Brokeback Mountain

Ang Lee, my favorite Taiwanese director, is back!!! Two years after his only directorial disaster, Hulk, he is back in his top form. Brokeback Mountain has all of Ang Lee’s trademarks: breathtaking cinematography, superb acting and especially his quiet, subtle and poetic storytelling style. Even though Ang Lee set out to make a great love story, Brokeback Mountain has been inevitably labeled by mainstream press as that “gay cowboy movie”. It is not the first time Ang Lee made a gay movie or a western. Actually he has made one masterpiece in each genre (The Wedding Banquet and Ride with the Devil), but it is probably the first time anyone has attempted to tamper with the usual macho males formula in a western.

Brokeback Mountain is a heartbreaking love story between two cowboys over the course of about two decades. The movie begins in 1963 when two young men, Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger), a ranch hand, and, Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), a rodeo wanna-be, first met. They landed sheep herding jobs for the summer on Brokeback Mountain. Their love affair started on Brokeback Mountain, a lonely and beautiful place, in 1963, a year when many social changes took place in the U.S. and worldwide. On Brokeback Mountain, isolated from real world, it seems natural that they would become lovers. Once returning to the outside, they have to hide their relationship and try to live a more conventional life, with devastating effects on their loved ones.

The movie is beautifully shot not in Wyoming, where the story takes place, but in Alberta, Canada. The gorgeous mountain terrain is the only refuge for the characters to be at peace with their feelings and enjoy their stolen moments. With the Oscar buzz surrounding Heath Ledger, I had expected to see an astonishing performance from him, but was surprised that Jake Gyllenhaal also had a best performance so far in his career. He is convincing as a more fragile and idealistic Jack Twist and can easily break your heart with his sad puppy dog eyes every time when his hope of life with Ennis is dashed. With this film, Heath Ledger has completed his transformation from a star to an actor. This Australian hunk has always had a taste for interesting roles. His Ennis is a man with few words. Even when he does speak, he mumbles most of the time. With his cowboy hat on for most scenes and his eyes in the shadow of his hat, he simply conveys all the emotions through his tight lips and rigid body. It is an ultimate minimalist performance.

I think Ang Lee could have made sparser use of music. The quiet and sleepy Wyoming surroundings lend extra power to the movie and I feel Ang Lee should have utilized it more. Gustavo Santaolalla and Marcelo Zarvos wrote a marvelous score, but it is intrusive and quite unnecessary in a lot of scenes, especially during the sheep herding period on Brokeback Mountain. The sounds of nature and two actor’s superb performance are enough to convey their feelings. The music only adds a sense of melodrama and cheapens what has transpired onscreen. Willie Nelson’s songs at the end of the credits do not convey the mood of the movie. I think Elvis’ Are You Lonesome Tonight would have been a better choice to convey all the sadness and regret Ennis feels in his life.

My two favorite scenes in the movie are Ang Lee’s specialties: the Thanksgiving family gatherings of the Twist and Ennis families. Ang Lee is a master when it comes to table shots. Once again, he captured the tension on each dinner table so perfectly that we could have cut it with the carving knife. The editing between these two scenes typifies Ang Lee’s subtlety in showing the parallels of Jack and Ennis’s lives. Without any outside music, both scenes also feel much more realistic. I also love the shot of Ennis the morning after his first sexual encounter with Jack. He was riding a horse with only sky as background and it is such a clever way of showing how unreal he must have felt as if he were walking in the clouds. Once he reached the herd and saw a sheep butchered by coyotes, a sense of reality set in; the butchered lamb foreshadows Ennis and Jack’s ominous future together. From such little details, we can feel Ang Lee’s steady hand is always in control of every moment in this movie.

Brokeback Mountain is adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from the The New Yorker short story written by E. Annie Proulx. Proulx is the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Shipping News. In that book, Proulx also dealt with finding love in a cold remote place. I love that simple and compelling tale of a man’s psychological and spiritual growth. Even though I have never read this specific short story, I could imagine the excitement McMurtry and Ossana must have felt when they first read the story. McMurtry is a veteran writer in the western genre. He may be most famous for his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Lonesome Dove, but he also originally created another famous counter hero in westerns, Hud. Incidentally, his book, Horseman Pass By, was transferred to the big screen as movie Hud in the same year Brokeback Mountain story started, 1963. Now McMurtry, with Ossana, has added a new twist to westerns and may have started another western genre revolution. According to Creative Screenwriting magazine interviews with both screenwriters, their major departure from Proulx’s story is the role of the wives. In the short story, the wives are relatively secondary, but McMurtry and Ossana think they are essential in explaining Ennis and Jack’s roles in this culture and in this time. They are not free to pursue their personal happiness, and in Ennis’ case, does not have a full grasp of his own sexuality.

