Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

Though much acclaimed, not so much for its frank gay love story, but for being the first gay make-out pic suitable for and pitched at straights, Ang Lee’s film comes exactly 20 years after Stephen Frears pulled off the same trick in the far superior MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE. And Frears did it without over-saturated scenic wonders blessing the courtship. (He also avoided the de rigeur gay victimization customary even for the most sympathetic gay-themed pics of the time.) Heath Ledger & Jake Gyllenhaal are very fine, with Ledger’s ‘still waters run deep’ characterization stealing the movie, and the script is beautifully structured to casually get us through close to two decades of their relationship. But when Lee finally puts his neck on the line with an artsy, but stunning piece of grotesquerie (its when Ledger visits the sterile parental home of Gyllenhaal), you suddenly realize how dry-eyed most of the story has left you.

PostScript: Well, after Heath Ledger’s tragic early death a couple of years after writing this, I don’t think many would still be left ‘dry-eyed.’

No comments: