That was in 127 Hours, part of the new genre of endurance porn that sanitises torture porn and turns it into something weirdly uplifting. It's based on the true story from 2003 of a solitary climber whose arm became trapped under a rock in an isolated part of Utah and, with the alternative being death, after 127 hours of solitude he performed an auto-amputation.
The film is mesmerising and ghastly but, despite soaring helicopter shots of the glorious landscapes and the visceral horror of its subject matter, it feels strangely light and frothy -- an ephemeral film that's like a fairground ride: gripping while it's in progress but instantly disposable when it's over, fading rapidly from the memory. It's hard-core entertainment rather than Art (although James Franco's performance is utterly convincing).
Not out until next spring, there's a desperate shortage of images for it.
So it's time to move back a couple of days to another James Franco film: Howl.
On paper this looks like a car crash: Franco plays Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, a screaming homosexual at a time when such things were less easy than they are today.
The publisher of Ginsberg's eponymous 1955 poem was prosecuted for obscenity and, in a landmark case, was acquitted. This is the story of (or behind) the poem and the case.
The script is a deft mixture of Ginsberg interviews, transcripts from the court case, and an animated reading of the poem itself. You see -- sounds ghastly, doesn't it?
That it works -- that it more than works: is, in fact, an exquisite, engaging, moving film -- is in no small measure due to Franco's seemingly limitless skills.
What I find odd about him is that he's not exactly pretty, either, although he's indisputably good-looking and casually sexy.
But he has an ability to inhabit other people's skins that's surprisingly rare in movie acting -- like Julianne Moore's huge talent.
So it was fascinating to have an opportunity to see Franco attempt -- and pull off -- two such vastly different roles in the space of two days.
Also today was one of my favourite treats from the Festival: Gregg Araki's Kaboom.
An insanely messy, campy movie with all Araki's trademark over-the-topness, this one is carried forward by the pastel-coloured exuberance of the film-maker and the dedication of his cast.
Araki's excuses for getting his cast naked seem to get increasingly desperate (we even had a trip to a nudist beach in this one), while his extraordinary coyness about showing male genitalia is embarrassing in its contrariness (though we had a delightful opening sequence of Thomas Dekker wandering naked in a dream. Not my cup of tea, but very nice all the same).
The biggest joy for me was Dekker's straight-ish roommate/fantasy lust object, Thor (I know, I know -- but so does Araki, and that's the point).
Delightfully played as a dumb surfer-boy/jock, by Chris Zylka, this actor's unstinting devotion to his character is truly noteworthy.
Like Dekker, I could spend hours contemplating Zylka's curves and planes, and admiring his audacity in what has to be one of cinema's best scenes ever. I give you the "roommate-caught-trying-to-suck-his-own-dick" scene:
Kaboom gets increasingly frantic as its running time passes, the plot ever more outlandish, and it all ends in a swirling mess of trite expositions and resolutions. It doesn't matter: this is triumphant campy film-making of the highest order.
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