Brokeback Mountain and Doogal

In the last couple of weeks, I saw Brokeback Mountain and Doogal. Both were shown in a theater. Both appeared to be projected at 24 frames a second. Both were seen by me. Other than those things, they basically had nothing in common.

Brokeback Mountain, of course, is something of a phemonenon at this point. It is a very good movie. The thing that really struck me about it was that the script and the direction were done in a way that was like a pretty stereotypical cowboy movie. Lot of yeps and uh-uhs. Lots of panoramic vistas and herds of livestock roaming around. The food gets screwed up. They eat too many beans. The cowboy doesn't want to move to town. The main character, Ennis, is basically a shut-off guy who has a hard time relating to his wife and kids. But this format of course is used for a pretty radical story, as mainstream movies go. It's the "gay cowboy" movie, after all.

I found this juxtaposition to be pretty brilliant. Shut-down cowboys using monosyllabic dialgoue to talk about their relationship. It wasn't a surprise when the end credits came up and Larry McMurtry was one of the screenwriters. McMurtry has a long history of writing cowboy characters in ways that speak to themes that work now. Lonesome Dove is a brilliant book and the miniseries was great, too. Once I saw that McMurtry was one of the screenwriters, I realized that the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain were very much like Woodrow -- the shut-down Ennis -- and Gus -- the more open Jack -- with a gay edge that didn't exist in Lonesome Dove, of course, but wasn't all that different from the really close relationship between Woodrow and Gus. Basically, Brokeback Mountain emphasized the personal effects of the characters' backgrounds -- Ennis needing something or someone to hold on to after he basically had been left alone when his parents died, Jack being a way closeted gay man -- more than Lonesome Dove did, while deemphasizing the Western panorama aspect of the cowboy stereotype. (It's kind of funny how Jack drove back and forth from Texas to Wyoming several times in the movie and it was treated like he was commuting, while just one cattle drive from Texas to Wyoming or somewhere around there consumed the whole book of Lonesome Dove). A lot of the same story elements just turned and applied to new kinds of issues.

Ultimately, I didn't think that Brokeback Mountain was a truly brilliant movie the way that, say, Sex, Lies and Videotape, LA Confidential or The Crying Game were brilliant movies. Some of the important characters weren't realized very well. Jack's wife's character was pretty crucial, but left largely undefined. Jack's confrontation with his father-in-law and his wife's reaction to it didn't make a lot of sense. All that being said, I thought that Brokeback Mountain was very, very good, especially Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams. Michelle Williams was great in getting over what it would be like to be a woman with severely limited horizons who was just trying to make a normal life, but that was falling apart. Heath Ledger similarly was very, very good in showing you a guy who really had nothing to rely on in his life, but was trying hard -- with very little dialogue. The moment when he tells Jack to lay off of his wife was really good. Similarly, without ever saying it, he got across that he really wanted to be a good father, but just didn't know how. In a weird way, Brokeback Mountain reminded me of Toy Story in that both are sort of landmark movies and would have been remembered for a long time even if they had only been decent, but fortunately turned out to be very good and so will be remembered even more.

None of that applies to Doogal. That movie blew chunks. It's about a dog that has to, along with his friends, stop an evil wizard spring -- literally, a spring, like the ones that stick out the sides of old mattresses -- from freezing the world via the magic generated by his magic mustache. It made so little sense that, about halfway through, it occurred to me that it might be a movie that originally was made in a different language and then had English dialogue dubbed over it. I thought maybe it had been French -- the movie kind of looked like animated Cirque du Soleil at times. Turns out it had been English and then had American dialogue dubbed over it. Anyway, it blew. After seeing enough Pixar movies, seeing animated hair move doesn't justify a movie anymore. And that's basically all Doogal had going for it. Stay away, even if your kids beg. If, however, you are a college kid looking for a movie to watch while drunk (not you, Intensius), Doogal might work for you.

Brokeback Mountain: Film minus
Doogal: Flick