Movie review: Brokeback Mountain

I finally watched this movie that I've been wanting to watch for... a couple of years at least? Since whenever I started caring to some extent about watching more of Jake Gyllenhaal's filmography. A couple of days ago I saw that it was going to be on Netflix until the end of the month (May) so I realized I needed to watch it within that time. If it ever previously was on Netflix, I never got around to watching it then.

My thoughts prior to watching it were that a) it's the famous gay cowboy movie and b) I had a feeling it might be kind of sad. Obviously it is indeed a gay cowboy movie, and the second point turned out to be correct as well. I have decided it's fine to cry about sad movies if they're sad enough, but if I start crying too often about stuff in my own life then that might indicate a problem, since I don't want to be a person who cries all the time. I set a (somewhat arbitrary, come to think of it -- I wonder what other people's ideas are about reasonable crying frequency) limit for how often, at most, it seems reasonable to occasionally cry about stuff in my own life, if applicable. Anyways, I digress. 

The movie kept my attention and didn't seem to lag in any portion, even though it's a bit on the longer side at over two hours. So it met or exceeded my expectations and I'd consider watching it again. There have been other famous/notable movies I've watched that were underwhelming, but this one was definitely good. 

I don't think the cinematography stood out as much as it sometimes does in certain other movies, but this movie definitely had a cohesive aesthetic in terms of clothing and set decoration/design and all that visual stuff. Not that the cinematography was bad, it just wasn't something I really noticed that much, aside from a single scene (the opening scene where one character is seen in the distance as a train passes by). 

The closest thing I'd compare it to thematically/etc, at least of movies I've watched, would be Boys Don't Cry, which I don't really want to watch again because it's a sad movie, even though I thought it was quite good. 

Brokeback Mountain seemed balanced in terms of the plot and pacing. The various different tendrils of the plot were effectively developed and were woven together cohesively across the story's time span of two decades. 

I'm glad I finally got around to watching this movie and now I can more fully understand why it's a famous movie. It was certainly better than No Country For Old Men which is also sort of a western-themed movie and somehow inexplicably is generally acclaimed, even though I personally found it boring and pointless, if I recall correctly.