'Sausage Party' Will Make You Want to Set Your Food Free

Sausage Party will make you want to set your food free—from yourself—and you may never eat dinner again without wondering if you're actually committing genocide. It's like The Muppets and Julia Child on acid. This is an animated movie for adults that portrays consumable goods—everything from hot dogs to cherry tomatoes to toilet paper to Jose Cuervo—as sentient beings, each of them brandishing skinny little arms and legs and able to communicate with each other. Every morning, as the supermarket opens, they perform a musical number hastening the arrival of “the gods” (that’s us), each of them hoping she or he will be chosen. To be chosen is to be bought, and taken to “The Great Beyond.” Nobody knows what that means, but everyone assumes it’s a good thing, a wonderful, magical, eternally blissful thing. Of course, reality, which the grocery store’s inhabitants will learn, is far more horrifying. The film’s message is clear: religion is the opiate of the masses, the thing that those in power use to control us. And the writers—Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ariel Shaffir—have crafted a canny, lucid thesis in defense of skepticism. Sausage Party is funny— sometimes uproariously funny—and surprisingly transcendent: at times, the gags (the film is ladled with jokes like a pot roast steeped in its own gravy) and the bleakness of the film’s message (there is no god, there is only the here and now) converge into a chaos of beautiful insanity. 

But the writers’ thesis-driven approach to comedy feels far too self-satisfied. It would be like if Blazing Saddles were trying to be Roots. In Blazing Saddles, which is one of the most important anti-racism films of the 1970s, the racists were idiots, and we were free to infer for ourselves just how wrong racism really is. Sausage Party, were it made in the 1970s, might be free to let us do some thinking on our own. But sadly it’s mired in message like a kindergarten class. And while I admire the film’s honesty, what I enjoy and delight in is its insanity, and Sausage Party often cannot do both at once. 

Here’s an example of insanity: Barry (voice of Michael Cera), a sausage, narrowly avoids being boiled to death in a woman’s kitchen; he escapes and ends up in the home of a 20-something stoner with crazy curly hair who, once he’s injected himself with bath salts, can see that all his food products are living creatures. (Normally, humans cannot perceive this because their version of reality is so limited.) Later in the film, when the consumables are battling the humans at the supermarket, Barry shows up with the severed head of this bath salt-addled junkie. Barry didn’t kill the guy (that would be far too mean-spirited); it was a freak accident. But when the noggin of this blazed lug plops down on the floor, and Barry yells triumphantly, “the gods can be killed!”, it’s a moment that is equally hilarious, moving, and bonkers. That’s the kind of thing that comedies need more of. 

But when Sausage Party fixates on its message against religion, it often feels as earnest as a kid-friendly Pixar movie. (Sidenote, the afore-mentioned drugged-out lunkhead drives a beat-up old car with a bumper sticker that reads, “Dixar.”) Seth Rogen, who plays the main character, a sausage named Frank, is the one who first discovers the truth about the Great Beyond, and he becomes the film’s literal voice of reason, championing free thought over blissful ignorance. When he angers the entire supermarket with his claims that the Great Beyond is a lie, he realizes he must be “nicer.” It feels smug and disingenuous, and really beneath everything else that’s happening in Sausage Party, because so much of Sausage Party is ingeniously crazy. It happily riffs on all the politics—be they racial, gender, what-have-you—of our time: two supporting characters are a Jewish bagel named Sammy Bagel, Jr. (voice of Edward Norton) and a Middle Eastern lavash named Kareem Abdul Lavash (voice of David Krumholtz); another character, the sultry lesbian Teresa del Taco (voiced by Salma Hayek) has a crush on Brenda, the other main character, a hot dog bun who’s in love with Frank. (She’s voiced by Kristen Wiig.) There’s a Native American character, Firewater (Bill Hader) who knows the truth but pretends not to: he’s imbued with all the stereotypes of the wise old Indian distilling knowledge (and weed). And, much like Blazing Saddles erupts in an orgy of chaotic violence at the end, Sausage Party erupts in an orgy too, the old-fashioned kind. 

As delightfully reprehensible as much of Sausage Party is, it loves silliness too, and accumulates a stock of wonderful little throwaway puns. Every adage about food you can imagine (“spill the beans”, “how do you like them apples?”) is thrown into the mix; when one character says, “Okay, so…”, a jar of sticky orange cheese suddenly appears and says, “Did somebody say ‘queso’?” And then there are moments that truly feel disturbing, like when a woman is preparing dinner, and we see the food being tortured and killed: a triumphant potato, the first item she picks up, suddenly screams in horror as she begins to skin him and then tosses him into a pot of boiling water; the woman then pops two baby carrots into her mouth, and we see her teeth chomping them into bits from the inside while outside, horrifying foods wail, “She’s eating children!” So if we have to have our comedies doused in messages today, at least some filmmakers are still jolting us with the kind of nutty, irreverent insanity that makes the genre an urgently needed antidote to our own reality.

Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernan. With voices of Nick Kroll (as one of the film’s chief villains, a douche), James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Paul Rudd, and Anders Holm. 

True Story

True Story wants very much to understand the evil that men do, but it’s too superficial to dig deep enough into its subject. The film is based on an actual case, that of convicted murderer Christian Longo. Longo was given the death penalty for the 2001 murders of his wife and three young children. The film chronicles the strange relationship that develops between Longo (played by James Franco) and a disgraced ex-New York Times reporter named Mike Finkel (played by Jonah Hill). Finkel has just been let go from his post at the Times because he fabricated part of a story he wrote about the African slave trade. After returning to his home in Montana and his wife (Felicity Jones), who works in the library of a university, Finkel discovers that Longo used his name whilst a fugitive from justice. Intrigued, Finkel reaches out to Longo in prison. And here’s where the movie loses me. When Finkel first encounters Longo, he tells the suspected murderer that he can relate to Longo because “he’s been through a trial of his own,” and he wanted to know “what it was like to be me.” Longo is obviously thrilled to be the subject of a vulnerable reporter’s curiosity—not to mention Finkel’s ticket to career salvation. And Finkel becomes enamored of Longo in very creepy and incredulous ways.

I haven’t read Finkel’s book about his relationship with Longo; nor am I familiar with the details of the actual murder case and subsequent trial. But the film documents an exchange that is hard to take. The writers—David Kajganich and Rupert Goold (Gold also directed)—are trying to explore the complex range of emotions at play here: On the one hand, Finkel has been publicly humiliated for falsifying information; his reputation is marred and he desperately needs a good story to revive his career; this makes Finkel vulnerable to the manipulations of a sociopath (assuming Longo is actually guilty). Meanwhile, there is the question of Longo’s guilt. Did he really do the unthinkable? Or is he just the perfect wrongfully accused man, nailed to the wall by circumstantial evidence and motive? Finkel stands to gain here too: He might be the one person to believe the innocent man, thus preventing another senseless death if Longo is acquitted of the five murders he is accused of committing.

These are fascinating ideas, but the movie doesn’t seem equipped to handle them with any finesse or curiosity. The relationship between Longo and Finkel is clumsily established with a montage sequence. I wish there had been scenes of Finkel spotting Longo while he did push-ups, set to some amped-up 80s power song by the likes of Men at Work or Duran Duran. The movie might have worked better as a spoof of crime dramas than the real thing. But that may also be the fact that we’re seeing two actors who have been associated with comedy for so long now trying to break out of that mold and do something different.

I won’t dispute their acting skills. Both Franco and Hill are strong performers. But there’s nothing else underneath those performances. The film doesn’t really event capture the tingling mysteriousness that pervades strong examples of this genre. We’re never immersed in the film the way that we should be. And moments of bad dialogue and seemingly odd, incredulous character choices only mar an already muddled film. 

The Interview

Has there ever been another fictional movie about assassinating a real, living ruler? I’m guessing so. But The Interview managed to find itself in a perfect storm of media hype thanks to the Sony hacks and North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, responding so negatively (and threateningly) to the idea of the film. Then again, it’s about his purported assassination, so I can certainly understand his vexation. But is it wrong to make a movie like this, since everything we hear about Kim Jong-un (and his father, Kim Jong-il before him) is so horrible? It does feel a bit wrong-headed, if only because of the real tragedy that exists for the oppressed millions living in North Korea, where a strong propaganda machine controls all information, and where there is apparently mass starvation. At least in movies like Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, the bad guys are so far removed from us in the present—and so vilified—rightly—in our minds—that the horrors perpetrated against them in the movie don’t feel horrific, just funny and even deserved. Perhaps The Interview is ahead of its time. But I’m doubtful it will be remembered as a great comedy, especially when it’s so pickled in its own insipid view of the world.

At any rate, with all the hoopla surrounding the tumultuous release of The Interview, it’s perhaps ironic—and more than a bit disappointing—that the movie isn’t very good. As a comedy, it delivers almost no laughs. (And all of them are squeezed into the film’s trailer.) The film may actually work better as a bad drama trying to understand the mind and the world of an eccentric dictator whose imprisoned people have been fooled into thinking he’s a god. But regardless, there’s little to recommend in The Interview.

