"And that’s all pretty ironic considering Franco was cultivating a kind of gender bender semi-gay gestalt to his audience."

Observes Roger Friedman in "The Astonishing Collapse of James Franco’s Career Cemented Now by Former Pal Seth Rogen in UK Interview" (Showbiz 411). 

There are allegations that Franco has engaged in sexual misbehavior. He's been "sued by ex students, and railed against in public by young actresses on a variety of unsavory issues."

Friedman dopily muses that Franco may have "cultivat[ed] a kind of gender bender semi-gay gestalt" in order "to seem harmless to women while secretly on the prowl." 

I haven't followed Franco enough to have any idea what sort of "gender bender semi-gay gestalt" he gave off, but why bother to do all that to trick women into thinking you're "harmless" when you are "secretly on the prowl"? Just seem like an ordinary man, look like James Franco, and what more would you need to do?

How I wasted the last half hour.

I clicked on "See James Franco hilariously fail at acting in 'The Disaster Artist' trailer" and watched the trailer...



... and I did not think that looked as though it would be good movie.

And I do think it's possible to make a good movie about a bad movie. I loved "Living in Oblivion." And "Ed Wood" was an excellent movie about making bad movies, including what everyone used to say was the worst movie ever made, "Plan 9 From Outer Space."

Though I thought the movie "The Disaster Artist" looked bad, I thought the memoir it was based on could be good. I considered buying "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made." And I was interested in the way I was interested in it, because "The Room," is a movie I absolutely refused to see, because I hate movies in which a woman and child (or woman or child) is trapped and we have to spend a lot of time staring at the faces of female/child actors looking very anxious and afraid.

But it turns out there are 2 movies called "The Room," and "The Disaster Artist" is about the other one.

So... that was a squandering of my magic power — paying attention.

A poll.

The comments on this post about these James Franco selfies made me want to do a poll:

Judge the Franco photos.
	Embarrassing because he doesn't look as good as he thinks.
	Hilarious because he's satirizing the selfies of other people.
	Just some dumb, routine shots of a reasonably nice looking man.
	Cool, intimate access to a guy I like who doesn't take himself too seriously.
pollcode.com free polls

"Sexiest Man Alive" thinks he's sexy.

And the award for Worst Judgment in a Selfie by an Academy Award Nominated Actor goes to... James Franco.

Could this be the end of selfies?

ADDED:  And the Award for Worst Judgment in Tweeting About Somebody Else's Selfie by a Sports Superstar goes to... Shaquille O’Neal.

AND: The Award for Best Dog Selfies goes to... Meade.



ALSO: I made this poll.

"When Franco says the word 'prestidigitation' behind his stoner’s grin, it’s as if he’s uttering it for the first time in English class."

Apparently the new 3D Disney "Oz the Great and Powerful" is terrible and James Franco is "woefully miscast" as the Wizard of Oz.

Is anyone ever miscast and not woefully miscast? Woefully is to miscast as scantily is to clad. Sorry, but the reviewer (WaPo's Ann Hornaday) invited English class thoughts.

Starting with a woefully miscast James Franco in the title role, continuing through a lame story line that’s merely a warmed-over version of the 1939 movie adaptation, and extending to visual effects that never approach the dazzlement and wonder of its revolutionary forbearer, “Oz the Great and Powerful” is a big, over-processed misfire that with a little more care and ingenuity might have lived up to its name.

Okay. Tough luck for fans of 3D children's material for kids and adults. It's all the same to me. But back to English class. Do you know the difference between a "forbearer" and a "forbear" (or "forebear")?  Hornaday doesn't. A "forbearer" is someone who refrains from doing something. If anyone is not a forbearer, it's a revolutionary.

An ancestor/forefather/progenitor is called a "forbear" or "forebear." You may think "forbear" is only a verb, but "bear," the suffix, comes from "beer," which means "one who is or exists." Does that seem weird? Break it in half. It's be-er. So you see why you don't need the "-er" on "forbear"? It's there already, in the "-ar." Don't let the drink "beer" or the animal "bear" confuse you here. Your forefathers are your forbears, and if they were forbearers you would not be a beer.

The OED quotes a 1786 Robert Burns poem "The Death And Dying Words Of Poor Mailie, The Author's Only Pet Yowe" which isn't about a bear but a sheep (yowe = ewe):

An' may they never learn the gaets,
Of ither vile, wanrestfu' pets—
To slink thro' slaps, an' reave an' steal
At stacks o' pease, or stocks o' kail!
So may they, like their great forbears,
For mony a year come thro the shears:
So wives will gie them bits o' bread,
An' bairns greet for them when they're dead.

Time Warner's cable guys "assigned to the highest-end 'Signature Home' jobs will be getting a more 'fashion-forward look' soon."

And Verizon's recent ads "highlighted its technicians’ dress shirts"  and "characterize the install as a white glove experience."

That's from a NYT article — promoted top and center on its front webpage — called "Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed." The photo at the link shows a clean-shaven, crewcut cable guy — with white paper booties over his shoes to protect the gleaming hardwood floor — demonstrating how to use the TV to a woman standing by her side. There's a second photo of another cable guy — also in booties. He's the bearded type. This better class of men will come to your house and help you set up the company's elaborate "suite of products."

"My genius husband had the router in the basement," joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters...

Now — it's been obvious to me for quite a while — the New York Times is written for women. But at what point does it actually become... ridiculous...

[Selene Tovar, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three] needed the Internet service at her three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood to be fast enough to power the family’s six televisions, five Xboxes, several PlayStations and multiple iPads and laptops. Even a new scale — a Hanukkah present from her husband — required a fast connection so it could send daily weigh-ins to an iPhone app.

Note the clueless husband: thinks a scale is a nice gift. Coming to Ms. Tovar's aid was Quirino Madia who "wore a white button-down shirt and gray slacks."

But watch out, affluent ladies of New York, "many cable technicians still wear the standard work clothes and tool belts."

***

And I'm sure it's got nothing to do with anything the New York Times would ever have intended to allude to, but reading that article made me want to Google "cable guy pornography," just to see how prevalent that genre was. I don't know. That's just the direction my mind went. Not that I clicked on any of the links. I didn't. And my Google search only retrieved about 4 million hits, so maybe it's not such a big porn sub-genre. I don't know if the new "fashion-forward look" will heat up the sub-genre or not. Actually, I think not. But I'm no porn connoisseur. I'm more of a Google-search connoisseur. For example, I moved on to the search: "fashion-forward cable guy porn" — 192,000 results — and found "James Franco Porn Documentary: Disappointing Sex Tape Inspires Film," an article in HuffPo (the San Francisco edition). Speaking of disappointing! James Franco does not appear as a fashion-forward cable guy in any porn film. Apparently, one time Franco made a home video with his girlfriend and realized: "Those people in pornos, they are great performers. They're not just doing it, they're selling it to an audience." The guy's a genius!

***

Rereading this post, I suddenly see what the real porn is for the ladies who read the New York Times: "three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood."