I ran across this SAG For Your Consideration ad a few weeks ago and had no time to post.

If you're not aware, the actors/studios/handlers decide themselves whether an actor is nominated as best actor or supporting. And among other things, they use the FYC ads to indicate how they want themselves slotted.

It's Heath for best actor Jake for supporting for Brokeback Mountain.

Prolly cause Heath was getting most of the raves, so Jake was a longshot unless they downgraded, and he was also a leading contender to get an actor nod for Jarhead.

The latter is out the window with the hideous Jarhead reviews, but it's still his best strategy for a nom, longshot though it is.

Ahhhhhhhhh. Thirteen days till I see Brokeback Mountain. It's closing the Denver Film Fest Nov. 19.

Ang is receiving the Mayor’s Lifetime Achievement Award, award, and will be interviewed onstage afterward. That will be very cool. (Especially since I think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of the few true artistic masterpieces of the last decade in film.)

Annie Proulx, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana are also coming. Even better.

But the best part: Ang and Annie are attending a smallish cocktail party fundraiser before the film, and a very kind and generous friend was nice enough to buy me a very expensive ticket.

Can hardly believe it. CAN NOT wait!

As anxiously as I've watched the Brokeback film project develop, undevelop and redevelop over the years, I had never actually read the story. I guess because I missed it when it first came out, and then I wanted to see it as a film first.

(Book-first rarely works out well. By design/length books are nearly always far deeper and more complex, and the film never lives up. But I can appreciate a great film, and then go read the book for added/different levels of complexity. Almost always better that way. And I really never expected it to take this long.)

But then, on a Sunday almost exactly two months ago, something happened to change all that. Oddly enough, it started with Katrina, and my self-imposed exile for my book project.

So I'm finally, belatedly going to share how the story bowled me over when I read two months ago, why I got obsessive about it, and also my one big problem with the story. (Which I've since mellowed on.)

This is exactly how I experienced it that day (almost; a few small edits). an email to a couple straight friends composed late at night, September 4, 2005:

something odd happened today. a few things, starting with the hurricane, but ending with annie proulx.

and i wanted to get some opinions on it, especially from straight people, so i'm sending this to a few of my favorite literary friends, who whoops, i still have not thanked for all the help and insight getting started with faulkner last month. (who is now seriously threatening nabokov as my most idolized writer, merely on the basis of "As I Lay Dying," which amazed me more with every passing page, and which gave me several crucial insights about my own book, including the fundamental organizing principle. but that's not what i came here to talk about.

i was feeling kind of guilty about the hurricane. i hardly paid attention all week. brought to a head something i'm really struggling with now, this immersion/estrangement thing. i get so involved in politics and events, so worked up that i don't get any work done. so i've had a few stern talks with myself about turning all that off for awhile and being with my own project. letting the world spin around its axis without me for awhile. but then i leave for four days, and bam! the gulf coast is a hell on earth and i've ignored them and feel guilty. (because i could have made it all better if i had just paid attention? hahaha. guess not. and yet ...)

so i heard these vague rumblings late in the week that n.o. had not in fact dodged the missile, and then i heard from my friend ile down there, who told a blood-curdling story that apparent the rest of you had all been following all week, and i've been frantically trying to catch up in the few days since. so i needed something today to pull it all together for me, so i went to the new york times of all places, because frank rich is there, and his column did exactly what i needed it to, and then . . .

of course my eyes couldn't dart past the tiny little film section of the front page without taking a peek, and what were the chances i would not be absorbed by the headline: "Cowboys in Love . . . With Each Other"?

for reasons i couldn't entirely remember, i have kept myself from reading Brokeback Mountain for at least five years, saving it for the variously rumored film projects. (is that pathetic? a writer who deems the book less worthy than the film? but in this case--when we're talking about mass cultural impact, heath ledger and jake gyllenhaal trump annie proulx by a country mile.)

so i knew the times piece was going to give away too much, and i needed to avoid it, but i couldn't make myself. and when ang lee described himself crying at the ending--MINOR SPOILER ALERT; MORE AHEAD--of the two shirts hung side by side--well, five years out the window, i drove right to borders and came home with a copy.

