Paying It Forward

I trust in the powers of paying it forward. If I have been touched in my heart or received an act of kindness, I'll return it or pass it on. Broke Back Mountain has inspired so many voices to come forward to reach out to touch our hearts. I am but one among the sea of voices. Yet, like little Trevor McKinney in Paying It Forward: “sometimes, the simplest idea can make the biggest difference.”

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Straits Times

The Straits Times is the matriarch of news in Singapore. For many years before the recent few, she is the only official storyteller Singapore has had. In contrast to cities with as many newspaper voices as there are musicians in an orchestra, news for Singaporeans is a single voice, strait-jacket tailored for benefit of the majority.

Broke Back was given cover page in the Straits Times lifestyle section: I felt a warm pat on my shoulders easing the weight of my sexuality I had carried silently for almost three decades now.

Warm because stories of me and my fellow brothers are now in the company of Hollywood mainstream film and Straits Times acknowledged that milestone in cinematic history.

Straits Times has set forth a chain reaction: out of the 3 million Singaporeans with access to the newspaper, how many will receive Broke Back with acceptance?

I have confidence it wouldn’t be hard. Regardless of the merits and de-merits of the film itself, I was inspired to dare think so, for a good straight crowd turned up at the preview last week.

Quote from LIFE!

“A straight guy like me wept buckets at this movie about the sweet romance…I haven’t cried at movies where boy breaks up with girl. Not even when boy breaks up with girl and the dog dies, the car is repossessed and the ship sinks…But this story, about two men who loved one another to pieces-it really moved me”

“The reason Broke Back Mountain has been hailed as such a breakthrough is precisely because the scriptwriters and Lee have depicted such a central gay experience in the language of straight romantic cinema.”

For more eulogies of Broke Back, click here. But do indulge sensibly; you won’t want to be carried away by unfounded sweet talk.

Yoga Editing

If you goggle Broke Back, there would be, at least ten pages of, resources to quench your thirst on the following topics: the sensitive yet sensible Jack Twist, your anguished sympathy for Alma and the romantic motif of the cowboy shirts.

I would like to be odd, and talk about yoga editing.
Yoga editing is not an offical cinematic term; i coined it out of frivolity. More precisely, Lee Ang used it on Broke Back, and I shamelssly named it for him.

The concept starts with this:

When you breathe in a meditative speed, slow and steady, as practiced in yoga, your mind opens up and calms down. If and when you are calm, you tend to receive sensitive/controversial news such as sexuality and love with open arms and less defensively.

How does Lee Ang make you breath meditatively in the movie?

First consider the following two sentences:
1. A short sentence is easy to read.
2. Unless there is an unfortunate opportunity for the writer to choose to pen a sentence as long as is found in the literature of Jane Austen to the laborious effect of making an otherwise brief idea ostentatiously adorned with protracted language.

When we read a book, we mentally breathe when we arrive at the end of a sentence. Sentence 2 requires the lungs of Mariah Carey to finish reading.

We take a mental breath, too, in the movie. Each time the movie cuts to a new scene, we take a mental breathe as if we read a full stop.

If each scene takes less than 5 seconds before cutting to the next, as you may experience in the final sequence of any Indiana Jones movie, your adrenalin pumps, and you are ready for rush hour.

On the contrary, if the editing is slow and steady as with Broke Back, you never need to feel rushed to do anything more than just meditate the visual scenes into your head.

I think too much about film techniques, though not apologetic if I make films too technical to your taste.

Other blogs of similar cinematic observations are:
0205
Movie of the Week
9 Reasons