James Franco reads gay beat poetry to his Japanese sex pillow

Here’s the first trailer for Howl, starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg in a movie that’s part biopic, part chronicle of the 1957 obscenity trial over the Ginsberg poem of the same name, and part interviews with Ginsberg.  Howl was one of the films I saw at Sundance, and I found it to be a pleasant surprise, given that I hate poetry.   You can read my full review here.  Luckily I am kind of a history dork, and the fact that directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman used actual court transcripts for the courtroom scenes and actual interviews for the interview sequences helped keep my fact boner engorged.  The trailer wisely doesn’t include any of the scenes where they animate Ginsberg’s poems like a bad music video, which were pretty goofy, and not in a good way.  But overall, it was nice to see a movie about that generation that actually tries to create an honest portrait, rather than being some nostalgic hippie circle jerk.  By the way, “Nostalgic Hippie Circle Jerk” is the name of my dad’s indie band. They sound like a retarded Papa Roach.

Opens September 24th.