Revolutionary street artist, self described "actor/Yale Doctoral candidate," and Vice-President of Being the Best Blogger James Franco has recently begun penning film reviews for Vice magazine. Vice has labeled this undertaking "A Few Impressions," probably because reviews serve a clear purpose and "impressions" are whatever you want them to be.
On Thursday, James Franco offered up his impressions of Leviathan, a documentary about the commercial fishing industry described by Gawker's Rich Juzwiak back in March as "a borderline-abstract stream of imagery." An accurate impression of Leviathan would probably entail making a lot of fish and boat sounds with your mouth. For reasons known only to James Franco, James Franco arrived at the 10 p.m. screening an hour early.
The following are his written impressions, abridged:
- "At some point, a huge crowd of Israeli women filed in and overpowered the Daft Punk emanating from my headphones. Must have been a special screening."
- "It was then I noticed a poster for the LA Jewish Film Festival depicting a bunch of directors’ chairs arranged like the Star of David. Underneath it read a different kind of star."
- "We entered the all-but-empty theater and sat in the back because I always sit in the back."
- "This is life. Man versus nature. Man’s machines. Man’s mastery of the planet. Man’s destruction of the planet. Man’s ushering in of the apocalypse. But it is also beautiful."
- "Dead fish. More romantic than dead cows. Is that because we’re more desensitized to seeing dead fish? Some restaurants serve them whole, and some “vegetarians” (pescetarians?) are OK with eating fish. Dead fish are somehow not as threatening or disgusting as other dead things that we eat; little swimming bundles of food plucked from the ocean, the unseen vastness."
- "I mean, WTF? How? How did the film’s makers achieve this poetry?"
- "Notice the cigarettes."
- "So many forms are consumed by the television these days, to see a bunch of truckers travel over ice-covered roads or a family of hunters doing their thing and being funny to boot is de rigeur on any given night."
- "Well, here it is: man, mastering the seas and the world, doing horrible things, brave things, impossible things. Because we are man. We need to survive. And conquer."
[Image via Getty]
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