2011 has demonstrated that Franco’s career isn’t so much a thing that can be talked about, like a baseball game or the weather, but rather that something that is understood and known in seemingly binary fashion, like the concepts of gravity or mortality. So if you don’t understand Franco now, this timeline will read as a list of roles and activities rather than what it is: James Franco’s metamorphosis from actor to some sort of entity that gives me a nosebleed if I think about it too hard.

January 3

- It becomes known that Franco is eying two films to possibly direct. Of course both potential projects will be written by Franco. Not one to shy away from a challenge, both projects would be based on books. One written by Faulkner and one by Cormac McCarthy. NBD.

January 14

- Franco lets it be known that one Franco alone cannot stand, so he tells MTV that he’s preparing a film for both him and his brother Dave to star in. It would be an extension of the Funny or Die videos that they created earlier in the year. One can only assume that he would write this in between the sentence breaks of his Faulkner adaptation.

January 17

- Realizing that he hadn’t announced any ambitious hyphenate projects over the weekend, Franco atones by announcing that he will act-direct in The Night Stalker, a true crime story based on serial killer Richard Ramirez. The film is/was being co-produced by Chris Cornell because it just is, ok?

January 20

- James Franco is announced as a star of The Iceman, a story about another serial killer, this time a mob hitman. Franco would not star as the Iceman, but rather some other character that is probably somehow more important to the story of the Iceman.

January 24

- James Franco is in talks to star as pornographer Chuck Traynor in a Linda Lovelace biopic. No, it’s not the same role as the one I mentioned in the introduction. Sometimes producers and Franco himself get confused and he accepts more than one part in the same film.

January 25

- One day later, James decides that he really should make a decision on those two adaptations he was working on. He thinks that the Faulkner adaptation is most deserving of his talents. He will direct and star in the film because doing only one thing is for terrible people.

January 31

- Looking back and realizing how slow of a month January has been for him, Franco steps up his motherfuckin’ game by teaching a class so postmodern and meta that I just took five minutes to look up what “postmodern” and “meta” meant. The Columbia College Hollywood is now offering a class that allows/forces students to “create a cinematic image of James Franco.” Of course, creating an image of Franco without the aid of Franco is comparable to owning a rainbow or clapping with one hand, so he will be teaching via Skype and…the best part…footage from the class will be footage in the students final project. What did you do for your film school project? A film about a kid and his dog? Fuck you. Franco’s is better.

February 4

- James Franco take a few minutes to himself, consumes his own arm, waits for the devoured arm to regenerate, then steps into a meeting to discuss playing The Wizard of Oz in Oz, The Great and Powerful. How does his desire to play Oz reflect on Franco himself? You wouldn’t understand the answer to that question.

February 7

- Remember that dumb TV show Three’s Company? Franco’s desire on Monday, February 7 is to immortalize that show through both film and stage. How did he reach this conclusion? He was in Park City, Utah for a multimedia installation entitled Three’s Company: The Drama, which is totally awesome. He dressed up like the blonde one. Click the link.

February 10

- James Franco is on the shortlist to star in Savages, a much-hyped literary adaptation by Oliver Stone. He tells the director that his availability is most of the afternoon on June 8th, then again between brunches on June 11. He does not get the part.

February 11

- Feeling lazy after his Savages meeting the previous day, gets into talks to play Kaneda, the protagonist in the heralded Japanese anime story Akira. He is offered the lead, but turns the role down with little fanfare. (Please note that the link to this story has its own lengthy timeline as well, going only so far as that present day. What can I say? Franco brings out the chronologer in me.)

February 12

- The past two days of blockbuster meetings make James feel too singularly focused on film. He opens an art exhibit to decompress. The exhibit opened in Berlin because of course it did, and it was entitled “The Dangerous Four Book Boys” because of course it was.

February 23

- Franco, undertaking a project that’s weird by even Franco standards, takes footage taken during the filming of Gus Van Sant‘s My Own Private Idaho focusing on River Phoenix and assembled it in a menagerie he chose to call My Own Private River with a score by Michael Stipe. Lest you think he only assembled one film for Van Sant’s art exhibition, I suggest you stop being an ass and turn yourself on to Franco’s second film, entitled Endless Idaho. It runs for twelve hours. For realsies.

