posted on December 24, 2005 07:03:48 AM
"The movie will still be more of a success than Gigli was"
LD, when your right, your right.
Fen,
Lets see what happens this week. How many parents will take their kids to see Bareback? This is the season (week or two) for the big family movies.
It's probably a good movie but I doubt it will do that well. How many fruits are in the United States and how many times can they pay to see the movie.
Straight males aren't interested in gay humpers, doesn't make any difference if they're cowboys or indians. Is there a policeman and a construction worker in this movie? Do they sing?
posted on December 24, 2005 08:46:44 AMYou don't think that this could because caused by some type of bias do you?
He's just upset that there are no bears in the movie.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on December 24, 2005 08:48:47 AMIs there a policeman and a construction worker in this movie? Do they sing?
Why would that make you go see the movie if there were?
The two male leads do not sing but they do kiss and cuddle inside of a tent. I hope that mental picture stays in your mind this holiday weekend.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on December 24, 2005 08:57:38 AM
I don't think it's a family movie. I don't think it sould be a family movie. I don't believe it's going to move up in the ranks, I actually believe that it will fall a slot of two but that's because of Munich and Rumor Has it (I think that's coming out this week - they have been blitzing us with ads). But, I don't think that BBM is going to see a drop in their per theater average. It started out with great word from critics and reviewers and has followed it up with great word of mouth from people who have gone to see it. It's a slow growth film.
Keep in mind that this was never intended to be anything other than an art house film. The fact that it is playing in the same theaters as King Kong and Narnia and is holding it's own has already made it a booming success. I think that reason that articles like the one that Bear quoted are written is for no other reason that to reassure close minded. Homosexuality is much more widely accepted than many would like to believe these days (as the early success of this film shows) and I think these types of articles are nothing more than an attempt to sing to the choir even if the writer is terribly off key.
The story is about much more than two gay men and many people are comfortable enough in their sexuality that they don't have to try to buttonhole and mock it. You are right, there are a lot of men out there that are not going to see this movie but many are the same ones that would have scoffed at seeing the same plot played out between a man and a woman as well so I don't think it really makes a difference.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Never ask what sort if computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him? - Tom Clancy
posted on December 24, 2005 09:42:06 AM
"The two male leads do not sing but they do kiss and cuddle inside of a tent. I hope that mental picture stays in your mind this holiday weekend."
No thanks for the mental image, LD. Now I need a shot and a beer to get it out of my head.
Amen,
Reverend Colin http://www.reverendcolin.com
posted on December 24, 2005 12:49:53 PMYou are right, there are a lot of men out there that are not going to see this movie but many are the same ones that would have scoffed at seeing the same plot played out between a man and a woman as well so I don't think it really makes a difference.
I bet a lot of straight men would be lining up if the plot was played out by two lesbian cowgirls.
Absolute faith has been shown, consistently, to breed intolerance. And intolerance, history teaches us, again and again, begets violence.
---------------------------------- The duty of a patriot in this time and place is to ask questions, to demand answers, to understand where our nation is headed and why. If the answers you get do not suit you, or if they frighten you, or if they anger you, it is your duty as a patriot to dissent. Freedom does not begin with blind acceptance and with a flag. Freedom begins when you say 'No.'
posted on December 24, 2005 01:22:54 PM
For some reason, I thought it was a musical with the Village People. I know how much you all love Broadway.
Amen,
Reverend Colin http://www.reverendcolin.com
"Brokeback Mountain," the controversial "gay cowboy" film that has garnered seven Golden Globe nominations and breathless media reviews and has now emerged as a front-runner for the Oscars is a brilliant propaganda film, reportedly causing viewers to change the way they feel about homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage.
And how do the movie-makers pull off such a dazzling feat? Simple. They do it by raping the "Marlboro Man," that revered American symbol of rugged individualism and masculinity.
We all know the Marlboro Man. In "The Marketing of Evil," I show how the Philip Morris Company made marketing history by taking one of the most positive American images of all time the cowboy and attaching it to a negative, death-oriented product cigarettes.
