If It IS Broke(Back), DO Fix It

Good to know that the New York Times has embraced the internet. I hear they've nearly got this weekend's magazine cover ready to roll on something called the I-Pod...but back to the here and now. Today's issue is gushing about the film parodies that have started to crop up and find their way onto the popular You Tube site. Essentially, people are lifting the music from 'Brokeback Mountain' and combining it with different male dominated movies to make it seem like these films might not be as - gulp - straight laced as we previously thought. I suppose this is the visual equivalent of the musical mash up popularized by 2 Many DJ's: the main difference being that you don't need to be an accomplished aural expert with an expensive Mac G5 but rather a laptop, DVD of your choice and Final Cut Pro.



I've linked to the two finest examples below - Brokeback To The Future and Brokeback Heat - which, as with other kinds of truly great culture, add something new to a familiar work. And there are moments in both that are laugh out loud funny in addition to you noticing subtle nuances. Take 'Heat', which is easily a 90s classic (it's usually in my top 3 from that decade along with 'Goodfellas' and 'Jerry Maguire') and a film I've probably watched close to ten times...and yet it took until Brokeback Heat for me to link De Niro's goatee beard with a possible homoerotic subtext. Naturally, we shouldn't read too much into what these internet auteurs are achieving but, leaving the very obvious gag to one side, is the internet finally coming out as a legitimate art form in its own right?





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHJufBabCz4