Other Precincts Heard From

[ultrabithorax]

     Some other opinions of the Other Annie Proulx Movie®: Eherensteinland, David Ehrenstein at HuffingtonPost, and Adam Mars-Jones at Guardian Unlimited.
     For the record: I haven't seen it, so I really have no opinion as of yet; however I'm probably gonna wait on this one -- I'm just not a fan of Westerns.  Even though its really a movie about

Comments

[dhpbear]

Sorry, but this David guy sounds like a bitter, jaded queen who seems bent on impressing the reader with how many obscure gay-movie references he can cough up. FEH!

[furr_a_bruin]

Perhaps, but he's also quite right.

I have never understood the furor over this tawdry little story; it's tedious, it's depressing and ultimately unnecessary. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was the '60s before Stonewall - so fucking WHAT?! If there's this massive "passion" between these two characters something should happen with it -- people throughout history have risked worse for lust and love.

As a chronicle of how many people with gay/bi tendencies have been stunted by societal expectations, it's great. The one thing it's not is a love story - which is how the blind masses singing its praises describe it. To borrow from a radically different genre, I grab two words from the world of Babylon 5 - FAITH MANAGES. I've always believed in the definition of love as "the state where someone else's well-being means more to you than your own" - and that definition clearly does NOT hold in this story

[envirobear]

I agree with you whole-heartedly about Ehrenstein--he probably has never stepped outside of his little world to see, much less understand, how rural gay AND bisexual men live outside his little bubble of long-term happy partnership in a place where the dirtiest thing one encounters is the street person he passes on the sidewalk and inhabits the happy land of make-believe of movies and live-as-queerly-as-you-want-without-fear. And while Mars-Jones may have worked with Edmund White and spent some time in Charlottesville, Virginia, I have serious doubts if the Brit truly grasps the lives of rural Americans who are NOT in the "ivory tower". That is the big problem with blowhards like them--they have never experienced the isolation and loneliness and societal pressure put on less-than-college-degreed rural American gay and bisexual men...therefore the story and the premise means NOTHING to them. They are happy to be urban--and urbane--"queers" of 2005, and they never presume to "lower themselves" to understand lives that are different

[furr_a_bruin]

By your logic, the only people who can "legitimately" comment on the story/movie are bi shepherds who've spent a lot of time out in the middle of nowhere with a flock.

I grant you there's a certain amount of urban sniffery in those two perspectives on thot of truth in th my pserspective there's also a lot of truth in what they say that most people jibbering madly about the movie just don't want to deal with. I grew up in semi-rural Oregon - no, not WAY out in the middle of nowhere, but far, far from being a "big city." I stand by what I've said about the story and the movie.