Nuggets & bites.

"While gay rights groups are decrying [Gene Shalit's] review as a bigoted and blindsided take on [Brokeback Mountain], our gut reaction is something else entirely. Shalit is behaving in a perfectly normal fashion, if he were to have fallen completely head-over-heels in love with Ennis over the course of the screening. Think about it: who hasn't tried to convince the object of their unreciprocated affection that the new special someone in their life [is] actually an obsessive, stalking psycho. Poor Gene. The guy is a total goner for the 'outstanding' Ennis."

--Defamer.com, January 6

"I'm with Gene [Shalit]. Why did we need this film? What significance is it to our society and us? ... I never thought of gay cowboys before and I think it is a shame that I do now."

--PoliticalGateway.com commentator Bud Beck, an English teacher at Florida's Webster College, in his January 7 column

"We're to believe that Ennis and Jack went to the Wyoming wilds year after year and never touched a fishing pole? Sorry, but that strikes me as the stupidest thing I've seen in a serious movie in a very long time. It's stupid because it totally ignores who these characters are ... rugged Western outdoorsmen who've spent their lives in the wilderness; they love to ride, hunt and fish. These guys don't go off to the mountains just to screw. Patently, they screw and they fish--you might even say that's their idea of heaven."

--Godfrey Cheshire, writing in The [Durham, N.C.] Independent Weekly, January 4

"I think a lot of the closeted men who'll dare see the movie in a theater. who in the office of their Topeka law firm can already mouth along to the trailer as it streams over their computer screens, will be unable to submerge what Brokeback shakes loose."

--Gay escort "R. Hagen," writing for New America Media news service, January 4