So, who has seen Brokeback Mountain? I confess to being one of those many who say, “Oh, I want to see that!” but hasn’t yet been to the theatre. But it’s not the homosexuality that keeps me away. It’s my 2.5 month old son. It’s hard to see a movie – I don’t have two hours to do any one task right now!
But of course you want that which you cannot have, and while I’ve never had much of a bladder to make it through a movie in one sitting, now that I can’t really get to a movie, I find that’s all I look at: movie listings. I’m so perverse. And I keep looking for movies that would blend my requirements – romance, happy ending – with Hubby’s requirements – must be good.
So yes, Brokeback Mountain is on my “I would see” list, mostly because of the forbidden romance, and there’s nothing that catches my attention like hidden, clandestine hotness between two characters.
Then, there’s Underworld: Revolution which I would not touch even if you paid me. I dragged Hubby to see the first installment, Underworld, and we renamed it ‘Underwear” because it was so almighty bad. Great special effects, but monstrously (har) lousy story. And, worst of all, there could have been a GREAT romance in there – vampire and werewolf? Hoo damn! But no, the two leads had as much chemistry as the wet sponges in my sink. There was one moment where it was Time for Them to Kiss and the whole theatre GROANED out loud at how forced and contrived it was.
I turned to Hubby and apologized in a normal voice, not even bothering to whisper, “I am SO SORRY I made you see this.” And this dude behind us nudged his wife and said, “See?!”
So yeah, the Revolution of Underwear is not on my radar.
Now, we do have digital cable and OnDemand, and there’s a movie in the listings that I am most curious about: anyone seen Playing By Heart? It’s from 1998 but it’s listed as a “recommendation” in our OnDemand menu. And hey – OnDemand means I can pause to go pee, change diapers, resettle the baby into sleep, or restart it when I fall asleep in the middle!
When the trailers for ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ first started playing on TV, all the teenage otaku who hang out at my house were really excited. Then we started reading reviews and articles. It was all down hill from there. My daughter decided that it lacked authenticity and she didn’t want to see it, not even for Ken Watanabe – who, according to Sweetpea and her high school buddies, is almost as hot as Viggo Mortensen.
My co-workers are into talking books; they trade them, discuss them, etc. ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ has been making its way around the building.
Comments include:
‘I just couldn’t get into the book till I saw the movie and now I know what all that stuff looks like, so I understand it better.’
‘Did you know that geishas weren’t prostitutes?’
At that point I put my head phones on. They’re listening to talking books; I’m listening to Warren Zevon. It’s all good.
I recommend the book, ‘Geisha: a life’ by Mineko Iwasaki. Honest-to-God geisha memoirs and extremely fascinating.
I go to movies alone often, when I want to really absorb the movie. I feel it’s an intensely personal experience sometimes, akin reading a book. I don’t want to be distracted or to feel concerned about whether someone else is enjoying him or herself. (I’m not antisocial—I do also go to movies with others, as a social occasion, but then the goal is spending time with someone I care for, and then, of course it’s different.) And I prefer seeing movies on a big screen, rather than at home. I’m home working & writing enough; I like to get out.
But then, I also prefer going to museums alone, since otherwise there is this distracting chatter, keeping me from paying attention to & thinking about what I am looking at. Also, everyone goes through exhibits at different speeds & is attracted to different things. I find it’s best to split up at the door & say, “I’ll meet you in an hour at the cafe. Okay?” I want to be able to indulge my own penchants & interests, without worrying whether they’re shared.
For me, doing such things alone is about something bigger, also. It’s about **not** being a woman who’s timid to go out into the world on her own—as some women in my family are, frankly. They have to be accompanied everywhere, and driven places, because they won’t drive beyond certain neighborhoods or never learned to drive & etc. I really wanted to reject that way of living. So it’s sort of a badge of honor to me.
“not even for Ken Watanabe – who, according to Sweetpea and her high school buddies, is almost as hot as Viggo Mortensen”
True story. Ken’s a hottie.
I read Brokeback Mountain and bawled for two hours. Seeing the movie in the theater might be out for me since I’d have to be physically carried out afterward.
But my friends have gone, some twice, and they love it. I was supposed to go with one this week, but I have a teenager down with chicken pox. Eck.
I’ve been trying to post a link to a hilarous write up about Brokeback from a Utah native, but it won’t let me. But you can go to http://www.tbogg.blogspot.com ,
go into January archives and find January 8th. It’s called No gay sex please, we’re Mormon. This is BBM from a male point of view and the last line cracked me up.
Oh yeah, there is an extremely hot picture of JG there. I even put it on my blog.
As I have said before, I’m as hetero as the next guy (providing of course that he’s, you know, also hetero) but I’m not that hetero…
Can’t stop laughing. And that is the hottest pic of JG I’ve ever seen. I loved him as Bubble Boy (yes, I LOVE that movie), but yaozah!