Hit the pause button for a moment so this idea can completely sink in:
Cigarette marketers cleverly attached, in the public's mind, two utterly unrelated things:
1) the American cowboy, with all of the powerful feelings that image evokes in us, of independence, self-confidence, wide-open spaces and authentic Americanism, and
2) cigarettes, a stinky, health-destroying waste of money. This legendary advertising campaign targeting men succeeded in transforming market underdog Marlboro (up until then, sold as a women's cigarette with the slogan "Mild as May" into the world's best-selling cigarette.
It was all part of the modern marketing revolution, which meant that, instead of touting a product's actual benefits, marketers instead would psychologically manipulate the public by associating their product with the fulfillment of people's deepest, unconscious needs and desires. (Want to sell liquor? Put a seductive woman in the ad.)
Obviously, the marketers could never actually deliver on that promise but emotional manipulation sure is an effective way to sell a lot of products.
The "Marlboro Man" campaign launched 50 years ago.
Today, the powerful cowboy image is being used to sell us on another self-destructive product: homosexual sex and "gay" marriage.
'People's minds have been changed'
In "Brokeback Mountain," a film adaptation of the 1997 New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx, two 19-year-old ranchers named Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) have been hired to guard sheep on a rugged mountain in 1963 Wyoming. One night, the bitter cold drives Ennis into Jack's tent so they can keep each other warm.
As they lie there, suddenly and almost without warning, these two young men both of whom later insist they're not "queer" jump out of the sack and awkwardly and violently engage in anal sex.
Too embarrassed the next morning even to talk about it, Ennis and Jack dismiss their sexual encounter as a "one-shot deal" and part company at the end of the sheepherding job. Ennis marries his fiancιe Alma (Michelle Williams, Ledger's real-life girlfriend) while Jack marries female rodeo rider and prom queen Lureen (Anne Hathaway). Each family has children.
Four years later, Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he's coming to town for a visit. When the moment finally arrives, Ennis, barely able to contain his anticipation, rushes outside to meet Jack and the two men passionately embrace and kiss. Ennis's wife sadly witnesses everything through the screen door. (Since this is one of the film's sadder moments, I wasn't quite sure why the audience in the Portland, Oregon, theater burst out in laughter at Alma's heartbreaking realization.)
From that point on, over the next two decades Ennis and Jack take off together on periodic "fishing trips" at Brokeback Mountain, where no fishing actually takes place. During these adulterous homosexual affairs, Jack suggests they buy a ranch where the two can live happily ever after, presumably abandoning their wives and children. Ennis, however, is afraid, haunted by a traumatic childhood memory:
It seems his father had tried to inoculate him against homosexuality by taking him to see the brutalized, castrated, dead body of a rancher who had lived together with another man until murderous, bigoted neighbors committed the gruesome hate crime.
Eventually, life with Ennis becomes intolerable and Alma divorces him, while Lureen, absorbed with the family business, only suspects Jack's secret as they drift further and further apart. When, toward the end of the story, Jack dies in a freak accident (his wife tells Ennis a tire blew up while Jack was changing it, propelling the hubcap into his face and killing him), Ennis wonders whether Jack actually met the same brutal fate as the castrated "gay" cowboy of his youth.
Ultimately, Ennis ends up alone, with nothing, living in a small, secluded trailer, having lost both his family and his homosexual partner. He's comforted only by his most precious possession Jack's shirt which he pitifully embraces, almost in a slow dance, his aching loneliness masterfully projected into the audience via the film's artistry.
Yes, the talents of Hollywood's finest are brought together in a successful attempt at making us experience Ennis's suffering, supposedly inflicted by a homophobic society. Heath Ledger's performance is brilliant and devastating. We do indeed leave the theater feeling Ennis's pain. Mission accomplished.
Lost in all of this, however, are towering, life-and-death realities concerning sex and morality and the sanctity of marriage and the preciousness of children and the direction of our civilization itself. So please, you moviemakers, how about easing off that tight camera shot of Ennis's suffering and doing a slow pan over the massive wreckage all around him?
What about the years of silent anguish and loneliness Alma stoically endures for the sake of keeping her family together, or the terrible betrayal, suffering and tears of the children, bereft of a father? None of this merits more than a brief acknowledgment in "Brokeback Mountain."
