James Franco released the trailer for his possible web series, Undergrads, cryptically and with little fanfare on JamesFrancoTV, so it’s a little hard to tell yet just how much and how deeply we’re being dicknosed. What we do know is that there’s a trailer, which Franco introduced by saying “My new show #UNDERGRADS.”

The trailer says it plays Thursdays at 8pm (on the web, presumably), and it shows college kids drinking and getting laid, and talking about drinking and getting laid, set to montage editing and pop music. Basically, every show on MTV. But knowing James Franco, it will probably also be a proto-meta, hyper-autobiographical pseudo-meditation on the very nature of self-referentiality, invoking interrelational aestheticism and an inclusion of the viewer vis a vis the viewed in a Nicolas Bourriaudian cross examination of patriarchal subjectivity. But I mean, that’s just a guess.

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If they gave an Oscar for Things I Wish People Would Shut the Hell Up About, Andy Serkis’s performance in Rise of the Planet of the Apes would win in a landslide. Naturally, Fox is busy pouring gasoline on the fire, releasing three CG-free clips of Andy Serkis in ROTPOTA to build Oscar buzz in advance of tomorrow’s next Tuesday’s nominations, and to back up James Franco’s “Andy Serkis is the Che Guevara of Chimps” article from last week. First of all, acting like a chimp isn’t hard, no matter how many times you say it is. He had one line, and the rest was grunting. Channing Tatum doesn’t win awards for that and neither should Andy Serkis. Secondly, asking people to consider performance capture against regular acting is like someone on American Idol getting to use autotune. You can swear you hit the notes all you want, the point is, there’s no way for us to tell.

Check out Andy Serkis’s incredible chimp acting below.
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YOU ARE A MONKEY, DEREK!

With Oscar season about to heat up, James Franco has written an article for Deadline in which he argues that his be-ping-pong-balled co-star, Andy Serkis, deserves the same consideration for wearing a wetsuit and jumping around like a monkey that other actors get for pretending that guys in wetsuits are actual monkeys. As I’ve said before, only through a team of men drawing another man acting like an ape who became a man were we able to discover what it means to be human.

…Narratively it was always his film: I play an emotionally stilted scientist who in the process of mistakenly unleashing a lethal virus on the human race, learns to care for others; Serkis gets to play Caesar, essentially Che Guevara in chimp form.

Che Guevara as a chimp? What an innovative idea, it’s almost as if they got it from a t-shirt…

Andy Serkis is the undisputed master of the newest kind of acting called “performance capture,” and it is time that Serkis gets credit for the innovative artist that he is…

…Audiences are used to large scale effects: impossible explosion, space travel, fantastic fairytale worlds, boys in tights swinging around New York, men with Squids for faces, but there is still a disconnection that happens when a character’s outer surface is rendered in a computer like Caesar’s was. We want to forget that there is a human underneath, the effects are so  well rendered we either forget that the spark of life in it’s eyes [sic] and the life in its limbs is informed by a breathing human or we are so drawn into the ontology of the character we can’t grasp its artistic origins or exactly how it was created. What this means is that we can enjoy such a character – enjoyment testified by the response to such films as Avatar, Return of the King, and Planet of the Apes – but we don’t give artistic credit where it is due.

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I know many of you are probably tired of James Franco and his antics, but I can’t get enough of him unapologetically dicknosing his way through every artistic medium. His plan to dicknose art in every orifice continues with Francophrenia, which will play at the Rotterdam International Film Festival at the end of the month.

The feature, alternatively titled Don’t Kill Me, I Know Where the Baby Is, is described as a “humorous psycho-thriller.” Franco and co-director Ian Olds made it by writing a new script for existing footage shot by Franco on General Hospital, where the Oscar-nominated actor has a recurring role as an avant-guarde [sic] artist called Franco. Franchophrenia will screen in Rotterdam’s main Spectrum Section. [THR]

So basically, a fancy version of one of those editing projects where you take a thriller and cut it so it looks like a rom-com, or vice versa.

Meanwhile, Franco also recently sold his first novel, to go along with his short story collection, Palo Alto, which came out last year. The novel is called Actors Anonymous. Will it be a hyper-meta, semi-autobiographical meditation on self-reference, invoking relational aesthetics and an inclusion of the viewer in a Nicolas Bourriaudian examination of the nature of subjectivity? You bet your dicknose it will!

The novel is  said to be a fictionalized version of Mr. Franco’s experiences as an actor (and grad student?). It was acquired by Amazon’s fiction editor Ed Park from Mr. Franco’s agent, Richard Abate. [Observer]

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A fired NYU acting professor is blaming his dismissal on James Franco, arguing in a recent lawsuit that the university was kissing up to their star pupil by firing the teacher who gave him a D. Yeah, either that or this “professor” simply demonstrated his own incompetence by failing to grasp the meta-textual hypersubtleties inherent to a dicknosing. One underestimates a dicknose at his own peril.

José Angel Santana said he slapped the “127 Hours’’ star with the bad grade because he missed 12 of his 14 “Directing the Actor II” classes while pursuing a master’s in fine arts [at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts].
Santana said he then suffered all kinds of drama — first from Franco, who publicly ridiculed him [video of that below], then from his department, which axed him over the “D.”
“The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure,” Santana, 58, told The Post. “The university has done everything in its power to curry favor with James Franco.”

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