Come Back, Come Back to Cold Brokeback Mountain

[dotinthesky]

Kevin and I just came back from seeing Brokeback Mountain. Wow... Wyoming looks so beautiful! The long scenes, with camera shots of the mountains, valleys and sky, are incredibly breathtaking. Added to the romance of the two sheep herders, it made for a very good movie. Michelle Williams stood out for me as the best performance: every scene with her was a lesson on controlled pain, suspicion, bitterness, anger, love, passion. It was so underplayed, yet really powerful. I was a little irritated that I couldn't understand much of the dialogue, because of the thick accents and because they seemed to speak without opening their mouths. But, in essence, there really was so little of the dialogue that was important. They could have made it a silent movie and the story's core would have remained the same.

Beforehand, we bought our tickets and sat in a nearby Cafe Nero. Our seats were by the window so we could drink our lattes and watch people on the street. I told Kevin we were on a date and he laughed. A few male couples walked in the cinema's direction and I wondered if they were friends or something more. Surprisingly, the majority of the people in the cinema were elderly couples. The old gentleman sitting beside me was breathing very loudly and I was worried he'd go into overdrive when the boys started kissing. Luckily, he was happily married to his wife (but could he, or any of the other men in the audience, have been able to fight off the lust during the scenes inside the tent?)

I'm not ready to go back to work tomorrow, and I no longer feel like reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. It's too bleak and depressing. There's not a single ounce of love in those pages, and I'm really not in the mood for contemplating the nihilistic ways of the world. I'd rather be on a mountain somewhere, tucked inside a tent and... reading a good romantic novel.

Comments

[tonight-we-fly.livejournal.com]

With a small irony, that was my first film of 2006 yesterday!

I was really concerned about the pace of the film early on, as it felt like you were three quarters of the way through the film about half an hour in (knowing that the film was going to last for more than two hours); but it really levelled out nicely as the film progressed.

I almost felt like laughing at my earlier interpretation when the last half hour felt so rushed, and a few essential moments were confined to being revealed in brief conversational catch-up. Rather like memories of being a student, having only written half of an essay but realising that you'd already used up 90% of the word-count.

The new Michael Winterbottom film A Cock And Bull Story will be released this month. I'd strongly recommend you to make that your second film of 2006. He can do nothing wrong...

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I felt that the pace of the film was very old-style hollywood (perhaps on purpose? to recreate that old-style sense of romance?) Some of the scenes reminded me of James Dean in "Giant", or "East of Eden". They were possibly used as sources of inspiration for this movie.

I'll check out A Cock and Bull Story. What's it about?

[tonight-we-fly.livejournal.com]

What's it about?

Michael Winterbottom has made the supposedly unfilmable book Tristram Shandy into a film.

It's also got one of the most appealling casts I've ever seen in a British film fora long time. Steve Coogan, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Ian Hart, Stephen Fry, Kelly MacDonald, Dylan Moran, Gillian Anderson... It looks like he's only missing Peter Mullan and Laura Fraser!

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I think Gillian Anderson is good. She was excellent in Bleak House. Don't know those other Brit actors... is Steve Coogan the one that got Courtney Love pregnant?