THE SOUND AND THE FURY (TIFF 2014 - TIFF SPECIAL PRESENTATION) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

James Franco delivers the "full retard" and Scott Haze is sheer, utter evil incarnate. Just another day o' good old finger lickin' yummy Southern Gothic 4 U 2 enjoy!

The Sound and the Fury (2014)
Dir. James Franco
Scr. Matt Rager
Starring: James Franco, Scott Haze, Jacob Loeb, Tim Blake Nelson, Joey King, Ahna O’Reilly, Loretta Devine, Janet Gretzky

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Last year, James Franco plunged his lead actor Scott Haze into the unenviable position of having to go ‘full retard’ as a psychotic half-wit in Child of God, the genuinely great film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s shocking potboiler. The real impediment to Oscar glory here was not just going ‘full retard’, but the fact that Haze took a crap on screen, wiped his poopy-butt with a stick, spied on young lovers boinking whilst jerking off, slaughtering a host of honey-pies, having sex with their corpses and then donning their finery before launching into a killing rampage in drag as he goes head-to-head against a whole passel of lawmen.

Here we are, one year later, and Franco hands the brilliant Haze the role of Jason Compson, easily one of the most reprehensible figures in American literature. Haze is probably thanking Franco for this one, though, since Franco reserves the ‘full retard’ challenge all to his lonesome. Playing Jason’s tetched in the head little brother Benjy, Franco sports enormous buck-toothed prosthetics, plenty of eyeball rolling, grunting and drooling. Franco goes further on the ‘full retard’ front than any actor in film history.

This is Franco’s second stab at William Faulkner in so many years, and it mucho-outdoes his shot at As I Lay Dying. Faulkner – to my mind – is a thoroughly unsuitable literary source for film adaptation. God knows many have tried and failed miserably, but Franco just keeps on giving the gift that keeps on giving. He plucks what he loves about the book and splatters it Jackson Pollock-like on the screen. This is probably the best thing to do cinematically with Faulkner's rich, stream-of-consciousness prose. Screenwriter Matt Rager delivers a grotesque blueprint that plunges Faulkner into the same lollapalooza inbred territory as Anthony Mann's overlooked masterpiece of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre and Elia Kazan's madcap Baby Doll.

And good goddamn, I accept this with open arms.

Here’s my bias. I love James Franco as a director. He spits in the face of everything and everybody, does what he damn well pleases and makes movies like nobody else in contemporary America. He celebrates what he's into and does it in such a go-for-broke manner, that it's hard not to respect the finished product.

Here he tackles the meandering tale of the once-rich-and-powerful Compson family dynasty of the Deep South and infuses it with the most delectably over-the-top melodrama imaginable. He divides his film into three chapters, primarily focusing upon the Compson brothers: simpleton Benjy, scumbag Jason and the doomed Quentin (Jacob Leob). In the mix we’ve got ‘fallen’ sister Caddy (Ahna O’Reilly), her ‘bastard’ child Miss Quentin (Joey King), loyal housekeeper Dilsey (Loretta Divine) and even hockey star Wayne Gretzky’s wife, Janet Jones, as the deluded Compson matriarch.

It's the family that snipes at each other, loses most of their legacy together and pretty much helplessly rue the day foul Jason took the patriarchal role. For his part, he steals, lies, vents, abuses and bullies his way through his pathetic, dwindling life.

And what of Benjy, our ‘full retard’? Well shucks, he’s a mite jealous when his beloved sister starts a-rollin’ in the hay with eager male suitors, so he begins a-stalkin’ some local gals and does somethin’ he shouldn’t ougtha be doin’.

This is pure, delicious Southern Gothic at its most insane. It even indulges in some delightful Terence Malick Tree of Life shenanigans, which play like parody of the highest order. Some might believe Faulkner would be spinning in his grave over this one, but I doubt it. I think even he might have had himself as rip-roaring a good time as I did.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

The Sound and the Fury is a Special Presentation at TIFF 2014.

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CHILD OF GOD - Review By Greg Klymkiw - # TIFF 2013 - "You never go full retard." - Tropic Thunder

Child of God (2013) *****
Dir. James Franco
Starring: Scott Haze, Tim Blake Nelson, Jim Parrack

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Everybody knows you never go full retard...Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, 'Rain Man,' look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho'. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, 'Forrest Gump.' Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. Peter Sellers, "Being There." Infantile, yes. Retarded, no. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, "I Am Sam." Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed..." - Robert Downey Jr. as Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder

Scott Haze as Lester Ballard, the inbred, slow-witted Tennessee cracker-barrel hero of James Franco's stunning film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's great novel Child of God, takes a huge crap on-screen, wipes his poopy-butt with a stick, delivers plenty of nice flashes of buttock (replete with ass-crack) and dolls himself up in the most hideous drag regalia ever wrought on the silver screen, but he most surely, undoubtedly and definitely does not serve up the aforementioned "full retard". In spite of Haze's genuinely affecting and often downright bravely brilliant performance, there might be something a tad more egregious than "full retardation" to keep him from a date with Oscar.

