Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Redwarmin This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Gordon-11 This film tells the life of an American homosexual poet named Hart, who died of suicide by jumping off a sailing army ship."The Broken Tower" is shot in black and white. It is a tell tale sign that it is a very artsy movie that has no commercial elements at all. I tried very hard to enjoy it, trying to appreciate the slowness of the pace, and trying to enjoy the beauty of the literature reading. However, there is really very little plot in the film, and the story is told in a very scattered manner. For every 30 seconds of plot, there are five minutes of self indulgent filler scenes. I got quite tired of watching James Franco walking around or sitting around. We also see a lot of Hart's sexual liaisons, ranging from walking up the stairs with another man, to apparently non-simulated oral sex.After watching the whole film, I did not gain an insight into Hart's life, but rather it felt more like a project for James Franco to expose the exploration his sexuality.

Boba_Fett1138 Even though this movie certainly is not entirely my cup of tea, I'm still able to see and recognize it as a good and original movie, that doesn't always makes things easy for itself.You could definitely say that this movie is being a bit too artistic for my taste. It's shot entirely in black & white and doesn't necessarily follow a main plot line. It just follows its main character, without making it apparent what direction the movie will be heading at. It also makes it often hard to see what the point of certain sequences in this movie are. It makes the movie at times feel like a bit of a pointless and overlong one.The movie definitely starts to become a bit of an endurance test after a while. I was perfectly able to take and follow the movie for its first 90 minutes or so but after that point it starts to become much harder to stay interested, also since the movie too often isn't providing you with anything interesting or provoking enough.It's definitely not an usual biopic, that goes deep into things. You still feel that you really get to know its main subject though, through its slow and subtle storytelling. He doesn't even say all that much but he lets his poetry and actions speak for him. In that regard I really have to compliment the movie and this also was the foremost reason why I still really liked it. You might not fully get to know the real Hart Crane through this movie but it might still get you interested in him and his work.James Franco is excellent as the movie its main character, even though he looks absolutely nothing like the real Hart Crane. It was not an easy role to play but Franco is luckily not afraid to make things hard on himself at times, which results in an interesting character and performance, that is solid enough to carry the entire movie. Since it really foremost is Franco who has most of the movie its screen time and the movie isn't focusing ever on any other characters. But that's not all Franco did. He also directed, wrote, produced and edited it. In other words, this was a real passion project for James Franco and this luckily does show in the movie. It's a skillfully made movie, with eye for detail, that handles its main subject subtly and with real respect.I liked it good enough and respect it but I of course do realize that this movie is not for just everyone. 7/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

sandover How to catch a tone, and what one betrays. James Franco is some kind of cultural phenomenon of our times; he has been called "Hollywood's workaholic", he himself has admitted an aversion to sleep since "there is so much to do", and for some time now has a flair for what may be his signature mode, that is performing artistic stunts, from cinema to video to installation and fiction.Hart Crane is a different matter. Who is not - even slightly - taken aback at first encounter by his curious mix of idioms, mixing Elizabethan enunciation, coining even words, with exotic images (rum, calypso, pirates, mermen) that are witnesses to a grinding difficulty almost agonizing in his voice, a voice of such distinctive music, that one wonders this concoction of the archaic, the deliberately anachronistic and the hesitant, traumatic modern - what does it mean? Should we bother, as in a peripheral phenomenon? Or, and here is my stake, it is America's unique candidate for articulating how can one write poetry - and of what kind - in a traumatic modernity? From John Ashbery to James Merrill and all other major or minor gay poets of the '60's, everybody seemed at least baffled when asked about his relation to Hart Crane. This is crucial.In my mind I tend to associate his act with Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" case of having two, not quite satisfying, versions of the novel, as if he too was coping with something. Alcoholism is a common ground, but I think is more symptomatic, and just not enough. To cut to the chase, what troubled Fitzgerald was how to integrate the ideal(ized) couple's disintegration as failing to conform in the eyes of the social order, the question "How the Big Other perceives me?" That social order, its stability, cracked in the dawn of 20th century modernity, and I think this is what troubled Hart Crane, too, as his pirate, clandestine imagery suggests.Is all this relevant? It is. For I think James Franco shies away from confronting the specificity of the case in regard to his stance; for what we get is big chops of poetry reading and then a bizarrely inarticulate movie. There is a gap between these two modes that Fitzerald and Crane confronted - that is the gap in the social link that is to be filled/articulated with artistic production or love - and is not convincing, for one simple reason if you will: tell me what is the difference between this depiction, and the one Franco performed in "Howl"; both seem to fit a "maudit", more misfit than doom-eager artist of the '60s, let alone articulate, and there is where Franco's social sense betrays him.On another level, let's look into this: the film, tellingly, evolved from Franco's thesis on Hart Crane. For all its borrowed cinematic vocabulary and merit, it has an "objectified" look, as referring to some external discourse, as if its "artistry" was compromised. Compromised by what? This is one case of what the french analyst Jacques Lacan called "the Discourse of the University", that is turning an object into quantifiable knowledge, that means taking Hart Crane or some gay, beat, marginal poet and integrate him (what an ideal object) in the academic machinery, domesticating exactly what resists it, its excess.To put it plainly, there is no sense of bravura from the poems to inform the cinematic form, even what was instantly a surprise - the chromatic turn inside Notre Dame - misfires for it makes "the visionary company of love" a question of dubious religious upbringing or disposition (that recurring choir) and finally desexualizes the carnal, endangered alert of Hart Crane's poetry. No true sense of poetic threat or encroached lamentation or release as in "The Broken Tower".In the end, it is a curio of cultural rather than artistic contours: James Franco has a disturbed, rebelled social sense without a cause that fitted him perfectly from the role that made him rise, James Dean, onwards for some time - I would even say he showed true allegiance with it. On the other hand, he is a post-Warhol era phenomenon: it seems his ambition is to perform literally Warhol's poker-faced phrase "I want to be a machine". But look what happens: instead of holding on to this rebellion, that sort of impatience that is such a virtue for the French people, he has collapsed the two into a machine without a cause.

Paul Asplund & Karl Dunn Just attended the premier of The Broken Tower at the LA Film Festival and, once again, James Franco makes brave choices and produces a beautiful film. The camera work, editing, score, and the actors' performances, sustain a sometimes difficult story with elegance, honesty, and passion.Set against the backdrop of 1920's New York, Paris, Cuba, and Mexico, The Broken Tower succeeds in merging two disparate art forms, film and poetry, to propel the narrative. There's also a lot of silence in this film where we are allowed to see Crane's world as through his eyes. Elegaic sequences are punctuated with cuts to black and the spare and subtle soundtrack perfectly matches the storytelling.I admit to knowing nothing about Hart Crane before tonight's screening but I left wanting to read his poems and letters myself.Thank you, Mr. Franco, wlm