BetterMost, Wyoming & Brokeback Mountain Forum
Brokeback Mountain: Our Community's Common Bond => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: Luvlylittlewing on March 16, 2010, 12:41:48 am
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Forgive me if this has been posted before, or if this section is a bad place to post this, but check out this link! Look familiar? :D
http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1693189145/ (http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1693189145/)
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Amazing! I feel like I've already seen that movie.
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Amazing! I feel like I've already seen that movie.
Yes, I know! Sweetgrass is being screened in SF, and I think I'll check it out. It should bring back some sweet memories!
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I stumbled on a review of this documentary in my newspaper this morning. It's about a ranching family who had a permit to graze sheep on federal land in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains in Montana. According to the review, we see two young hired hands take the sheep up into the mountains for the summer. One of the boys is "young and impatient." We even see the eviscerated carcass of a sheep that has been killed by some wild animal.
Sound familiar?
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That review was in my paper yesterday! It's a must-see, IMO!!
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I dropped by to see this movie the other day, but it was gone, replaced by some inane horror cult film. That show barely stuck an hour!!
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It came and went in Denver so fast...I went to see it but some inane comedy was showing instead. That show barely stuck an hour!
Aw I love it! Great Brokieism! I never had a chance to see Sweetgrass, although its run here was much longer. Looks like I'll have to catch it on cable or buy the DVD when it come out!
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;D Looks very surreal.
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbF_8e151ds[/youtube]
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This Friday I will get to see it on the big screen at the same art house theater I saw Brokeback Mountain in, back in 2006!
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:D
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ_PEA0Aad0[/youtube]
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this looks real interesting
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This Friday I will get to see it on the big screen at the same art house theater I saw Brokeback Mountain in, back in 2006!
Cool! I would love to know all about your experience! :)
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I was tickled when, some few minutes after having become fired up about the movie Sweetgrass, I learned that it would be opening in a few days at a venue within driving distance. The same venue where four and a half fuckin’ years ago I saw Brokeback Mountain for the first time.
When we arrived at the Grandin Theater (http://www.grandintheatre.com) for the 7:30 p.m. show, I learned also that it would be show in the same main theater that I had seen Brokeback, the old main stage as it were; all festooned from the days of Art Deco, waiting for someone to come paint a mural. The theater was not as crowed as it was that night in January 2006, but there were about 25 people there. Unfortunately this included one hyper active couple who sat ahead of us and felt the need to chatter about every damn thing they saw on the screen until I asked them to please stop. Those two twerps had raised my blood pressure to such a level as I have rarely experienced.
The previews included one for Focus Feature’s upcoming release, The Kids Are Alright, but that is another story.
It was hard going to see this film without some preconceived notion about it, having watched the videos on Youtube and being enticed by the scenery, so familiar to my movie going and real eyes. I knew that it was going to be no Brokeback Mountain, but in a very strange way there were undeniable parallels. The first of these is the lack of much dialogue, especially in the beginning.
And in the beginning was the sheep, alpha and omega throughout. Sheep feeding, sheep bleating, sheep defecating, sheep urinating, sheep running, sheep herding, the world was sheep, and the handlers only came about later. What you saw was the raw and tough real world that Jack and Ennis would have known.
Spoiler Alert: (been a while since I used those words) There is a definite fecundity of life factor. A female hand drags a bleating newborn lamb thru a barn, past dozens of sheep, its mother following, concerned. She is getting the new born to a pen where it will be safe from being trampled by the others. She wants the mother to go with it, but the mother gets spooked and retreats back into the heard of identical sheep and you look and wonder if she has disappeared for good, loosing her identity in the crowd.
Then there is a delivery, and I am interpreting this having only seen it once and not real certain I know of which I speak. The mother sheep is rolled over and the emerging lamb is visible. The handler handles it on out into the world and then you realize, the mother is dead. In the next scene you see maybe this sheep, maybe a different one, being fitted with this little jumper like suit and you hear the hand say to put it in with this one over here and maybe she will think it her child and nurse it, and it dawns on you this newborn had been dressed up in the hide of a dead lamb in a effort to fool a mother into adopting it.
And there is the drive, that amazing scene where hundreds of sheep trot down the main street of some small town; a few people come out to watch. Herded out into the wilderness by a family with walkie talkies. Young and old. Followed by the familiar curved wagon of Basque, I suppose, origin that has followed these sheep for years. Followed them until they reach the summer pasture and then it is just the two of them:
John, the old hand, with his horse, Jake, muttering softly over and over: “Watch your step, watch your step, Jake” Muttering, singing, shaped by years of isolation and deprivation. Happy as Loyal Blood with a meteorite.
The other one, the young one, I never did catch his name. The one with the cell phone. The one who came along a long time after people stopped going to the moon. Not a bad looking young man, he fills out his Georgia Sweat shirt and his jeans well, but he is untested. He is trying emulate something that wears a hat like the one he wears. He is not bad at what he does, but when you hear his transistor radio play a commercial for a sale coming up in August, you get the sense he has been out of his element a long time.