James Franco spends most of the film trying really hard to be funny by hamming it up, but his mugging isn’t charming. It’s the bad over-acting of a comic performer whose directors (Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg) don’t have the sense to reign him in. Throughout the film, which runs nearly two hours (and could have easily been thirty minutes shorter), I felt strongly that the makers of it were convinced everything they were doing was hysterically funny.

Franco plays Dave Skylark, the host of a popular entertainment television show that features segments like Rob Lowe revealing his baldness and Eminem unceremoniously coming out on the air. Seth Rogen plays Dave’s producer and best friend, who becomes convinced that the show needs to focus on more important subject matter. When the pair discovers that North Korea’s dictator, 31-year-old Kim Jong-un, is an avid fan of the show, they decide that interviewing the infamous despot will catapult them into a more respectable, serious level of TV journalism. But the CIA has other plans for them, namely to assassinate Kim Jong-un during their stay in the country’s capital, Pyongyang.

Inept assassins can be funny. The plot of The Interview could almost be that of a Marx Brothers movie. James Franco and Seth Rogen try very hard as those inept assassins, but there’s not much fun to be had in their many botched attempts at killing Kim Jong-un. The gags must have seemed funny in the abstract, but the movie is so enamored of its premise that it doesn’t feel the need to do anything more than let that premise play itself out. There’s no invention in the humor, only the dull satisfaction of the performers and the writers who think they’re doing something funny. (Franco acts like a child and makes idiotic decisions that frustrate their plans over and over again; Rogen generally suffers the consequences, like when he’s forced to insert a metallic capsule into his rectum to hide a poison agent from some of Kim Jong-un’s goons.) The jokes are repeatedly delusional, content to recycle an antiquated notion of Asian culture and an arrogant, ignorant nostalgia for Asian stereotypes. (As when James Franco says, “Koniwicha” to North Koreans as he alights from his plane.) Even those feeble gags might have been funny if they had been written and acted out with any imagination.

Perhaps Sony didn’t orchestrate the hack that led to The Interview’s canceled—and then marginally un-canceled—premiere. But the free publicity they’ve gotten out of this event will likely help make up for a loss in revenue. (And the film is sure to do well as an online rental via Youtube and Google Play.) And it has, strangely enough, secured a weird little spot in cinema history for a markedly forgettable movie.

With Randall Park, who gives the film’s most authentic and heartfelt performance as Kim Jong-un himself; Lizzy Caplan as a CIA agent (whose chest is ogled by the camera in one of the film’s classiest moments), and Diana Bang as Sook, one of Kim Jong-un’s propaganda ministers, with whom Rogen’s character falls in love. (Her hairdo, which looks like a soft roll of black charcoal, is somehow perfect, especially when she’s holding a vintage-looking machine gun and firing away.) Written by Dan Sterling.

Palo Alto

James Franco has seemingly done it all. He's acted in giant blockbusters and indie films (both good and not so good), soap operas, the cult hit sitcom Freaks and Geaks, and an episode of 30 Rock in which he played himself. He's directed a documentary imagining the lost (X-rated) content of William Friedkin's 1982 thriller Cruising, gone for a PhD in English at Yale, and recently, written a book of short fiction called Palo Alto Stories. From that collection, which I have not read, filmmaker Gia Coppola has fashioned a stunningly beautiful work called Palo Alto. It's about a group of teenagers in Palo Alto, California.

The film left me feeling a bit disturbed and heartbroken for the lives of young people, not just today but any day, because so much of being young is a kind of aimless search for meaning and identity. And really, that search doesn't necessarily go away once a person reaches adulthood. Sometimes it intensifies. Sometimes it makes you cynical. Sometimes it makes you afraid. In superficial ways, the kids in Palo Alto are pros at being teenagers. That is, they party hard and have no qualms about partaking in the expected teenagery vices. Their parents are generally out of the picture or too self-involved to notice what their kids are up to. The few adults we get to know are actually just as irresponsible as their kids.

