James Franco rarely bothers me anymore, but last night I saw a few paragraphs he put up at VICE about a 25-minute screen test he did for Blood Meridian some four years ago, and it made me angry. Blood Meridian is a beautiful and brutal book. I don't know whether it can make the jump to film. Someone with a creative vision on a level with McCarthy's own could, maybe, use it as source material to create something similarly disturbing and awe-inspiring for the screen, but that person is not James Franco. He's gone and done it anyway, though. Because he's James Franco, and he's made of money, and he can go and do anything he wants and then put whatever that is in front of an audience and they will watch it, or eat it, or read it, or do something else with it. Because he's James Franco.
In light of this I decided to post a thing I wrote about him a while back. This piece is at least a year and a few months old, and I wrote it in anger about one of the first installments of Franco's column at VICE. I've lightly edited it for clarity and what-have-you. Have at it:
