PhilPaine.com

I have to be the only per­son who went to this movie to see the scenery and the sheep. A long time ago, I was a shep­herd. I spent two and a half years work­ing var­i­ous sheep farms. So I’ll skip mak­ing the obvi­ous com­ments about this movie. The March­ing Morons, in their tens of mil­lions, are no doubt up in arms about this “gay west­ern”. But there’s no point in debat­ing with igno­rant sav­ages, so I won’t waste my time doing so. See the film. It’s not a mas­ter­piece, but it’s a well-craft­ed love sto­ry and char­ac­ter study with some superb act­ing. Now, I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly eager to see a sto­ry about true love mud­dled and thwart­ed by a dumb cul­ture. But Rodri­go Pri­eto is a good cin­e­matog­ra­pher, and I am home­sick for moun­tains. Well it didn’t take me more than a few min­utes to fig­ure out that it couldn’t have been filmed in Wyoming, where the sto­ry is set. A few of the estab­lish­ing shots were of the Tetons, but most of the time the moun­tains looked all wrong. Those huge diag­o­nal slabs with caste­late peaks, and unbro­ken mass­es of dou­glas fir and spruce sweep­ing down into crys­talline lakes in deep intra­mon­tane trench­es — well, that’s Cana­dian Rock­ies [see pho­to above]. Wyoming moun­tains have a dif­fer­ent look.

The bane of film authen­tic­i­ty: inac­cu­rate sheep.

The sheep. Well, there was some stuff that was right. The old Euskalduna with a beret is some­thing you would have seen in that time and place. Some of the work the main char­ac­ters where shown doing was cor­rect. But all the sheep were fresh­ly shorn and marked, and they were still fresh­ly shorn and marked after they had sup­pos­edly been pas­tur­ing up in the moun­tains for months! There wasn’t a din­gle­berry in sight. The main char­ac­ters where not shown inter­act­ing with the dogs, which were nowhere to be seen, most of the time. Take note, Ang Lee, I’ll be watch­ing… next time, get the sheep right.