On the other hand, that's not all there is to being young. And I suppose it would be easy to watch a movie like Palo Alto and jump to that conclusion. One of the problems with films about youth is that they tend to be stuck in stereotypes. We get a certain kind of cinematic teenage type that rarely changes. Little novelty or variety is offered up. Most kids are painted as searching and confused. Surely there must be some who aren't so self-serious? So self-important? Palo Alto reaches into the troubled teenager vacuum and plucks out a few that are desperately in need of saving, and then lets us watch them tread water. There's a kind of beauty in the film's impartiality to human tragedy. One boy--spinning out of control because of some repressed anger--gets drunk and then speeds down the wrong way of the interstate. We brace ourselves for a collision that is never revealed. It was a powerful moment. I wondered why Gia Coppola chose not to let us see if he did in fact crash.

The cast is headed by Emma Roberts and Jack Kilmer (whose father, Val Kilmer, has a small part also). Roberts plays April, a somewhat shy, smart, curious, playful girl who partakes, albeit reluctantly, in the incessant partying, but doesn't know if she really enjoys it. (She does enjoy cigarettes.) April is searching for something, but she doesn't know what it is, and she's also being pursued by her soccer coach, who's played by none other than James Franco himself. He keeps telling April he loves her, and it's not clear if he's telling the truth or just manipulating her. Regardless, his involvement with a teenager is a manipulation, because she's too young to know how to respond to his advances. She kind of likes them--what self-conscious young person doesn't want to hear someone say "I love you"?--and yet there's fear in her eyes. Is he a wolf on the prowl or just emotionally confused himself?

Ultimately Palo Alto left me feeling slightly indifferent. It has a lilting, fleeting quality to it. I think it captures some of the confusing emotions that afflict young people. But the characters aren't particularly strong, at least not the leads, although the cast is indeed talented. They don't leave much of an impression, except Nat Wolff, the douchey one with anger issues. He's the guy I loved hating, although I did feel sorry for him later in the film. And Zoe Levin--as the high school "slut" who's a bit pathetic, a bit sympathetic--also registers, especially when Coppola turns her into a kind of comic freak when she's pushed into a swimming pool by a rebuffed beau, after which she attacks him with a wine bottle. Perhaps James Franco isn't the best storyteller to be published and than have his work adapted into film, but Coppola turns it into a competent-looking piece.

Veronica Mars

Kristen Bell plays Veronica, a thirty-ish year-old woman who is about to sign on with a big law firm in New York City when she's unexpectedly pulled back to her hometown of Neptune, California, where an old love interest has been accused of murder. Veronica, it turns out, used to work for her father, a private eye, and she apparently was pretty good at solving mysteries. This modern-day Nancy Drew flick is kind of thin--it feels like an extended episode of a TV show more than a movie--but then again, it's more of a valentine to the many fans of the show, which was canceled in 2007 after three years.

The initiated should be pleased with seeing many of the recurring characters from the show reunited. There were some confusing moments for non-fans, but overall, Veronica Mars is pleasing fluff, bolstered by the always plucky Kristen Bell. Jason Dohring plays Logan, her ex-boyfriend who went on to marry another girl from their high school days. Said girl is also the murder victim, a troubled pop star whose downward spiral (and turbulent marriage) was fodder for the tabloids. It all feels very much like something that could only happen in Hollywood. Where else would you rekindle your relationship with your high school sweetheart while trying to prove that he didn't murder his pop star wife, with whom you also went to school? (All while avoiding persistent phone calls from a charming would-be fiance and a prestigious law firm.)

There are some amusing supporting performances, such as Ryan Hansen as Dick, another chum from high school, and Gaby Hoffman (where has she been?) as an obsessed fan who dresses like the murdered singer. Jamie Lee Curtis makes a brief appearance as Veronica's would-be employer, Chris Lowell plays Veronica's current boyfriend, Enrico Colantoni plays her dad, and Krysten Ritter plays Gia, another high school friend. With Tina Majorino, Francis Capra, Percy Draggs, Jerry O'Connell, Ken Marino, and James Franco as himself. Written by director Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero.

Spring Breakers

Can I have my 90 minutes back? I think this movie was a critique of vapid materialism and wasted prosperity, but it showcased what it critiqued with such obsessive, pornographic enjoyment that it left me feeling cold and ready for it all to end. (Some have praised it for being hiply ironic. It's really just stupid, and oh so poorly written, though admittedly well-made.) For those of you who felt MTV's annual televised spring break programming needed some narrative and a little Bonnie and Clyde thrown in for good measure. Directed by Harmony Korine. With James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine. ★

Oz the Great and Powerful

The first and last thirty minutes of Oz the Great and Powerful are funny and clever, and James Franco's deliberately corny performance works well for the movie. The middle section sags, as Franco, playing Oz, the con man from Kansas who is magically transported--via tornado--from Kansas to Oz, is sent out by two good witches to destroy a wicked one.