What is important to the moviemakers, rather, is that the viewer be made to feel, and feel, and feel again as deeply as possible the exquisitely painful loneliness and heartache of the homosexual cowboys denied their truest happiness because of an ignorant and homophobic society.
Thus are the Judeo-Christian moral values that formed the very foundation and substance of Western culture for the past three millennia all swept away on a delicious tide of manufactured emotion. And believe me, skilled directors and actors can manufacture emotion by the truckload. It's what they do for a living.
Co-star Jake Gyllenhaal realized the movie's power to transform audiences in Toronto, where, according to Entertainment magazine, "he was approached by festival-goers proclaiming that their preconceptions had been shattered by the film's insistence on humanizing gay love."
"Brokeback Mountain," said Gyllenhaal, "is that pure place you take someone that's free of judgment.
These guys were scared.
What they feared was not each other but what was outside of each other. What was so sad was that it didn't have to happen like that." But then, said the article, Gyllenhaal jumped to his feel and exclaimed triumphantly: "I mean, people's minds have been changed. That's amazing."
Changed indeed. And that's the goal. Film is, by its very nature, highly propagandistic. That is, when you read a book, if you detect you're being lied to or manipulated, you can always stop reading, close the book momentarily and say, "Wait just a minute, there's something wrong here!" You can't do that in a film: You're bombarded with sound and images, all expertly crafted to give you selected information and to stimulate certain feelings, and you can't stop the barrage, not in a theater anyway. The visuals and sound and music and along with them, the underlying agenda of the filmmakers pursue you relentlessly, overwhelming your emotions and senses.
And when you leave the theater, unless you're really objective to what you've experienced, you've been changed even if just a little bit.
Want to know how easily your feelings can be manipulated? Let's take the smallest, most seemingly insignificant example and see. Sit down at a piano and play a song, any song even "Mary Had a Little Lamb" as long as it's in a major key. Then, play the same song, but change from a major to a minor key; just lower the third step of the scale by a half-step so the melody and harmony become minor. If you watch carefully, you'll note this one tiny change makes the minor-key version sound a bit melancholy and sad, while the normal, major-key version sounds bright and happy. (As the expression goes, "Major glad, minor sad."
Now take this principle and apply it to a feature film by expanding it a million-fold. A movie's musical score has one overriding function to make the viewer feel a certain way at strategic points during the story. And music is just one of dozens of factors and techniques used to influence audiences in the deepest way possible.
Everything from the script to the directing to the camera work to the acting, which in "Brokeback Mountain" is brilliant, serve the purpose of making the movie-makers' vision seem like reality even if it's twisted and perverse.
Do we understand that Hollywood could easily produce a similar movie to "Brokeback Mountain," only this time glorifying an incest relationship, or even an adult-child sexual relationship? Like "Brokeback," it too would serve to desensitize us to the immoral and destructive reality of what we're seeing, while fervently coaxing us into embracing that which we once rightly shunned.
All the filmmakers would need to do is skillfully make viewers experience the actors' powerful emotions of loneliness and emptiness juxtaposed with feelings of joy and fulfillment when the two "lovers" are together to bring us to a new level of "understanding" for any forbidden "love." Alongside this, of course, they would necessarily portray those opposed to this unorthodox "love" as Nazis or thugs.
Thus, many of us would let go of our "old-fashioned" biblical ideas of morality in light of what seems like the more imminent and undeniable reality of human love in all its diverse forms.
A "Brokeback"-type movie could easily be made, for instance, to portray a female school teacher's affair with a 14-year-old student as "a magnificent love story." And I'm not talking about the 2000 made-for-TV potboiler, "All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story," about the Seattle school teacher who seduced a sixth-grade student, went to prison for statutory rape, and later married the boy having had two children by him. I'm talking about a big-budget, big-name Hollywood masterpiece aimed at transforming America through film, just as Hitler relied on master filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make propaganda films to manipulate the emotions of an entire nation.
In place of "Brokeback Mountain's" scene with the castrated homosexual, the "adult-child love story" could have a similar scene in which, as a young girl, the future teacher's mother took her to see the body of a woman who had fallen in consensual "love" with a 14-year-old boy, only to be brutalized, her breasts cut off, and bludgeoned to death all by Nazi-like bigoted neighbors. (So that's why she couldn't be honest and open about her later relationship with her student.)
