Latest news with #AngLee
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Brokeback Mountain' Co-Writer Knew the Film Would Lose Best Picture After Learning Clint Eastwood Hadn't Seen the Movie
'Brokeback Mountain' losing Best Picture to 'Crash' at the 78th Academy Awards in 2006 is often cited as one of the most egregious Oscar snubs of all time. Two decades later, 'Brokeback Mountain' co-writer and producer Diana Ossana still remembers the sting of losing and the moment she realized the prize would evade her. Speaking to the New York Times for the film's 20th anniversary, Ossana, who co-wrote the script with Larry McMurtry, said she saw entrenched homophobia towards Ang Lee's film from some of Hollywood's elite. She recalled attending a party at 'Crash' director Paul Haggis' house and being excited to meet Clint Eastwood, who had enjoyed his own Oscars sweep the previous year for 'Million Dollar Baby,' only to be told that the Western icon hadn't watched her cowboy movie. More from IndieWire Everyone Wants Their Own Jane Austen Adaptation, and They're Getting Them 'The Social Network Part II' in the Works with Aaron Sorkin Writing and Directing 'Paul started walking me over and he goes, 'Diana, I have to tell you, he hasn't seen your movie.' And it was like somebody kicked me in the stomach,' Ossana said. 'That's when I knew we would not win Best Picture. People want to deny [that homophobia was a factor in the Oscar race], but what else could it have been? We'd won everything up until then.' Ossana went on to explain that the film's rollout gave her a unique perch from which to view America's evolving perspective on gay rights in 2005. While watching the movie in theaters, she was able to observe the occasional discomfort people felt towards gay sex scenes, even as the film's storytelling largely overpowered those biases and captivated audiences. 'The theaters were all packed because everybody was so curious about this movie,' she said. 'And when the sex scene between the boys came on, you'd see some people got up and left, but not very many. At the end of the film nobody would leave. They would just sit there nailed to their seats until the lights came on, and there would be people crying.' Anyone who missed the chance to see 'Brokeback Mountain' on the big screen in 2005 now has an opportunity to witness it for themselves, as the film is currently playing in theaters courtesy of a 20th anniversary re-release from Focus of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See
Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
How Brokeback Mountain Holds Up—And Doesn't—20 Years Later
Ol' Brokeback got us good, didn't it? Ang Lee's 2005 drama about cowboys in love was a genuine cinematic phenomenon. Brokeback Mountain helped boost stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal onto the A-list. One of its lines—'I wish I knew how to quit you'—became a source-transcending classic, referenced with the persistence and fervor of Jerry Maguire's 'You had me at hello' and Titanic's 'I'm the king of the world.' Though Lee would go on to win the Best Director award at the 2006 Oscars, the film's loss of the Best Picture trophy to Crash elicited a minor outrage, with hundreds of people contributing to buy an ad in Daily Variety decrying the Academy's poor decision. A 2015 Hollywood Reporter re-polling of Oscar voters showed that they would have given the award to Brokeback over 'that Don Cheadle movie that nobody can remember' were they to do it all over again, and in 2018 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. A box-office hit, with an $83 million domestic gross, Brokeback was standard-setting for modern LGBTQ+ cinema. It helped show that movies about same-sex love could make real money and that playing gay was no longer the career death-sentence it was once considered. In commemoration of its 20th anniversary, Brokeback Mountain is back in theaters, giving audiences the chance to fall for Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist's love story all over again. But it also gives us an opportunity to view the movie through a modern lens and apply contemporary sensitivities to a film that has been effectively canonized. Was Brokeback Mountain groundbreaking, or was it a gay love story trapped inside the conventions of a traditional heterosexual one? Were its central lovers authentic or merely shoved into containers its creators thought a mostly straight audience would tolerate? The answer is more complicated than a simple yes or no, and if nothing else, Brokeback Mountain remains fertile territory for pondering the representation of same-sex love in film and its continuing necessity. To any who might think we've progressed enough to make the movie's message quaint or devoid of urgency, there's plenty of evidence to the contrary. It may be true that its rerelease comes 10 years after the federal passage of same-sex marriage