You see, Lester's pappy's gone and done hung hissef' and in the process, left his son with nothing and nobody. The family farm has been auctioned off and our hero, shotgun in hand, takes to an old hunting shack in the deep woods where he lives out his life on game (he's a durn' tootin' crack shot) and the occasional stolen chicken from the prissy, white-haired gentleman farmer who now owns the former Ballard plantation. Sheriff Fate (Tim Black Nelson) and Deputy Cotton (Jim Parrack) keep a healthy watch on Lester since the boy occasionally flies off the handle and needs to be given some quality rest time in a padded cell.

They seem oddly sympathetic to Lester, but ultimately, what can they really do when mysteriously naughty shenanigans occur in the county? They've gotta target someone. After all, our boy Lester is just plumb crazy.

Lester is also a full-bodied young lad and when he discovers a lovers' lane area in the backwoods, he develops a healthy penchant for peeping through the back seat windows of parked cars. As the vehicles bob up and down with the strokes of amore, the dulcet tones of grunts and moans wafting through the air, Lester handily (so to speak) beats his meat to the proceedings.

One morning, he spies a vehicle still running. In the back seat are the bodies of a young couple locked in a lovers' embrace and they are stone-cold from carbon monoxide poisoning. With keen interest, Lester notices that the young lady is awful purty. Hmmm. What's an ornery country boy with a hard-on supposed to do in a situation like this?

Well, he does what no Oscar-winning performance will ever be acknowledged for. And he does it repeatedly - only subsequent recipients of his man-juice are not stupid enough to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Luckily for Lester, he's mighty handy with a shotgun.

Franco has managed to do the near impossible. He renders a character - especially via Haze's performance, who gains our empathy to a point where we even get the "Oh, for Christ's sake, Lester, ya' shouldn't oughtta be doin' that" feeling.

Child of God is a genuine triumph. Franco handles the picture with verve and style. He even manages to utilize chunks of McCarthy's prose in a series of odd "conversational" voice-overs and literal title cards splashing across the screen. I loved this technique. It was fun AND rooted the film in the glorious American literary tradition of Southern Gothic. Franco elicits a wide range of great performances and his actual coverage and composition of the dramatic action feels like the work of someone who's been directing movies his whole career.

The movie is grotesque, at times sickening and often shocking, but it is rooted in genuine humanity and is easily one of the best movies of the year.

"Child of God" is a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013). Part of me wishes it was a Gala. I'd have paid premium scalper prices to witness the stuffed-shirt-richie-rich response of some of the assholes who go to those things. In the meantime, this is one hot ticket item and feel free to visit the TIFF website HERE to secure a shot at seeing this great movie.

INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR. Review By Greg Klymkiw - Klymkiw HOT DOCS 2013 HOT PICKS

Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) ****
Dir. James Franco, Travis Mathews
Starring: James Franco, Val Lauren, Travis Mathews

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This is one sloppy tossed salad of a movie. Adorned with thick runny lumps of yummy dressing that spew from a long-necked bottle, held and shaken with manly vigour over the wide awaiting receptacle, never mixed or smeared into the veins of fleshy arugula, lying in wait for a fork to prong into it to greedily ingest the globules that stick upon their resting place, this magnificent Salade de cinéma is an utterly pretentious, self-indulgent wank-fest of the highest (or lowest order, depending on how you view these things).

And Damn! It's a lot of fun.

James Franco, one of the great actors of the 21st century, teamed up with acclaimed queer filmmaker Travis Mathews to co-direct this exploration of gay male sexuality within the context of re-imagining 40 minutes of excised lost footage from Cruising, William Friedkin's MPAA-butchered masterpiece from 1980. A lack of time and money, however, forced the filmmakers of Interior. Leather Bar. to re-imagine their re-imagining, so what we're treated to is a documentary about the making of a re-imagining as re-imagined by Franco and Mathews before, during and after they re-imagine it.

Fine by me.

