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Robert Fuller's article, so touted, is one of the largest piles of horseshit I've ever read. Brokeback Mountain is the ultimate closeted movie. It was boring and trite when it was called Out of Africa (now if it had been Out of the Closet in Africa ...). It's dead, prestige filmmaking in which any emotion is smoothed down in the name of taste and production values. People who repress their sexuality live with turbulence boiling under the surface. A movie has to make us feel that even if the characters keep their turbulence under wraps. BM was nothing but dull, dead surfaces with the kind of stoic manliness that ruined Gary Cooper's career.
Funny how everyone assumes Chuck and Larry is offensive -- though the gay film critic Nathan Lee in the Village Voice called it a more radical film than Brokeback. People marrying for convenience is a staple of comedy. If gay marriage can be treated the same way straight marriage has been, isn't that a sign that the very idea of it is becoming more accepted?
And contrary to the previous correspondent who can't read, if this had been a dishonest review, it would have pretended it was a good movie because Zacharek agrees with gay mamrriage. Instead, she said a movie whose message she agreed with was bad. That's called separating aesthetics from message, knowing one doesn't justify the other. It's what critics do.