via the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which helped codify social acceptance of gay people, at least for a time. But the current presidential administration's hostility toward LGBTQ people (on top of Clarence Thomas' indication that he's open to the overturning of Obergefell in his 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson opinion) suggests that Brokeback's depiction of the challenges same-sex couples face remains depressingly relevant. In the time since Brokeback's original theatrical run, pop-cultural discourse has changed considerably. The 2010s, in particular, saw an increased focus on matters of representation in criticism and especially in social-media analysis, particularly as it pertains to the depiction of marginalized groups. It is harder than ever to ignore that no major Brokeback player—not Lee, Ledger, Gyllenhall, Annie Proulx (who wrote the short story the movie is based on), producer James Schamus, nor screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana (the latter of whom also produced)—publicly identifies as a gay man. This is gay romance by putatively straight people. Much like the plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the legal challenge to California's Prop 8, which led to same-sex marriage being legalized in the state, the Brokeback heroes were hand-picked for their seeming regularity. Two cowboys who relish manual labor, pound whiskey, and engage in horseplay, they lack many of the gender-nonconforming traits that could complicate their appeal to mass audiences. When Ennis (Legder) tells Jack (Gyllenhaal), 'You know I ain't queer,' he really means it. He's practically breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to straight audience members, too. While the setting of Brokeback Mountain, where the pair first works together herding sheep, provides secluded idyll along the (theoretically) utopian lines of Fire Island, Jack and Ennis are largely divorced from gay culture. At one point, Jack suggests Ennis uproot his life and move close to him in Texas. Even though it is the '70s at that point in the movie and gay liberation is in full swing some thousand miles away, moving to a coastal queer hub like San Francisco is never considered. The bigger-picture stuff is ignored for the sake of telling a smallish love story. And it's a love that seems to come out of nowhere—there's virtually no indication that Ennis would be interested in Jack before Jack makes his move and invites his co-worker into his tent on a cold night. How Jack clocked Ennis and where he got his nerve remains a question that Lee and company didn't bother to answer, as if these characters are an inherent mystery to filmmakers exploring a world that's not their own. (There's even a set-up of Ennis taking a nude sponge bath feet away from Jack that elicits not a single glance from Jack.) When they do have sex, it at least initially buys into stereotypes. Jack is the more emotive, more loquacious member of the couple and as such, he is the bottom—as far as we can tell. Granted, this is a nuanced stereotype, and it's daring that Brokeback goes there at all. Many of the mainstream depictions of men who have sex with men around its time—The Birdcage, In and Out, Will & Grace—tip-toed around sex and/or portrayed their characters as having been practically neutered. Their hurried, relationship-consummating, seconds-long sex was much-discussed at the time of Brokeback's release, in no small part due to Ennis using his saliva as lubricant. But really, that one brief scene is the movie's only depiction of sex. Twenty years ago, the scene of their fervent kissing after having not seen each other for four years was perhaps all the passion that mainstream moviegoers could take, but it's telling that the depiction of Jack's first sexual encounter with his eventual wife Lureen (a transcendent Anne Hathaway, who deserved a Supporting Actress nod) is more explicit than that between Jack and Ennis; she's at least topless while the men remain clothed. But if Brokeback Mountain's revolution is mostly by concession, that doesn't mean it avoided challenging the status quo entirely. Ennis and Jack both go on to marry women and start families, seeing each other intermittently for 'fishing' and 'hunting' trips. They're cheating on their wives, living lies, and yet we are still encouraged to root for them. Jack also cruises for sex in Mexico and, we learn later, brought another man to his parents' ranch to work there. His non-monogamy is an affront to the respectability politics that Brokeback Mountain otherwise espouses. It is the emotional monogamy—a common rule of open couples—that matters here. The movie encourages a sophisticated reading of the love between Ennis and Jack. Their transgressions of enforced monogamy are not to be held against them—they're doing the best with what they have and we know it. Brokeback ultimately transcends