Howl

This film is a wonderful act of imagination on its own.

One of the qualities I like about this film is that the writer-directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, are aware of the time when Beat scene was new.

The film of Howl, like its source material, is undeniably brave, committed and inventive.

What's cinematic experimentation without a few failures in the lab? Maybe that's why Howl is so appealing: The filmmakers don't get everything right but their passion for Ginsberg's genius and their excitement over trying to deconstruction a literary master work is contagious.

It's well-crafted, but I wish the film showed us an additional dimension or two of the central figure, who once said the great challenge in writing, any kind of writing, is "to write the same way you are."

Well intentioned on every level, the movie is successful only on some, and it falls flat when trying to visualize the innards of the poem itself.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's mostly whiffed docudrama makes the influential poem by Allen Ginsberg (Franco) seem dull, ordinary, pedestrian instead of pioneering.

howls movie shows the poets life in intriguing mysteries makes you wonder where are all the poets now overall the movie was a bit lackey in some parts but the imagination in the animation makes realize there is life out there 7/10

This is not a biopic about poet Alan Ginsberg, but a cinematic interpretation of the titular poem that caused a stir in the art and legal community. It unfolds in several scenarios: Ginsberg (James Franco) reads the poem to a coffee house crowd, the poem is illustrated through animation, he talks to Time magazine (an interview that was never published), there are highlights from the court case that tried the poem as obscenity and a few glimpses into his relationships. If you're not looking for a straight narrative and appreciate artistic cinema, you might like this.