Franco, who seems particularly obsessed with what he might discover for (and about) himself (and, by extension, society as a whole), hires a straight actor (Val Lauren) to play the Al Pacino role from Cruising and film the entire process. Lauren and Franco engage in a series of conversations that feel very real (but conversely seem, perhaps, to be scripted) and deal with straight attitudes to gay sex in the world at large, but also within the macrocosmic context of the film-shoot itself. Lauren is constantly on edge and always questioning Franco's motives while Franco often retorts with the notion of how sexuality in the cinema (and in particular, gay sexuality) is repressed, while violence is celebrated. (Indeed, the MPAA ratings board were happy to allow all the graphic butchery to remain in the film over the explicit gay sex.)

Furthermore, Franco laments his upbringing (and that of straight society) which ignores, represses and/or vilifies gay sexuality. He uses toothpaste commercials to illustrate this. I mean, really, what's not to love about James Franco?

Cruising is the perfect launch pad for this exploration. The film was, and continues to be alternately vilified and celebrated by members of the gay community. Even during its making, hordes of angry gay men protested at the filming locations and the studio hired over 300 off-duty NYC officers to keep the peace. Mistakenly perceived as an anti-gay anthem on celluloid, Cruising is a relentless and unnerving mystery thriller about a "homo killer" on the loose in New York and a straight, doe-eyed rookie cop (played by Al Pacino) who matches the physical attributes of the victims and is sent to live undercover within the Big Apple's sect of leather bar S&M aficionados. Pacino becomes a sort of Dorothy in the Land of Oz - introduced to genuine friendship with a gay neighbour (Don Scardino) and most importantly, the joys of leather-clad gentlemen openly fellating, sodomizing and fist-fucking each other in gay leather bars whilst one of the best soundtracks in movie history grinds out the ever-so cool and malevolent sounds of John Hiatt, Rough Trade, Willy DeVille, Madelynn von Ritz, Lump and a bevy of others.

Friedkin's film is a masterpiece - albeit a flawed masterpiece. When submitting the film to the MPAA to get a rating, he was forced to make cuts totalling 40 minutes. This does wreak some havoc with the film's narrative, but what remains is a nightmarish vision of how homophobia (and closeted self-hatred) manifest themselves into the ultimate assault upon homosexuality - a serial killer who butchers beautiful young men he's attracted to during and/or after he's had sex with them runs rampant amongst the leather bar community clearly has considerable metaphoric value. Some might argue that Friedkin creates an inferno of evil when his camera "cruises" the streets and bars, but frankly, it's not this world of leather-clad Hershey Highway Lovers that ever seemed evil to me. It's all so stylishly, lovingly rendered that I always found it unbelievably sexy and cool. The men, all shapes and sizes, are simply mouth watering and the endless array of sexual activity is tantalizing.

At one point in Franco's film, he talks about his re-imagining by stating that he wants to render the evil images from Friedkin's film into something fresh and beautiful. This is not the first, nor last time Franco contradicts himself in the movie (since he also extols the virtues of Cruising). I suspect these odd contradictions are part of the overall design and if not, they at least feel like it and add to the film's wonky charm.

And while this might sound weird, charm is what this movie has in spades. Franco and Mathews are a charming team and whether we see them in action during the prep or production, it's always a blast hearing Franco waxing eloquent while Mathews is a rock solid filmmaker attacking everything with both art and craft. Val Lauren is completely and utterly charming as the young actor chosen to recreate the Al Pacino role. What's always cool is that the film is capturing a genuine actor who must play the thing he is - a straight man who needs to cruise a bar. He's a bundle of trepidation and excitement. Watching the lad ruminate during prep, slowly get into character until he fits in the leather bar scenes perfectly and gaze on with Franco, agog, yet delighted with a sex act performed in front of them, it's so obvious why Franco loves working with him and how, if the heavens are properly aligned, this could be a star-making performance for Lauren.

The bottom line is this: I love James Franco, I love Cruising, I love Friedkin, I love charming, naked men and I love seeing stuff on screen that I can genuinely walk out of the cinema and declare I've never seen before. If you feel likewise, you'll probably love the movie as much as I do.

"Interior. Leather Bar." is playing at the Hot Docs Film Festival 2013. For tickets and showtimes, contact the Hot Docs website HERE."

Take a look at this sequence from CRUISING and THEN try to tell me that William Friedkin is NOT one of the world's greatest living film directors.What you'll see here are a series of montages with Al Pacino cruising bar after bar after bar. Includes, my fave, "Precinct Night" and some fab Crisco action.

Enjoy!

And here's a taste of INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR.