one month passes...
The animation was dreadful.
― raging hetero lifechill (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 24 October 2010 12:56 (fifteen years ago)
It's going to be terrible, I can sense it...but I've got to see it.
― Bob Six, Sunday, 24 October 2010 13:03 (fifteen years ago)
four months pass...
Not a film. Would have worked better as an episode of Storyville on BBC4. Animation was fine.
― Gukbe, Sunday, 27 February 2011 07:20 (fourteen years ago)
Didn't like the courtroom set up much as the driving narrative. It'd have good to see James Franco stretched a bit more and to have shown some mire key moments in Ginsberg's life, eg the visionary experience with Blake's Sunflower.
Overall, Franco's acting was fine but it was a bit dull as a film.
― Bob Six, Sunday, 27 February 2011 19:28 (fourteen years ago)
i guess it is okay to grant this film a little leeway, considering its budget and that it is the first film made entirely in powerpoint
Animation was fine.
yeah, no. terrible! long sections resembled the cgi sections you see in commercials for anti-hayfever medication. maybe there is some kinda primitive charm to the illustrations they're based on, i have no idea, but a saxophone emanates fiery sparks is not a pursuasive visual motif.
the film was so muddled, anyhow; shot too close for franco to really inhabit ginsberg; pieced together without much interaction, just dry first person soliloquys all the way through; cluttered with unnecessary titles (like, really?, on ferlenghetti?, as a voiceover narrated that it was ferlenghetti on trial?). hamm was hammy, relying on some kinda good natured gravitas, and there was no attempt to make any kind of dramatic case, or clash of ideas, out of the courtcase; just to spoonfeed the audience the POV that censorship trials were nonsense (which, sure!, they were!, but a succession of flawed & mineable 'is this literature' arguments feels kinda like it self-congratulates our present day selves, here).
there were parts of this that were moving, in accurately conveying some of ginsberg's realities - as a gay man who referred to his self as a condition; as a troubled son, etc, but they didn't really inform or expose anything else about the poem, or make a thorough character to concentrate on.
― your LiveJournal experience (schlump), Sunday, 27 February 2011 20:10 (fourteen years ago)
Having read the poem once in high school and dismissed it, I got a lot from the context and even some of the animation. I liked the bull-factory devil thing with the angel people flying towards it (corny as it was) and I really got a sense of the beauty in the passages about being in...Rockford? with Carl and the walls of the asylum melting away. It gave it enough vibrancy for me to appreciate the poem and the era a little better than I did before. Again, I don't think it works as a film but if I were to have stumbled upon it as an episode of Storyville on BBC4, I think it would have worked a lot better.
― Gukbe, Sunday, 27 February 2011 21:21 (fourteen years ago)
Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!
This got a spontaneous laugh from all 4 of us I think in the cinema.
― Bob Six, Sunday, 27 February 2011 22:52 (fourteen years ago)