James Franco recently told an MTV interviewer (our old pal “Cuddly Josh” Horowitz, same guy from the last post) that he’d have no problem doing “sex for real” on camera for the right role. Oh, you mean the guy who watched a male prostitute have gay sex, carved “Brad Renfro” into his arm for art, sold people “invisible art“, filmed naked dudes playing basketball, and used money from Gucci to film himself walking around Paris with a dick strapped to his face is willing to do crazy things for his art? Friends, please recommend a good pearl cleaner, for I fear I’ve smudged mine from all of the clutching.

Things get really real in “Interior. Leather Bar.” — including the sex scenes.
The film is James Franco’s re-examination of Al Pacino’s 1980 flick “Cruising,” and it has some real-life sexy times in it. While Franco avoids getting in on any of the action in the NSFW flick — which just debuted at the Sundance Film Festival — he did tell MTV News that, for the right project, he would consider pulling a Shia LaBeouf and have sex for real with the cameras rolling.
“I’d say under the right circumstances. There are a lot of circumstances,” he said, with co-director Travis Mathews by his side. “Who’s involved? Both behind-the-scenes, behind the camera, in front of the camera.”

Oh please, Shia LaBeouf is like a child’s crude drawing of James Franco. Shia LaBeouf only does weird stuff in the hopes that someone might subconsciously associate him with James Franco and start thinking of him as something more than a cut-rate Logan Lerman. The weird thing about Franco is that once upon a time, he seemed genuinely, refreshingly self-aware. Taking money from Gucci to walk around Paris with a dick strapped to his face in particular was brilliant, Bill Murray-level performance art. But at some point, between bragging about his blogging awards and feuding with Gawker, and writing a name-droppy poem for Obama, all his self-awareness seems to have evaporated. Is the combination of fame and academia simply so corrosive that it leaves one defenseless against the inevitable onset of self-seriousness? Or is this just Franco’s long game, setting us up for an even deeper dicknosing? The only person who can answer that is Brad Renfro, and Brad Renfro is dead, my friend. But I hope so. I so adore a dicknosing.

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Sharp-eyed Frotcast listener James was recently on vacation in Norway, where he came across a short film (that was all the detail I got) called “Dickface.” It’s a two-minute film that apparently played at Fantastic Fest, and the production company’s website reads simply:

Portrett av kunstneren som ung mann. Dersom han hadde manglet armer og hatt en kuk til nese.

[Translated]: Portrait of the artist as a young man…if he had no hands and a dick for a nose.

From what we know about the piece (and really, what more do you need to know), it’s strongly reminiscent of James Franco’s seminal video installation, which he created using a Gucci sponsorship and a floppy prosthetic penis, “Dicknose in Paris.” Could Dickface be a companion piece? A prequel? Could James Franco be involved somehow? He’s not listed on the film’s credits, but if there’s one thing we know about Dicknose, it’s that it works in mysterious ways. Perhaps it’s a rare case of independent, spontaneous, separate acts of dicknosing. In its way, the Dicknose is even more understood than the yeti, the sasquatch, or the chupacabra. Here at FilmDrunk, we’re committing to staying at the forefront of Dicknose research for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I’ll be pitching studios around town on my epic science-fiction adventure with James Franco attached to star (he’ll be so excited when he finds out!), Dicknose in Space. Hopefully we’ll get a decent mo-cap budget and Andy Serkis can play the Dicknose.

"Dickface."

In the course of his career, James Franco has played wide variety of characters — a handsome scientist, a handsome hiker, a handsome friend of spider-man — but as Vulture recently illustrated, one thing has remained a constant throughout: his penchant for an acting technique known as “the dramatic whisper.” It’s a great way to get your point across without shouting (bad actors love to shout — have you ever watched Blue Mountain State?). As an added bonus, it keeps you from waking Kimiko-tan. I like to imagine James and his pillow-talk whisper starring in other famous films throughout history, such as The Graduate.

“Son? One word: (*whispers*) dicknose.”

And in Citizen Kane, dicknose is a sled.

Eat your heart out, James Franco. While you were filming naked

Marion Laval-Jeantet [pictured, in 2007] prepared her body to accept the horse blood plasma by getting injected with different horse immunoglobulins over the course of several months.
These foreign animal antibodies were injected in progressively larger amounts to allow her to build up tolerance in a process that she referred to as “mithridatisation,” after the Persian king of Pontus, Mithridates VI, who supposedly built up an immunity to poison by regularly consuming small doses of it.
Earlier this year, after months of preparation, she was injected with horse blood plasma, which contained the full spectrum of immunoglobulins without provoking an allergic reaction.
As part of the performance piece she also wore a set of stilts with hooves on the end to feel at one with the horse. She walked around with the donor horse in a “communication ritual” before having her hybrid blood extracted and freeze-dried.
She explained to Centre Press that the whole process made her feel “hyperpowerful, hypersensitive and hypernervous.” She added: “I had a feeling of being superhuman. I was not normal in my body. I had all of the emotions of a herbivore. I couldn’t sleep and I felt a little bit like a horse.” [Wired]

I consider this an important piece.

She injected herself with the blood of a horse and it made her feel “a little bit like a horse?” Why, I hardly know where the science ends and the art begins! Eat your heart out, James Franco. Suddenly it seems… the dicknose is on the other hoof.

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"'Dicknose!'"

Whether he’s filming naked chick machete bike fights, carving “Brad Renfro” into his arm, or getting Gucci to pay him to walk around Paris with a prosthetic penis on his face for the film “Dicknose in Paris,” James Franco is a delightful rabbit hole of never-ending absurdity.  His latest venture is something called “The Museum of Invisible Art,” which, by the sounds of it, will bring him even closer to literally smelling his own farts. Yes, I consider farts to be “invisible art.”

From the project’s Kickstarter page:

As an extravaganza of imagination, a museum that reminds us that we live in two worlds: the physical world of sight and the non-visible world of thought. Composed entirely of ideas, the Non-Visible Museum redefines the concept of what is real. Although the artworks themselves are not visible, the descriptions open our eyes to a parallel world built of images and words. This world is not visible, but it is real, perhaps more real than the world of matter, and it is also for sale.

Important Note: When you contribute to this Kickstarter project, you are not buying a visible piece of art! You will not receive a painting or a film or a photograph in your mailbox. What you will receive is something even more fascinating: The opportunity to collaborate in an act of artistic creation. You will receive a title card with a description of a piece of art, as well as a letter of authentication. You may mount this card on a blank wall in your home or gallery. What comes next is up to you! The artwork comes to life—and takes on full personal meaning—in your imagining and describing of it, both to yourself and to your visitors. You may also choose to sell the non-visible artwork to another collector, to exhibit it elsewhere, or to lend it back to Praxis when we take the Non-Visible Museum on tour.

For now, we want to tour this museum in the U.S. and Europe. For each exhibition, we will give a tour of the Non-Visible Museum, describing to all those in attendance what they are looking at and imagining. As this tour grows, we will continue to collaborate and add new works.

Thank you for reading this far and dreaming with us.

It sounds to me like they’ve finally found a way to legitimize stoners sitting around talking about all the awesome things they’d make if only they weren’t so stoned. “Hey, maaan, you wanna buy an idea?”  Oh, you crazy dreamers.  This sounds great.  I’ve even composed a song for the opening. I call it “Sleepwank with Me.”

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