Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9), the “gay cowboy” movie with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, will have its first-anywhere showing at the Telluride Film Festival, I’ve been told. The four-day festival will unspool Friday, September 2nd and conclude on Monday, September 5th. Brokeback will also visit the Toronto Film Festival.

There’s also talk about some

There’s also talk about some kind of informal screening of Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust at Telluride, but that’s a bit up in the air. Towne has had difficulties getting the right musical score for his period film, which is based on John Fante’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, but the music problems have been solved (the finished score, says Towne, is “not anything you’d associate with normal scoring for a 1930s movie…it’s a bit like taking Nino Rota and filtering him through Kurt Weill”) and whatever happens, happens. I’ve been waiting to see this drama, which stars Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, for a long time…and I guess I’ll have to wait a tiny bit longer.