Ditto that.
It’s very unbecoming of her to behave this way about the movie, and it cheapens the awards that the movie did get. You won’t hear Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana trashing other writers, that much I’m sure of.
Yeah, she should have kept her mouth shut. She sounds like a sore loser.
This is total bullshit IMO, and I’m going to use the same argument tagos used when preaching to the choir of admirers of Proulx’s writing in this thread-- BBM is destined to be a classic, and if you didn’t like it, the fault is yours, not the work’s. You aren’t into gay cowboys or tragic love stories? Fine. But that’s not a fault of the movie’s, which is perfectly written, amazingly acted, and took just as long to tell the story as it needed to.
You liked Crash better, that’s your prerogative, but don’t say BBM wasn’t a great movie because you didn’t get into it. That’s exactly like me saying Annie Proulx is a florid hack with a penchant for obstructively byzantine prose, Pulitzer be damned. You say, “but she won a Pulitzer!” So what? BBM won scads of awards and you still dismiss it. Sauce for the goose and all that.
It was Dan Savage’s second choice of a definition for the word “santorum”.
She’s got that right, in a Pot.Kettle.Black. sort of way.
It’s petri dish. The only petrie dish I can think of is Laura Petrie, and not everyone would agree with Rob on that. :dubious:
I find it interesting (and a bit amusing) that Proulx’s claim about Hollywood being culturally “out of touch” with America is the same line we’ve been fed by the right-wing ranters in this country for years. The only difference is Proulx’s attack comes from the left–the same side of the political spectrum where the entertainment industry’s supposed sympathies lie.
I dunno. I agree with her. It’s not secret that the academy is full of a bunch of gutless wonders and the movie critic scene is rivaled only by the video game writing community for it’s total lack of relevance, inability to rip in to something that clearly sucks and general high crap tolerance. At least someone is willing to call them out for being a bunch of lame-o’s.
Crash is based on an idea that seems utterly brilliant to every 19year old film student. “It’s all like, connected man. I’ll make a movie with a bunch of characters, and their lives are connected in some tenuous way. And stuff happens. Yeah. And I’ll talk about Racism. I know, as a white male, all about racism. Yeah! And then there will be a redemptive ending, because it’s all like okay and connected” Luckly, most film students rather quickly realize how trite that idea is (Amores Perros did it best, IMHO) and move on to tell authentic stories about stuff they have some sort of personal connection to besides contemplating the plight of the black man while listening to bad house music at a party with his all-white friends in an upper class LA suburb.
Anyway, I think the award ought to have gone to Lord of War. Now there is a movie that has some teeth on it.
Holy shit, Ang Lee is gay!?!?
Learn something new everyday. Who knew?
And Norman Jewison (director of In The Heat Of The Night) obviously is black.
Wow, Rubystreak, I’m sorry that you’ve taken so much offense at me thinking that *Brokeback *was meh. I’m glad it captured you. It didn’t capture me. Gay cowboys had nothing to do with me not getting into it (honestly, I could care less about the gender of the people involved), and I think the tragic love story angle has been handled better by other people. The acting was amazing, however.
And remember, the converse works as well - just because something has won awards doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, either. I’m not dismissing the movie, I just didn’t see where it’d said something new or made some grand point.
My point in the whole thing is that Hollywood latched onto “gay cowboys! this is groundbreaking!” and parroted that message, when it seems to me that that misses the point of the movie and reduces it, in some way. While *Crash *was contrived, unsurprising, and relied too heavily on tired coincidences as plot devices, it left me with more than *Brokeback *did.
But even sven’s right - Lord of War is better than both of them, by a country mile.
I’m not offended. I just think it’s kind of hypocritical to defend Annie Proulx by saying she won a Pulitzer, thus any criticism of her as a writer is off-base, and then think it’s valid to turn around and dismiss BBM despite its many awards. I didn’t set these criteria, I’m just trying to apply them uniformly. I think BBM is as worthy of defense as Proulx is, and this was turning into a “dis on BBM” thread, which is most definitely flogging a dead horse.
I think the gender of the people involved is a key element to the story, and to dismiss it as not being important is disingenuous. Tragic love stories are hard to tell without being derivative, and I think BBM avoided this quite well. I also think it’s an important story to tell, just as important as Crash if not moreso.
