Hacker Cinema
Brokeback Mountain
2005 · Film · 134 min
Directed by Ang Lee
In 1960s Wyoming, two men develop a strong emotional and sexual relationship that endures as a lifelong connection complicating their lives as they get married and start families of their own.
3 positive11 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
It sounds like you’re saying you knew the Top Gun Maverick shots were CGI because you know a lot about planes, not because the footage looks wrong.
Barbie was chroma keyed - they discuss it in the aforementioned YouTube videos.
And, yes,I know blue aliens don’t exist. But parts of that movie are composited mixtures of CGI and humans in body paint. The point is that you can’t distinguish the digital from the physical.
And, really, what about Brokeback Mountain?
Really? You could tell the planes in Top Gun: Maverick were all CGI over reference footage? You could tell the Barbie movie car sequences were shot in front of a green screen (as opposed to a matte painting, which is how it appears)? You could tell that almost all the racing shots in Gran Turismo were CGI?
This wasn't an example given in the video series but what about a movie like Brokeback Mountain? Can you tell which of the sheep or which of the mountaintops are CGI? If you can, that's absolutely shocking to me.
Take a look at this shot: https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/z8wbv4/whats_the_consensus_on_this_shot_from_the_avatar/
Can you tell which parts are CGI and which are practical?
Here's the answer: https://imgur.com/a/Q7UUn2G
It's a false dichotomy that a movie has to be a "fresh take" or a rehash, with nothing in between or combination. Nihil sub sōle novum.
And different/unexpected != good, not by a long shot.
Simply, if core characters are changed to their opposites it fails to be the same story any longer. Change the name to "Space Opera" and no one would have cared.
I misspoke earlier when I implied agenda before, which while heavy-handed, wasn't what made me really angry. As mentioned elsewhere in thread it was the betrayal of Luke and Yoda.
(Also, the Empire was always modeled after fascist Nazi Germany, even down to the black, white, red colors, and storm-trooper terminology.)
If you want to see a progressive film made by grownups, watch "Brokeback Mountain", not this disrespectful pile of garbage.
This. Just because we agree with something - doesn't mean it's apolitical. Even a purely romantic film such as Brokeback Mountain, when it was released was called political by Christian conservatives. I don't agree with their views at all, but in this case they were right.
Because anything that can be targeted by legislation, is political in it's definition.
Also, multiple war movies, such as Rambo for example are explicitly political. So, this recent pearl clutching about Hollywood political honestly makes no sense.
It was up against the biopic of the Williams sisters' father "King Richard", Japanese film "Drive My Car", Stephen Spielberg's remake of "West Side Story", and gay western "The Power of the Dog".
Perhaps the last was the second time such a film has been snubbed by the Academy, after "Brokeback Mountain" was infamously passed over by "Crash" in 2005.
A few more great books that beget great films:
* The Silence of the Lambs * The Shining * Shawshank Redemption (novella but I'll allow it) * Brokeback Mountain (same) * No Country for Old Men * Little Women (there are a few versions to choose from but I would choose the 1994 adaptation myself, thought he 2019 version was very good) * Requiem For a Dream * Lolita * Roots (mini-series but I think we should allow it)
That's what I can think of off the top of my head.
I know it's a stupid example, but even in the movie "The Brokeback Mountain" the two gay men had families and kids, not only because being gay was ostracized, to put it mildly, but also because having kids was considered a duty, social pressure forced many homosexuals to live a "normal life" to avoid discrimination or worse.
Being gay was dangerous, it could ruin an entire family forever.
There are many ways to push people to do something they are not keen to, draconian laws is one of them.
Never heard of "Lonesome Dove", or that he was the author behind the movie Brokeback Mountain.
I grew up in Italy, lived abroad for a few years in my adult life (northern Europe and Singapore), and spent 2012 to 2020 in San Francisco (I'm now back to Italy).
Despite 8+ years of living in the US, I occasionally stumble on articles like this, and am very happy to discover yet another piece of American culture that I completely missed, mostly because I didn't grow up there nor attended school there.