This is not a movie one can easily forget upon leaving the theater; it has been lingering in my mind and refuses to let go. Sometimes unbeknownst to filmmakers, their movies connect in a special way. Years ago, I saw a wonderful British movie, Maurice. I discerned a lot of similarities in their plots, with major difference being their surroundings and social backgrounds. Maurice is a movie adaptation of E.M. Forster’s tale of two men coming to terms with their sexuality in the Edwardian age. Now years later, Proulx’s story shows us a similar struggle in the American West. As long as there is intolerance in society, there will be more heart-wrenching tales for writers to tell.

Ennis and Jack are correct when they say they are not queers; they are only human. And Ang Lee has succeeded after all: the movie is a great love story showing that love knows no gender, race or country.

Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha can be well summed up in one word: beautiful. From cinematography to music, from production design to art direction, from set decoration to costume design, it is breathtakingly beautiful from the first scene to the last.

The movie is only the second feature film from director Rob Marshall, but with his abundant experience on stage, he has an unerring eye for beauty. The movie tells the story of how a fish village orphan, Chiyo, becomes a famous geisha, Sayuri (played by Ziyi Zhang). Unfortunately, Arthur Golden’s original book is not strong enough to build a whole movie on. Golden’s book is an interesting read of Geisha culture and training and offers readers a peek into Japan’s history from 1920s to late 40s, but when it comes to the central love story, it reads more like a melodramatic paperback romance aimed for teenagers. Marshall successfully transfers the book’s look and atmosphere onto the big screen and has done an excellent job condensing pages of geisha training into about 15-minute screen time. Marshall combines quick editing with presto music to emphasize the intensity and urgency of Sayuri’s training. It is apparent that Marshall’s choreography background has enabled him to orchestrate the sequences in a smooth and masterful fashion; however, when it comes to telling the love story, there is little he can do to improve upon what Golden has in the book.

The casting of three Chinese actresses (Michelle Yeoh is Chinese-Malaysian.) in the lead roles has caused little ruckus in Japan but loud protest in China. Because of the bad blood between the Chinese and the Japanese due to WWII, Chinese people have called Ziyi Zhang and Li Gong (who played Sayuri’s arch rival, Hatsumomo) traitors for playing Japanese geishas. I believe that China has much more to celebrate about from this movie than to condemn it. The movie proves that these three Chinese actresses are the most recognizable Asian faces in the movie world today. The studio cast them clearly with international box office and dollar signs in mind. All three actresses are well known throughout Asia and Europe and they have been steadily building a fan base in the States thanks to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and all of Yimou Zhang’s Chinese movies. All three had made People magazine’s 50 most beautiful people in the past. In 2005, Ziyi Zhang was also on Time magazine’s list of world’s 100 most influential people. The magazine called her “China’s gift to Hollywood”. Ziyi Zhang is poised to become one of the biggest Asian stars in Tinseltown. All three have done a competent job in this movie, but Zhang and Gong’s struggle with English has limited their ability and may have also forced the screenwriters Robin Swicord and Doug Wright to write more simplistic dialogue to the detriment of the movie. I wish Steven Spielberg had made this movie years earlier with Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung in the lead. (Spielberg purchased the right to Golden’s book years ago and Cheung was long rumored to be attached to the project; however, Spielberg kept pushing off the production in order to make other movies and Cheung eventually dropped out of the project. In the end, Spielberg decided to only assume producer’s role and let someone else direct the movie.) Cheung may have been a little too old for the role, but her fluent English and superb acting skill could have been a great boost to the movie. In this movie, the best performance belongs to Kaori Momoi who plays Mother, the owner of the geisha house in which Sayuri grows up. Mother could easily have become a loathsome character, but Momoi humanizes her instead of caricaturizing her. Her Mother character is probably some one who has gone through plenty of hard times and learned to put her self-interest and self-survival ahead of everything else. Even though Momoi is also not a native English speaker, she manages to turn it to her advantage. She delivers her lines in such a slow and calculated fashion that it fits her character’s manipulative mentality perfectly.

