Author Topic: Four (now FOURTEEN!) Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?  (Read 183698 times)

Offline southendmd

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #30 on: December 09, 2009, 11:17:18 am »



HAPPY EFFIN' ANNIVERSARY, BUDS!
You said it, Meryl!  Aren't we glad we took the plunge?

Offline Monika

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #31 on: December 09, 2009, 11:27:17 am »



HAPPY EFFIN' ANNIVERSARY, BUDS!
happy effin anniversary, yourself Meryl!

Offline Penthesilea

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #32 on: December 09, 2009, 12:01:26 pm »
Happy Anniversary to all my BetterMost buds!

It's not my personal anniversary yet, but still ... four years - damn! How's that possible - four! effin years :o. Where has the time gone? To think that I know so many of you for four years now boggles my mind.


Four years proud Brokie!

Marge_Innavera

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #33 on: December 09, 2009, 12:43:47 pm »
First saw it in mid-January, when it was in limited release in the KC area.  That meant I had to drive all the way over to Cupcakeland*  to see a matinee, which was a sold-out screening.  About three weeks later it went into wide release in the metro area and I saw it again in a multi-plex closer to home.

One of these days, I'll get to view it in one of those old-time movie palaces, like the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.


* suburban KC on the Kansas side -- a horror show of solid pavement, office parks, shopping malls, obscenely overpriced condos, and Republicans.

Offline CellarDweller

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #34 on: December 09, 2009, 03:00:12 pm »


Tell him when l come up to him and ask to play the record, l'm gonna say: ''Voulez-vous jouer ce disque?''
'Voulez-vous, will you kiss my dick?'
Will you play my record? One-track mind!

Offline Berit

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #35 on: December 09, 2009, 04:37:21 pm »

It won't be four effin years for me until Jan 26, next year. It was on that date in 2006, the Australia Day public holiday, that Brokeback Mountain had it's first public screening in Australia. I saw it  at the morning session with my friend George at the multiplex in the Broadway Shopping Centre (pic above) in Sydney, not far from where I live. We went to the morning session because usually few people go to that session. Not so on this occasion. The place was packed. I'd read a few reviews in the media leading up to the release date, most of which played up the gay cowboy thing. I wasn't expecting a lot. I'd never heard of Jake, nor Annie Proulx for that matter. I'd heard of Heath as a minor actor in low-budget Aussie soap operas on TV. The only person I knew was Ang Lee from Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Though the cinema was packed, it was received very well. Not a peep from the audience throughout and nearly everyone remained, hushed, for the credits at the end. It had a four month run in Sydney and I saw it about twenty times at the cinema, some of them with George. He loved the movie but did not become a Brokie. My reaction following the first viewing could be likened to shock. I couldn't stop thinking about it and often found myself in tears. I had not read the short story prior to seeing the film. I sought out info online and found IMDB, which I didn't know about until then. From IMDB, thanks to the Trolls, who drove me away, I found my way here to BetterMost in Nov 2006. I had never belonged to such a site before and didn't know how they worked. I had never "chatted" with others on line before. It's not exaggerating to say Brokeback Mountain changed my life.
Amazing.....Kerry saw it in Sydney and I saw it in PiteƄ, Northen Sweden......and the story is the same.....This movie really changed my life.....
Ennis.....always Ennis.....

Offline Kerry

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #36 on: December 09, 2009, 09:15:20 pm »
Amazing.....Kerry saw it in Sydney and I saw it in PiteƄ, Northen Sweden......and the story is the same.....This movie really changed my life.....

 :-* {{{ Berit }}}  :-*
γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Offline Meryl

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #37 on: December 10, 2009, 11:51:05 am »
Well, it's not often you know exactly where you were at a given moment four years in the past.  I was in my seat at the Chelsea Cinema watching the boys on the mountain for the very first time.

I'm glad to be with you all four years out and counting.  Here's to our boys and to good friends!  :-*



Ich bin ein Brokie...

Offline Penthesilea

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #38 on: December 10, 2009, 02:49:59 pm »
Well, it's not often you know exactly where you were at a given moment four years in the past.  I was in my seat at the Chelsea Cinema watching the boys on the mountain for the very first time.

I'm glad to be with you all four years out and counting.  Here's to our boys and to good friends!  :-*


Aww, that's sweet :).
Cheers right back atcha! :-*

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Re: Four Effin' Years! How will you celebrate?
« Reply #39 on: December 12, 2009, 03:43:13 pm »


I had been reading everything I could about the movie on line (on the IMDB board especially), and I was counting down the days until the (very) limited December release. As per usual, I was working crazily on a major project, and I had been working past midnight every night, so I figured it would be easy to go to the theater Thursday night (December 08) to see the Midnight showing on the Upper West Side. It was--

Well, you know.

Anyway, the first thing I did the next morning (before going back to my project) was read the following review.

And I said--Yes. That's it.

It still is one of the best reviews I've ever read.



http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/12/09/movies/09brok.html

Movie Review
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
NYT Critics' Pick


December 9, 2005
Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love



Jake Gyllenhaal, left, and Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain."

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: December 9, 2005


THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.

One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.

The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.

The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting."

That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.

This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.

In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from "Red River" to "Midnight Cowboy" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.

Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire.

So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider.

When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business.

Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery. The reunited lovers rush to a motel.

So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame.

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.

The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self.

"Brokeback Mountain" is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in "Brokeback" territory. Another recent film, "Jarhead" (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.

Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.

Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."

One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.



"Brokeback Mountain" is rated R. It has mild violence and sexual situations.

Brokeback Mountain

Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
"Tu doives entendre je t'aime."
(and you know who I am...)


Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne)
and Pee-wee in the 1990 episode
"Camping Out"