James Franco is just the man for this kind of movie. With his wide-eyed stoner look, Franco is amiable but also tongue-in-cheek. He turns Oz into an endearing snake oil salesman who has dreams of emulating Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison, but feels constrained by the cynical frontier-people of the Midwest. Once in Oz, he encounters people who have real magic powers, but are so trusting that they're easily conned into believing his yarns.

The problem is that the story feels too much like a rehash of The Wizard of Oz. Only it's not nearly efficient enough to retread such familiar turf. Worse, the film is full of cutesy characters, including Franco's flying monkey sidekick and a tug-at-your-heartstrings china girl. (I kept hoping someone would smash her, and groaned inwardly when I realized she was to be a major character.)

It's surprising to see a director like Sam Raimi churning out such commercial material, except that he's spent the last decade making the Spider-Man movies. Probably it would have been even less fun with a more conventional director. Raimi is trying to out-Tim Burton Tim Burton. But he also takes the material more seriously than Burton has done in some of his recent work (like the abysmal Dark Shadows). There's a mixture of reverence and deliberate artifice at work here, only the two fail to connect the movie. It's a bit disjointed. Is it a silly kid's movie? A wide-eyed adventure/homage to a classic American fable? A parody? It wants to be all of them, perhaps, but never really makes up its mind what it's going to do with such ambitions.

At the same time, there are bits of humor that manage to find their way into the script, and these help loosen up some of the dry spots in Oz, which has visual opulence to spare, but often finds itself lacking in true imagination. (Also, I really enjoyed the finale, in which Oz uses his tricks to fool the witches. It was a fun way to end the movie and breathe some life into it.)

[Spoilers in next paragraph]

The witches are interesting: Michele Williams looks a little like Kim Basinger. She plays Glinda: the exceedingly good and somewhat naive witch. Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz play the bad witches. Kunis is hard to take in anything because she constantly reminds me of her character from Family Guy, and she's not very intimidating when she transforms into the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West. I kept wishing for Margaret Hamilton (the original Wicked Witch), so terrifyingly good. But Weisz is an absolute delight. I felt that she relished her part, and she's so gorgeous that it makes her a very enjoyable villain.

With Zach Braff, in a small role as Franco's assistant back in Kansas (and the voice of the annoying monkey), Joey King, Tim Holmes, Bill Cobbs, Tony Cox, Abigail Spencer, and Bruce Campbell in a cameo as one of the guards in the Emerald City. Culled together from L. Frank Baum's various Oz books by screenwriters David Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell Kapner. 127 min. ★★

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The 2001 Planet of the Apes remake was so dismal that I went into this one with low expectations. But Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an entrancing diversion, with James Franco as a scientist injecting apes with a virus that makes them super-chimps. He's working on a cure for Alzheimer's, and even tries an experimental batch on his ailing father (John Lithgow), who's got Dementia.

You're never sure if director Rupert Wyatt intends for this to be funny, but it is. The movie doesn't exactly wink at the audience, but with Franco in the lead, who's never far away from being tongue-in-cheek, you feel the director has given the audience permission to laugh and have a good time. Besides, the movie is genuinely entertaining, and makes good use of San Francisco as its setting (including a well-paced and exciting showdown between apes and police on the Golden Gate bridge).

The computerized apes look fairly realistic. CGI never sells itself to me all the way. There's something not quite believable in it, but the creators of these formidable creatures accomplish quite a lot with the technology at hand, and the movie avoids hokeyness for the most part. The apes are compelling characters, and most of the time they're the more sympathetic creatures in the movie.

With Freida Pinto as a veterinarian/love interest, Andy Serkis as Caesar, the star Ape, Tom Felton, as a scummy caretaker at the facility in which Caesar becomes a captive, and David Oyelowo as Franco's boss, the man holding the purse strings behind the mad scientist's work.

Your Highness

 Your Highness is one of those movies where you laugh--a lot--at its crudeness, but after the movie's over, your desire to be more highbrow kicks in, and you decide you ought to disparage it in your review for being so lowbrow. Your Highness might be better thought of as a legitimate attempt at a rip-roaring fantasy-adventure yarn rather than a pure spoof. Its main tack is to play everything with a straight face and undercut it with a curse word or some kind of sexual reference. So if you're not into that kind of humor, this won't be the movie for you.

