A more appropriate title for Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain would be "Heath Ledger: Ten Things You Love to Do."

I would list all 10 activities, but it all boils down to smoking endless cigarettes and being naked. Naked by a campfire, naked when jumping off a cliff -- you get the idea.

Ledger stars as Ennis, whom I imagine as what a Marlboro man sprinkled with manly fairy dust would look and sound like based on Ledger's gruff Western drawl that renders half of the movie's dialogue unintelligible.

To be serious, I have to get on the bandwagon and declare Ledger's performance one of the best I've seen in a long time, and he certainly deserves his Oscar nomination.

In the film's opening scenes, Ennis meets Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), and the two are hired to herd sheep up on Brokeback Mountain. The pair gets to know each other, and before you know it, it's the summer of love.

The intimate scenes themselves are raw and intense, and the filmmakers and actors deserve a lot of credit. With those scenes, the movie ran the risk of becoming an out-of-control emotional and melodramatic mess, bogged down with preaching and angsty musings. None of that here.

The relationship is explored with dignity and intelligence, and the audience, I'm glad to say, respected that.

After falling in love, Ennis and Jack go on to lead publicly heterosexual lives, complete with wives and children, but still get together for romantic getaways on Brokeback Mountain.

The women in this film perfectly capture the wives' tough situations. Michelle Williams, Ledger's onscreen wife and real-life fiancée, received an Oscar nomination for her role, but Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries) should have been nominated as well.

Hathaway plays Gyllenhaal's wife. I was skeptical about her acting chops, but she held her own and took a risk by playing a very unsympathetic character.

Despite the great acting a few things about the movie are just annoying. Take the soundtrack. It's hard to believe, but the same five or six chords make up 90 percent of the background music. That particular country western track was on an endless loop, and halfway through the film I was ready to throw the genius that came up with it off the top of Brokeback Mountain.

Another issue I had with the film is the plot itself. So many fascinating subplots are introduced and immediately discarded. At one point, Ennis begins a relationship with a waitress, and it looks like it's headed toward marriage. The next time we see her, a year or so has passed, and she's tearfully begging Ennis to tell her why he left.

I realize the movie has a lot of ground to cover, but sometimes the vast amounts of skipped time are just too much. Every cut emphasizes Jack and Ennis' relationship, but the outside forces make the doomed couple's fate more dramatic. I would have traded 10 scenes of the guys sitting around a campfire in silence for another few minutes of Williams or Hathaway.

Brokeback Mountain is a good movie with some great acting, but if it wins the Oscar for best film, it will be for its risky subject matter, not the movie itself. Grade: B+