its representational imperfections with pure heart. Even if it doesn't quite persuade us of Ennis and Jack's early attraction, Ledger and Gyllenhaal's performances sell their characters' love. This is a classic movie romance that ends up gracefully navigating the complications that its characters face by virtue of their same-sex attraction. If Brokeback Mountain played as irrelevant in 2025, it would be a good thing, a sure sign that as a culture, we'd left toxic and time-wasting anti-gay bigotry in the past. It is a failure of our culture that in some places in this very country still, Ennis' prognosis of his relationship with Jack still rings true: 'The bottom line is, we're around each other, and this thing grabs hold of us again, in the wrong place in the wrong time, and we're dead.' Earlier this month, Tristan Kern de Gonzales, the widower of actor Jonathan Joss, shared that he and his husband endured harassment and threats 'by individuals who made it clear they did not accept our relationship,' before Joss was fatally shot 'by someone who could not stand the sight of two men loving each other.' Investigators are looking into whether sexual orientation played a role in the crime, and though they haven't yet come to a determination, it's difficult to look beyond the alleged hatred that preceded Joss' killing. What Ennis fears, the violent murder that flashes through his mind when Lureen tells him of Jack's death as a result of an exploding tire, is still happening. Lee and company may have shaped this story to make sure it went down easy, and they succeeded in achieving the universal by invoking the longing that many feel, regardless of sexuality, for loved ones that they cannot be with for any reason. But its universality is a direct result of its precision about the complications arising from being two men in love in a specific time and place. Just as Jack sinks his hooks into Ennis, leaving him lovesick and shaken, so has this movie affected its audience. Twenty years later, it's enough to make you recite through gritted teeth, 'Brokeback Mountain, I swear…'
Geek Tyrant
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Ang Lee to Direct Immigrant Western OLD GOLD MOUNTAIN — GeekTyrant
Ang Lee is stepping back behind the camera for Old Gold Mountain , a new film adaptation of C. Pam Zhang's haunting debut novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold . The two-time Oscar-winning director ( Brokeback Mountain , Life of Pi ) will bring his signature poetic intensity to this sweeping, revisionist western about two immigrant orphans trying to survive, and bury the past, in a mythic American landscape. The adaptation, written by Hansol Jung, follows siblings Lucy and Sam, 'newly orphaned children of immigrants who are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. 'Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry and glimpses of a different kind of future. It feels like Lee is a great fit for this project, to tell this story. The filmmaker is also developing a Bruce Lee biopic. Source: Deadline
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Fala Chen lands a role in Ang Lee's new movie
23 Jun - It was reported that Fala Chen has found her new project in Ang Lee's upcoming film, "Old Gold Mountain". As reported on Epoch Times, the film has been described to be Ang Lee's next Oscar contender, and that starring in the film would mean that Fala will have more visibility with the awards crowd. The movie is adapted from C. Pam Zhang's debut novel, "How Much of These Hills Is Gold", which follows Lucy and Sam, newly orphaned children of immigrants who set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. It was reported that Ang Lee was previously working on a Bruce Lee biopic. However, due to the high cost of the project, producers were reluctant to agree and that he decided to shelve the project temporarily. Fala, who has been pursuing an international career for the past decade, was last seen in Nick Cheung's film, "Peg O' My Heart". (Photo Source: Fala IG, IMDb)
BBC News
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'In every theatre, people would leave': How 'gay cowboy movie' Brokeback Mountain challenged Hollywood
