Alicia I love this movie so much

Nonureva Really Surprised!

Bereamic Awesome Movie

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

SnoopyStyle James Franco does an experimental autobiography of American poet Hart Crane. Michael Shannon plays Emile, one of his lovers. It's black and white and supposedly Franco's student film at New York University. It is unwatchable if you're looking for a narrative driven story. I'll be cruel and say it's pretentious. It's an art student film. It is technically competent. The black and white photography looks good. Unlike most amateur films, this one has top level actors. It is simply not good as a film. I'd rather have a short film with only Franco reading poetry. There's no way to maintain enough concentration to follow the entire run.

Boba_Fett1138 Even though this movie certainly is not entirely my cup of tea, I'm still able to see and recognize it as a good and original movie, that doesn't always makes things easy for itself.You could definitely say that this movie is being a bit too artistic for my taste. It's shot entirely in black & white and doesn't necessarily follow a main plot line. It just follows its main character, without making it apparent what direction the movie will be heading at. It also makes it often hard to see what the point of certain sequences in this movie are. It makes the movie at times feel like a bit of a pointless and overlong one.The movie definitely starts to become a bit of an endurance test after a while. I was perfectly able to take and follow the movie for its first 90 minutes or so but after that point it starts to become much harder to stay interested, also since the movie too often isn't providing you with anything interesting or provoking enough.It's definitely not an usual biopic, that goes deep into things. You still feel that you really get to know its main subject though, through its slow and subtle storytelling. He doesn't even say all that much but he lets his poetry and actions speak for him. In that regard I really have to compliment the movie and this also was the foremost reason why I still really liked it. You might not fully get to know the real Hart Crane through this movie but it might still get you interested in him and his work.James Franco is excellent as the movie its main character, even though he looks absolutely nothing like the real Hart Crane. It was not an easy role to play but Franco is luckily not afraid to make things hard on himself at times, which results in an interesting character and performance, that is solid enough to carry the entire movie. Since it really foremost is Franco who has most of the movie its screen time and the movie isn't focusing ever on any other characters. But that's not all Franco did. He also directed, wrote, produced and edited it. In other words, this was a real passion project for James Franco and this luckily does show in the movie. It's a skillfully made movie, with eye for detail, that handles its main subject subtly and with real respect.I liked it good enough and respect it but I of course do realize that this movie is not for just everyone. 7/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

sandover How to catch a tone, and what one betrays. James Franco is some kind of cultural phenomenon of our times; he has been called "Hollywood's workaholic", he himself has admitted an aversion to sleep since "there is so much to do", and for some time now has a flair for what may be his signature mode, that is performing artistic stunts, from cinema to video to installation and fiction.Hart Crane is a different matter. Who is not - even slightly - taken aback at first encounter by his curious mix of idioms, mixing Elizabethan enunciation, coining even words, with exotic images (rum, calypso, pirates, mermen) that are witnesses to a grinding difficulty almost agonizing in his voice, a voice of such distinctive music, that one wonders this concoction of the archaic, the deliberately anachronistic and the hesitant, traumatic modern - what does it mean? Should we bother, as in a peripheral phenomenon? Or, and here is my stake, it is America's unique candidate for articulating how can one write poetry - and of what kind - in a traumatic modernity? From John Ashbery to James Merrill and all other major or minor gay poets of the '60's, everybody seemed at least baffled when asked about his relation to Hart Crane. This is crucial.In my mind I tend to associate his act with Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" case of having two, not quite satisfying, versions of the novel, as if he too was coping with something. Alcoholism is a common ground, but I think is more symptomatic, and just not enough. To cut to the chase, what troubled Fitzgerald was how to integrate the ideal(ized) couple's disintegration as failing to conform in the eyes of the social order, the question "How the Big Other perceives me?" That social order, its stability, cracked in the dawn of 20th century modernity, and I think this is what troubled Hart Crane, too, as his pirate, clandestine imagery suggests.Is all this relevant? It is. For I think James Franco shies away from confronting the specificity of the case in regard to his stance; for what we get is big chops of poetry reading and then a bizarrely inarticulate movie. There is a gap between these two modes that Fitzerald and Crane confronted - that is the gap in the social link that is to be filled/articulated with artistic production or love - and is not convincing, for one simple reason if you will: tell me what is the difference between this depiction, and the one Franco performed in "Howl"; both seem to fit a "maudit", more misfit than doom-eager artist of the '60s, let alone articulate, and there is where Franco's social sense betrays him.On another level, let's look into this: the film, tellingly, evolved from Franco's thesis on Hart Crane. For all its borrowed cinematic vocabulary and merit, it has an "objectified" look, as referring to some external discourse, as if its "artistry" was compromised. Compromised by what? This is one case of what the french analyst Jacques Lacan called "the Discourse of the University", that is turning an object into quantifiable knowledge, that means taking Hart Crane or some gay, beat, marginal poet and integrate him (what an ideal object) in the academic machinery, domesticating exactly what resists it, its excess.To put it plainly, there is no sense of bravura from the poems to inform the cinematic form, even what was instantly a surprise - the chromatic turn inside Notre Dame - misfires for it makes "the visionary company of love" a question of dubious religious upbringing or disposition (that recurring choir) and finally desexualizes the carnal, endangered alert of Hart Crane's poetry. No true sense of poetic threat or encroached lamentation or release as in "The Broken Tower".In the end, it is a curio of cultural rather than artistic contours: James Franco has a disturbed, rebelled social sense without a cause that fitted him perfectly from the role that made him rise, James Dean, onwards for some time - I would even say he showed true allegiance with it. On the other hand, he is a post-Warhol era phenomenon: it seems his ambition is to perform literally Warhol's poker-faced phrase "I want to be a machine". But look what happens: instead of holding on to this rebellion, that sort of impatience that is such a virtue for the French people, he has collapsed the two into a machine without a cause.

