Author Topic: A new review of BBM!  (Read 2019 times)

Offline Shuggy

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A new review of BBM!
« on: April 07, 2008, 04:32:06 am »
This review was in today's [Monday April 7] Dominion Post, Wellington, New Zealand

Quote
Ledger's legacy adds to poignancy

RECENTLY, a friend — who flirts happily with being a conspiracy theorist, and who is therefore a very entertaining friend — expounded how she believes television programming has been (to rephrase her somewhat simplistically) taken over by the Dark Side. She wanted me to explain how it all works, and, to be frank, I couldn't.

I think who decides what goes on, and when, is probably both simple and complicated.

The whole world is being taken over by people who grew up wearing those jeans called bubblegummers and the rest of us just have to accept that, while, of course, continuing to rail against it.

As well as that, the wishes of advertisers play an infuriating role in what and who we see on our screens.

Sadly, the phrase "quality television" has a different meaning for them to many of us. Then there's that thing called "the charter" [which requires a proportion of NZ content in free-to-air broadcasting - Shuggy] which is used however the person using it wishes to use it. And lastly, and probably most importantly, a programme has to have been made for it to be shown.

Reality is a whole lot cheaper to make than drama, but it's more than that. I link the growing interest in memoir, for example, at perhaps the expense of the novel, to the growth in reality television.

We might well just be in a different stage of cultural development. We probably need at least another 10 years to have passed to fully be able to analyse what is happening to the stories we get these days.

Nevertheless, it's a damn shame that we don't get more quality drama on our screens and, as I've said before, I feel quite cheated when Sunday night's drama slot on TV One gets taken over by a film which has been made to be seen in a cinema, not in our sitting room.

But you can't mind too much when the Sunday slot is filled by a drama of the quality of the one we saw last night.

In spite of its coming laden with awards, I hadn't seen Brokeback Mountain, partly because when I read the story by Annie Proulx on which the film is based, it moved me so greatly that I sort of couldn't bear to have to go through it again.

Then, of course, Heath Ledger, one of the two stars of the movie, died under such very sad circumstances a few months ago.
While his death in itself was tragic — his being a young man full of promise, and also a father — what came out afterwards was worse.

It became almost irrelevant whether his death was suicide or accident: the subsequent picture drawn for us was that in spite of a golden career, and friends and family who loved him, here was a troubled, lonely, and anxious young man.

One reassuring aspect of the whole sad situation was the decided lack of public schadenfreude that one usually finds when the glamorous die young.

Certainly, knowing what was to become of Ledger gave Brokeback Mountain an added poignancy. That movie, however, was already drenched in that quality, evident from the moment we found ourselves alone with two cowboys and several hundred sheep in the raw Wyoming back country.

Larry McMurtry, a dab hand at the cowboy genre, had been brought in to turn a 50-page short story into a film that lasted well beyond two hours: that's nearly three minutes a page, which is a lot given that our heroes are the laconic sorts.

The camera had a lot of work to do, and it did it brilliantly, the bleakly beautiful landscape transforming into the one those paintings by Andrew Wyeth or our own Grahame Sydney show. And a certain strand of cowboy music, with its use of the wistful instrument that is the harmonica, is a gift to the makers of films in this genre.

The thing about this genre is that it is timeless. Once Jack and Ennis were out with the sheep, the century they were in disappeared.

Weren't our eyes, as New Zealanders, drawn to a flock of sheep as opposed to the cattle that cowboys are usually mustering?
Sheep gave Ennis and Jack the chance to show their gentler, nurturing side, of course, as they hefted them about the place.

I did like the ruthless little touch, though — Jack's jacket was sheepskin lined.


IT WAS a wonderful film, once one got accustomed to the slow pace of the opening half hour or
it The pace gave authenticity to n the relationship, both romantic and t sexual, as it grew between the men, U and their simultaneous denial and y acceptance of what was happening to them.

Effective use was made of communication by postcard — pre-text, the most laconic form of communication available, and used previously by Proulx in her novel of that name.

Best of all was what the film was actually "about": as if being different isn't hard enough, how is it for those who are completely going against stereotype?

What could be more manly than a cowboy?

Nothing showed this dichotomy better than the two sorts of behaviour Jack and Ennis participated in when together — the boyish clumsiness that accompanied their love-making (apparently Ledger nearly broke co-star Jake Gyllenhaal's nose while filming a kissing scene) and their other displays of physicality when they tumbled and fought like testosterone-driven young bucks.

The sadness of it all, though — including the loss suffered by the women they married, and their children. What a mucked-up world it can be.

Often, while watching, I was reminded of a man we knew slightly a few decades ago, a top rugby coach. His sexuality was a closely guarded secret.

It was a mutual friend who told us that this coach, utterly scrupulous in his dealings with young rugby players, and a prisoner of his personal situation, finally moved away from his own country (to somewhere they didn't play rugby) and drank himself to death.

I guess the rugby world is as hard a world as that of the cowboy when it comes to being gay.


Linda Burgess TELEVIEW

Authentic:
Brokeback Mountain's backdrop of sheep mustering gave Heath Ledger's character, Ennis, the chance to show his gentler, nurturing side.