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<FONT FACE="Verdana"><B>This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...<BR>
<BR>
</B><FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Brokeback Mountain (R)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Friday & Saturday, May 5 & 6<BR>
7:00 PM<BR>
Sunday, May 7<BR>
4:00 & 7:00 PM<BR>
</B>$5/adults<BR>
<B>(see Review below)<BR>
* * *<BR>
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Next week at the Kenworthy-<BR>
</B><BR>
<FONT COLOR="#000080"><H2>Neil Young: Heart of Gold (PG)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>May 11-13, 7:00 PM<BR>
May 14, 4:30 & 7:00 PM<BR>
* * *<BR>
</B><BR>
<B>Also in May at the Kenworthy-<BR>
</B><BR>
<B>Match Point (R)<BR>
</B>May 18 & 19, 7:00 PM<BR>
May 21, 4:10 & 7:00 PM<BR>
<BR>
<B>Rendezvous Talent Showcase<BR>
</B>May 20, 7:00 PM<BR>
$10/general admission<BR>
<BR>
<B>Inside Man (R)<BR>
</B>May 25-27, 7:00 PM<BR>
May 28, 4:05 & 7:00 PM<BR>
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<B>Coming in June:</B> Boys of Baraka; Children’s Matinee series: Dreamer; Cheaper by the Dozen 2; Wallace & Gromit<BR>
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Regular movie prices: $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger<BR>
KFS series pass prices: $30/10 films, $75/30 films. KFS pass good only for Sunday movies.<BR>
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For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a schedule, visit our website at www.kenworthy.org<BR>
<B>* * *<BR>
This week’s review-<BR>
<BR>
</B><FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Brokeback Mountain<BR>
</H2></FONT><BR>
Directed by Ang Lee<BR>
Written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx<BR>
Rated R: Advisory: Sex scenes, adult subject matter, strong language and nudity.<BR>
Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes<BR>
<BR>
<B><I><U>As reviewed by Peter Travers writing for Rolling Stone Magazine<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
Ang Lee's unmissable and unforgettable Brokeback Mountain hits you like a shot in the heart. It's a landmark film and a triumph for Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, who bring deep reserves of feeling to this defiantly erotic love story about two Wyoming ranch hands and the external and internal forces that drive them from desire to denial. <BR>
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Directed with piercing intelligence and delicacy by Lee, the film of Annie Proulx's 1997 short story turned into the unerring script by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana is a model of literary adaptation that wears its emotions on its sleeve.<BR>
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That leaves the film vulnerable. The media keep tagging it as the gay cowboy movie, the queer Gone With the Wind, the Western that puts the poke in cowpoke. Coupled with the rise of homophobia as church and state shout down gay marriage, the film is up against it.<BR>
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Do me a favor: See the movie first and make your judgments later. It's an eye-opener. The story begins in 1963, when ranch boss Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid) hires Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal) and Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) to herd sheep up on Wyoming's Brokeback Mountain. Ennis is quiet, but whiskey and Jack's talk about his rodeo riding loosens Ennis' tongue and his inhibitions. One cold night they share a bedroll. Jack gives the impression of experience. For Ennis, this is nothing he'd done before, but no instructional manual is needed.<BR>
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Proulx writes it this way: "They never talked about sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, 'I'm not no queer,' and Jack jumped in with 'Me neither.' "<BR>
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Lee and the gifted cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros) transform Proulx's terse prose into expansive visual poetry. Shooting in Alberta, Canada, Lee avoids trite postcard prettiness to find the beauty and terror in nature that mirror the vivid and sometimes violent relationship between the two men. "It's nobody's business but ours," Jack tells Ennis.<BR>
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He's wrong, of course. Joe spots them with his binoculars and never hires them again. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams) and has two daughters. Jack moves to Texas, marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway) and has a son. Living a lie is easier than dealing with the truth, at least it is for Ennis until Jack pays a visit -- his first in four years.<BR>
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Lee's filmmaking mastery has never been more evident. Watch the skill with which the Taiwanese director of <U>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon</U> and <U>Sense and Sensibility</U> walks the volatile ground of this reunion scene. Ennis can't contain his excitement. Running down the steps to greet his friend, he collides with Jack's body, kissing him fiercely and Jack returning the heat. Alma sees it too, from the window, finding reinforcement for something she's always felt. Without dialogue, Lee creates a whole world that can be read eloquently and movingly on the faces of the actors.<BR>
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And what actors. Though the characters must age twenty years, Lee has cast the film young, a risk that pays major dividends. Hathaway (The Princess Diaries) excels at showing Lureen's journey from cutie-pie to hard case. And Williams (Dawson's Creek) is a revelation, using what Proulx calls Alma's "misery voice" when her husband goes fishing several times a year with Jack. Who can blame her? They never bring home any fish. When Alma remarries and lets Ennis feel the knife of her resentment, Williams lets it rip.<BR>
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Of course, the movie would not work at all if the two lead actors didn't deliver the goods. Gyllenhaal finds the reckless core in Jack, who cruises alleys and bars in Mexico when Ennis rejects his offer to settle down and run his father's ranch. Ennis lives in fear of coming out -- he relates a harrowing childhood incident in which he saw a man tortured and killed for the crime of living with another man. And so he forbids himself happiness with the one person he has ever truly loved.<BR>
