Michael Shannon Movies Blog

  Here’s tough watch if ever there was one – James Franco’s mostly black and white film school project about an obscure (to me at any rate) gay American poet in the 1930s. I quite like Franco with stuff like ‘Why Him’, ‘This is the End’ and the TV show ‘The Deuce’ all excellent pieces of work. He also made ‘The Disaster Artist’ in which he had a laugh at Tommy Wiseau’s ‘The Room’. Funny, as it was you never saw the bold Tommy giving a blow job to a (probably) fake male phallus! The film charts the troubled life of poet Harold ‘Call me Hart’ Crane. Told in 12 chapters or ‘Voyages’ the film is a pretentious collection of poetry readings and self indulgent scenes that go on forever and go nowhere. Hart struggles for his craft and has to beg money to survive. He works in advertising and gets his kicks down at the docks with sailors. One of his lovers is Mr Shannon with whom Franco has a minute long snogging session with before they get down to the real action. Shannon is t...