I am probably the last person on earth to see this movie, and I hesitated to write about it here, because it’s so last year or something, but who cares. It’s my blog, and you don’t have to read about how much I loved a movie that came out last year.

One of the things people say over and over about Brokeback Mountain is that it stays with you. I felt that after initially reading the short story. It was so powerful, so spare, and so moving. I don’t often tell my husband he has to read something, because our reading tastes (most of the time) aren’t all that similar. It isn’t that he doesn’t like literature. I think he just sees reading true crime as research, and I think that’s the direction he sees himself going, writer-wise. One thing I read that Larry McMurtry said after reading Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain,” was that he wished he’d written it. That was how I felt after I read it. I can’t explain why, because it’s not like anything I write. It reminded me, actually, of Cormac McCarthy. The characters were so well drawn with so few words. They were so real. And their story was so moving. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it, and after seeing the movie, well, I can’t say I’m speechless, because here I am blathering, but it was probably one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen in my life.

One of the things that pierced me to the core was the sky. The sky only looks like that in the West. The movie was filmed in Canada, but I was forcibly reminded of the landscape and sky in Colorado, where I grew up. You kind of forget that sky, I guess, but then when you see it again, like I did in this movie, it seizes you; it all comes flooding back. My family has lived in the West, mostly in Texas, since the late 1800’s. I kept thinking of the trips we’d make to see my great-grandparents, who lived in a very small town in Texas. It looked so much like the small towns in this movie. The house that Jack’s parents lived in was so much like my great-grandparents’ house. They paid $500 for it when they first married and lived there until they died in the 1980’s. Everything about the setting in this movie was totally authentic. It made me so homesick.

I think it’s a shame that Heath Ledger had to make this movie the same year that Philip Seymour Hoffman made Capote. I have not seen Capote yet, but Steve loved it and said Hoffman was totally deserving of the Oscar he won for best actor. If it had not been for Hoffman, I feel sure nothing would have stood in Ledger’s way of winning the Oscar. He was incredible. I am related to guys like Ennis, and Ledger perfectly captured that set of the jaw and the way they swallow their words. There is a beauty in their simplicity. It took me a long time to appreciate that.

One of the things I admired about the story, and then the movie, was the way that it dealt with Ennis and Jack’s relationship as one of passion and love — one that couldn’t be fulfilled because of society and Ennis’s fears. I can’t figure out how to explain this, but you don’t dwell on the fact that they are two men in love so much as that they are two people in love, and they can’t be together. It’s heartbreaking. On the one hand, it’s rather obvious that it’s two men, but somehow that isn’t where you focus. It is so subtle, and I just can’t figure out how to explain it. On the one hand, I hate to even say that, because it insinuates that there’s a problem with having a love story about two men. Let’s face it — in our modern American society, there still is, isn’t there?

Obviously you’d probably have to be living under a rock not to have heard some of the more famous lines, and having read the story, I knew how it would end. I was still sobbing at the end. It was so moving — the tiny little shrine Ennis created in his closet. I started crying when Ennis and Jack parted for the last time, and I didn’t stop until the film was over. If anything, I just sobbed harder.

The movie was incredibly faithful to Annie Proulx’s story. The women characters were fleshed out a bit. Some of the relationships were expanded a bit. I don’t remember the Thanksgiving scene at Jack’s being in the story. The Thanksgiving scene at Alma’s was rendered exactly as it was written in the story.

In all, the movie was pitched perfectly. The actors, screenwriters, and director are to be commended on their performances.

Have you read my squee over the new Harry Potter flick yet?

I have also been having a bit of a squee over Makani’s fan art. This one is Maggie’s favorite:

She keeps asking me if she can look at the picture of Squidward dressed up like “Professor Snake.”

Last night, ABC ran its premiere of Their Eyes Were Watching God, adapted from Zora Neale Hurston’s novel of the same name. You can read my review of the novel here. I enjoyed the movie. I thought the casting was excellent, especially Halle Berry as Janie. The soundtrack was excellent and very appropriate. The acting was subtle — much was communicated with the simplest gesture or look. However, some of the charm of the dialect was lost. I heard it come through at times in the dialogue, but not like I remembered in the novel. Also, the scene in which Janie finally tells Jody off did not even come close to the power that scene had in the novel. Janie was still way too meek. That scene is my major gripe about this adaptation. I felt that it was a bit hard to believe that Janie wouldn’t age at all over the course of 20 years.

The actor who played Tea Cake, Michael Ealy, had a great deal of magnetism, and his chemistry with Berry was palpable. My first thought when he came on the screen was, “Uh-oh… here come Tea Cake…” If you had read the book, you just knew him as soon as he came onscreen.

Much of storytelling is taken out, and the trial is deleted entirely, but the cast perfectly caught the gossipy old hens on their porch whispering about Janie and Tea Cake, and I teared up when Tea Cake and Janie danced. I was thinking of Zora Neale Hurston. I was thinking that this book was published in 1937 and basically died. It wasn’t resurrected until Alice Walker came along. It wasn’t part of the canon of American Literature until very recently. What a vindication for Hurston, who must have known what a fine book she had written.

The costumes were historically accurate — very beautiful clothes for Janie and everyone else dressed as I imagined. The juke joint in the Everglades was perfect. Watching Tea Cake’s descent into rabies was touching and sad.

At several points, Janie references the title of the book in the movie. I felt that was overdone for those watchers who were unfamiliar with the book. The title comes from the scene when the hurricane is coming, and it seems out of place and odd for Janie to keep telling us, when she looks up, that she’s watching God.

Overall, I have to give it a high rating. It was very enjoyable.

I have written a new Pensieve article — a review of the extra features on the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD.

One of you who bought the DVD besides me: did you have to turn the volume up very high in order to hear the dialogue? I know that British people talk more quietly than Americans, but I hadn’t noticed this problem with the movies before. Is it my copy? Or is the sound quality not too good? On the other hand, it sounded fine through the headphones on the computer. If it is my TV or DVD player, then I must say this is the only movie I’ve noticed having a problem, aside from the Twin Peaks pilot, which is noted for sound issues in general.