Sundance 2010 Preview: HOWL

James Franco is known for comedy, but for any of you that watched MILK knows the guy definitely has some incredible acting chops. Add in the fact that he will be playing one of my favorite poets Allen Ginsberg and this film is set to be one of the best films at Sundance. That is all that needs to be said about this film so I will leave you with a portion of the Ginsberg poem the film is based around:

       I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
              madness, starving hysterical naked,
       dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
              looking for an angry fix,
       angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
              connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
              ery of night,
       who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
              up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
              cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
              contemplating jazz,
       who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
              saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
              ment roofs illuminated...

Official Synopsis:

It’s San Francisco in 1957, and an American masterpiece is put on trial. HOWL, the film, recounts this dark moment using three interwoven threads: the tumultuous life events that led a young Allen Ginsberg to find his true voice as an artist, society’s reaction (the obscenity trial), and mind-expanding animation that echoes the startling originality of the poem itself. All three coalesce in a genre-bending hybrid that brilliantly captures a pivotal moment—the birth of a counterculture.

HOWL is playing at the following times:

6:00 PM Thu, Jan 21 Eccles Theatre
6:30 PM Fri, Jan 22 Screening Room, Sundance Resort
2:30 PM Sat, Jan 23 Library Center Theatre
11:15 AM Tue, Jan 26 Racquet Club
6:00 PM Wed, Jan 27 Broadway Centre Cinemas VI
3:15 PM Fri, Jan 29 Eccles Theatre