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.

Fall 2014 #1: Kill Bill Volume 1 - Quentin Tarantino

Alright so I think it’s safe to say I failed miserably at my Summer 2014 Movie Bucketlist reviews. While I saw all 16 movies, I reviewed the first 3 and never made time to review the rest.

Now I have a new rule for my Fall 2014 Movie Bucketlist, and it’s that I can’t watch the next movie on the list until I review the previous one. So my first film on the list was Kill Bill Volume 1. 

This is my fourth Tarantino film, since I saw Django Unchained two winters ago, Pulp Fiction for my first Movie Bucketlist from January 2014, and Inglorious Basterds somewhere in between. After Pulp Fiction, I would say this is probably the one that comes up most in conversation. I always knew it as “That movie with Uma Thurman in the yellow suit where whenever she sees an enemy a really high pitched tone plays and the screen turns red.” I can probably thank Date Movie (2006) for that. 

But in all honesty, the movie really impressed me. I loved how it revived old spaghetti western motifs, and fused them with Japanese samurai movies to create this imaginative tale about kick ass women. I think anyone who has something bad to say about this movie, especially women, should probably be paying less attention to the violence and more attention to how a white male director has portrayed women as totally in control of their own lives and as complete badasses who don’t take shit from anyone. I mean… Deadly Viper Assassin Squad? DVAS? DIVAS!?

The film follows the Bride (Uma Thurman) after she wakes up from a four year coma caused by her team of elite female assassins betraying her at her wedding and killing all of her guests as well as her unborn child. She swears revenge on the women (and their leader, Bill), who wronged her and who were dumb enough not to kill her.

What the film does that makes it so impressive is that it juggles tons of fourth-wall breaking illusions, such as physically impossible amounts of blood and gravity-defying fight scenes, with the simplicity of a revenge story. Not to mention slightly off-chronological storytelling, which reiterates the idea that this is a movie and not real life.

Not to mention, the film includes a five minute short animated film to explain a specific character’s (played by Lucy Liu) backstory.

For a film that features more violence than almost any film I’ve ever seen, it’s also an incredibly well-written, well-acted piece of feminist cinema that should be looked at as pretty damn awesome. I said it. The F-word.

The film is split into two volumes because Tarantino filmed for 155 days and cut the film down to 4 hours before deciding it had to be released as two separate films. I will be watching the Volume 2 shortly (even though it’s not on my Fall Bucketlist). Currently Kill Bill Volume 1 is #166 on the IMDb Top 250.

Day 6: January 8th, 2014: My Fair Lady (1964) - George Cukor

A lot of firsts this week! Last night: my first Audrey Hepburn movie. I can’t believe I’ve lived twenty years without exposing myself to this great actress. Actually now that I think about it, I saw the first five minutes of Roman Holiday a few months ago… too much narration.

So apparently My Fair Lady is just George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion but with singing? Oh my god I just looked it up and Pygmalion was the Greek guy who fell in love with a statue he made. I’m an idiot. Everything makes sense. Okay. So My Fair Lady is about a pompous, self-righteous, misogynistic elocution professor named Henry Higgins who takes a bet to turn a flower girl from the slums and pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball. That girl turns out to be Eliza Doolittle, played by Audrey Hepburn.

In the beginning, Eliza is incoherent in her Cockney accent. Like literally, I wish there were subtitles. But Higgins makes a point of treating her like garbage, and the film continues its entire three hours with him seeing her as nothing more than what he calls “baggage." 

Yes. He is both of those things. But anyway, the movie is awesome because it’s just one of those classic movie musicals that makes you feel almost as if it’s a live show. The scene where Higgins tests Doolittle’s newly learned upper class accent out at the race tracks is probably the best.

But her process is not without its obstacles. Higgins is rude, aggressive, and stubborn. He works her almost to death in the beginning with hardly any results.

And un-ladylike Eliza is definitely entertaining to listen to.

That scream is her reaction to everything. So anyway. The film actually does make a lot of poignant statements about upward class mobility and the cyclical nature of an under-educated society, but I’m going to have to give most of that credit to Shaw. The film itself is very dazzling and entertaining without the statements about socioeconomic obstacles and intellectual inequality. Mainly because Audrey Hepburn.

Also I’d like to point out that Audrey Hepburn’s singing was deemed too rough for audiences to hear, so all of her singing but one song "Just You Wait” was dubbed. Which is always disappointing, and probably explains why she didn’t get an Oscar nomination. The film did win Best Picture though. Julie Andrews (who actually played Eliza Doolittle on Broadway) actually won for Best Actress that year for Mary Poppins, and then was nominated again the next year for Sound of Music. Can’t beat that.

Last point: My first ever experience with My Fair Lady and its plot came a whopping 10 years ago, in the Disney movie, Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen. That girl… was her.

The Lucky One (2012) - Scott Hicks

After several painful minutes of perusing Netflix, wondering why they don’t have better search features (there’s no full length list of movies in each genre, just a collection of the ones they think you’ll like?), I gave up and switched to HBOGo, realizing that I had a date with the one and only perfect human specimen that is Zac Efron. 

Cue swooning. Disclaimer, this was my FIRST EVER NICHOLAS SPARKS MOVIE. Yeah, I never bought into it, because The Notebook is overhyped and the others are just re-creations of the same clichés. If I were to describe my pre-viewing perception of Nicholas Sparks romances in one word, it would be heavy-handed. It’s emotional whipping, perfectly set up by a foolproof formula that Nicholas Sparks uses for different character tropes like a Mad Lib. I mean, Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth would never fall in love in real life, am I right? But then again I would watch Zac Efron in a Lifetime movie about a DMV worker named Tobias who just loves his job and wants nothing to change (call me Lifetime if you have any thoughts).

