Results tagged “jamesfranco”

Some collaborations between Hollywood people and non-Hollywood artists yield magical results -- take Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' work on Where the Wild Things Are, for example -- but in the case of Erased James Franco, the hour-long art film made by the artist known as Carter with Hollywood actor James Franco occupying the central role, the results are confused, mundane, and borderline pretentious. Billed as a riff on Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing" (which is owned by the SFMOMA), the film is meant to be an "erased performance" in which Franco appears in a non-descript setting reading random lines from all of his previous work, including the Spiderman films and the TV show Freaks and Geeks (at the time of shooting, in June 2008, Milk had not yet been released). There are a few inspired moments in the piece, but they mostly involve performances not originally given by Franco, where he performs monologues from other films like Todd Haynes' Safe or John Frankenheimer's Seconds, which starred Rock Hudson -- we especially enjoyed a brief telephone conversation Franco has with Julianne Moore, with her words clipped from lines from Safe. But the majority of the film features long, labored shots of Franco writing on loose-leaf paper, waving his hands, drinking water, answering phones, moving a chair around, and walking in and out of a room.

, will open next week. In 1977, Milk became the first openly gay man to be elected to a major public office in the United States, only to be assassinated within his first year of serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. At turns tragic and exhilarating, the film chronicles the last eight years of Milk’s life (played by Sean Penn), when he worked on campaigns for public office and the protection of gay employees.

Yeah, yeah. We stuck this in Day Around the Bay, but we feel it merits its own post. (Besides, we'd hate for some local bloggers to go one day without bashing us in private for being "too gay now." We digress.)