Brokeback Mountain Will Not Cure Your Headache

Heath Ledger is angry. Not the yelling demonstrative kind of angry. The kind you keep inside, except for the concentrated amount you let vent out the eyes. I mean, how else is the Academy going to tell you're acting laconic and not just being laconic? So yeah, he's that kind. The self-imolating kind that's really only presenting itself as anger. It's really that self-loathing stuff that is the staple of any 7 million dollar low budget independent movie produced by a thriving subsidiary of Universal. Anyway, it all comes roaring out when a pick up truck almost hits him on his way to the bar. He walks around and punches the driver through the open window a few times before trying to pull him out of the vehicle, only to get beat by the giant inside.

It is here, and not back in the gay tent, that we can draw the line between a regular movie and the kind that have hopes for awards. The kind that don't give you what you want. (Some might say this a different way, that they don't give you what you expect. But that's not it at all.) This is not to say that just because Jet Li hits Bob Hoskins in Unleashed that it is inherently a better movie (even though it is), just that it's not going for the same reaction. Which generally consists of someone yelling "Ohhhh!" or "Daaaaamn!" which one can get just as easily from something as dizzingly presented as Unleashed as with something as idiotic as Transporter 2. And so those are lumped together and are thereby inferior to the Brokeback Mountains and Constant Gardeners that are paraded out just as calculatingly as the aforementioned "popcorn movies." These are the movies that are lauded because they make us think. Now, I'm not going to try and extol the virtues Unleashed could potentially have on your philosophical and political stance. You wouldn't believe me anyway. But at least Unleashed gives us the choice as to whether or not we want to think. We can enjoy it on a purely visceral level like the guy behind us who's thrashing around in his seat with his "Oh, shit!"s and his violent encouragements or we can choose to take in everything we are presented with, thankful for both. Certainly one cannot say that Brokeback Mountain doesn't make us think at least a little. Even the people leaving the theater before the first cameoflaged homosexual sex scene can finish so abruptly have to be thinking something. Even if it is whatever Bill O'Reilly told them to think. But it's forcing us to. There is no way to make that "Oh shit!" kid sit through this movie, gay sex or no. And it's not the lack of violence and it's not the "subtlety" of the performances or the barely perceptible political messages. It's because the movie never gives him anything he wants.

It's the very same principle that he will not read Of Mice And Men because his English teacher wants him to. He has to exercise his right to choose even if it goes against what he might end up enjoying and dare we say it, thinking about, if left alone. But Focus Features doesn't truly want those kids to see their movies. They don't want to make $200 million dollars. Then they'd be like the Coldplay of the indie film world. They'd be ridiculed. They'll take their paltry $80 million and make the next Brokeback Mountain. Because they don't want us to get what we want. They want to force to think, and think their way. And then get rewarded for it.