smooth_op_85
So, I decided to watch Sal because I was looking for gay themed films and this one popped up. Big mistake, it dramatizes the last day of his life but the key word is drama, why not put something interesting for us to hold our attention? Speaking of attention, I was so bored by the 30 minute mark that I ended up surfing the web and I am sure I missed nothing important For a film about the last day of an American icon, they should've taken some dramatic license or something. It really made me feel like I was REALLY watching someone's last day, bogged mundane and all the minutiae. In other words, I can't finish this film anymore than I finished the 3 rd and 4th season of In The House...it was just too painful for me to continue watching, it's boredom level is Prometheus...and that movie was flippin' boring!
velitrae
As a fan of Sal Mineo and James Franco I was looking forward to this film. With a short running time I began to worry as the 30 minute mark was approaching and I was not getting into it.This movie has parts similar to "The Brown Bunny" that terrible movie consisting of filming a driver wandering aimlessly and then ending with a surprisingly graphic unrelated sex scene. Only "Sal" omitted the surprise since of course the movie tells you at the very beginning how he dies. If you like Terrence Malick movies (I don't) with a dose of "Investigative Reports" you may enjoy it. If you are a fan of Sal Mineo you won't. The kind-of epilogue regarding the arrest of the killer seemed like an afterthought.Franco said his intent was to capture the mundane typical activities of someone on the last day of their life without them knowing it is their last day. That doesn't make for an interesting movie. I suppose if the character was fictional and the death at the end was a shocking out-of-nowhere surprise it could be entertaining, like a "Twilight Zone" episode. But Sal Mineo was a real person and we know already that he was murdered in a pointless random act.The tediousness of the opening workout scene (as appealing as a shirtless Val Lauren is), the smoking scenes, and the severely close-up conversation scenes, just dragged on and on. Even the play rehearsal scene was tedious and didn't tell us anything. I wanted to know who were the important people in Sal's life? Who were his friends? Did he have a relationship? Maybe he really was a has-been actor desperately trying to convince friends to fill the seats of his off-off-off-Broadway play. But I was hoping for more. The copy-paste of real Sal's "Rebel" Oscar-nominated performance upped the contrast of what this movie could have been.
bbmcdonald-828-981701
I love James Franco & know how talented he is as an actor & now in art as well. I heard he had begun directing so when I saw his movie "SAL" up for viewing I dug right in; not knowing much about Sal Mineo I thought this could be fascinating. Boy was I wrong...and I mean BIG time wrong. This movie looks like something a pack of High-School film club wannabes attempted to make over their Summer break. No make that over their Christmas break.The movies cinematography, if you can call a single light and one very shaky hand-held camera being filmed by some drunk pulled off the street entertainment, was actually boring and just totally substandard. The incessant & tedious closeups of the actors face, nose or eyes while doing some of the most mundane activities like the minutes long scenes of him smoking or driving were simply awful. No art form, no intrigue, no nothing. Any hope for cleverness remained nonexistent.Music & sound were other factors that were flimsily handled as if they really didn't matter because all the closeups of the actors nose meant so much more. The overall flabbiness and lack of tension made this 90 minutes particularly painful. The inconsistent tenor of the sound throughout was choppy and uneven while sounding especially tinny, as if hastily grabbed from some stack of tunes noted from long ago. Were those scratches I heard? Now the acting was particularly amateurish, calling upon memories of plays attempted when we were all of 14, cocky & convinced of our immense talents. I search for descriptives to somehow get across just how terrible this film is and I come up frustrated and empty...kind of like the movie itself. This is no experimental art film folks, it is simply a rotten flick for which you will kick yourself for spending the time and money. MISS IT!
gianniz
The trouble with close-ups of two men eating lunch and discussing Sal Mineo's upcoming film is that we don't get much more than two men shoveling food in their mouths. I don't know why director Franco was so locked in to the close-up. Or why we get so much footage of Sal Mineo driving through LA in his Chevy Malibu. Without any dialog or view out the window, this is downright boring. The accompanying torch song (Pink Flamingos?) on the sound track was so loud I had to cover my ears. As for period authenticity, someone should have checked the script: in 1976 people did not use the expression, "You're good to go." —- not even the nurse as the health clinic.
AD
