Review of Howl (2010) by Tibor B — 10 Sep 2012
A curious, and somehow admirable, film which experiments with illuminating Ginsberg's famous poem Howl, through a mixture of biopic (with Franco as Ginsberg), courtroom drama in which charges of obscenity are battled and "poem video" with computer animation attempting to illuminate spoken sections of prose.
I admired its experimentation but eventually found it far from fulfilling in any department. A feature length biopic with Franco as Ginsberg may have worked placing him within the larger context of his peers and the impact Beat poetry had on accepted literature.
A feature length courtroom drama exploring the obscenity charge and the larger question of what constitutes literature may have worked. Finally, a wilder and far less cheap and glossy video experiment accompanying the poem in full might have worked as a short film.
The three together somehow don't - none of them are engaging enough to want to make new audiences explore Ginsberg and I can only imagine those familiar will be massively underwhelmed and find it irrelevant.
This review of Howl (2010) was written by Tibor B on 10 Sep 2012.
Howl has generally received positive reviews.
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