A film review over at the Poetry Foundation blog makes the new James Franco film about Hart Crane seem a lot less about Hart Crane and a lot more about Franco’s ideas about him.
Then again, can you ever have an alternative to that?
I bet so few people have ever read Hart Crane that it really won’t matter that much. And there is something rhetorically valuable about “shock value” in film, especially when it might encourage some of the audience members to pick up a book of Crane’s poems, which might be the point.
Not a film guy. More a poetry guy. I liked the film Franco made about Ginsberg, but that was mostly just poems and interviews that were performed.