You’re entitled to your opinion but I do think it was new in some significant ways and did make a grand point. I also think it deserved more awards than it got. However, people in this thread were saying that no one could say Annie Proulx was a bad writer because, hey, she got a Pulitzer! Please.
Don’t you think it WAS groundbreaking? When is the last time you saw a movie this “mainstream” featuring gay cowboys, a direct confrontation of the horrendous effects of homophobia and the ripple effect it has on entire families of closeted people trying to pass in a virulent culture? I was very moved by BBM and I think it’s a story that needs to be told b/c it’s easy for people to ignore how harmful homophobia can be and how far-reaching its consequences.
I haven’t see it but I’m going to put it on my Netflix queue.
Let me make sure I understand this. If there’s a person that doesn’t think that BBM is the greatest film of all time, that Citizen Kane is Ishtar, then that person is obviously defective? That they need to go through a series of psychotherapy and painful shots to the bellybutton and having their eyelids held open and subjected to nothing but BBM over and ovver while someone puts drops in their eyes?[sup]*[/sup]
*This is hyperbole. In no way, shape, or form am I trying to suggest that you made this arguement, or that you actually think the above.
You might want to read the whole thread, Superdude. She was parodying tagos’s earlier argument about Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Sure, it’s a stupid argument, but Rubystreak isn’t the one who introduced it.
Thank god.
Actually, I HAVE read the entire thread.
I guess I just got wooshed.
Ang Lee has presumably been around gay people, and had some actual conversations with them. I’ve known a lot of film people, and while all them would profess to be good liberals and deeply troubled by the plight of the black man and oh-so-in-touch with the urban crises of the modern age, not more than a handful of them ever actually spent so much as lunch actually having a real talk with a black guy. I can only think of one black kid in my film classes at the large state university I went to. You’ve never seen so many white men in one room. The world of film may be full of liberal guilt and macho street posturing, but it is still very very much an upper-class white male world.
There are endless movies like this. They lay out a bleak world full of bad guys and all the drama and darkness makes it seem deep. They trot out the boogie men from both the left and the right, and that makes it seem balanced. And the only person who isn’t condemned is the camera, the viewer. They all boil down to “The world sucks, and it’s pretty much everyone’s fault but my own or they systems that I am a part of.” The white middle-aged audiences walks away from the theater feeling educated and properly distressed, but reassured that nothing in their lives has to change. “Oh dear, it’s just terrible”, they tell themselves as the chat over lattes, calmed because at least they’ve done their part by being politely horrified by the problem and now there is nothing more to do.
Traffic. Elephant. Thirteen. House of Sand and Fog. Mystic River. It’s the hip trend. I’ll tell you a great hint for telling a movie’s real intentions- just check to see if they portray sex with a black guy as the protagonist’s ultimate fall.
So you know, in fact, that Paul Haggis has had no more contact with black people than having lunch with one? Cite?
Give us a fucking break. Ang Lee is no more qualified to comment on the plight of the gay American than Paul Haggis is to comment on the plight of the visible minority, and you know it.
In any event, the point here is not that “Crash” was a worse movie than “Brokeback Mountain,” which is a valid point of view, but that Annie Proulx is a dumb, bitter biznatch whose “column” is rife with contradictions, hypocrisy, tortured attempts to make herself sound smarter than she is, and general idiocy.
Unless you want to be seen as using a racial slur, better change that to boogeymen or bogeymen. “Boogie” is a derogatory term for blacks. Cite. (You can learn a lot from this site, Ms. Betty Crocker). 
Anyone who thinks the Oscars or Pulizters mean anything is a fucking tool.
Well, I’m married to a woman, have conversations with her and even have sex with her from time to time. Based on your criteria I’m an outright feminist with the authority to make a film based on a woman’s psyche.
If you’re saying having lunch with a gay man gives you authority on the issue and justifies being able to make a movie, then I declare myself an expert on women.
What if it turns out Haggis had lunch with a gay black man? That would be fun.
Sounds like a litte white guilt is in play. Doesn’t mean your view of Crash is correct.
Well, see, you are already about 500 miles ahead of almost all of Hollywood when it comes to making movies that portray women as actual human beings and not strange curiosities.