In 1937, Hollywood adapted Pearl Buck’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Good Earth, for the big screen. It used an almost entirely white cast to portray a Chinese farmer’s lifetime story. Since then, Hollywood has come a long way to have its first all-Asian big budget production. As for some people’s assertion that a movie about Japan should be headlined by Japanese actors, Gong answered eloquently in her interviews, “As actors, we seek roles that challenge and inspire us. Think of all the amazing performances that would be lost: Meryl Streep as a Polish woman in ‘Sophie's Choice’; Russell Crowe as an American in ‘The Insider’; Ralph Fiennes as a German in ‘Schindler's List’; Vivien Leigh as an American in ‘Gone With the Wind’; Sir Anthony Hopkins as an American president in ‘Nixon’.” If Katherine Hepburn could play a Chinese woman in Dragon Seed and Luise Rainer could win an Oscar for O-Lan in The Good Earth, who is to say that Asian actors cannot play roles of other Asian descent? I only hope that Memoirs of a Geisha is simply a start for Asian actors and Hollywood will have more rich roles created with them in mind.

Syriana

Syriana is actually a Robert Altmanish ensemble movie with many interweaving subplots. The story jumps from U. S. to Switzerland and some unnamed Middle East country. The first 30 minutes of the movie could be confusing and frustrating for some audiences. It certainly bored me a little since we, the audience, are yet to be clear about the interconnections among all the characters and storylines. As the movie goes on, it becomes more and more interesting. As a political thriller, it succeeded in keeping me on the edge of my seat till the end.

Not every one will like what director/writer, Stephen Gaghan, has portrayed in this movie. Evil intentions lurk in every corner of the world and the future looks pretty bleak. I only wish this film could have come out before 9/11. 9/11 has opened a lot of Americans’ eyes on how cruel fanatic Muslim extremists have become, but it has not made Americans think deeper about what makes suicide bombers do what they do. In the movie, American government’s decisions in Middle East are mainly based on benefits for its own people; we are expanding our empire at the expense of other nations. As a movie with many subplots, unfortunately, sometimes it cannot delve deeper into every character. I would have loved to see more about Wasim Khan, the poor Pakistani boy, who was gradually seduced by an extremist group to become a suicide bomber. It is ironic that the most human character for me in this movie is a terrorist. It is about time for us, as Americans, to realize that our government’s meddling in foreign countries is partially responsible for terrorism. Even though we don’t produce our own suicide bombers, how can we honestly say our own political assassinations in other countries are not acts of terrorism?

I think the movie is well made by Stephen Gaghan, but since I was so grasped by all the storylines, I really didn’t pay much attention to any technical details. The movie has a solid cast. There may be a few typecast (I personally would like to see Chris Cooper play someone other than a Texan), but I don’t think there is a single bad performance. George Clooney famously gained 30 pounds and had spinal fluid leak out of his nose because of making this movie. He has done a nice job transforming himself from a decorative hunk in movies to a serious filmmaker, both in front of and behind the camera. I can feel his character’s world weariness and loneliness. His character, Bob Barnes, is a CIA field operative. He may sometimes detest what he has to do, but deep down he has a strong sense of right and wrong and loves field work. But the best performance in this movie has to go to Jeffrey Wright. I think he is one of the best, if not the best, character actors in his generation. He gave two best supporting performances of this year (Syriana and Broken Flowers). The two characters are quite opposite, but he plays them with such ease and understatement. He plays a different role every time I see him. As a black corporate lawyer in the white boys’ club, we can always feel a slight unease behind his confident persona. I am disappointed that he has not been recognized for any of his performances during this award season.

I did not understand the movie’s title when I saw it. After the movie, I did a little research. Robert Baer, the author of the book the movie is loosely based on, told NPR that the title is a metaphor for foreign intervention in the Middle East, referring to post-World War II think tank strategic studies for the creation of an artificial state that would ensure continued U.S. access to crude oil. As global economy and advance in technology have blurred borders among countries, maybe it is time for us to stop thinking regionally and start thinking globally. We as a mankind are in this universe together. Destroying one group to advance another will only lead to destruction for all.

Introduction

Hi, everyone! This site is really a place for me to review movies and hear your opinions as well.