Two favorable (one could even say glowing) Venice Film Festival trade reviews (from Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett) of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain graze on one side of the pasture…fine, good grass, etc. But a “whoa there, cowboy!” review from Movie City News David Poland out of Telluride suggests the possibility of gopher holes, Liberty Valance-type adversaries and unfriendly Comanches whooping and shooting arrows in the weeks and months ahead. I also need to take exception with Bennett’s lead observation, to wit: “Everything you ever imagined about the characters of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River or Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Ride the High Country is revealed candidly in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, an epic Western about forbidden love.” Wouldn’t the more appropriate allusion be about Robert Redford and Paul Newman’s relationship in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Nobody in their most perverse dreams ever imagined anything remotely askew about the father-son affection between Wayne and Clift in Red River.