More on Brokeback Mountain
Links from victorian_tweed
Annie Proulx on the movie version of Brokeback Mountain
Proulx says: Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; film can be more powerful than the written word.
Is that right? My reaction straight after seeing it was "very good, but not as good as the story." If I could keep only one, I'd choose the story, hands down. Admittedly I've been reading the story semi-obsessively for five years and only saw the movie for the first time last week.
The only film scenes I think of as more powerful than the book versions are ones with many characters, especially large-scale battle scenes (say Gettysburg or The Lord of the Rings), or even something like that Deadwood scene I mentioned a few weeks ago, with five characters collapsed on a bed following a traumatic incident. When just one or two people are involved, I think the written version is always preferable, assuming we get at least one character's detailed thoughts. Nothing can make up for losing "Ennis...felt he could paw the white out of the moon" from BBM! Similarly, no film Hornblower could ever come close to Forester's deeply introspective book version. On the other hand, I'm much more likely to cry at a movie than reading a story. Maybe film has more visceral impact, after all - but the written word offer more depth.
Since I've never done a poll, if you've both read the story and seen the movie:
Poll Brokeback Mountain
And another great link:
Review from the New York Review of Books criticising the tendency for the advertising and the media to refer to it as a love story, rather than as a gay love story: The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking...
Annie Proulx on the movie version of Brokeback Mountain
Proulx says: Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; film can be more powerful than the written word.
Is that right? My reaction straight after seeing it was "very good, but not as good as the story." If I could keep only one, I'd choose the story, hands down. Admittedly I've been reading the story semi-obsessively for five years and only saw the movie for the first time last week.
The only film scenes I think of as more powerful than the book versions are ones with many characters, especially large-scale battle scenes (say Gettysburg or The Lord of the Rings), or even something like that Deadwood scene I mentioned a few weeks ago, with five characters collapsed on a bed following a traumatic incident. When just one or two people are involved, I think the written version is always preferable, assuming we get at least one character's detailed thoughts. Nothing can make up for losing "Ennis...felt he could paw the white out of the moon" from BBM! Similarly, no film Hornblower could ever come close to Forester's deeply introspective book version. On the other hand, I'm much more likely to cry at a movie than reading a story. Maybe film has more visceral impact, after all - but the written word offer more depth.
Since I've never done a poll, if you've both read the story and seen the movie:
Poll Brokeback Mountain
And another great link:
Review from the New York Review of Books criticising the tendency for the advertising and the media to refer to it as a love story, rather than as a gay love story: The lengths to which reviewers from all over the country, representing publications of various ideological shadings, have gone in order to diminish the specifically gay element is striking...