Inevitably, such a film would make us doubt our former condemnation of adult-child sex, or at least reduce our outrage as we gained more "understanding" and sympathy for the participants. It would cause us to ask the same question one reviewer asked after seeing "Brokeback Mountain": "In an age when the fight over gay marriage still rages, 'Brokeback Mountain,' the tale of two men who are scarcely even allowed to imagine being together, asks, through the very purity with which it touches us: When it comes to love, what sort of world do we really want?"
OK, I'll bite. Let's talk about love. The critics call "Brokeback Mountain" a "pure" and "magnificent" love story. Do we really want to call such an obsession especially one that destroys marriages and is based on constant lies, deceit and neglect of one's children "love"?
What if I were a heroin addict and told you I loved my drug dealer? What if I told you he always makes me feel good, and that I have a hard time living without him, and that I think about him all the time with warm feelings of anticipation and inner completion? And that whenever we get together, it's the only time I feel truly happy and at peace with myself?
posted on December 27, 2005 09:13:19 AM
Poor linda.....scared of the make believe Christmas Grinch and made to look like a fool...now tries again with the "homosexual grinch will get you"
mingotree/crowfarm - posted on December 20, 2005 "Ya but linda, I'M the nasty atheist, scummy LIBERAL and YOU are the enlightened "christian"?? How quickly you lower yourself to my level.
posted on December 27, 2005 09:49:22 AM
Nice article Linda, kind puts the movie in a new perspective. Propaganda.
I guess though most moves have some propaganda to them. When Emporer Hirohito came to the US the one person he wanted to see most was John Wayne. And John Wayne never served in the military.
Ron
"Better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."
posted on December 27, 2005 10:16:13 AM
::They do it by raping the "Marlboro Man," that revered American symbol of rugged individualism and masculinity.::
I thought the City of Los Angeles did that years ago when they tore down in infamous Marlboro man billboard that served as a landmark along the Sunset Strip.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Never ask what sort if computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him? - Tom Clancy
posted on December 27, 2005 12:28:04 PM
BTW Linda - you might want to edit out the complete synopsis of the movie. I'm sure there are others like myself that have plans to see the movie and like me, probably don't want to have it ruined when they read majoy plot lines they did not know were in there.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Never ask what sort if computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him? - Tom Clancy
posted on December 27, 2005 12:47:24 PM
Fenix are you advocating censor ship now?
Ron
"Better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."
posted on December 27, 2005 12:52:23 PM
I didn't read fenix's post as censorship....more of a request for consideration of others, common politeness....something linda sorely lacks.
mingotree/crowfarm - posted on December 20, 2005 "Ya but linda, I'M the nasty atheist, scummy LIBERAL and YOU are the enlightened "christian"?? How quickly you lower yourself to my level.
posted on December 27, 2005 01:04:48 PM
Linda posted an article which can be read a number of places, the whole story plot line has been bounced all over the internet. Unless you just refuse to read anything about it, nothing Linda posted was news.
And not reading about it might be good advice for Fenix to take, I don't think Linda did anything wrong. You just don't like her because she bests you time and again.
Ron
"Better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."
posted on December 27, 2005 01:17:55 PM
Ron - shove it. Anyone with basic common sence knows that when one prints detailed info on a complete plot line that it is common courtesy to warn people that they are reading spoilers. The fact that you are going to complain and try to defend a lack of simple common courtesy and a request that was not presented in rude or demeaning manner goes to show what a crock your holy than thou act is.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Never ask what sort if computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him? - Tom Clancy
[ edited by fenix03 on Dec 27, 2005 01:18 PM ]
[ edited by fenix03 on Dec 27, 2005 01:21 PM ]
posted on December 27, 2005 01:49:23 PM
So you are wanting censorship. Interesting.
Once again what Linda did was not wrong. And you can think as you wish. That movie has been out how long now? And you haven't seen yet, that is supposed be someone's problem besides your own?
How about taking some self responsibility, oh wait that may be to much to ask for.
Ron
"Better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."
posted on December 27, 2005 01:59:21 PM
No you twit. I was suggesting the use of common sense and courtesy. I thought you were all about that.
