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For two glorious sentences, we thought that the NY Times just might be using a Brokeback Mountain review to launch the initial installment of a major daily newspaper's first-ever serialized erotic novel:

THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends.

Unfortunately, despite all the "bone deep" penetration into "craggy landscapes," the piece abandons its early, literary smut pretensions and devolves into a sober review of the much anticipated gay cowboy movie. Even a brief, two paragraph excursion into the Freudian underpinnings of the relationships between Huck Finn and Jim, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fails to reignite the erotic promise of the lede, making us fret that perhaps Brokeback won't kick its spurs into the hindquarters of mainstream acceptance the way we hoped it might.