>To make a plot like this movie's credible, you would have to begin it
>in the mid-1940s and end it before the mid-1960s.
>
>In Ang Lee's universe, it's as if the sixties and seventies' sexual
>uprisings either didn't happen (Brokeback Mountain) or were
>fundamentally misguided and ended only tragically (The Ice Storm).
>Only his Regency venture (Sense and Sensibility) ends happily (but in
>that case he had to, based on Jane Austen's plot). For Lee, it's
>been all downhill since 1817 or thereabout?
heh. I've been pestering Brian for his review. When his review of Manderlay came out, I told him that I'd concluded that Brokeback was really just a 'chick flick'. You could see this in the marketing. I kept trying to think what the film reminded me of and I thought, "yeah, The Gay We Were."
Then, I read that Schamus was asked what film set the precedent for this one. His reply? The Bridges of Madison County.
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2006/01/20/from-the-horses-mouth/
Of course het women would flock to the screen to see it. They've been told all their lives that men are incapable of romantic love. But this story, they're told, is about that sort of one-and-only-made-for-each-other-love-you-til-my-dying-days love. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) So women want to see it and they want to see if there's some secret between men, something they've been left out of that means that these two men can have that, where straight men ostensibly cannot.
But, of course, if you look at the research, het men a bigger romantics than women.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org