Brokeback Mountain (2005) - Ang Lee

From the director of Life of Pi comes one of the highest grossing films with LGBT protagonists of all time… How to Get Oscar Noms by Two Straight Guys!

Kidding aside, I fell ridiculously in love with this movie. Now I’ll discuss why it’s problematic.

I’m joking! *clears throat* In Wyoming in 1963, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) are hired to herd sheep for the summer. Jack’s job is to guard the sheep all night from coyotes in their remote sleeping area in the mountains, and Ennis’ job is to… take care of base camp? A bottle of booze later, their loneliness gets the better of them and after two seconds of cuddling they’re in crazy frantic love-making mode.

I knew they were gonna have sex the second Jack tried to help clean Ennis’ wound from falling of his horse. Nothing is more intimate than cleaning a wound!!

But sadly the summer of cuddling in denim ends, and Ennis marries Heath’s wife IRL the white Michelle Williams, Alma. They have two daughters together. Jack tries to come back the next summer, but the homophobic rancher knew about their little secret and refuses to hire him. So he moves to Texas and marries his Love and Other Drugs (2010) costar Anne Hathaway!

When Jack and Ennis reunite after four years, the chemistry is electric!

Don’t see how two closeted men in the 1960s would make out outside, but it’s cute.

They begin to have seasonal trips up to Brokeback Mountain for “fishing.” Alma knows better, and over the years her marriage to Ennis deteriorates, ending in divorce.

During one trip, Jack suggests they get a cute little ranch together and live happily ever after and it’s the actual cutest thing. But Ennis has some weird childhood memory of his town brutally murdering a gay man and he refuses. Stupid Wyoming.

The film is seeped in toxic masculinity and explores how it negatively impacts their relationship. Poor Jack just wants to be with Ennis forever and ever.

He’s the sensitive one. Ennis is more of a… wear denim and punch guys on the Fourth of July kind of guy.

And so they fight and fight over the course of a 20 year relationship.

Jack is so sensitive even with his creepy mustache.

I knew the movie had great performances by the main four actors, Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway, but what I didn’t know is the great tertiary characters that fill Brokeback Mountain’s awesome cast.

Kate Mara (House of Cards, The Martian) plays Ennis’ grown up daughter.

Linda Cardellini (Scooby Doo, Freaks and Geeks) plays Ennis’ girlfriend for a short period of time after his marriage.

Anna Faris (everything great) plays a random girl who is a friend of Jack’s wife. A gif of her in the movie doesn’t exist so here she is playing basketball in her underwear with Chris Evans.

Brokeback Mountain is a hugely successful mainstream film with a love story between two men. It won Best Picture and Best Director at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs, Critics’ Choice Awards, Producers Guild Awards, and Independent Spirit Awards. It lost Best Picture at the Academy Awards to Crash.

So much of the LGBT film we have today is in part due to Brokeback Mountain’s success. Despite it’s limiting view of same sex love, how it is shameful and private and ultimately doomed, it remains a true accomplishment of cinema for its time.

The Impossible (2012) - Juan Antonia Bayona

This is the trailer for the film “The Impossible” which is in theaters now. I actually just got back from it so I’m writing this while I’m in “the movie mood.” It’s a state of being where you can still feel the emotions that a movie you just saw created in you and you can’t stop thinking about it. It’s probably not a very objective way to write a film review, but here goes.

“The Impossible” is a disaster drama by director Juan Antonio Bayona (2007’s “The Orphanage”). The film was released in Spain in October 2012, but it wasn’t released in the United States until January 4th, 2013. With the Academy Award nominations being announced tomorrow, and my obsession with award show season growing by the minute (it’s actually becoming a problem), I am so excited for this film to do well both commercially and critically.

I had watched the trailer a few times and I was actually really excited for this movie. I think the combination of “true events” and “natural disasters” make for amazing and inspiring movies, except this one doesn’t even need the fake “Rose and Jack” storyline that “Titanic” had. It’s raw in the way “Les Misérables” is, and chilling in the way other disaster movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” are. Basically, the story follows the Bennet family during the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The family vacations in Thailand for Christmas and are very quickly separated by the massive disaster that devastated much of southeast Asia.

Because of my experience with the trailer, I knew the film had very little time to actually introduce the pre-tsunami Bennet family. There’s Maria and Henry, the parents, and sons Lucas, Thomas, and Simon. Henry is some kind of businessman in Japan, and Maria was a doctor before she had her kids and Henry got a job a Japan. The film makes the family clearly British, even though the family the film is about is Spanish. Bayona said that he wanted to make the film as universal as possible by not specifying the nationality of the Bennet family. So the family is British. Who doesn’t love British accents?

Because Taylor Swift and Harry Styles just broke up. Anyway, the story is extremely moving in a much more “in your face” way than Les Miz was. Maria (played by Naomi Watts) and the oldest son, Lucas, find each other early on, and they have to deal with serious injuries as well as the decision to go to a hospital instead of looking for the rest of their family. Meanwhile, Henry (Ewan McGregor) finds his two younger sons, and the three of them struggle with finding help or looking for their loved ones. But their plot is definitely secondary to the moving and powerful tale of the mother and her son. I saw the film with my mom, which was basically the equivalent of a mother and daughter seeing “Brave” together. But also throw in the fact that no teenage boy wants to cry in front of his mom.

The film deals with compassion, familial love, and human nature in a way that is surprisingly accessible to someone who has never dealt with anything near this scale. Along with that, it captures both the mass hysteria and the humanistic companionship that comes with surviving a tragedy like this one. There’s an especially touching scene where Lucas and his mother are wandering through the wreckage, and they hear a boy crying. Lucas argues that they need to get to higher ground, but Maria makes a case for why they have to save him. She posits “what if it were Thomas or Simon?” even though she knows it isn’t. They end up saving him and in the end we see the boy reunited with his family. Meanwhile I’m like

I can’t say it enough. The film is seriously powerful. Naomi Watts certainly deserved her Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama, and I think Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland (who played the oldest son Lucas) deserved one as well. There’s something about the way Tom Holland handles his character that is really moving, and I have a feeling we’ll be seeing him soon again.

There’s a scene where Ewan McGregor’s character is taken to a shelter after spending all night looking for his wife and son, and he is sitting around a group of survivors telling their stories. A man gives Henry a phone to call his kids’ grandfather, and he tells him that him and his two sons are alright, but that he can’t find his wife and son. He hangs up because he breaks down, and the group forces him to call the grandfather back (at a time where cellphone battery is more valuable than everyone’s material possessions combined) to tell them that he will keep looking for his loved ones. It’s emotional and heartbreaking and there wasn’t a person in the theater not sniffling.

I have to give the award for “most heartbreaking scene” to when Maria first emerges from the water. It takes her a moment to realize what has happened, and she then breaks down. The full force of the water rushing past her is nothing compared to the thought of her having lost her family. She cries out and every audience member understood what it was like to be confronted with being truly alone in such a devastating way. 

I highly recommend that anyone with a functioning heart goes to see this film. I know that awards season consists of the meteor shower of intense emotional films, where comedies are few and far between, but this movie is truly inspiring. I’ll admit it, by the end I looked like this.