There is not romance between these two men, in fact I am left wondering if John has ever known affection for anything more than his horse, or a good night’s sleep. John maintains the camp, with a wood stove and a walkie talkie and a camera with a motor drive and a roll of 800 ASA film to document the gutted sheep, splayed open in an eerily familiar pose.
So much of it is eerily familiar. The sheep, moving as specks on a ridge, the men, dozing, the camp fire, whipped up by the wind showering sparks like those that landed on Jack and Ennis the last time the coupled. The wind, the rain, the predators. It was as if it were the same bolt of cloth, cut by a different dye. Annie Proulx and the film makers, they nailed it, they really nailed it.
Sweetgrass was shot over the period 2001-2003 in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area of Montana, just north of Yellowstone. The wilderness area was created in 1964 and those families that had grazed there before then were grandfathered in, allowed to continue doing so. One by one the dropped off until this 2003 trip, after which this last family, who had run their operation since 1900 decided to call it quits.
This movie is an amazing document of a way of life that is now all but gone. It is a testament we all owe these people to watch and see for ourselves what they did to survive, where that long wool coat hanging in the back of the closet, moth eaten, came from. Let the smell that reaches our nostrils each time we pass thru the rain with it on remind us. Yes, you are a pretty girl. A pretty girl this evening.
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I was travelling with my friends up in the Absarokas...which my friend Sherri called the Absarkies...up near the Wyoming/Montana border. We were taking a dusty shortcut from one scenic skyway to another, when we saw a cloud of dust ahead. And what did we spy emerging from the dust but...sheep!!
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858890-98f.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858890-98f)
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(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858893-fb7.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858893-fb7)
:-\ For some reason, Divshare only wants to show some of these photos, not all.
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(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858894-4ab.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858894-4ab)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858896-7e1.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858896-7e1)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858899-132.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858899-132)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858901-1f6.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858901-1f6)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858903-660.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858903-660)
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(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858905-26b.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858905-26b)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858909-36b.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858909-36b)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858906-2f5.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858906-2f5)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858908-a8c.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858908-a8c)
(http://www.divshare.com/img/midsize/7858891-2fd.jpg) (http://www.divshare.com/download/7858891-2fd)
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http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,45366.msg574812.html#new
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I saw this myself recently - it was wonderful. Beautiful and bittersweet. I loved the older herder - he was so gentle, peaceful and had so much experence. It was sad to see a way of life that has now all but disappeared, and the younger members of the family not be as interested in continuing the traditions, but understandable for such hard work.
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http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,45366.msg574812.html#new
Shall we merge these two threads? I will if there's no objection.
Topic now merged.
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Halfway through this film now. Kind of sickening and sad what sheepherders had/have to go through -- I had no idea. BBM makes it look so romantic and dreamy, but reality seems to be that it's just kind of incredibly lonely and gross and hard.
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No offense meant toward those who liked this movie, but between the one guy handling sheep shit with his bare hands, the other guy urinating in front of the camera, the dogs eating the dead sheep's entrails, and the young guy using every curse word in the book within the span of two minutes, I was not too entertained by it. I finally gave up at the 1:32 mark when the old guy punches the horse in the face. Didn't really care to see what happened after that point.
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Sweetgrass will be on the PBS show "POV" tonight! :)
http://www.pbs.org/pov/sweetgrass/photo_gallery_sweetgrass.php (http://www.pbs.org/pov/sweetgrass/photo_gallery_sweetgrass.php)
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I noticed the listing in TV Guide. I thought the title sounded familiar.
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Thanks for the heads up, I wouil like to see that again.
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Thanks for the heads up, I wouil like to see that again.
Hello, I've been meaning to thank you for your review of the film, but I never got around to it. Forgive me. :-* I want you to know that I did read it, and I found it very entertaining and helpful. I never had a chance to see Sweetgrass in the theaters, and I'm going to try and watch it on PBS. I'm looking forward to it!
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I watched an hour of the film last night. It came on our local PBS affiliate at 10:00 p.m., and I quit at 11:00 p.m. because I had to be up for work this morning.
I felt that what I saw was interesting, but I also feel it would have benefited from some voice-over narration, for example, some information behind the history of taking the flocks of sheep to the high pastures for the summer, who owned the sheep, some information on the guys who were tending the sheep, that sort of things. Without this, I found it a little boring at times.
Still, in the hour of the program that I watched, it was amazing how many sights looked familiar. They certainly "got it right" in Brokeback Mountain.
As I watched the one guy put up that pyramind tent, I found myself saying to myself, "Tent don't look right." ;D
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Thanks for the review, friend. People have compared it to the recent film Tree of Life in that way.
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Thanks for the review, friend. People have compared it to the recent film Tree of Life in that way.
I would have liked to have seen the whole movie. I just couldn't sit up that late on a "school night." :-\
In one scene, I felt sort of sorry for the ewe when the hand sort of yanks the lamb out of her vagina.
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I´ve had Sweergrass on my HD for months, it´s about time I got around to watch it ::)