The movie is melodramatic even by my standards (I will support the claim that Les Misérables and Titanic use melodrama appropriately, so I have a very high “Oh brother” threshold). Nicholas Sparks just seems to think that our soulmate is just around the corner, and with a little hackneyed language and declarations about the meaning of life, we can find true love with anyone. See example below.

So my boo Zac plays this U.S. Marine, Logan, who, one morning after a night raid, finds a glossy photograph glimmering amongst the rubble. He walks over to pick it up, and just as he stares into the eyes of the mysterious woman in the picture, a bomb lands on the exact place where he had just been sitting. Eight months later, while looking at the picture again, driving a Humvee, and talking with his best friend about how the woman in the picture is his guardian angel, an explosion kills his best friend and presumably some other people (this whole scene is like 30 seconds I didn’t understand it). Logan finishes his third tour and comes home to live with his sister’s family. After his two nephews try to play a prank on him by waking him up and he almost accidentally chokes the younger one to death, Logan makes a cute little vlog telling his sister that he must leave her home and find peace with himself. With some savvy Google techniques, Logan uses the lighthouse in the back of his guardian angel picture to track down his savior, which means walking from Colorado to Louisiana? Everything leading up to this moment has taken 10 minutes, and the opening credits roll as Logan and his faithful German Shepard, Zeus, walk across the country. It’s over the top and you know what…

Zefron finds his guardian angel lady, named Beth, but is overwhelmed by his emotions and instead accepts a job working as a helping hand in her dog kennel business… They fall in love THE END. Another odd thing I noticed about the movie is that it skips over all of the happy parts through montage, but drags the miserable parts out like slow peeling Band-Aids. When Logan gets the hang of his dog-washing/walking gig, he and Beth finally start to see eye to eye. We later find out that Beth’s brother was a marine and died a year ago, which makes her slow growing love for Logan, whom she often compares to her brother, even more awkward. Beth lives with her son, her grandmother, and occasionally gets into fights with her ex-husband, who is the son of the only judge in town and therefore he feels the need to remind Beth how blessed she is that she won the custody battle for her son, but can at any time lose him to her psychotic cop ex-husband. Hence this dazzling one-liner.

But when Logan and Beth’s son start bonding - montage. When Logan and Beth bond and wash dogs together - montage. I guess you can’t really do sad moments through montage, but I’m not sure if they felt they were pressed for time, since the film is 1 hour 40 minutes, or they just didn’t want you being too happy for too long. Anyway, enough about the boring aspects of this movie, because there is actually a lot of interesting stuff going on here, and yes it obviously has to do with a shirtless Zac Efron.

For decades, the film industry has been male run and operated. That means, male characters are written by men, and female characters are written through the eyes of men. In cinematography as well, shots are done through what is referred to in feminist theory as “the male gaze,” meaning that they are shot through a male’s perspective. This forces both male and female audiences to see through a male’s perspective. Think of films like Piranha 3D, how often are there gratuitous boob shots, and where are the shots of shirtless guys partying it up? Think of Titanic, where the Kate Winslet’s boob just sits on the screen for an insane amount of time, or Shakespeare in Love, where Gwyneth Paltrow majestically spins as the cloth holding her boobs pressed against her chest comes off. This Mad Men gif simplifies what the male gaze looks like in cinema.

But sometimes, male actors come along that are so physically alluring, that directors can’t help but shoot them as sexual objects for the viewing pleasure of “the female gaze.” The term isn’t actually used, but in the past few years, cinema has accommodated for such a thing. Cue Magic Mike gif.

Magic Mike is the pinnacle of a “female gaze” film. It exists solely as an erotic display of the male form (I’m pretending the non-stripping scenes didn’t exist because they are pitifully boring and static). The camera operates as a lens through which a woman or gay man would watch the object on display. The term that used to be used was “homoerotic gaze” because there didn’t even used to be female directors, so it had to be assumed that the cinematography was done for a gay audience. The iconic figure in the homoerotic gaze is the French actor, Alain Delon. Delon starred in dozens of films from the 1960s to the 1980s, and each time he is put on display to be gawked at. Audiences described him as so radiantly erotic that films catered to his physical objectification in ways that would make his characters seem superficial, if it weren’t for his talented acting skills.

Even John Travolta had been subject to this, in films like Grease and Saturday Night Fever, where camera angles seek to display his body as a male specimen to be watched. But recently, the female gaze has become so insanely overt, in films like Magic Mike, any movie with Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Teen Wolf, and that deleted scene with Ryan Gosling undressing in Place Beyond The Pines that everyone is talking about. The Lucky One is definitely high up on the list, because as I noticed, every romantic scene is focused on Zac. And for good reason obviously.

In fact, all of the lovemaking scenes contain so little of Beth, played by Taylor Schilling, and focus almost exclusively on Zac’s physique. 

So, in essence, the film is a voyeuristic look at the one and only Zac Efron, with a boring and overdramatic storyline that is meant to be completely ignored. It got a 20% on Rotten Tomatoes, but made $100 million on a $25 million budget. After viewing the film in its entirety (and then some parts again), I had to double check that Nicholas Sparks was still married to a woman, as well as the director Scott Hicks. To me, the camera’s gaze of Zac seemed so obviously intentional, but I guess that’s what you have to do when your target audience is a million percent female. But then can someone explain the intention of this shot?

GOD BLESS THIS DAY.