Twenty years ago, Ang Lee's drama about the love between two male sheep herders was finally released after a long struggle to get it made. It was a watershed moment for gay representation that balanced playing by Hollywood's rules and changing them. When it was released in 2005, Brokeback Mountain entered the collective consciousness in a way that is vanishingly rare for a film with queer subject matter. Even non-cinephiles would have been aware of the "gay cowboy movie", as it was often described in the press, and the subsequent controversy when it lost the Academy Award for best picture to Crash, a clumsy crime film that now regularly appears on lists of the worst Oscar winners ever. Brokeback Mountain did take home three Oscars, including a prestigious best director prize for Ang Lee, and remains a beloved gay touchstone. Actor Paul Mescal recently complained that it feels "lazy and frustrating' to compare his upcoming film The History of Sound, a period romance in which he and Josh O'Connor play travelling lovers in rural Maine, to Lee's tender neo-Western about romantically attracted sheep herders Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal). Whether you agree with Mescal or not, the persistent comparisons are a sign of Brokeback Mountain's enduring impact and popularity. Indeed, to mark its 20th anniversary, Lee's film is now being re-released in US cinemas this week for a limited engagement. Adapted by screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a 1997 short story by Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain was a relatively novel proposition back in 2004. "The fact its two leads were handsome A-list male stars and [it showed] their characters in a romantic story together was groundbreaking," says Tim Teeman, author of In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master. This view is broadly echoed by queer film critic Manuel Betancourt, author of Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies, who says the film's success with critics and audiences alike felt like the start of a "new era of gay representation [on screen]". At the time, Brokeback Mountain looked like a surprising pivot from director Ang Lee, who had recently made the 2003 superhero film Hulk, though his other directing credits ranged from an acclaimed Jane Austen adaptation (1995's Sense and Sensibility) to a hugely successful martial arts film (2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). The film's core cast was a quartet of hotly-tipped rising stars in their twenties: Ledger and Anne Hathaway would go on to win Oscars for subsequent roles, while Gyllenhaal and Michelle Williams are rarely far from the awards season conversation. How it was pioneering "It's easy to take for granted the way that Brokeback Mountain, with its starry cast and A-list director, profoundly changed the shape of LGBTQ+ representation in the mainstream," argues Kyle Turner, author of The Queer Film Guide: 100 Films That Tell LGBTIA+ Stories. Turner notes that "the wave of mainstream queer moves in the 90s" tended to "toggle between Aids-related dramas like Philadelphia (1993) and And the Band Played On (1993), and lighter comedies like The Birdcage (1996) and In & Out (1997)". By contrast, he believes that Brokeback Mountain carved out a new niche as a "straightforward and serious" film that won "newfound respectability" for a romantic story involving same-sex lovers. That story begins in rural Wyoming in 1963, when drifters Ennis and Jack are hired by a local rancher to herd sheep through grazing ground on the titular Brokeback Mountain. One night, with their inhibitions loosened by moonshine, Jack makes a pass at Ennis and the two men have sex in a tent – a pretty audacious scene for a mainstream film in 2005. When Brokeback Mountain came out in December 2005, Ossana, who was also the film's producer, made a point of attending screenings in some of the US's more conservative states to gauge the audience's reaction. "The theatres were packed, and in every theatre it was the same – after the tent scene, five or six people would get up to leave," she tells the BBC. Brokeback Mountain grows sadder and more anguished after Ennis and Jack consummate their relationship. Their sheep-herding summer ends with the two men scrapping, presumably in frustration at the romantic feelings they dare not acknowledge. Ennis then marries his fianceé Alma (Williams), while Jack meets and marries rodeo rider Lureen (Hathaway). It's four years before the two men meet again, at which point Jack asks Ennis to leave Alma and build a life with him. Heartbreakingly, it's a giant leap that Ennis can't bring himself to make. "Everyone talks about the 1960s being a time of 'free love', but it was actually a very narrow-minded and restrictive time for many people in America – that's what the hippies were rebelling against," Ossana says. For Ennis, the prospect of living in a gay relationship with Jack is simply too much to countenance, so for the next 20 years, their passion is limited to sporadic fishing trips that are separate from their everyday lives. The men are affected by overt external homophobia: when Jack returns to Brokeback Mountain, he is told by a prejudiced rancher that there is no work there for men "who stem the rose", a deceptively elegant euphemism for gay sex. But ultimately, it is Ennis' deep-rooted internalised homophobia that thwarts their potential happiness. The challenges of getting it produced Thinly-veiled homophobia – this time in early-2000s Hollywood – made Brokeback Mountain an immense challenge for Ossana and her fellow producer James