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.

Life of Pi (2012) - Ang Lee

Over the past few years, big 3D flics have been able to dominate the Oscars, but fail to achieve the award for Best Picture. Avatar (2009) won 3 Oscars (lost to The Hurt Locker), Hugo (2011) won 5 Oscars (losing Best Picture to The Artist), and now Life of Pi won 4 Oscars but lost Best Picture to Argo. It is important to note that all three of these films won the Oscars for Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. I haven’t seen The Hurt Locker, but sometimes I just wish movies would win for their visual difficulty alone. I definitely preferred Hugo to The Artist, and I feel the same way after finally seeing this spectacle, Life of Pi.

The film is based on the 2001 book by Yann Martel. It tells the story of Pi Patel, the lone (human) survivor of the shipwreck of a Japanese freight ship. His family owned a zoo in India but they are planning on moving to Canada and selling the animals. A massive hurricane later, Pi finds himself stranded in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a live Bengal tiger.

The story is told by a grown-up Pi, narrating his experience for an author interested in hearing about what happened. Because the audience knows Pi survives, all of the complexity of the story rests on HOW he manages to last weeks in the ocean with a tiger.

A lot of the early part of the story is dedicated to Pi’s childhood in India. He grows up in French India, and at a very early age, he becomes not only a Hindu, but also a Christian and a Muslim. His father is not religious, and his mother is Hindu, so young Pi deals with defending his beliefs to his parents. His father mocks him for “blindly believing in everything” and compares it to “believing in nothing at all.” But on the whole they are supportive, which makes it heartbreaking when Pi’s father is forced to move his entire family to Canada because they can’t afford to keep the zoo.

This gif shows young Pi and the young tiger (named Richard Parker because of an error on his forms when the zoo bought him) and then teenager Pi with Richard Parker on the lifeboat. What I REALLY found amazing about this movie is how Pi deals with his beliefs in a way that coincides with his misfortunes, but also in how he sees Richard Parker. His father forces him to accept at a young age that the tiger is a cold-blooded carnivore, and would kill Pi if he had the chance. But the entire movie shows Pi struggling to believe otherwise, and sometimes that does not always go his way.

Even more impressive, the tiger is 100% CGI, so the actor for Pi does all of his performance by himself. The tiger being CGI was important, because it allowed the tiger to develop into a character himself, with facial expressions and movements that felt much more real than if they had a trained tiger doing everything. Speaking of the special effects, they certainly earned their Oscar. Sometimes when the story is slow, massive special effects scenes are thrust into the film to give it a greater universe to develop the characters in.

The whole film was done in a studio, a fact that made my jaw drop every time something astounding happened. I couldn’t believe how beautiful they made everything, and it certainly helped give the film the emotional gravity it needed to succeed.

The film was directed by Ang Lee, who has an extremely versatile career, since he also directed Brokeback Mountain (2005) and Hulk (2003). He won his first directing Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, and his second for Life of Pi. (P.S. He beat Stephen Spielberg both times, once with Munich and then again with Lincoln) Here he is with the star of Life of Pi, Suraj Sharma.

I am unbelievably happy that they rereleased this film in theaters, because it just wouldn’t have been the same on a TV. Take my word, it’s beautiful, go see it.

Last note, in 2003 Fox announced that M. Night Shyamalan would direct Life of Pi. He declined because he wanted to do Lady In The Water. So this beautiful film was almost directed by the man who brought you The Last Airbender (2010).