James Franco May Be the Most Purple Prose-y Film Critic Ever

Not content with being the kind of guy that would just write one review of a movie starring his contemporaries, James Franco returned to Vice to share some more thoughts with us, this time, on Leviathan, a film NPR called “a documentary — and yet not a documentary.” (Okay.) This time, Franco’s review revealed far more about what’s happening in his beautiful mind and life than about the worthiness of the film.

We learned that:

1. James Franco saw Leviathan last Tuesday at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills. He arrived an hour early. He really did go to the movie because there is a photo of the marquee included that is credited to James Franco.

2. James Franco is currently reading Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter (or, he was on Tuesday, which was a week and a half ago. He could have finished it by now.).

3. James Franco viewed the film with a companion who arrived right on time. His companion was a she.

4. James Franco was “sold” by the epigraph at the beginning of the movie quoting the Book of Job.

5. James Franco is “the biggest Moby Dick fan ever,.”

6. James Franco finds dead fish “more romantic than dead cows.”

“Is that because we’re more desensitized to seeing dead fish? Some restaurants serve them whole, and some ‘vegetarians’ (pescetarians?) are OK with eating fish. Dead fish are somehow not as threatening or disgusting as other dead things that we eat; little swimming bundles of food plucked from the ocean, the unseen vastness. But on witnessing how immense these devices are, these manmade leviathans that pull their prey from the sea by the shipload, one can only wonder: How many more are left? How can it be?”

How can it be indeed.

7. James Franco wants to know how the cinematographer got some of those shots:

“I mean, WTF? How? How did the film’s makers achieve this poetry? Because, if anything, this movie exemplifies the art of poetry without words, the art of poetry through images, the art taking real life and framing it and juxtaposing it in such a way that it becomes greater than fiction. It holds up a mirror to nature, but this mirror came from a fun house and in its distortions reveals a deeper truth.”

8. Unfortunately, James Franco’s female companion suffers from seasickness that was brought on by the shakey camera work in this documentary/not documentary and did not totally enjoy those shots.

9. Oh brother, I give up:

“This is life. Man versus nature. Man’s machines. Man’s mastery of the planet. Man’s destruction of the planet. Man’s ushering in of the apocalypse. But it is also beautiful … man, mastering the seas and the world, doing horrible things, brave things, impossible things. Because we are man. We need to survive. And conquer.”