Saturday, April 08, 2006
Day 2
4/7/2006- Three notes before today’s interactions. Yesterday, Thursday April 6th, I picked up a stack of Rolling Stone that my neighbor was offering to anyone who wanted them on our street or if there was no one interested in the magazines then he was going to have them picked up by the recycling company. I took them. There just happened to be an interview with Heath Ledger in one. I picked up the whole stack and did not notice the covers until I brought them home. I will commit on the interview when I came to that magazine chronologically in my pile of back issues. As a member of the Western Literature Association I receive e-mails from colleagues about subjects relating to the literary West and the West’s portrayal in popular culture, if Brokeback Mountain is mentioned it will be catalogued in this review. Also, many of the magazines that I have around the house feature full-page reviews of a film the week it is released (or near its date of release), both on home video and in the theatre, as well as capsule reviews for the remainder of the films run in a theatre. Both the full-page review and the capsule will be included in this account but subsequent runnings of the capsule will not be included. Neither will repeat viewings of a television commercial or a print ad.
There was a small capsule review of Brokeback in the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Friday supplement entitled, Weekend. It provides information about new restaurants, art happenings, concerts and other events around town as well as new movies that just came out in theatres or at the video store. The review was taken from the Associated Press wire and bears much resemblance to the review from this week’s CinWeekly. It is just a sentence that boils the film down to being the genesis for the rash of gay cowboy jokes across pop culture over the last couple months. http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20060407/ENT02/604070302/1027/rssenq0501
Started and finished reading the Dec. 12th, 2005 issue of the New Yorker. In that issue there is a full-page ad, featuring the Brokeback (at places in this account I am just going to refer to the movie just by its first word) movie poster and sponsored by Bombay Sapphire gin. The film is featured in the gin company’s Inspired Visions series outlining the critical acclaim and preopening buzz of the film. The ad tries to combine the glamour of gin cocktails with the longing and suppression that the ad agency sees at the heart of the film.
Through after some talk Susan and I decided that it was most likely planned I did find it a little overkill that this ad for the film would appear in the same New Yorker issue that the movie’s review was in. After reading Anthony Lane’s brilliantly written review of Brokeback I am struck by his assertion at the end, that Brokeback Mountain is not a gay Western because it is neither gay nor a Western. This is interesting because it seems to contradict Mr. Lane’s implication that the subtext of all Westerns is homosexual. He calls to mind the image of the closeted gay icon Montgomery Cliff in the classic Red River but then says that the context of the homosexual relationship in Brokeback goes not make it “gay enough” (my phrase).
There was a small capsule review of Brokeback in the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Friday supplement entitled, Weekend. It provides information about new restaurants, art happenings, concerts and other events around town as well as new movies that just came out in theatres or at the video store. The review was taken from the Associated Press wire and bears much resemblance to the review from this week’s CinWeekly. It is just a sentence that boils the film down to being the genesis for the rash of gay cowboy jokes across pop culture over the last couple months. http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/AB/20060407/ENT02/604070302/1027/rssenq0501
Started and finished reading the Dec. 12th, 2005 issue of the New Yorker. In that issue there is a full-page ad, featuring the Brokeback (at places in this account I am just going to refer to the movie just by its first word) movie poster and sponsored by Bombay Sapphire gin. The film is featured in the gin company’s Inspired Visions series outlining the critical acclaim and preopening buzz of the film. The ad tries to combine the glamour of gin cocktails with the longing and suppression that the ad agency sees at the heart of the film.
Through after some talk Susan and I decided that it was most likely planned I did find it a little overkill that this ad for the film would appear in the same New Yorker issue that the movie’s review was in. After reading Anthony Lane’s brilliantly written review of Brokeback I am struck by his assertion at the end, that Brokeback Mountain is not a gay Western because it is neither gay nor a Western. This is interesting because it seems to contradict Mr. Lane’s implication that the subtext of all Westerns is homosexual. He calls to mind the image of the closeted gay icon Montgomery Cliff in the classic Red River but then says that the context of the homosexual relationship in Brokeback goes not make it “gay enough” (my phrase).
# posted by J Gall. @ 1:42 PM 
