"Brokeback Mountain" is one of the best films I've seen in a long time! It was sold out for most of its performances in my area, and I bought tickets for an early Sunday afternoon matinee on Saturday night, when we got to the theatre and couldn't get in. Good thing I bought the tickets in advance, because even the Sunday morning showings were sold out.

The main protagonists are indeed sheepherders, not cowboys, and we can have a nuanced discussion about whether they truly qualify as "gay" once you've seen the movie. The "gay cowboy" moniker probably derives from the South Park line a couple of years ago where one of the South Park kids ask if independent films are all about "gay cowboys eating pudding." BTW, there's no pudding in Brokeback Mountain either.

It's based on a great short story by Annie Proulx. In very economical writing, the story says as much by what it DOESN'T say as by what it does.

The film explores the complexity of forbidden relationships, In an earlier time, ballads were written about similar subjects--ballads like "Mill o' Tifty's Annie" or "Annachie Gordon." Those old Scottish ballads dealt with love thwarted because of social class or economically required marriages. In today's society, such reasons for prohibiting relationship are quaintly outdated, and even prohibitions due to ethnic or racial differences seem passe. The issue of sexual orientation is the frontier of relationship prohibition that resonates in today's society, so that's where this modern tragic ballad occurs. Just as Mill o' Tifty's Annie's brother breaks her back for liking Andrew Lammie, so the couple in Brokeback Mountain needs to worry constantly about the possibility of being gay-bashed to death. As the character Ennis DelMar observes: "This thing gets hold of us at the wrong time and wrong place and we're dead." One year after Annie Proulx's story was published in the New Yorker, Matthew Shephard was beaten to death and left crucified on a ranch fence about 30 miles from Ms. Proulx's home. She was part of the jury pool called for his murder, though she did not actually serve.

Heath Ledger's performance is the best acting I've seen, perhaps, since Meryl Streep in "Sophie's Choice." He manages to convey the full complexity of a very repressed character with understatements and silences.

A must-see, unless you're too much of a homophobic sissy to deal with it.

--Charlie Baum