You came to this board screaming out for it and threatning to report anyone that did not show it towards you but when a request is made, of another person mind you - I didn't ask you to do anything - I asked Linda who is more than capable of speaking and acting for herself - for the same you think it's condoning censorship.
Tell you Mister Manners - why don't you go find another minimum wage employee to harrass and leave civil conversation to the adults.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Never ask what sort if computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him? - Tom Clancy
[ edited by fenix03 on Dec 27, 2005 02:00 PM ]
posted on December 27, 2005 02:05:44 PM
::How about taking some self responsibility, oh wait that may be to much to ask for.::
What is gods name does this have to do with personal responsibility? You know full well that the request I made was not unreasonable. the only reason you are playing this part is because I called you a pompous ass for harrassing people for your own personal pleasure.
If Bear, Colin, Near or replay had asked the same thing you would not have said a word but let someone that just called you to the carpet for childish behavior make a request of a fellow conservative and all of a sudden you are all full of piss and vinegar ready to duke it out.
Idiot!
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Never ask what sort if computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him? - Tom Clancy
posted on December 27, 2005 02:08:00 PM
In your own mind has she done something that you feel is discourteous. I am sure I am not alone in seeing that Linda's post was neither discouteous or rude, you have taken it that way because of your lack of understanding actual discussion on this movie.
Don't read the thread if you don't like it. You are the one crossing over to the rude and obnoxious, but that seems to be your way when you don't get your way.
"Brokeback Mountain," the controversial "gay cowboy" film that has garnered seven Golden Globe nominations and breathless media reviews and has now emerged as a front-runner for the Oscars is a brilliant propaganda film, reportedly causing viewers to change the way they feel about homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage.
And how do the movie-makers pull off such a dazzling feat? Simple. They do it by raping the "Marlboro Man," that revered American symbol of rugged individualism and masculinity.
We all know the Marlboro Man. In "The Marketing of Evil," I show how the Philip Morris Company made marketing history by taking one of the most positive American images of all time the cowboy and attaching it to a negative, death-oriented product cigarettes.
Hit the pause button for a moment so this idea can completely sink in:
Cigarette marketers cleverly attached, in the public's mind, two utterly unrelated things:
1) the American cowboy, with all of the powerful feelings that image evokes in us, of independence, self-confidence, wide-open spaces and authentic Americanism, and
2) cigarettes, a stinky, health-destroying waste of money. This legendary advertising campaign targeting men succeeded in transforming market underdog Marlboro (up until then, sold as a women's cigarette with the slogan "Mild as May" into the world's best-selling cigarette.
It was all part of the modern marketing revolution, which meant that, instead of touting a product's actual benefits, marketers instead would psychologically manipulate the public by associating their product with the fulfillment of people's deepest, unconscious needs and desires. (Want to sell liquor? Put a seductive woman in the ad.)
Obviously, the marketers could never actually deliver on that promise but emotional manipulation sure is an effective way to sell a lot of products.
The "Marlboro Man" campaign launched 50 years ago.
Today, the powerful cowboy image is being used to sell us on another self-destructive product: homosexual sex and "gay" marriage.
'People's minds have been changed'
In "Brokeback Mountain," a film adaptation of the 1997 New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx, two 19-year-old ranchers named Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) have been hired to guard sheep on a rugged mountain in 1963 Wyoming. One night, the bitter cold drives Ennis into Jack's tent so they can keep each other warm.
As they lie there, suddenly and almost without warning, these two young men both of whom later insist they're not "queer" jump out of the sack and awkwardly and violently engage in anal sex.
Too embarrassed the next morning even to talk about it, Ennis and Jack dismiss their sexual encounter as a "one-shot deal" and part company at the end of the sheepherding job. Ennis marries his fiancιe Alma (Michelle Williams, Ledger's real-life girlfriend) while Jack marries female rodeo rider and prom queen Lureen (Anne Hathaway). Each family has children.
Four years later, Jack sends Ennis a postcard saying he's coming to town for a visit. When the moment finally arrives, Ennis, barely able to contain his anticipation, rushes outside to meet Jack and the two men passionately embrace and kiss. Ennis's wife sadly witnesses everything through the screen door. (Since this is one of the film's sadder moments, I wasn't quite sure why the audience in the Portland, Oregon, theater burst out in laughter at Alma's heartbreaking realization.)