February 25

- Ensuring that highbrow melds with lowbrow to keep the universe in harmony, all the while doing it in the oddest fashion possible, plays a character named The Franco on General Hospital. Hold on. That’s only 5% of the meta you’re about to receive. The Franco is gearing up to attend the Academy Awards, which James Franco the non-soap opera character is actually, really hosting in a few days.

February 27

- James Franco co-hosts the Academy Awards. It doesn’t go well, and he doesn’t seem to care.

February 28

- THE DAY AFTER he hosts the Academy Awards, James Franco announced that he is collaborating with director/nutjob Harmony Korine, not on a film, mind you, but a staged fight between two actual LA street gangs. If you’re asking yourself why these two men would do this, then you really don’t get art at all.

March 6

- James Franco drops out of While We’re Young, demonstrating that James Franco is capable of dropping out of films that he WASN’T EVEN A PART OF! Director Noah Baumbach is now saddled with the designation of being the 2011 director that made that Franco-less movies.

April 8

- James Franco’s film Your Highness premieres. He just acted in it, so it’s really not worth talking about that much.

April 9th to May 9th

- James Franco sleeps.

May 10th

- With sleep still in his eye following a month-long slumber, James Franco casts Val Lauren in the lead of the Sal Mineo biopic he’s directing, simply titled Sal. It’s worth nothing that Lauren looks like an extremely close relative of David Blaine.

August 5

- James Franco has a starring turn in the critically acclaimed and successful Rise of the Planet of the Apes. It will be the most normal thing Franco does all year.

August 12

- James Franco consults his New Year’s resolutions checklist and finds that, with the year half-over, he has completed not only most of his resolutions, but all the resolutions of the half-dozen art school dropouts huddled around him.

September 21

- The continuum of time, ceases to flex for James Franco, his work moving at a clip now only best described as “very busy.” In related news, acting becomes the world’s most lucrative profession now that James Franco isn’t hoarding all the roles. He picks up a role in the Apatow-riffic film Jay and Seth Vs. the Apocalypse.

September 21 to Today, December 20

- James Franco sheds his body to exist in a realm that he cautiously describes as “similar to time, but sort of furrier.” Everyone nods politely and waits for his next film.

December 31*

- In a performance art piece entitled simply “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” James Franco emerges from the dropped New Year’s Eve ball (just short of its midnight destination), covered in a viscous material that keeps him warm, despite the fact that he is totally nude. He will then manually drag the ball up to the top of the spire, resetting both calendars and time itself to 2011 again, so he can pick up a few of the roles he didn’t have time for. This will repeat for eternity.

*Probably

Not all film franchises are this successful. Of course, there are classic prequels that pull it off, there are others that just miss the mark entirely and wear their commercial ambitions on their sleeves. Here are examples from both camps.

It’s not hard to determine why the Academy, critics, and audiences would respond to an actor immersing themselves in characters that are so disparate from their selves. And by that rationale, a performance via motion-capture in a CGI film could ostensibly be the pinnacle of acting as we know it. The actor is stripped of his or her identity, their affectations, language, and movement pulled from their body and placed on an entirely new creation, be it animal, human, or other. There exists no better way to lose yourself in a role than through motion-capture technology, but trying to compare a mo-cap performance to traditional ones begs a host of unpleasant and undesirable philosophical questions, such as “What is acting?”

Gross. Let’s not address those.

Rather, I’d take a more practical and quantifiable stance to determine whether a motion-capture actor like Andy Serkis, who has played Golum, King Kong, Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Captain Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s upcoming The Adventures of Tintin, can put his performances side-by-side against a turn by Daniel Day-Lewis or Tom Hanks.

Discrepancies abound because, to varying degrees, Serkis’ performances are run through a filter, so we are not seeing the man at work. We are seeing the man’s work run through computer programs using technology that no one really need understand to enjoy his performance. But we certainly need to understand it if we are to allow it to compete against other actors’ for the title of Best Acting Performance of the Year..

It’s no stretch to say that Serkis is doing his job better than anyone else can do it. But so few have tried that we can’t really make heads or tails of what that means, at least not yet. There hasn’t been a deep enough well of performances from which we can draw to ascertain where Serkis stands, aside from the fact that he’s the best. And when that well does get deep enough, the argument could be made that these types of performances should be compared to each other, rather than against traditional live-action performances.

Assuming we get to that point, we will have a slate of other contentions to deal with, namely, the role of technology in comparing and judging one performance against another. A great actor can transcend a low-budget to offer a performance worthy of an Oscar nod, as Tom Wilkinson did for In the Bedroom. But finding a way to transcend crappy motion capture technology is unthinkable right now. Sure, this isn’t an issue in this era, considering most films that do mo-cap technology can afford to do it (reasonably) well, but in the future this would need to be taken into account, and if it’s to be examined in the future, it should be examined now.