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Ledger's magnificent performance is an acting miracle. He seems to tear it from his insides. Ledger doesn't just know how Ennis moves, speaks and listens; he knows how he breathes. To see him inhale the scent of a shirt hanging in Jack's closet is to take measure of the pain of love lost. As Jack told him once, "That ol' Brokeback got us good." That's the key reason -- besides its daring, its bravery, its dead-on relevance to right now -- that this classic in the making ranks high on the list of the year's best movies. It gets you good.<BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Peter Bradshaw writing for The Guardian (London)<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
Here is a love story from director Ang Lee in which the taboo word "love" is never spoken. In fact the whole movie is a rich, spacious, passionate way of showing, not telling, feelings that dare not speak their name - and doing so with superb intelligence and magnificent candour. Brokeback Mountain is an adaptation of a piece of writing from 1997 by Annie Proulx that already bears the burdensome reputation of being the best short story ever to be published in the New Yorker magazine: the tale of two itinerant ranch-hands in the early 1960s, Ennis and Jack, who get a summer's work shepherding on Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. They are played here by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal.<BR>
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Thrown together, lonely and frustrated, Ennis and Jack find that their relationship has grown deeper and fiercer than friendship and they have sex. It is a glorious, revelatory experience, and safe from society's disapproval on that remote Arcadian spot they are at one with their own natures and with nature itself. And for the rest of their lives, unhappily married with children, meeting every few years as notional buddies for furtive "fishing trips", they yearn to recapture that brief shining moment of happiness and truth.<BR>
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Beautifully composed and wonderfully acted, this film is massively superior to the last Proulx adaptation - the woeful <U>Shipping News</U> - and far better than Ang Lee's last cowboy movie, his very moderate civil war drama <U>Ride With the Devil</U>. Most literary adaptations are crushed, concertina-ed affairs in which a novel's various chapters, scenes and characters are squeezed out. A short story is different, and this movie gives you the feeling of wings being spread, not clipped. There is a real sense here that the dimensions and space of the film have been stretched, and screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have developed and extrapolated the source material with flair, in particular giving a dramatic presence to the women in Ennis and Jack's story. The wives are destined to be baffled and hurt, and crucially realise that it is they, and not their menfolk, who are expected to live out their lives in a state of denial.<BR>
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If anyone is the seducer it is Jack, played by Gyllenhaal, whose performance - along with his presence in Sam Mendes's forthcoming Gulf war movie Jarhead - shows that he has matured into one of the most charismatic actors of his generation. Jack is a rodeo rider, a guy who lopes and mopes around fairs most of his professional life in exchange for a few seconds of thrashing ecstatically on the back of a bucking steer before being painfully and all too quickly thrown off. The sexual metaphor is not, however, laboured, and Jack's attempts to draw out the laconic, strong-and-silent Ennis are not predatory but open-hearted and good-natured. Ennis himself is a humble ranch-hand by trade, only doing the job so that he can make enough cash to marry his sweetheart Alma (Michelle Williams) and, as he fiercely tells Jack, he "ain't no queer". After their first sex, Ennis grimly heads off to his sheep, getting into a habit of making work an alibi for non-commitment that will last him for the rest of his life.<BR>
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The release of this film has already been accompanied by a debate about how new and groundbreaking it is, and whether or not there has always been a gay subtext to cowboy movies. I would be a millionaire if I had 50p for every time someone mentioned Montgomery Clift and John Ireland admiring each other's pistols in Howard Hawks's 1948 western Red River. Unfortunately, this insight is often exaggerated to tease those reactionary homophobes who often claim exclusive custody of the western, and leaves unanswered the question of how or whether hints of homoeroticism are more authentic than overt stories of heterosexual friendship. The conventions of cowboy life and the bunkhouse were socially created circumstances in which gay identity could be invisible, but Brokeback Mountain is surely new in courageously removing invisibility's cloak, in removing the sub- from the subtext, and asking how gay men can exist without living a lie, a question that has not disappeared in 2006.<BR>
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It is a desperately sad story in many ways, a story of two wasted lives, but a beautiful and moving story, too. Jake becomes a sellout, working for his obnoxious father-in-law selling farm machinery, and Ennis turns into a grumpy and taciturn old cowpoke - their true selves become more poignantly inaccessible with each unsatisfactory holiday together. Further than this, Brokeback Mountain is the story of how most of our lives, gay and straight, are defined by one moment in which things go gloriously and naturally right, when everything falls into place, but which is then infected by the bacilli of wrongness. Ennis and Jack, flawed as they are, do their best to resist the encroachment of that infection; they fight not just against bigotry, but dullness and mediocrity. Their story is not tragic, but heroic<BR>
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<I>Film reviews researched and edited by Peter A. Haggart<BR>
</I><B>* * *<BR>
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<I>Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
</I>508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho<BR>
</B>208-882-4127<BR>
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PAMELA PALMER, <B>Volunteer<BR>
</B>Mailto:ppalmer@moscow.com<BR>
Film and Events Committee <BR>
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
<BR>
http://www.kenworthy.org<BR>
To speak with a KPAC staff member, <BR>
call (208) 882-4127<BR>
Mailto:kpac@moscow.com<BR>
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