(of course that was just the last straw. long painful spring and summer with my family over the gay stuff. a weird second coming out phase nobody ever told me was coming. they were all so accepting at first--or were they? on the surface yes, and do they want to, yes. but still, the idea of their brother actually making out with a guy . . . gives them the shivers. and they communicate it in so many subtle ways they're not even aware of, and i wasn't either until it all came to a head this past month, with a sad little coda last night at my parents' 50th wedding anniversary dinner. so let's just say i was primed.)

during the drive, i remembered why i originally put off reading it, before even the first rumors of a movie. annie proulx. i had to read Postcards during grad school and it bored the crap out of me. never finished it. don't know whether it was her or me not ready for her, but she left me with a very bad taste, and i was sure she was not up to the task of the kind of first great popular gay love story.

well, she was. really, really amazing. broke my heart, as intended. with a few glaring flaws here and there, but who cares?

i was really curious how it read to straight people, though. how much of it was great storytelling, and how much was it ripping me up over my own life slipping away without getting this damn love thing down?

and then annie surprised me at the end. she was definitely too heavy-handed with the tire-iron idea throughout, but the ending (hmmmm. i guess i'm assuming you've read it. i always assume i'm the last literate person on earth to get to any of the really good stuff), i was shocked at how off it felt. if ang lee had remembered correctly, that would have been an amazing ending, with the shirts hanging there together. but then there's a break, and then two paragraphs in a very different tone, with ennis having nightmares about his lover getting bludgeoned to death with the tire iron.

it took me just about a minute to figure out why that felt so wrong. then i realized it: only a straight person (or a sympathetic lesbian?) would write that ending. she thinks she NEEDS the tire iron to make this a tragic story. or perhaps that she really wanted to boldly address the worst horror of gay life: death at the hands of a tire iron. amazing. she had ALREADY addressed the worst horror of gay life, and she didn't even realize it. at least for homos today. (or in 1997.) i don't know one single gayguy worrying about the tire iron. and nearly every gayguy i know is struggling with his love life. even now that we can couple up, we have no idea how to do it. we're so freaking damaged by the time we make it out, and we have no women in our relationships to do most of the relationship work and . . . and we're just a mess.

but even in the time she set the story--or for thousands of years before--i do believe 99.9% of the homos in the world were successfully avoiding the tire iron. it's what they GAVE UP to avoid it, that's been the tragedy of gay life. her story completely nails it. THAT is the tragedy here.

and most of her instincts were dead on. brilliant to set her story over a 20-year period vaulting right past stonewall. these guys COULD have escaped their prison, and one of them wanted to, but ennis never had the guts to do it. he lives to tell the tale, but he's the most tragic figure here. she doesn't seem to grasp that. she thinks her dead character is the tragic one, but he gave it his best shot and failed; it's her other guy who did himself in.

part of her clearly seems to know that--she wrote the freaking story that screams it. but she didn't seem to fully grasp it. she feels the need to impose this other, physical tragedy, as if the other one wasn't enough.

that's what i found kind of offensive when i got to the end, even before i could grasp what was angering me. that that wasn't enough. i don't think most straight people get that, do they? that you can take all the tire irons out of the picture, you can take the work discrimination out of the picture, we can stop fearing for our lives for our jobs, for any of that stuff, but if we still can't find the love we crave . . . that's a tragedy too.

and that's ACTUAL one most of us are living with, by the way. (or at least a handy excuse for goofballs like me who just can't manage to bag a man. heeheehee.)

but it was still a wonderful story.

how odd that we needed someone other than a gayguy to write it for us. i'm sure hundreds, thousands, endless number of gay love stories have been written by gayguys for gayguys--wasn't leaves of grass a big sloppy gay lovefest? another classic i've never gotten close to--but we needed an outsider to yank it out of the romance genre, and make it palatable. we needed annie proulx and ang lee and heath ledger and jake gyllenhaal. god, i pray the movie is so wonderful straight people are forced to hear about it all through the oscar race and some of them actually go out to see it. or perhaps just the idea or the ad-campaign images of those two will be enough to get some people over the shudders of the idea of two guys kissing.

but i'm really glad i read the story. definitely opened up something inside of me. if only we had any of the quirky, oddball, intellectual gayboy hotties i'm looking for out here in the hinterlands. heheehe. maybe once i finally get my ass out to ny next year i'll find that boy. i hear tell they grow a lot of them out there.

---

Note: I have since eased up about the tire iron. I still think my point is correct, and that she doesn't seem to (get? trust?) how tragic the story already is. But so what. I'd actually forgotten all about it. (Seriously.) The strong stuff stuck with me, the flaws faded away. I still adore that story. Tugs at my heart every time I think about it.

Update:

You guys kept adding so many comments (thousands), that long after this post, we started a whole Brokeback Mountain Discussion Forum.

