Brokeback Mountain
Brokeback Mountain, which most critics are calling the film of the year, starts tomorrow in Indianapolis.
Who wants to go? Not necessarily tomorrow, but sometime soonish?
Who wants to go? Not necessarily tomorrow, but sometime soonish?
2. No one is making much of this being a 'small film' - it has a 'low' budget (only $14 million), but that's because everyone involved took pay cuts to do it. If the actors and filmmakers had all asked for their regular asking prices, it probably would have cost somewhere between 40 and 50 million. Most non-FX driven films have their prices inflated ridiculously by above-the-line costs, but given that it's taken the makers of Brokeback Mountain over five years to get the film made, having a budget of $14 million was probably an important component of selling the film to those investors who came from outside of Focus Features.
3. Few people would be falling over this movie if it weren't one of the best of the year (which it is) and if it didn't feature one of the best performances of the year (which it does). I'm saying this as someone who could give two shits about Ang Lee's (or Heath Ledger's) past cinematic works. I was a little skeptical too, but Brokeback Mountain has this unique power which stays with you for weeks.
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Also $14m is a tiny budget for a feature film in Hollywood, especially with this kind of star power. Maybe I should have said low budget instead of small. But the truth remains that this film is much closer to an Indie than a major holywood movie. Watch Entourage? This is Queens Bvd.
The number of movies that critics fall all over that suck is longer than the line for the bathroom at the overactive bladder convention. Equally long is the list of films that are awesome, which critics hated. Unfortunatly most - and I do mean a good 80% of them - have no fucking clue what they are doing, and have just been doing it that way for so long that they think it's the right thing to do. Basically see the movie - which I do intend to do - and then make your own opinion. I was just commenting on the Cliche nature of a gay cowboy, artsy movie. It's like the Contrived Hot or Not formula. Start with a base score of 5 - show clevage = +2, have an american flag + 1, have trendy emo glasses +11 - Same thing applies here... Cowboys +1, Gay Cowboys +10.
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As I said, the only reason the movie's budget is $14 million is because Ledger, Gyllenhaal, Lee, Schamus, McMurtry, and all of the other people involved with the film who normally would be paid multiple millions of dollars took massive pay cuts. On character driven pieces, it is often simply above-the-line costs which lead to inflated budgets. There's very little that's 'independent' about the budget or production of Brokeback Mountain - it's made by a major studio (Focus, a subsidiary of Universal) by a major-studio director with major-studio stars.
And you're right - most critics have no idea what they're talking about, falling over themselves to praise 'meaningful' shit like Crash and The Constant Gardener while hedging their bets on films that are actually embued with a powerful sense of cinematic presence like Hustle & Flow and War of the Worlds (to name two examples of films that got shat on by a significant percentage of the critical community).
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