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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"Sparkles."

One of the perks of being a famous actor AND having a number of fancy graduate degrees is that you get to write essays about movies for the Paris Review (named for a city Franco himself once dicknosed!). James Franco recently took on Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part One (a film Franco once expressed interest in appearing in) for the fancy-pants periodical, and he did it in what I must say is most Armond White-ian fashion. He compared Twilight side by side with Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, much like Armond did with Kick-Ass and Lady Gaga’s Telephone (or Arthur and Your Highness). Okay, fine, so the parallel review is a classic device. I just wanted to connect Professor Dicknose with the Trollmaster General somehow. It seemed apt.

The movies are in many ways very different [you don't say!]. But both use sex as a submerged theme while on the surface promoting a wholesome idea of family values; both seem to devalue motherhood; and both deal with characters who are so financially secure that they are almost impossible to identify with. The Descendants is a much better film, but that is because it is not hampered by the precedent of an extremely successful book, a rabid fan base, and a studio that is out for green (so much so that they are willing to split the product into two films, even if it means stretching the material thin to the point of vapidity).

Saying something “devalues motherhood” seems abstract and not particularly useful to me, but I did sort of feel the same way about the financial component in The Descendants, where half the plot was George Clooney, playing the heir to a massive real estate trust in Hawaii, trying to decide what to do with his kingly fiefdom. And his eventual decision wasn’t exactly populist. Meanwhile, I haven’t seen Twilight, but it doesn’t seem like you’d have to stretch the material to achieve vapidity.

[on Twilight] The protagonists finally marry, having waited until the wise old age of eighteen, and since the book and the film dutifully show them being wed, they are then allowed to f*ck each others’ brains out. For a film that claims to be sexually responsible, the “Twilight” movies are awfully dependent on teenage sex to attract viewers. The actors prance about like pieces of meat, their disturbingly developed bodies on full display; Taylor Lautner’s rippling teenage chest is just a little better than the child beauty-pageant stars at the end of Little Miss Sunshine. The fans have divided themselves into teams (Team Jacob and Team Edward) and, considering that they already know the outcome of the love triangle between Bella, Edward, and Jacob, the choice of a team can mean little more than—well, you can imagine. [ParisReview]

What can we imagine? That they want to bang the dude of the team they root for? Jeez, for a guy who films dong-flopping gay basketball films and once sat in the room while a male prostitute earned his fare, he sure seems demure all of a sudden. I think it’s interesting that just putting on the film critic hat is enough to make even James Franco seem like kind of a prig. I was kind of hoping that he’d dicknose the entire profession. It’s what we’ve come to expect.

Last time James Franco and Harmony Korine got together, they shot a film where James Franco BMX fights a bunch of naked gangster chicks (see above). If you’ll remember, that was for the same art show where Franco carved “BRAD RENFRO” into his arm. Now Variety says Franco and Korine are teaming up again for a film called “Spring Breakers,” starring Emma Roberts, Vanessa Hudgens, and Selena Gomez. That’s right, the queens of the Disney channel and the guy who did Trash Humpers. This positively reeks of dicknosery.

“Spring Breakers,” tells the story of four college girls who rob a restaurant to pay for their trip to the beach.
Roberts would play a Southerner who feeds off danger, while Gomez would play a religious girl. The rest of the group would include Hudgens [thanks, brilliant deduction there, Variety -Ed.]. Franco will co-star as a drug and arms dealer who bails them out of jail. [via Variety - Thanks to Larry for the tip]

The trip goes from bad to worse when Roberts falls in with a mysterious gay clown with cerebral palsy, and Gomez’s faith is tested by a botched abortion that leaves her addicted to heroin. Then, just when you least expect it…. DICKNOSE!

(*Vanessa Hudgens shoves Spaghettios up her vagina as a comment on consumerism, James Franco flies off in biplane cackling wildly, the bullwhip up his ass fluttering heroically in the breeze*)