Today, mo-cap technology is primitive; future critics will say the performances today aren’t adequately captured, and are just a vessel to display the latest and greatest in CGI and mo-cap technology. Further down the line, I’m certain that we’ll see technology that renders a character like Golum expressionless and quaint. People will look back on an Oscar nod to Serkis’ Caesar the chimp as a novelty offered by voters who had no sense of where these types of performances were and where they were going. While I don’t share the Academy’s high opinion of itself, I agree that a knee-jerk reaction to a phenomenon (regardless of its durability) does no one any good.

In this vein, supporters of the mo-cap-for-Oscars movement praise Serkis for his methods and accuracy. I have no doubt that Andy Serkis did more research into the movements and psychology of primates in his preparation for Rise of the Planet of the Apes than many actors did previously for their Oscar-worthy performances, but the Oscars are myopically focused on what ends up on the screen, rather than who did the most homework. Further, to task the Academy with rewarding this type of performance is to ask them to learn how a monkey moves, then critique Serkis’ methods. It’s a fine line, as audiences respond to foreign, unfamiliar roles all the time, but praising Daniel Day-Lewis for his role in My Left Foot is a far cry from praising him for playing a speechless animal. Perhaps the Academy would like to think they’re that avant-garde, but they’re not.

The easiest criticism of Fox’s effort to get Andy Serkis an Oscar for Apes is that people are conflating Serkis’ groundbreaking work (granted) with a “great performance” simply because we’ve never seen anything like what he’s done. When put up against Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Song of the South, sure, Serkis’ performance looks downright luminous. But what benchmarks do we have?

He’s been the only guy making a name for himself here, as performances in director Robert Zemeckis’ mo-cap fare such as The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol, and Beowulf have been widely panned as “creepy” despite offering up turns by lauded actors such as Tom Hanks and Jim Carrey. Serkis stands alone, which is all the more reason he doesn’t need the validation of an Academy Award. Awards exist to praise a standout among a field of people doing comparable things. No other actor is doing what Serkis is doing. As such, there is no field from which to draw an award-winner.

To be fair, there are so many extenuating circumstances in his performance, like the novelty and technology, that comparing his turn, mired in scuba suits, ping-pong balls, and CGI, against a purer, more transparent performance by an actor in a non-CGI film seems like a fool’s errand. He’s a guy on a green screen wrapped in neoprene who plays animated characters. Let’s not compare that to Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. Not only is it not fair to either party, but it’s also remiss.

I have no doubt that, as I mentioned earlier, there will be an abundance of CGI performances that we can compare against one another once the technology becomes more accessible and standardized. And if we get the urge, let’s give them their own Academy Award, much as we did with Best Animated Feature. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, let’s be very thankful that a great performer like Serkis can breathe life into these roles better than anyone else can without feeling the need to size him up against people that are doing something completely different.

1. Pam Magnus – In the Line of Fire

Bank teller Pam Magnus got super excited when she recognized the Minnesota home town of her customer James Carney. Unfortunately there was no James Carney- he was really assassin Mitch Leary, and Pam had inadvertently threatened to blow his cover. Leary then visits Pam at her apartment and slaughters her and her equally unlucky roommate. True Minnesotans have better manners. For shame, Mr. Leary!

2. John Conners’ Foster Parents – Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Poor Todd and Janelle. They put up with bratty John Conner’s crap for years, and their reward (besides a modest government subsidy check) was a Terminator hook to the face. Even the dog bought it in this massacre. And that’s after a group of innocent bikers get beaten for their clothes by the other Terminator- the one that’s supposed to be a good guy!

3. The Nun – The Da Vinci Code

Was there any more innocent victim to Silas’ psychotic rampage than the old nun that let him into Saint-Sulpice? Perhaps the viewers who had to look at Tom Hank’s ridiculous haircut for two hours.

In this Apes, “Bright Eyes” is the nickname for Number 9, the test subject for ALZ-112. The Alzheimer’s cure has the side effect of adding green specks to her iris. Number 9 rampages, scientist Will Rodman’s (James Franco) experiment is shut down, but 9 had a baby so Will takes the baby home to his dad (John Lithgow) who has Alzheimer’s himself. Cesar (Andy Serkis) inherited Number 9’s super intelligence, so once he gets pissed, it’s rising time.

