Up on Brokeback: A trip down memory lane to Moose Mountain

This week, 29 January to be precise, marks my 5th Brokeback anniversary. Five years ago almost to the day that I took myself off, on my own one night, to see a film that I'd wanted to see earlier in the month, when I'd been in Arizona, but had been unsuccessful. I wanted to mention it today because tonight, in Oxford, I bumped in to a special someone that I don't know well enough but who told me completely out of the blue that she lived by Moose Mountain. Here's the place I mean.


This is one of those fortuitous moments that you can never predict and which catch you out. I told her about my love for Brokeback Mountain and how that people I know have made some physical attachments with her home and she kindly said that this had made her night - hearing how much we have come to love her home, when she is over here, a long way from it.


Moose Mountain, close to Calgary in Alberta, is clearly a beautiful place, befitting the story that is played out on it in the film, even though under another name. A banal reason for its choice as a location was sheep. You can read about that here. But it was a place of beauty and isolation. It also gave cast and crew a vital extra hour of daylight.


The filming locations of Brokeback Mountain have now become a tourist industry in their own right and Moose Mountain has a prominent place on that list as the place in the film that became Brokeback, where Ennis and Jack fell in love and where Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger spent their time. I did a post on these locations almost 4 years ago, which you can read here.


But if you really want to find Brokeback, this is the place to go.


Includes pictures from IHJ.

My review of Black Swan is now up at MovieBrit.