At Screen Comment we love us a good, brainy actor every once in a while—actor/filmmakers? Even better. In the previous two decades there was Spacey, then there was Malkovich, and now it’s the new guard with James Franco. Franco has that wonderful and compound quality: self-effacing while at the same time exuding a certain authority over American filmic output. The same guy who appeared in “Pineapple Express” as a stoner who’d make the guys from “Wayne’s World” jealous is also the guy who directs the “The Clerk’s Tale.” We guess it’s unnecessary to mention ...
James Franco’s short film “The Clerk’s Tale” will close Critics’ Week at Cannes. Screen Comment’s Ali Naderzad did a close reading with Franco on the Spencer Reece poem it is based on.
Ali Naderzad - “The Clerk’s Tale” has a hint of sweet hopelessness. It reminds me of Thoreau’s famous sentence “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”I found the following sentence especially striking:
He does this because his acceptance is finally complete—and complete acceptance is always bittersweet. And then, there’s the extraordinary. We are changed when the transactions are done— older, dirtier, dwarfed."
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