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MOODY ON BROKEBACK
Author Rick Moody, whose novel The Ice Storm was adapted by James Schamus for an Ang Lee film, discusses Brokeback Mountain in the pages of The Guardian. I wish he had gone a bit more into his thoughts on Lee and the process of adaptation informed by his own first-hand experience, but his is a good take on Lee’s artistic intent:
“There is also the question of whether or not Lee’s film is a genuine western. The western, in American cinema, is one of the foundational genres. It’s the bedrock on which the language of film was constructed. It’s the genre on which American identity was staked. Rugged individualism! Life outside the law! Manifest destiny! To tell this western as a movie is an audacious, ambitious thing. To tell this story as a movie is to tilt at the very history of the cinematic form.”
