damn good review

[kaigou]

Daniel Mendelsohn gets it.

The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual—that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people"—you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.

link via digsby's Hullabaloo.

Comments

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I went to see it here in Texas, and what I thought most amazing was that my friend & I were among the youngest in the crowd. It was a matinee performance, granted, but the majority of the audience were men and women (maybe one man to every three women), in groups, perhaps early forties to their sixties. And yes, there were a number of scenes where I had to blink furiously to be able to keep seeing the screen (which is saying something, for me); I heard a lot of sniffling around me from pretty much a third into the movie to the end.

Don't go see it unless you've got tissues, a good friend with you, and are emotionally up for some pretty intense stuff. Ang Lee pulls no punches, but that's one reason I admire him.

[musickal.livejournal.com]

Ang Lee pulls no punches, but that's one reason I admire him.

Same here. This movie was fantastic!