Lisa and I have been re-watching Freaks and Geeks and I can't help but loving James Franco's character, Daniel. At times he bothers me, but then he goes to the Dungeon to play DandD with a bunch of geeks, and, well, what's cooler than that?
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| James Franco just happened to be in the background here (wink) |
My appreciation of his acting - particularly his role in Milk - is enhanced by my voyeuristic interest in his second career as a graduate student. I didn't know much at all about this until Lisa told me he was in her writing program. Now his artistic aspirations seem to be all over the news.
The second link is a New York Magazine bio, which can be summed up by an enigmatic wink he gave the author: In "the hours after our brief meeting, and then in the months that followed, I would come to believe that everything important about Franco and his career could be derived from that mystifying wink. The only problem was that I had no idea, really none at all, what he meant by it."
Like his art, it's not clear how serious he was about this wink. Is he putting on a show, being ironic, or deadly earnest in all of his endeavors?
One thing is certain. He is maniacally driven: Take, for instance, graduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars.
So fascinating. It makes me wish I had actually spoken to him at Lisa's graduation rather than just staring all night.
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