It's easy for Europeans to dismiss the US as a young Country with little history; but the truth is, the US has had a rather interesting history in the past several decades, and the intensity and variety of it makes it possibly deeper than what happened in a relatively sleepy Europe.
You can find token examples of Americans who think that Harry Potter tricks children into being Satanists. You can find Americans who think that Schindlers List is jewish propaganda. You can find Americans who believe that Brokeback Mountain should be banned under obscenity laws.
These are fringe beliefs. As a general rule, movie studios do not shitcan movies just because a couple of dumbasses think that the movie goes too far.
Seriously, if Harry Potter was released despite the controversy it caused, there is no way in hell that "controversy" around The Interview is the reason behind this decision. You'd have to be incredibly out of touch with American society to think otherwise.
"Lee[1] was quoted as saying, "What do I know about gay ranch hands in Wyoming?" In spite of the director's removal from the subject at hand, Brokeback Mountain showcased Lee's skills in probing the depths of the human heart."
... and I remember, as someone who grew up in that time period, in the poor-white-trash southwest, being amazed at how perfectly he nailed the aesthetic and mood of the entire movie[2].
So it can be done ...
[1] Ang Lee is a Taiwanese-born American film director, screenwriter and producer.
[2] Brokeback Mountain
This is a good practical article. Maybe it's obvious, but I feel like it's missing one recommendation: weigh the risks and benefits. Are people going to die if the anonymization is broken, or are the consequences relatively minor? Are there ways to reduce the severity of these consequences? To maximize the benefits?
I take a bit of issue with Pete's statement that Naryanan's break "gave access to their complete rental histories". Rather, it gave access to slightly munged ratings a for possibly partial subset of the movies included in the dataset. While this is real, it's not quite the same as knowing their entire rental history.
To my knowledge, there was no damage done by this exploit: no one was fired because it was likely they loved Brokeback Mountain. By contrast, the Netflix Prize brought about a lot of great research that otherwise might never have been done much less made public.
I'm glad the data was released, and the contest held, and I think in retrospect the benefits outweighed the potential risks. I would hate for the conclusion to be that privacy must be upheld above all other factors. I would hate for the outcome to be that no such dataset will ever be released again.
* Life is beautiful
* Last Train Home
* Brokeback mountain
* Slumdog Millionare
* Aftershocks (Tangshan dadizhen)
* Bus 174
* Moon
* The Wire (TV series)
* Zorba the greek
* City of God
IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?
1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.
Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.
Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.
Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:
Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.
Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.
Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?
What a bunch of bull. Suppose for a second that Americans had happily reconciled religion and evolution a hundred years ago. Would that mean ignorant American yokels would line up to see a movie about a fairly boring (personally, anyway, by movie protagonist standards) nineteenth century naturalist? Jennifer Connelly or no, blaming creationists for the commercial unviability of a movie about Charles Darwin is like saying, "My discount liquor store would have been a big success if Google hadn't closed its local campus. Now that the Googlers are gone, who's going to buy these bottles of King Cobra and Mad Dog 20/20?" It just doesn't make sense. If anything, the controversy would have helped the film, since it would polarize communities and make non-creationists feel like maybe they should see it just to make it clear what side they're on.
In the end, you can't blame lack of broad appeal on politics. Look at Brokeback Mountain versus the zillion previous gay art-house romances that went nowhere. Did Brokeback Mountain break out because American evangelicals got soft on gays for a moment? No, it broke out because it had big names (Heath Ledger, Ang Lee, Maggie Gyllenhaal's brother), a plot, accessible dialog, and a bunch of familiar elements (cowboys, forbidden love) that made it easy for audiences to engage with the characters.
I wonder how they'll handle people with multiple identities. For instance, on their front page one of the "recently found" photos was of Heath Ledger, in the movie Brokeback Mountain.
Would they be able to identify him as both "Heath Ledger" and "Ennis Del Mar", the character he played? If they supported multiple identities for individuals, would they also support multiple individuals for identities? Like if I were to search for "Bruce Wayne"; would I get photos of everyone from Micheal Keaton to Christian Bale, as Batman?
That brings up a third concern. This application could be a major problem for super-heroes.