And for links to everything imaginable, see our Ultimate Brokeback Mountain Guide.

Shew!

For a minute (week or two, actually), Jarhead was beginning to look like this year's Alexander. (Which I had to see in spite of the withering reviews, and yes, it really was that bad, though Colin Farrell was not.)

A consensus Oscar contender for possibly best pic and definitely best actor just a few weeks ago, its stock suddenly plummeted once people actual saw it. Early buzz was baaaaaaad.

And then the actual reviews poured in for opening day Friday, and they were only half bad--literally: 51% rating on Rottentomatoes cream of the crop--but that was way way way below recent expectations.

And the bad were really bad. Check out these capsules on RT:

• Salon: "As hard as the actors work, Jarhead feels false right down to its seductive visuals."
• LA Times: "As much as we intellectually admire Jarhead, it's a cold film that only sporadically makes the kind of emotional connection it's after."
• NY Times: "Jarhead is a movie that walks up to some of the most urgent and painful issues of our present circumstance, clears its throat loudly and says nothing."

But . . .

THE GREAT NEWS:

It blew away expectations at the box office this weekend, doubling tracking. Check this out from boxofficeguru (the link will go bad in a week):

Universal invaded second place with one of the year's biggest surprises, the Gulf War saga Jarhead, which debuted to an estimated $28.8M. Doubling expectations, the R-rated pic starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Foxx averaged a sensational $11,925 per theater from 2,411 locations. That was the biggest opening weekend average for any wide release since Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in mid-July. Directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty), the $72M production pulled in young men and played especially well in larger urban markets. . . . 52% of the crowd was over 25 and 57% was male.

Thank God. As much as the reviews dash my hopes for one of my most eagerly-awaited films of the year, and knocks Jake Gyllenhaal out of the oscar derby, it did something else I wanted even more.

It solidified Jake's status as a bone fide star.

Just in time for Brokeback Mountain.

Yes, it's just all about Brokeback these days, isn't it.

But hey, it's important. Really important. I've been watching this film project develop for years, and the key to the whole impact was that it wasn't just some tiny indie film, it was a big project starring two hot young rising stars.

Since then, their stars have tarnished a bit. Jake had one huge hit in his career: The Day After Tomorrow grossed $187 million domestically last year. Heath had a big early success in The Patriot, but followed with one commercial dud after another. And Jake wasn't the reason for Day's numbers, so we were still waiting to see whether he could anchor a pic and sell it.

Did he. Whether it was him or Kayne West's Jesus Walks in the brilliant ads and trailer, he is suddenly big right now. He's got two big hits, so the one can't be written off as a fluke.

Next month when Brokeback opens, and a month after that when it goes wide, Jake will be fresh off a big hit: playing a jarhead in the Marines, of all things. A movie eaten up by millions of hardass young straightguys. Sure can't hurt.

Might even given them an excuse to see it when their girlfriend suggests it: Oh yeah, he was that cool Marine dude from that war movie last month.

OK, maybe.

I don't know how many straightguys it will lure in, but it changes the essential equation about Brokeback. It's now starring a real star.

Thank God.

I swore off blogging for a bit to stay focused, but this I need to talk about.

Just saw Capote. Extraordinary. Especially for a writer. What a gift to get such a glimpse at his process. But . . .

Huge but. But what a cynical take on him. I just don't buy it. He got all those people to open up to him by faking empathy? When he was truly just cold blooded, calculating and entirely manipulative? I guess there are con artists that good out there. I just found it way too hard to swallow.

Now I totally buy that he manipulated people. And that he was routinely conflicted: horrified and saddened, while at the same time at work--he could spot great potential for his own gain at the same moment he experienced great sorrow for them.

But this film showed only half of that equation, hence very little internal conflict. He cared only about himself in this version. Monstrous megalomaniac.

I wrote down CYNICAL! on my note paper about 20 minutes into it. Later I replaced it with cruel. Eventually, comical. Mommy Dearest level ludicrous when he whined that they were torturing him by keeping his alleged friend the killer alive.

Maybe he really was as cold blooded as the killers. But I found that aspect of it exceptionally unconvincing.

And just about everything else about the film pitch perfect. Unfortunately, that was the central conceit.

So I still admire it greatly, with one gigantic reservation.

Mark it a deeply flawed masterpiece.

---

Note: I don't fault Philip Seymour Hoffman's acting, by the way, which was stunning. (And everyone else in the film was exceptional, too.) Unless they left the other half on the editing floor it was clearly written that way and directed that way. Not his decision, it would appear.