Break your balls and nail your scrotums to Ginsberg’s dazzling, word-fountain that is HOWL. Pig-sick of mind-numbing, post-WW2 mediocrity, mad-as-hell Allan verbally raped the USA with forensic, gay finesse. It’s petrol-bomb pederasty. With fiery gay genitals smoking for rights, recognition and wrongdoing in every line, a joyful butt-fuck of heads-down, heterosexualism USA 1955.
What should we expect
So maybe, just maybe, you’d expect an adaptation to riot on the screen, huh, to loot, burn and diss every hang-up known to queens? Nope; kiss your deliriums – as in any finely tuned artful excess – goodbye. In the film version – lamer than a low-cal lobotomy – joint directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have made a turkey so vanilla you’re talking ice-cream, as in I screamed to watch this abortion!
Jumping Jesus in crotchless panties, where’s Bruce LaBruce when he’s needed? Arguably the only film director living who makes porn and laughs at bigotry. It’s an essential cocktail for hip, dick-swinging queens, Bruce’s ‘Hustler White’ is sick subversion par excellence of gay cinema.
“Not exactly Howl, then, a po-faced, woefully one-dimensional take on both the poem and the obscenity trial it spawned.”
Inexplicably avoiding any imaginative thrust, except sporadic inept animation pedestrianising Ginsberg’s imagery, Howl’s biography ‘101’, a ham-fisted attempt to legitimize gay poetry for prissy, middle Americans and their kids.
The final word on HOWL
HOWL is frequently dull, often excruciatingly embarrassing. Hell, cartoon hipsters even howl their despair, werewolf style. The movie treats context like it’s a depraved, unmentionable cans of worms. Er, boys, couldn’t your joint committee brains have created a few, helpful blizzards of Sergei Eisenstein montages, image storms showing the true hate, bigotry and homosexual repression of 1950s USA? And typically, matinee idol James Franco – obviously cast for favourable box office receipts – gets his actorial cake and eats it too, with kudos for a so-called, ‘difficult’ gay role, but played just straight enough to secure his panting, valley girl fan base.
Gee, thanks a bunch, James – some day, all gay men will be like you… Not!
Go read the poem …
