s finest characters have always been women, have they not?

When I got home this evening, I saw the interview of the cast with Oprah, who, frankly, sounded so obtuse. (I must add here is that this is the first time that I have ever watched Oprah’s show, so I do not know how she is in general as an interviewer.) Heath Ledger, who looks and sounds radically different in real life from Ennis Del Mar, seemed shy and clearly uncomfortable about the adulation that his performance has received, and his one main statement about the film during the interview was a quiet, but firm, condemnation of people whose prejudices get in the way of other people’s happiness. Jake Gyllenhall was extroverted and chatty, obviously an experienced talk-show guest, and both women (Michelle Williams and Ann Hathaway) seemed very proud to be associated with such a fine work of art. And yes, Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams appear to be very much in love.

On Tuesday, 31 January, the Academy Award nominations will be announced, and on Sunday, 5 March, the awards will be handed out. I rarely predict well, but I expect the film to win BEST PICTURE, BEST DIRECTOR, BEST SCREENPLAY FROM ANOTHER MEDIUM and, possibly, BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (Michelle Williams). But awards do not really matter at this point in time. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is cinematic history now, and nothing can change that fact. Absolutely nothing.

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