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6 Reasons To Feel Ambivalent About James Franco

This past month has provided a perfect sample of the man, the myth, the enigma, the bizarre riddle that is James Franco. We’ve been given Oz the Great and Powerful, which for many demonstrated the limits of Franco’s charm. The character of Oscar, aka Oz, is meant to be some sort of redeemable sleazebag, but Franco makes him pretty much all sleazebag, and this makes the witches’ shared infatuation with him more than slightly implausible. I can handle a fantasy land with munchkins and magic but the notion that Franco as Oz is remotely likeable was too much.

[h2]3) Sometimes he does interesting things with his life[/h2]

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I dig that James Franco is super into education, to an extent. I have complicated feelings towards academia in general and the qualities that are valued in the environment of liberal arts colleges that rarely include intelligent and critical thought, but I won’t hold that against him too much. He is someone who wants to be learning all the time, and that’s admirable. He has a reputation for being a voracious reader, including reading heavy works while on set for movies he’s working on, so that seems cool. It’s also rare for someone who achieved stardom at a relatively young age like Franco did to make education a priority later in life to make up for missed opportunities earlier in their lives, so honestly, good on him for all that.

He also seems really interested in all kinds of forms of artistic expression, and likes to experiment with things. He seems willing to try anything, such as appearing as a recurring character on a popular TV soap opera. This was weird but kind of cool. Then there’s the other art work he’s produced, including short stories and films and documentaries and essays and multimedia stuff. I haven’t seen any of this material for myself, but the project he collaborated on with Gus Van Sant involving My Own Private Idaho and River Phoenix sounds particularly interesting, potentially at least. Van Sant is probably a good mentor for someone like Franco.

Then he does a bunch of charity work that we rarely hear about, so he seems alright.

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