Brokeback Mountain

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A gay cowboy romance that is in in the works, directed by Ang Lee and produced by James Schamus and Diana Ossana for Focus Features, a division of Universal Pictures (In other words, a major studio release). Shooting on the movie begins this summer. It is currently in casting negotiations for the part of the two male leads: Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.
The screenplay is adapted from the short story, “Brokeback Mountain” by Annie Proulx, available in the collection Close Range : Wyoming Stories.

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Weekend Update 2004-01-06

Over the long New Years weekend, my friend Cate, who was in from Germany, came over and we went to Dan and Doug’s New Years party (photos soon!) along with Kathy and had a good time. Cate and I went to the Catholic supply store downtown and got religious medals (I know, I know, I was just saying below that I’m not a fan of the Catholic church. I still like the saints, though. They never did anything to me.) and went to the 62nd Street antique mall. It was great to see Cate again, and I hope it’s not two years before I see her again. I’m hoping to visit my sister in England, though, and if so, maybe Cate and I can hang out in London.

I went to see House of Sand and Fog with Melissa. Deeply depressing. If you see this, do it on a bright sunny day, not a dark gloomy one like we did.
And I did more painting in my living room. I also read ALOT. I finished Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, and read Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown, the guy who wrote the DaVinci Code.

Middlesex was excellent. Angels and Demons was good, but not off the charts good. If you liked the DaVinci Code, you’ll enjoy this. I had it figured out well before the end, though, and it basically followed the same formula the other: Langdon as hero, girl as intrepid side-kick, a race against time to solve a puzzle, with an anonymous, unknown bad guy who turns out to be someone familiar to you in a wild twist at the end of the book. The appeal for me is the idea of clues to mysteries hidden in plain sight, amongst objects you see every day, with a scavenger hunt like puzzle attached. And I love the idea of secret societies, unusual iconography, etc.

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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

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Coming Summer of 2004, starring Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow & Jude Law. Thus guaranteeing that I, Doug and Amy will all be in the theater to watch. Very 1930’s Art Deco style movie, with Angelina in uniform, flying a plane. I will so be there. Gwyneth is a reporter. I wasn’t paying that much attention to Jude Law in the trailer, but I’m sure he was hot, too. For a boy.

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Onion: Non-Widescreen Version Of DVD Received As Hanukkah Gift

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The Onion wries a news story that sounds vaguely like my friend Douglas:

A hilarious story about a kid who’s disappointed to receive the “full-screen” version of the Matrix Reloaded as a gift, as opposed to the more desirable letter-boxed, or “wide-screen” version.

“With approximately a third of the movie’s visual content missing, thanks to ‘pan-and-scan,'” he added under his breath.”

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“Mary Sue” in Online Fan Fiction

MARY SUE (n.):

1. A variety of story, first identified in the fan fiction community, but quickly recognized as occurring elsewhere, in which normal story values are grossly subordinated to inadequately transformed personal wish-fulfillment fantasies, often involving heroic or romantic interactions with the cast of characters of some popular entertainment.

2. A distinctive type of character appearing in these stories who represents an idealized version of the author.

3. A cluster of tendencies and characteristics commonly found in Mary Sue-type stories.

4. A body of literary theory, originally generated by the fanfic community, which has since spread to other fields (f.i., professional SF publishing) because it’s so darn useful. The act of committing Mary Sue-ism is sometimes referred to as “self-insertion.”

Sounds dirty.

Making Light’s lengthy article on the concept of “The Mary Sue” is well worth reading.

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Narnia Movie

Narnia UnicornThey’re doing a film version of the Chronicles of Narnia.

That’s so cool. I loved these books when I was a kid, and I bought the boxed set a few years back and re-read them. The film version is being done by Peter Jackson, the producer of the Lord of the Rings, and will use some of the same production and design people, which is so fitting, because Narnia’s creator, C. S. Lewis was a lifelong friend of J. R. R. Tolkien.

2022-03-13 Update:
I saw this movie later and wasn’t especially impressed by it. It seemed to hit hard on the Christian themes, which ruined it for me.
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I don’t care how “sexy” Ben Affleck is…

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He simply does not cause lesbians to want to have sex with him. Believe me. Icky. Icky. Icky. I’m sorry, but the culture police need to write him a ticket for Gigli AND Chasing Amy. Seriously, if Ben Affleck wanted to have sex with me, I might auction the option off to my gay male friends, but that’s the closest I would EVER come to considering the idea.

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The Magdalene Sisters Documentary

I wrote a few months back about the Magdelene Laundries – In Mid-20th Century Ireland (until the last one closed in 1996), the Catholic Church ran commercial laundries, run by nuns, that were essentially prisons for wayward girls, who were deposited there by their families when they became pregnant, got in trouble or otherwise upset society.

The story of these prisons is now being told in a British documentary, Sex in a Cold Climate by Steven Humphries, and was then made into an award-winning (but denounced by the Catholic Church, big surprise) movie, The Magdalene Sisters by Peter Mullens, which is currently playing in the United States. I happened to run across an interesting article about the movie in Slate, and it occurred to me that, had I been born a few years earlier and in the wrong country, I would have been one of those girls.

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Mel Gibson is a Total Nutjob

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Holy crap. What a fucking moron.

Gibson’s theology, writes Christopher Noxon in the New York Times, “is a strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives — including a seminary dropout and rabble-rousing theologist who also happens to be Mel Gibson’s father.”

In the 1992 El Pais interview, Gibson said that “For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the 60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules.

“Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated. … The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don’t believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends. It’s the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it,” he said.

I will never see any of his movies again.

(2014 Update: And I haven’t, either.)

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