Wow.

Donald Wildmon and Rick Santorum are going to be hiding under the bed in abject terror today, because whether they like it or not, Brokeback Mountain is resonating EVERYWHERE, not just in the Godless metropoli of New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco:

"Brokeback Mountain," a tale of an affair between two gay ranch hands directed by Ang Lee, placed eighth with an estimated $2.4 million from 69 theaters, up 64 from a week earlier. The drama averaged an impressive $34,783 per theater and has taken in about $3.3 million to date. Jack Foley, president of distribution, said the film was playing well across the country and to all demographics. "Brokeback" adds 50-75 theaters Friday.

For a film like this, in this kind of release, to make it into the top 10 is truly extraordinary. It looks like the Christofascist Zombie Brigade (^TM Marc Maron) campaign to keep quiet about the film in the hope that it will go away isn't working very well. It certainly means that in the all-important Academy Awards race, Brokeback Mountain has now become the film to beat. If it turns out, as I have a hunch it will, that Brokeback takes home a cartload of awards in February, we're going to hear a great hue and cry about how gays run Hollywood and are foisting their agenda on the rest of us, much the same way as we used to hear all the grumbling about how Jews run Hollywood. A while back I posted about how gays are the new Jews, and for the most part that's correct, except in the context of the mythical wingnut meme of the war on Christmas, in which Jews are the new Jews.

I haven't seen Brokeback yet, which is kind of shameful for someone who's been doing online movie reviews for seven years. But this was the weekend of my annual Holiday Orgy of Cookie Baking, and after sitting through over three hours of watching Adrien Brody fighting strangely Freudian swamp monsters in King Kong on Saturday, I wasn't up to shlepping to Montclair to see a movie guaranteed to set off my already fragile menopausal hormonal emotional state and leave me crumpled in a fetal position in a corner weeping uncontrollably. But it is on my agenda for this weekend, probably on Christmas Day, which seems both delightfully subversive and strangely appropriate, as it will make this particular Jew, however lapsed I may be, one of the few people in America to celebrate the birth of Joshua of Nazareth by making the connection between the taking in ANOTHER story of doomed outsiders confused about why they are who they are, but knowing that that ultimately they can be nothing else.


(hat tip: Americablog)