Howl (2010)

Howl is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. In 1957 San Francisco, Allen faced charges in the obscenity trial.This is simply not my cup of tea. It may be yours if you like jazz, poetry and most importantly, have James Franco read you poetry. I don't like the non-linear telling of the story. I don't think Franco is a particularly good reader. There should be real intensity in the story but Franco's restraint performance contradicts it. For fans, I would suggest wearing a beret, lighting a smoke, turning on the jazz and snapping your fingers. You would get into the right mood which I never achieved.

(61%) A decent stab at bringing poetry to the sliver screen in this part animated snippet of Allen Ginsberg's life during a public obscenity trail around the release of his most noteworthy work. The runtime is pretty brief as it allows the poetry to do a fair amount of the talking with Ginsberg's life playing almost second fiddle between the court hearings. James Franco does a fair job in a role that mostly requires him to recite poems to quite mesmerising looking music video style short films that I thought worked perfectly well. The fact that a series of poems needed to be brought to a court of law to decide whether or not to ban them from public circulation in a so-called free country to me is as utterly laughable as it is annoyingly true. And marks the fact that rich and powerful prudes even today still seem to have a say on things that don't concern their tiny, weak, and largely closed minds.

Epstein and Friedman's depiction of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl is very well developed and although its progression of the message was slow and not to easy to follow at some points, it kept me satisfyingly intrigued throughout. They help you to understand what Howl as a poem truly represents, aside from the message Ginsberg was trying to convey, the most important aspect of the poem is its place in artistic history for the fight of free expression and freedom of speech. But what this film helps you to really grab an understanding for is that that is what the lines of Howl are all about, although many mistake the poem as just Ginsberg's expression of his "coming out" as a homosexual, if you take the time to read it or listen to Ginsberg explain the poem you'll see its more of an expression of expression, a "coming out" for any aspect of life that needed to be shown in such a perspective.

I'm surprised that this film worked as well as it did, and that it has been received as well as it has here. I read Howl about 5 years after Ginsberg wrote it, when I was in high school, and, like it or not, it became part of my thinking in the fifty years since then. Still in high school, I could quote passages from the poem at my friends, who would follow up with the next passage, etc. Boooring. But if you had told me that a film would be made about it, with a script constructed of trial transcripts and interviews in the public record, alternating with a recreation of Ginsberg's first public (paying-public; there was ONE previous reading of the full poem) reading of the poem, I wouldn't have expected much. And I would have been wrong. It's well-done and well-acted, and no excuses are made for anything about Ginsberg or his work. I was dismayed at first to see the poem interpreted into animation, but the filmmakers were savvy enough to produce the animation in the style of the times, i.e., 1955, when Disney's Fantasia was still the state of the art, and the animation in Howl could have come out of the Night on Bald Mountain section. In the end, it worked, I think, by keeping the viewer visually in the world of the poem itself, rather than in the biographical material about Ginsberg or the trial and the litigants. So if you want to watch a movie about a poem, and the poet and his friends, but mainly about the poem, this one does a pretty good job.