gradyharp THE BROKEN TOWER will likely never be on the list of best films made, so why award it five stars? Because this very fine art piece is the result of the devotion of James Franco to his craft. He worked directly with Boston College professor Paul Mariani, the author of a half dozen volumes of poetry, as well as several biographies of 20th-century American poets, including William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell: Franco based THE BROKEN TOWER on Mariani's similarly titled 2000 biography of Crane.The subject of the film is the life and creative genius of Hart Crane, (July 21, 1899 - April 27, 1932) an American poet who found both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that is difficult, highly stylized, and very ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem in the vein of The Waste Land that expressed something more sincere and optimistic than the ironic despair that Crane found in Eliot's poetry. In the years following his suicide at the age of 32, Crane has come to be seen as one of the most influential poets of his generation.James Franco wrote the screenplay based on book by Paul Mariani, directed and edited the film and acted the main role of Hart Crane. Crane was a nearly disconsolate man who refused to follow his wealthy father's business, longing instead to be a poet. Born in Ohio he traveled to New York (the place he always considered home), to Cuba, and to Paris searching for his poetic voice. He was a gay man in an era when his lifestyle was always under threat, he had a lover (Vince Jolivette) early on in an affair that was filled with passion, and in his travels he seemed to find his true love in Emile (Michael Shannon) that endured the manic highs and depressive, death-haunted lows that befell this self -destructive visionary poet. He attempted suicide at least once and finally ended his life in a successful suicide at the young age of 32.Franco breathes life into Hart Crane, offering more understanding of this enigmatic genius than we have ever been afforded. In making the film Franco uses his younger brother Dave Franco to depict the young Hart and selects his small cast wisely. The film is completely in black and white and is in the format of 'Voyages' - each voyage takes us through a distinct part of Hart's life: his gay loves, his poetry readings, his forays to Cuba and to Paris and his lonely hours of sitting before an old typewriter where he created the major epics of poetry that remain some of the finest ever written by an American poet.The film is choppy, not unlike the manner in which Hart's mind worked in bits and pieces, always immersed in thoughts of the sea, the labor of common man, of the Brooklyn Bridge which would play the major role in his most famous epic poem THE BRIDGE, and of the fellow artists whose work he so admired. There is a strange musical score (the work of Neil Benezra) which is long on choral chanting, and a quality of gritty cinematography achieved by Christiana Vorn. The technique of the making of this film matches the vision of James Franco in continuing to visit the lives of isolated geniuses. The dialogue, what little there is, is Crane's poetry as spoken by Franco.For many this film will seem self-indulgent on Franco's part. And perhaps it partially is. But the flavor of this gay American poet of the 1920s and the reflections of America at that time ring true. THE BROKEN TOWER is not a biopic of Hart Crane. It is an elegy. Grady Harp