There’s a Geisha union?
The UFoG?
I learn something new at the Smart Bitches’ every day. Cool.
It is the hottest picture ever. Wait, except for the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Oh, man. (Fanning self here)
http://www.ew.com/ew/covergallery/0,12924,649136,00.html
Okay, last one. Here’s a link directly to that hot pic.
http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/145/1296/640/jake.jpg
Oh, oops. That was supposed to be just a link. Hmmm…
No fruit throwing please. Accident.
heh heh
I wish all accidents could be a fraction that drool-worthy.
Fuck it. I’m not even going to re-size the picture and repost the link. It’s way too pretty as it is.
I’m always behind on movies, and clueless as to what everyone’s talking about. Yet, for some reason during the holidays, I went ape-shit over movies. I saw King Kong and grossed out on the island scenes and wondered if the special effects dude paid off the producer to get more of his work in the movie. Some scenes just went on and on and oooon.
I saw Pride and Prejudice and loved it, but I’m easy.
Memoirs of a Geisha pissed me off, but not for any of the reasons sighted thus far. I bought the book, and like so many books I buy, I haven’t read it yet. So I can’t say how the movie translated the story – only can say that, as a writer, if I pick a movie to death while watching it, I hate it. This story was Cinderella in a kimono. The protagonist would have had the perfect life, if only all those mean, nasty people hadn’t dumped on her. She had absolutely zero growth as a human being – she merely managed to survive the heartless cruelty of others and in the end, won a prize for her ‘goodness’. Yeah. Whatever. I kept wanting her to stand up for herself and kick some ass, but it was not to be. I nodded off a few times – not kidding. We went to the 11 pm show.
I saw Brokeback Mountain and thought it was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It stayed with me for a very long time. Hell, it’s still with me. The acting was glorious, the story was phenomenal, the music broke my heart, and the scenery was beautiful. I’m taking my husband to see it tomorrow. He’ll like it, but won’t admit it. Well, maybe he will. Admit it, I mean.
Sarah, hire a baby sitter and go see this movie at the theatre. Or get your hsuband to watch Freebird and go without him. You won’t be sorry, I promise.
Movies like that always inspire me to write better books. Then I weep with grief when it never quite hits the mark. Still, inspiration is never a bad thing.
Not a fan of Brokeback Mountain, but then again, I haven’t been much a fan of Ang Lee’s works as he tends to give his films this contrived and artificial feel. It looks pretty, it feels pretty, and it is pretty, but it’s covered in plastic. Does this make sense?
I was sooo wrong about the husband liking Brokeback Mountain. He didn’t *dislike* it, but he was way less enthusiastic about it than me. His reasons struck me as very odd. Can’t say what, or risk spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, but suffice it to say, he didn’t think one of the characters was sympathetic. Thought he was an asshole. This after I cried because I felt SO sorry for him.
I’ve been dating/married to my husband for 26 years. You think you know someone….
Okay, my mother persuaded my 69-year-old father to attend a matinee. And he said he liked the movie very much. But he also gave an interpretation that left me scratching my head. (And I’ll bet, Stef, that it may be like your husband’s.) He didn’t seem to see the relationship as a meeting of equals. He felt one character was more passive, and was pressured into having the relationship, and also into prolonging it, when it would have ended earlier, if the other character hadn’t been so “pushy,” as he put it. He felt sorry for the character whom he felt had been “pushed.” Which left me taken aback; I hadn’t seen it that way at all. I’d seen it as very much about mutuality. (So did my mother, BTW.) Stef, does this sound familiar? I wonder if this says more about my relatively conservative father’s psyche trying to make peace with content in the movie that might have been troubling to him.
I think the buildup is a little slow, but that I forgot that later, during the great last 45 minutes of the movie. (Trying to think of what should have been cut & where.) I don’t feel quite as distanced from the material by Lee’s style, as I think Maili might. (If I understood her comment correctly.) I do feel this was filmed in a more classical, rather “cool” & objective narrative style, with not a lot of overt emotional cues. I felt I had to be more observant & to do more of the work than I sometimes have to do with movies about romantic relationships.
I still want to see it a second time, and maybe I won’t get thwarted from doing that tomorrow, as I have been for the past couple weekends. (But also, I really want to see “The Constant Gardener,” since I really was thrilled by that director’s other movie, “City of God,” and I understand that it’s also a romance. I can’t spell the director’s name. Mireilles? Anyway, he has a very different style from Ang Lee’s.)
I truly enjoyed ‘City of God’. 🙂
Re: Ang Lee’s films—IMO, there is a difference between feeling the depth of an emotional distance [or lack of] and feeling through a glass pane. His later films belong to the latter. [I loved one of his early works, Eat, Drink, Man Woman.]
To be honest, I have never really managed to pinpoint what is it about his newly-adopted style of filmmaking that leaves me indifferent to his ‘international’ films.
sherryfair, your father’s reaction is really interesting. I can see his point, although that hadn’t occurred to me. Like you, I didn’t see it that way. And it wasn’t what my husband didn’t like about it. He had a problem with how one of the characters treated his wife. He said he couldn’t find any sympathy for him because he thought he was selfish and uncaring of her feelings. It was an odd reaction to the movie, I thought.
I loved the subtle symbolism – particularly the shirt. I noticed some things the second time around that I hadn’t picked up on the first time I saw it.
Mike said he’s out on ‘art films’. He’d rather see romantic comedy, or twisty suspenses like The Usual Suspects, or The Game. Says he hates leaving a theatre feeling bad.
We are The Odd Couple.
“And it wasn’t what my husband didn’t like about it. He had a problem with how one of the characters treated his wife. He said he couldn’t find any sympathy for him because he thought he was selfish and uncaring of her feelings. It was an odd reaction to the movie, I thought.”
If it’s the same character I think it is, I also didn’t find him neaerly as sympathetically portrayed in the film as in the story. In fact, having watched the film first, I wasn’t at all sure that what the gay community had been touting this movie for was unequivocally delivered. If that was supposed to be a palpable sense of what it meant to be threatened and in fear of death because of who you love, then yes, I think the movie spoke strongly on that point. If it was supposed to be a “love” story though, about a love relationship, on that point I am undecided. I do think that the film portrayed the more tortured of the two characters as pretty jerky and as downright unsympathetic at times, and that great “I wish I could quit you” line ran so strongly for me at the end, because, by that point, I felt the relationship was based on an extremely powerful attraction, a profound lust, but that it was not exactly functional, and that the tortured character may not be really capable of love. Of course, the complexity of the relationship was a wonderful surprise for me, because the film did not, IMO, flinch away from the darker aspects of these imperfect characters. I kept asking myself what role gender played here, whether, if they were a man and a woman, for example, would we apply different rules vis a vis the adultery, for example. Someone commented to me that the movie reminded them of that older film, “Same Time Next Year,” which was sort of interesting, too. So on one level, I thought the film was compelling and rich and fascinating and wonderful, but on another, I wish one of those characters had found someone kinder and more willing to live the life he wanted, instead of the person he refers to almost as if he’s a drug by the end of the film.
One thing I’ve discovered, the more I hang out in the Romance community, is that I am far less bothered by love stories with adultery in them than many other readers are. I suspect that my tastes are rather unfashionably archaic and were molded more in the old, grand romantic tradition, where adultery is the inspiration for blues songs, opera, great thick Russian & French novels, long-running HBO series and probably about one-quarter of the movies that are up for Academy Awards. These narratives have given me so much pleasure & entertainment, over the years, that it’s very, very hard for me to imagine sending Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina for therapy, so that, in a series of sessions, they can learn to get over their unhealthy addictions and form more sensible attachments. Of course, in real life, I see adultery as entirely a different matter. Then, I’m not at all indulgent. But, in fictional narratives—whether it’s “Layla” or “The Postman Always Rings Twice” or “Brokeback Mountain” or a TV drama—I regard these love triangles as a situation with endlessly fascinating dramatic potential & I can’t get enough of them. But … I know, I know, adultery is like the fatal third-rail in Romance: If a book touches it—or rather, if your heroine touches it—sparks shoot up & there is instant incineration of the heroine’s spotless character & a corresponding reduction in sales figures.
And Stef, my mother’s convinced my father didn’t “get” the movie, either, and she feels he’s an alien for it. But 45 years of marriage have left her shrugging philosophically over his blind spots. You know that tone that mothers can use when they say: “Well, you know your father …”
And Stef, my mother’s convinced my father didn’t “get†the movie, either, and she feels he’s an alien for it. But 45 years of marriage have left her shrugging philosophically over his blind spots. You know that tone that mothers can use when they say: “Well, you know your father …â€
I think it’s clear your dad couldn’t wrap his head around what was clearly a mutual attraction between these two guys (in fact, I think you could argue that the “pushed” one felt just about everything more intensely). But, at least based on what she said here, Stef’s husband’s reaction strikes me as kind of progressive (with no homophobic overtones). In fact, I was glad Lee didn’t draw the wife in question as an unfeeling shrew who got what she deserved—that only added to my appreciation of the film.
As for adultery in Romance, I have no prohibition against it, but perhaps since some people I know have been stung by it in real life, I’m less able to chalk it up to dramatic effect, at least, not automatically. Like everyone else, I evaluate it based on context and execution. Is the author sensitive to all sides, how does she portray the other spouse, and how does she handle the outcome? But beyond the adultery aspect of BB, the film engendered many questions in me about how we might change our assumptions and judgments when gender roles are different.