From that point on, over the next two decades Ennis and Jack take off together on periodic "fishing trips" at Brokeback Mountain, where no fishing actually takes place. During these adulterous homosexual affairs, Jack suggests they buy a ranch where the two can live happily ever after, presumably abandoning their wives and children. Ennis, however, is afraid, haunted by a traumatic childhood memory:
It seems his father had tried to inoculate him against homosexuality by taking him to see the brutalized, castrated, dead body of a rancher who had lived together with another man until murderous, bigoted neighbors committed the gruesome hate crime.
Eventually, life with Ennis becomes intolerable and Alma divorces him, while Lureen, absorbed with the family business, only suspects Jack's secret as they drift further and further apart. When, toward the end of the story, Jack dies in a freak accident (his wife tells Ennis a tire blew up while Jack was changing it, propelling the hubcap into his face and killing him), Ennis wonders whether Jack actually met the same brutal fate as the castrated "gay" cowboy of his youth.
Ultimately, Ennis ends up alone, with nothing, living in a small, secluded trailer, having lost both his family and his homosexual partner. He's comforted only by his most precious possession Jack's shirt which he pitifully embraces, almost in a slow dance, his aching loneliness masterfully projected into the audience via the film's artistry.
Yes, the talents of Hollywood's finest are brought together in a successful attempt at making us experience Ennis's suffering, supposedly inflicted by a homophobic society. Heath Ledger's performance is brilliant and devastating. We do indeed leave the theater feeling Ennis's pain. Mission accomplished.
Lost in all of this, however, are towering, life-and-death realities concerning sex and morality and the sanctity of marriage and the preciousness of children and the direction of our civilization itself. So please, you moviemakers, how about easing off that tight camera shot of Ennis's suffering and doing a slow pan over the massive wreckage all around him?
What about the years of silent anguish and loneliness Alma stoically endures for the sake of keeping her family together, or the terrible betrayal, suffering and tears of the children, bereft of a father? None of this merits more than a brief acknowledgment in "Brokeback Mountain."
What is important to the moviemakers, rather, is that the viewer be made to feel, and feel, and feel again as deeply as possible the exquisitely painful loneliness and heartache of the homosexual cowboys denied their truest happiness because of an ignorant and homophobic society.
Thus are the Judeo-Christian moral values that formed the very foundation and substance of Western culture for the past three millennia all swept away on a delicious tide of manufactured emotion. And believe me, skilled directors and actors can manufacture emotion by the truckload. It's what they do for a living.
Co-star Jake Gyllenhaal realized the movie's power to transform audiences in Toronto, where, according to Entertainment magazine, "he was approached by festival-goers proclaiming that their preconceptions had been shattered by the film's insistence on humanizing gay love."
"Brokeback Mountain," said Gyllenhaal, "is that pure place you take someone that's free of judgment.
These guys were scared.
What they feared was not each other but what was outside of each other. What was so sad was that it didn't have to happen like that." But then, said the article, Gyllenhaal jumped to his feel and exclaimed triumphantly: "I mean, people's minds have been changed. That's amazing."
Changed indeed. And that's the goal. Film is, by its very nature, highly propagandistic. That is, when you read a book, if you detect you're being lied to or manipulated, you can always stop reading, close the book momentarily and say, "Wait just a minute, there's something wrong here!" You can't do that in a film: You're bombarded with sound and images, all expertly crafted to give you selected information and to stimulate certain feelings, and you can't stop the barrage, not in a theater anyway. The visuals and sound and music and along with them, the underlying agenda of the filmmakers pursue you relentlessly, overwhelming your emotions and senses.
And when you leave the theater, unless you're really objective to what you've experienced, you've been changed even if just a little bit.
Want to know how easily your feelings can be manipulated? Let's take the smallest, most seemingly insignificant example and see. Sit down at a piano and play a song, any song even "Mary Had a Little Lamb" as long as it's in a major key. Then, play the same song, but change from a major to a minor key; just lower the third step of the scale by a half-step so the melody and harmony become minor. If you watch carefully, you'll note this one tiny change makes the minor-key version sound a bit melancholy and sad, while the normal, major-key version sounds bright and happy. (As the expression goes, "Major glad, minor sad."
