I'm close to impressed.

How's that for vaguely non-committal.

Not quite impressed, not entirely UN-impressed....

...the verdict's out on whether I've actually decided to actively appreciate one James Franco or leave him in the "he's no Adrien Brody" camp.

I feel like my little eduphile self should dig the fact that after he finishes his Masters program he's planning on a PhD in English.....

But then I read his short story. The one Esquire was indugent enough to publish....

It's sort of, um.....lame.

I mean, I get that he seems to be trying to emulate a neo-Kerouac style, but he misses the mark. It like he's TRYING too hard to nail a stripped-down, minimalist, "life-is-hard-and-then-you-die" mood but actually he ends up sounding sort of sophomoric and overtly vulgar.

I dunno, maybe it's a work of subtle genius and I'm overlooking how understated he's being in his attempts to beat us over the head with his "life juxtaposed with death" message, but frankly - it's a couple of drunk winners in an old car insulting each other and driving into a wall. Then they lay around and toke up and insult each other some more and we're supposed to be, um....existentially moved by some sort of "not quite obvious" subtext about meaninglessness and feeling alive and what happens when we wave kitchen knives at friends we don't really like.

Or something.

And then in the end his anti-hero narrator ostensibly drives his car into oncoming freeway traffic and we're supposed to be left feeling something.

Sorry, did I spoil that?

Here's the entire story. Decide for yourself, I guess.

But back to that matter of being impressed. He's not an actor I've ever been hugely moved by - neither does he bug me the way, oh, Clive Owen, Gerard Butler or Jude Law bug me....I guess I'm just so generally inspired by weighty academic pursuits that I wanted this bit of intellectual gossip to direct my opinion of the Franco toward the "ooh, aren't you something special!" end of the celebrity spectrum.

So far, I'm still just "meh."

Maybe if he did something else with his hair.....?*










* Yes, there's the cold, hard truth. If he looked like Sam Worthington or was built like Christopher Meloni I'd apparently be dramatically more impressed by all of this. But he looks like James Franco. And to me, he'll forever be the whiny kid in Spiderman. I can't get all effusive over the whiny kid in Spiderman.