James Franco Does Queer Cinema 'Feast of Stephen'
James Franco is a perfect ten. He's incredibly kind on the retina, he can act, and now, he can direct too. After studying at New York University's Film School, his directorial debut, The Feast of Stephen has just won him a Teddy at the Berlin Film Festival for excellence in queer cinema.
Although his short film contains slow motion collisions of equal parts penis and basketball, (balls everywhere really), this does not, in any way, mean that Franco himself is of the homosexual demographic. I hope.
Based on Anthony Hecht's achingly homoerotic poem by the same name, which includes lines like: "The coltish horseplay of the locker room,/ Moist with the steam of the tiled shower stalls...", the film tracks a young man's daydream from a game on a New York basketball court, to a very sexual, gay, rite- of- passage beating in Central Park.
It's a collision of violence and ecstasy, with an intimacy that alternates between kick, punch and dry-hump, all 'mounting' to the film's grand finale where the protagonist has feces smeared across his face.
It's demeaning and has a gang-rape feel to it, but the grin he shares with the audience at the end, suggests that this disambiguation is merely part of growing up.
I gotta say, not since Leo Dicaprio did Basketball Diaries in 1995, has the sport looked so interesting. There's dribbling and sweating, and that's just from the audience. Even if silent, gay, naked basketball films aren't your thang, anything by James Franco is worth the watch.
YouTube has removed the video preview but you can watch the video here
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There’s not much that James Franco could do to push me away from my long-held dream that he will, one day, be my boyfriend. It ain't like you don’t dream of the same thing. But, ok, we might not be able to overlook this if he did it to our bedroom. Especially if we weren’t there to watch.
His new movie, The Pineapple Express, opens this weekend, and seeing as though he's also announced