Schamus. After she read Proulx's short story in 1997, Ossana and screenwriting partner McMurtry persuaded the author to let them adapt it for the screen. "Annie said, 'I don't see a film there, but have at it,'" Ossana recalls. They completed the screenplay in three months, but it took nearly eight years to get the film into production. "The biggest problem was casting Ennis. Actors would commit and then back out, or they just were too afraid based upon what their representatives were telling them," she explains – because for an aspiring leading man at the time, playing a gay character was widely viewed as "career suicide". After Lee joined the project in 2001, the producers found an actor willing to play Ennis, but this star dropped out around five months later. "I already had a feeling he might back out," Ossana says, alluding to the widely held trepidation about playing a gay character. By this point, she was already convinced that Ledger was perfect for the role based on his haunting performance in the 2001 romantic drama Monster's Ball. Crucially, too, he had previously "played a gay teenager in a soap opera" in his native Australia, so Ossana hoped he might be more "open" than his American peers. Her hunch was correct, but Ossana says studio executives were initially reluctant to cast Ledger because they felt he wasn't "macho enough" to play a cowboy – or even a "wannabe cowboy", as she sees the character. "It was probably helpful, in terms of the film's infiltration into the mainstream, that [Ennis and Jack] are two men who inhabit a conventional kind of masculinity," Turner says. Betancourt believes Brokeback Mountain was able to provide a watershed moment in LGBTQ+ representation precisely because it was rooted in proven Hollywood tropes. "As a Western and a melodrama, it played within two well-worn genres and infused them both with new vibrancy – mainly due to the fact it's a love story between two men," he says. At the same time, Brokeback Mountain also adheres to another Hollywood trope: what Teeman describes as depicting "queer love as beautiful but doomed", a narrative that plays out in the likes of The Children's Hour (1961) and Philadelphia (1993). The two men's flickering romance is finally extinguished when Jack dies in ambiguous circumstances. Lureen tells Ennis over the phone that Jack was killed by an exploding tyre – though at the same time, we see images of Jack being viciously beaten by a group of men. Ennis is envisioning, all too believably, his lover being killed in a homophobic hate crime. Its debatable legacy Perhaps because it played by the rules while challenging them at the same time, Brokeback Mountain's place in film history is assured. In 2018, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, which recognises works that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It occupies an equally integral, though more complicated place, in the queer film pantheon. "As a piece of cinema, it remains as ravishing and disarming as ever," Betancourt argues, "but as a pivot point for queer representation, it remains as singular but limiting as it was then." It is, after all, the story of two closeted gay or possibly bisexual men who "pass" as straight in their everyday lives. More like this:• Why Requiem for a Dream still divides• The darkest children's film ever made?• The horror that traumatised millennials Though Brokeback Mountain remains important and influential, it's difficult to quantify its long-term impact on LGBTQ+ representation. Teeman notes that Hollywood gave a green light to several "mainstream queer-themed films" in its wake, notably Milk (2008) and The Kids Are All Right (2010); these were followed in turn by Carol (2014), Moonlight (2016) and Call Me by Your Name (2017). But he also believes "there's little consistency and regularity in the flow of queer-themed stories and lead characters to the screen". For Teeman, "TV and theatre are [still] more radical than film when it comes to queer representation." Brokeback Mountain also retains a unique relevance because of its place in the ongoing debate about whether straight actors should play gay roles. Both Gyllenhaal and Ledger, who died in 2008, are widely presumed to be heterosexual, though Ossana says it was "none of my business" as a producer to ask questions about their sexual orientation. "It's the old chestnut, and Brokeback Mountain is the ultimate exemplar," Teeman says. But even with these caveats, it remains a stunning and heartbreaking piece of cinema that strikes a particular chord with LGBTQ+ viewers. Brokeback Mountain offers a stark reminder that denying your true identity is a tragedy that can derail several lives at once. Brokeback Mountain is being re-released in US cinemas, beginning with special showings on June 22 and 25. -- If you liked this story sign up for The Essential List newsletter, a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram.
