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...

  This is the third of three short films that Shannon has listed on his Wikipedia page. I’ve already had a look at 'Zamboni Man' and 'Mullitt' and my views of these can be found elsewhere in this blog. This one came a bit later in Shannon’s career, by which time he was an established actor. Of the three this is probably the least appealing owing to the subject matter and you have to wonder why they bothered with this grubby project. The 14 minute film follows a day in the life of the titular Herbert. He works in forestry and much of the film is taken up with shots of him bringing down trees in his timber cutting machine. We see him go out with his family and he tells his wife that he needs to stop at the side of the road for a pee. He heads into the woods and starts to pleasure himself. When he returns his wife asks if we was taking a dump as he was away for so long. He gets home and returns calls made by his father and the relationship is clearly fractured...