Monkey + AK-47 = 'Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes' Viral

Baby Cesar is adorable but we’re still very obviously looking at motion capture. We’ve only traded one technology for another. Instead of endearing top of the line makeup, we have soulless polished CGI. I know you can’t train a stunt ape to rampage on cue, but let’s not pretend this is like looking at a real simian. You can tell by the nature of how it moves that it’s not primal. It’s great performance work, but the goal was “real ape,” not “ape-like animation.”

When the apes finally rise, it is a really awesome climax. I will probably own the Blu-ray just to watch that sequence and there are plenty of cool scenes they have not given away in the trailers. I’m glad a movie exists where apes swing down suburban streets and city streets. Getting there is pretty laughable though.

There’s no worse character than the angry neighbor who is so over the top one-dimensional, I can’t believe they put him in several scenes. Jacobs (David Oyelowo) so blatantly cares only about money, it’s incomprehensible that he’d ever rise to CEO of a research corporation. Tom Felton will have a healthy career as an evil blonde bully as his Dodge Landon character shows. Caroline is the defining role for Freida Pinto, as in get used to thankless hot love interests, because it’s not all Slumdog Millionaire and Miral.

The story makes one bold move. Will actually tries ALZ-112 out on his dad! I can’t believe a Hollywood movie makes that morally ambiguous choice. For a while, Rise is one of those movies where the science is actually more interesting than the monster. In The Fly, I really wanted to see teleportation technology work. In Darkman, I really wanted him to make fake skin last in sunlight. Of course, it’s really just an excuse to make the apes smarter. The way Cesar shares ALZ with his buddies is just silly.

Cesar is the hero of this and the blatant evil of the humans makes that clear, intentionally or not. That’s a different take on the material. In the Heston Apes, the point was a metaphor for how we treat animals, but the apes were equally culpable for making the same mistakes. Rise is a pure revenge tale on the evil captors, which may be where society is today. We’ve gone too far so screw it, let the apes have it. Still, cool ape rampage!

Cast: James Franco, Andy Serkis, Freida Pinto

Synopsis: An origin story set in present day San Francisco, where man’s own experiments with genetic engineering lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.

Release Date: August 5, 2011

“His journey covers this incredible path of being a very innocent young child,” Serkis said. “We talked about gifted children playing concertos at the age of four or being brilliant at math but are unaware of that kind of intelligence. It’s just natural to them. Cesar believes himself to be of that species.”

James Franco plays the scientist whose Alzheimer’s research creates Cesar’s enhanced intelligence. “Will (Franco) is a father figure,” Serkis continued. “He reaches a moment of self-awareness. He’s led a very sheltered existence. He confronts himself and realizes he’s a freak, a freak of nature. At that point it coincides with being taken away from his family and thrown to a prison, a hardcore prison, a sanctuary with other apes, his own species who he does not recognize.”

Got that so far? Sounds like act two, when Cesar realizes he’s not like the nice human scientists. We know where this is going. “He manages to bring these apes together and find a common ground and lead them to revolution. It was a challenge of getting inside the mind of a creature. Because of the look of the character – Caesar looks like a chimpanzee – we had to discover when he becomes more humanlike and when he becomes more primeval.”

Rise of the Planet of the Apes opens August 5.

10 photos‘Immortals’ Actress Freida Pinto

It goes without saying that the CG work is breathtaking. It must have cost a fortune. So much so that they couldn’t afford to comb Andy Serkis’s hair. But that’s beside the point, the movie looks like it will be heartbreaking. But also awesome. Did you see that chimp parkour off that jerk neighbor’s face?! Also, he spends his free time building a model of the Statue Of Liberty. Also cool!

Bravo, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. I’m definitely seeing this when it opens August 5th, even if every plot point has probably already been shown in the trailers. (Yahoo)

Anyway, this is an amusing little viral for Twentieth Century Fox’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes. My only regret is that they didn’t take the opportunity to dress the chimp in people clothes. See what a difference a stylish pair of overalls makes?(via Bloody Disgusting)

‘Rise Of The Apes’ Looks Like Ape-Made Braveheart

In this third trailer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, we see monkey Caesar go from a baby to a family pet to an abused monkey to the general of a monkey army in this clip. They grow up so fast.

