As everyone filed into the theater for Frank, we were handed paper masks that looked like the giant head the titular character always wears. Before the screening started, a producer asked us all to put the masks on, and he took a picture of the audience full of Franks. Honestly? Not a bad preparation for the sort of film Frank was.
Frank isn’t quite one of those bat-s*** crazy movies where stuff, so out there you’d wonder who comes up with, it is incessantly thrown at the wall whether it sticks or not. It’s a little more controlled that that, but it’s still a weird, weird movie. Frank (the guy with the big head) actually isn’t the main character, nor the only source of weirdness (far from it). The leading role is actually held by Domhnall Gleeson (About Time), who plays a young English wannabe songwriter who is apparently decent at the keyboards, but can’t write a good song to save his life.
Gleeson is beginning to put together quite the career. He’s now co-starred with Rachel McAdams, Michael Fassbender, and Maggie Gyllenhaal in just the last two years. He’s playing a similarly awkward character in Frank so I’m really interested to see how Gleeson might be stretched by roles in Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s pacific prison camp movie, and sci-fi thriller Ex Machina, where he co-stars with Oscar Isaac. It doesn’t seem like it’s as likely to happen, but I’d hate to see him go the way of Jim Sturgess, who shone in Across the Universe, but has only occasionally cropped up in major roles since then (like 21 and Cloud Atlas). I re-watched Across the Universe recently, and I still think Sturgess is a good actor, but he does rely a lot on the choreographed musical numbers there.
More thoughts on Frank soon when we publish our full review.
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