Now take this principle and apply it to a feature film by expanding it a million-fold. A movie's musical score has one overriding function to make the viewer feel a certain way at strategic points during the story. And music is just one of dozens of factors and techniques used to influence audiences in the deepest way possible.
Everything from the script to the directing to the camera work to the acting, which in "Brokeback Mountain" is brilliant, serve the purpose of making the movie-makers' vision seem like reality even if it's twisted and perverse.
Do we understand that Hollywood could easily produce a similar movie to "Brokeback Mountain," only this time glorifying an incest relationship, or even an adult-child sexual relationship? Like "Brokeback," it too would serve to desensitize us to the immoral and destructive reality of what we're seeing, while fervently coaxing us into embracing that which we once rightly shunned.
All the filmmakers would need to do is skillfully make viewers experience the actors' powerful emotions of loneliness and emptiness juxtaposed with feelings of joy and fulfillment when the two "lovers" are together to bring us to a new level of "understanding" for any forbidden "love." Alongside this, of course, they would necessarily portray those opposed to this unorthodox "love" as Nazis or thugs.
Thus, many of us would let go of our "old-fashioned" biblical ideas of morality in light of what seems like the more imminent and undeniable reality of human love in all its diverse forms.
A "Brokeback"-type movie could easily be made, for instance, to portray a female school teacher's affair with a 14-year-old student as "a magnificent love story." And I'm not talking about the 2000 made-for-TV potboiler, "All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story," about the Seattle school teacher who seduced a sixth-grade student, went to prison for statutory rape, and later married the boy having had two children by him. I'm talking about a big-budget, big-name Hollywood masterpiece aimed at transforming America through film, just as Hitler relied on master filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make propaganda films to manipulate the emotions of an entire nation.
In place of "Brokeback Mountain's" scene with the castrated homosexual, the "adult-child love story" could have a similar scene in which, as a young girl, the future teacher's mother took her to see the body of a woman who had fallen in consensual "love" with a 14-year-old boy, only to be brutalized, her breasts cut off, and bludgeoned to death all by Nazi-like bigoted neighbors. (So that's why she couldn't be honest and open about her later relationship with her student.)
Inevitably, such a film would make us doubt our former condemnation of adult-child sex, or at least reduce our outrage as we gained more "understanding" and sympathy for the participants. It would cause us to ask the same question one reviewer asked after seeing "Brokeback Mountain": "In an age when the fight over gay marriage still rages, 'Brokeback Mountain,' the tale of two men who are scarcely even allowed to imagine being together, asks, through the very purity with which it touches us: When it comes to love, what sort of world do we really want?"
OK, I'll bite. Let's talk about love. The critics call "Brokeback Mountain" a "pure" and "magnificent" love story. Do we really want to call such an obsession especially one that destroys marriages and is based on constant lies, deceit and neglect of one's children "love"?
What if I were a heroin addict and told you I loved my drug dealer? What if I told you he always makes me feel good, and that I have a hard time living without him, and that I think about him all the time with warm feelings of anticipation and inner completion? And that whenever we get together, it's the only time I feel truly happy and at peace with myself?
continued on: http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48076
Linda can edit all she wants. I won't be.
Funny as you claim to be against censorship but are one the only ones wanting it here.
Wanted to add, it is funny they would say something about Portland OR, measure 36 is alive and well here. Also the movie is only showing in one theater.
Ron
"Better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."
posted on December 27, 2005 02:11:55 PM
Call me to the carpet? LOL
I did something I felt good about and nothing you or anyone else would of said to change that.
But then again pizzing and moaning about things is all the left is really about.
Ron
"Better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."
posted on December 27, 2005 02:29:32 PM
I realize that Christmas is supposed to bring out the child in all of us but you are aware that it is metaphorical right?
~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~
Never ask what sort if computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If he's not, why embarrass him? - Tom Clancy
posted on December 27, 2005 02:33:57 PM
In your case I am beginning to wonder. But then again maybe throwing tantrums are your style, when you don't get your way?
Ron
"Better to be hated for who you are than loved for who you are not."
I hope that mental picture stays in your mind this holiday weekend.
