Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is often tender, often boring and often brilliantly filmed tale of forbidden love. Like all good tales of forbidden love it is slow-paced and makes the viewer long for more much like the lovers long for each other more. However, this two-hour fifteen minute film is about 25 minutes too long, excruciating 25 minutes at that. Like all directors who make their films as a labor of love (Peter Jackson, Spielberg lately), Lee does not get where and how to end this film. He wants it to keep going while you keep planning to get out of the hall.

Heath Ledger is brilliant and if you had the displeasure of watching his previous movies, you are in for a surprise. One wonders how much it took out of him to perform this role. He is wound tight, inward, responsible and often just helpless and he portrays it all via a clearly weird barely audible southern accent.

Jake Gyllenhaal is disappointing as always. His bushy face and construction worker sentimentality is both out of place and required in the film's tone. He is clearly the most overrated actor with a smart choice of films that keeps the critics happy.

If not anything, this film proves that Ang Lee isn't your everyday filmmaker. After the Hulk misstep, he goes back to what he does best -- tell long drawn-out stories that are basically cultural landscapes.

The Closet

This mild little French film takes a gentle stab at the reverse politics of homophobia in society and specially in corporations where homophobes tend to be overly supportive of homosexuals in order to maintain the facade of propriety. The film above all is funny, entertaining and comical and certainly worth watching on a casual evening. The subtitles are a pain but generally the story is pretty straightforward.

The Idiot (Part 1)

The audiobook I am listening to now is The Idiot by Fyodor Doesoevsky. It is a long book. Nine parts in total over 24 hours. I finished part 1 yesterday. Very impressed already. The book, like all books in that era, has a lot of general stuff that is not very interesting but the plot elements and specially the theme are quite remarkable. After Crime and Punishment, I have newfound respect for Russian authors. I recently read that Doestoevsky's "The possessed" is one of the first and most amazing accounts of a terrorist! I got excited about that and want to read it someday. Long projects these though. I guess audiobooks make it easier. Though they are long and one really has to concentrate as one can't 're-read' a page as one can in a book. I mean I can go back but it is cumbersome at best.