Brokeback Mountain Links

In a recent ComingSoon.net article, Ang Lee discusses the filmed-in-Alberta feature:

"Documentaries helped a lot, still photography, visiting there, reading. But the least is fictional movies. I actually tried to avoid it. I consciously was not doing a Western movie genre, which is overlapped with what I do here, but it has a very cultural influence, which is also very true in our culture. That's more powerful than your knowledge about real people in the West."

Follow the link to read more about Lee's approach to the story. The review (9 out of 10) is available here.

According to Fox News, the film is also sparking a new ratings debate:

"We assumed it would be R; it was R. It was totally fair," Schamus [the film's producer] said at a press roundtable discussion about the film. "It's an adult, grown-up movie. It's a movie I think young people could see or should see in the context of their parents talking to them about it. That’s an R rating to me."

But some have blanched at the R as too strict for "Brokeback," since there are only two scenes where the main characters kiss and one short sex scene between them in which more is implied than shown.

"I don't believe it would be inappropriate [as PG-13]," [film critic] Jones said. "The ratings system continues to prove how flawed it is. It's flawed, and it's controlled by larger studios."

The New York Daily News has an article on actress Michelle Williams, who plays Alma, a housewife in the film:

"I felt the role in an in-my-bones kind of way," she [Williams] says. "This is the stock I come from."

"Michelle picked up on every beat in the story," says Diana Ossana, who co-wrote the screenplay with Larry McMurtry. "She's from Montana, she has that background; there are things she grasps intuitively. The phrase Still waters run deep completely applies to her."

xtra.ca, a gay and lesbian news site, features another interview with Ang:

When asked what made a straight, urbanite from Taiwan latch on to a story of gay cowboys, he laughs. "I think they deal with a lot of twisted elements -- there's no language for them -- very private and twisted. That was something very special for me and yet different from my own experience." But Lee feels the über-masculine genre of the Western has a homo side that's not been depicted, adding, playfully: "Just because you don't go to the other side of moon doesn't mean it doesn't exist."