However, Danny McBride's performance works. He somehow makes his obnoxious slob of a character likable. And James Franco is equally funny. His performance belongs in the straight version, and McBride's character constantly berates his attempt to maintain some kind of formal "quest movie" seriousness. The tug-of-war between those two performances is probably the highlight of the movie. Natalie Portman's character is sort of forced. She's essentially there as a penance because the movie relies so desperately on the damsel-in-distress plot (Zooey Deschanel plays the damsel, and has the least interesting part in the movie. She stares out a window a lot, and the movie occasionally reminds us of her presence--the reason Franco and McBride are on their quest--but that's about it for her. It barely makes use of her comedic talent, and while she sings briefly, it's only as a joke).

The movie also makes fun of what some people call "homo-social" relationships between men. However, it isn't all that progressive in its thinking. The camera ogles Natalie Portman taking a bath in a bikini (objectifying female characters is okay as long as they're good fighters?). And Deschanel's weak part speaks to this as well. Again, I was laughing a lot, but it really did feel like something created in a frat house. Many comedies feel that way lately. Frat boys have some comic sense, or at least they know how to use the F word to make a line of dialogue punch a little more, but these movies lack the kind of comic genius that distinguishes some of the better spoofs. It's not the difference between highbrow and lowbrow humor, but the difference between creativity and tried-and-true laughs, that work, but let's face it, are predictable and easy.

Your Highness has a good pace, and the quest part is fairly interesting, even if it clutches firmly onto familiar trappings. What got me was the ending, so heavily relying upon special effects. It made me sad that even comedies are deploying more and more of their capital to computer graphics. Surely the bigness of Hollywood movies has reached its turgid breaking point? And yet, the coming attractions promise more. I wish Your Highness had settled for something smaller. I think the jokes are enough to sustain it. But they seem to get lost in the pursuit of the dumb, enormous action of the plot. And there are moments during fight scenes where you can hardly tell what's going on because the camera zips around like lightning, and the editor seems to have honed his skills on music videos. He's following the style of the current editing school, which is music video-speed. Yet another reason for our diminishing attention spans.

Howl

I like James Franco because he makes interesting career choices. I won't say his choice to do General Hospital last year was daring, or provocative, or interesting, but it's refreshing to see an actor doing what he wants to do. On the other hand, Franco's newest movie, Howl, is kind of daring. Howl is about Allen Ginsberg and his phantasmagorical poem ("Howl"), which was accused of being obscene.

The movie traces the trial in which David Strathairn and Jon Hamm face off as lawyers on opposite sides of the case, while a cartoonish-looking Bob Balaban sits sternly at the bench with his gavel. Interspersed with the courtroom drama story, which is the most mainstream thing about Howl, are scenes of Franco as Ginsberg, being interviewed by an unknown person, talking about his writing style, his thoughts on art and the creative process, his homosexuality, his relationships, and his mother, who died after she underwent a lobotomy.

The standout in Howl is the animation: a visual representation of Ginsberg's poem, which is the third part of Howl's intercutting story. It's vividly mad and madly vivid, a fascinating realization of Ginsberg's rambling, chaotic, sensual style. Such an ambitious attempt at uniting poetry and film makes Howl worth seeing, although it's probably not going to find much of an audience. It's more of a documentary than a piece of narrative, and the courtroom drama section of the movie is, despite being the most traditionally dramatic aspect of the movie, not the emotional center of the film. Is it an attempt to ingratiate the movie's form with mainstream audiences? I'm not sure, but I think it does provide a bit of respite from the trippy animated scenes and the scenes where Ginsberg talks to the camera like it's his shrink. Franco has a sort of droll, blase way of reading the poem (and speaking in general) that is charged with an energy that comes from his chest and seems to force its way out of him. His voice is a strange combination of lethargy and passion: he's like a stoner who's simultaneously mellow and unhinged.

Jon Hamm and David Strathairn don't really have much to do other than defend their side of the "obscenity in literature" argument, and while they are good actors who do convincing work, it's not very challenging work. Hamm is easy to like, so of course it's not hard to put him on the side of open-mindedness, and Strathairn does a good job playing the stuffy, wormy conservative villain who wants to outlaw what he doesn't understand. The judge's decision isn't really very momentous, but then we're left with the impression that this was never the point of Howl. Instead, it seems more an attempt to give a voice to someone who had trouble being understood but struck a chord with his incoherency. Ginsberg's poetry has been compared to jazz in its rhythm and its style, and indeed it seems like linguistic jazz--seemingly unstructured and unpredictable, going against the rules of form and style, but penetrating the senses with its dark, deep and fluid imagery.

Directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. With Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, Treat Williams, and Alessandro Nivola. ★★½