While this is an extended version of this international trailer we posted earlier, it shows a bit mor fighting and a bit more of Draco Malfoy being a total cock to him. (Side note: Tom Felton is my favorite for this generation’s “Billy Zabka Memorial ‘Typecast As A Dick’ Award.”)

We are privy in this trailer to more combat scenes, showing how exactly how the monkeys overtake the humans. In case it wasn’t obvious, they do it with monkey-strength and screeching.

If you watch all three trailers, you probably have a very good sense of the film, so feel free to just kick over your $14 ($17 if you were planning to see it in 3D) to Screen Junkies. We accept PayPal.

4 photos'Immortals' Is Looking Pretty, Pretty '300'-y

Disney, Warner Bros., Dreamworks, The Weinstein Co., and maybe Marvel won’t be making the trip this year, which means you won’t see any precious footage from The Dark Knight Rises or The Man Of Steel or The Avengers which seems like BULLshit. But don’t worry. You’ll be able to see scenes from The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part I and Shark Night 3D, so that should keep people from stabbing one another with pens, right?

Oh okay. Well, I guess you’ll also have a chance to see promotions for The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn, Cowboys & Aliens, The Amazing Spider-man, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Hobbit, and The Immortals. And if all those panels are full, you can check out The Raven or “Terra Nova.” So don’t worry, there will be plenty of stuff to act nerdy toward. (NY Times)

Super 8:

Cowboys and Aliens:

Rise of the Planet of the Apes:

The Change-Up:

Captain America:

So thank you, 20th Century Fox. The down-side here is that the video doesn’t actually give any tips on avoiding humanity’s overthrow at the hands and hand-like feet of the apes. In fact, it makes it sound like it’s inevitable. Is it too late for me to throw myself in with the apes? I know a winning team when I see one.

The trailer has risen. Now the Rise of the Planet of the Apes concept art is rising too. I was gonna make a rise/dick joke, but it’d be kinda weird if any of these drawings gave you an erection. Fox has released a pack of wild concept arts for their upcoming film, directed by Rupert Wyatt, and starring James Franco as the visionary scientist who’s one of the folks responsible for turning earth over to a bunch of damn, also dirty apes. Thanks a lot, Franco.

You won’t see Franco’s character here, but you will see plenty o’ apes. Here they are hangin’ out, taking over cities, being super violent. Y’know – ape stuff. Oh, they’ll also be busting into movie theaters on August 5th, 2011. Just don’t tell them to stop talking on their cell phones, or they will beat you to death with them and steal your bananas. I’m assuming you bring bananas to the movies. (/Film)

The trailer for Rupert Wyatt‘s Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes shows a pre-Planet Of The Apes just as the simians figure out how to get out of their cages and force us to live in underground caves. And this is all thanks to James Franco and his science experiments. He couldn’t just leave it well enough alone. Not content with a successful Hollywood/soap opera/writing/art/teaching career, Franco had to delve into neuroscience. And now we’ll all have to live under ape rule. Congratulations, nerd.

The video above is Fox‘s official teaser trailer to get you excited for the actual trailer for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which gets released tonight at midnight on Apple‘s site. Hopefully, the trailer will get you excited for the actual movie, and not just for another damn dirty preview. Sometimes, with all the trailers, on-set pics and preview clips for big budget action movies that leak out, I forget there’s a real-life movie going to be released. Maybe in the future, movies will be nothing but a series of trailers and ridiculous hype. So… every movie will be like Grindhouse? I keed, I keed.

Directed by Rupert Wyatt, Rise of the Planet of the Apes monkeys around in theaters on August 5. James Franco is set to star and be very much awake on camera.

In seriousness, even though the video is ridiculously short, it’s still pretty impressive. I’ve watched it like 68 times and the ape seems weirdly human each time. Can’t wait until this shot shows up in the movie, so I can yell out “there it is!” in the theater and everyone will love me. (ComingSoon)

So Fox took polls and crunched the numbers in their secret underground “entertainmentories” (entertainment laboratories). They found out that the title Rise of the Apes, for the upcoming James Franco-starring prequel to the Planet of the Apes series, needed more words to make more $$$. After testing a few titles on lab monkeys and humans alike, they decided on:

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Needs more “of the”s. How about The Story of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Or The Movie of the Story of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Hopefully, they tested those out too, cause I think there’s even more cashola to be made.

The film shows us how the genetic experimentation of apes led to their eventual domination of our puny planet, and will be directed by Rupert Wyatt. (ComicBookMovie)