[quote]It's also based on a novel by a woman, so an authentic expression of gay experience it's not. But very little that comes out of Hollywood is lifelike. It's a romance.[quote]So by that same logic, Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Euripides's Medea and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra cannot be authentic expressions of women's experience because they were all written by men, and you would also characterize them as "un-lifelike."[quote]I am a woman, [R99], and so are the majority of my friends. I cannot, in my life, recall even a passing acquaintance saying, "Gosh, I really feel I know what Cleopatra was going through right now."When did people here get so literal-minded, stupidly contrarian, and culturally illiterate? It's not about whether *you* personally can identify with the experiences of a character conceived by a seventeenth-century playwright and inspired by the Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt in 32 BCE. The poster cited those two characters because they are well-known examples of complex, interesting, rich, and convincingly realized female literary characters written by men. He could also have mentioned Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, who are equally compelling and multi-dimensional. Similarly, Jake Twist and Ennis Del Mar, as conceived by a woman, Annie Proulx, in a deceptively simple story, almost transcended their fictional status and became like 'real' people to their (sometimes overly) devoted fans.by Anonymousreply 111May 1, 2025 4:06 PM, The term "so Brokeback Mountain" became an anti gay slur. Hated that. But it was indicative of the seismic cultural impact of this movie.. Coming on the heals of the AIDS plague it helped "rehab" gay men as human beings, culturally at least. Because it was set pre plague the audience was freed of the persistant AID's baggage of previous "gay , Movie studios used to own theaters. Vertical integration: studios controlled production, distribution, and exhibition. Paramount, Warner Bros, MGM, and RKO all had theater chains. In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Paramount Decree, forcing studios to divest their theaters..