"Brokeback Mountain" and "East Side Story"

Looking at two films which represent queer culture and experience as cultural artifacts, East Side Story and Brokeback Mountain are different from screenplay, to production, to screen. East Side Story is an independent film which attempts to retell the famous West Side Story with gay characters, with a story of coming out and finding true love. It's subplot succeeds in revealing the experience of homophobia, and also of racism. The film as a whole, however, fails. To its credit, it was an independent film, writers Carlos Portugal and Charlo Toledo and crew likely lacked the experience of Brokeback's Ang Lee and Annie E. Proulx, and even while produced in 2006, the budget was small and its poor quality and not-so-talented supporting actors give it the look of a bad late nineties box office flop, but with emabarassingly bad moments of S & M role-playing, gratuitous shots of oral sex and raunchy woman-hating banter, and a few crotch shots short of weird soft porn. A better storyline could have bouyed the piece, but alas, it was full of innuendo and fit right into the slanted stereotype most critics have of gay men and queer culture- that it's all about sexact, the film has its merits, but only those mentioned earlier, and none that redeem it. Considering film as political would warrant this one obsolete, and I would argue that although a gay artist has just as much a right to make a casual, inconsequential movie as the other guy, doing the community a disservice such as this is a travesty. Not so with Brokeback Mountain. A thoughtful, dramatic work, the film shares the intimate journey of two gay men as they try to keep their love secret from themselves and the world. The lives of closeted gay-idenified individuals is represented here, wrought with grief and heartache that a preson of any orientation can understand. Brokeback has given a human face to a population of people, whose story has before now been untold to those confused by their lifestyle. It is a bridge that ties the universal to both the viewer and those the characters represent. The sex scenes are justified in this film, as they support the plotline and are minimal, not frustratingly trashy. The most critical difference between the films is not how much money went into making them, but the careful narrative and handling of it that does justice for the queer community.