The Worst Film Ever

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Blistering performances.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I LOVE James Dean even though I was born 15 years after his death. I think he was a wonderful actor, an amazing person and someone who would have gone on to do great things. I've read his biographies, I've watched the movies he was in and I've found out from interviews what he was seemingly like in "real life". But I was so disappointed in this movie and I feel he deserved to have a better movie made about him. This movie didn't tell us anything we didn't already know and they didn't go into details ... the kind of details that we'd have wanted to know about. People in his life who were a pivotal part of his life were just omitted from this movie and it was just like this ... they took a wonderful man's life and shortened it in an hour and a half. James Dean's life was worth more than an hour and a half. And the guy who played him didn't look enough like James Dean. It made watching him very difficult because it was hard to believe. At one point, he looked like someone off of revenge of the nerds. The guy was also too tall to play James Dean. There was one scene where everyone was standing together in a bar, and he was the same height as everyone else. James Dean was short ... like 5'8 or 5'9. All those guys could not have been 5'8 or 5'9. I was just really disappointed and I wish that they could make a movie that was more 'real' to his life.

Franco aced Dean's walk, voice, mannerisms! Now every time I watch Franco, it's like I'm watchin' Dean! (Is that a good thing?!) Anyway, I learned a lot about Dean's life in this bio. He truly was a tortured soul! You had to pity him & you'll understand why when you view this film. I bought it & have watched it a lot.I read that after this film, Franco won a Golden Globe Award (which he said he gave to his mom) & the offers just kept pouring in. After viewing this film, DeNiro hand-picked him to play his son in City By The Sea, which Franco promptly jumped at! (I don't blame him!) May Franco's career continue to shine as he continues honing his craft, ridding himself of his shyness & giving us ever more characters to view & identify with!

I would like to begin by truly saying that James Dean was an actor that met his end before we, as cinema watchers, were fully about to appreciate his talent as well as full body of work. The short three films that he devoted himself to wasn't enough for my taste buds, and I think the majority of film aficionados would heartily agree – yet I would have to say that those seeking the knowledge of James Dean, the truth behind his life and his devotion to youthfulness – should not (repeat NOT) watch this horrid film. I realize that this was a made-for-TV film that couldn't take the risks that most major budget films could, but I didn't realize that "consecutive sentences and structured storytelling" needed a big budget to complete. What made this film strange was that it began so strongly with a detailed scene about how devoted Dean was to his trade, but after that, it just went further downhill by avoiding details and the classic cop-out "educated guess" technique. From outlandish storytelling to depreciating acting from the beginning to the end, James Dean attempted to bring Dean to life, but sadly, just drove Dean into another devastatingly horrid car crash.While I did mention above my disappointment with the acting, it wasn't so much the style of acting, just the lack of excitement. Dean was played by Spiderman's egotistical villain (hell-bent on saving his father's name), James Franco. While I feel he captured the audacity of Dean, as well as those smaller details, but he wasn't Dean. To me, there were scenes that felt as if Franco was adding onto Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man impression/character. He wasn't original, he wasn't charismatic enough, and the Franco's win of a Golden Globe was completely uncalled for. He played the part, but didn't build the character, and after all of it I still had the looming thought that Rydell left me with at the very end … the "educated guess" which completely debunked the film – but that is another story. Sam Gould playing Martin Landau was completely forgettable and I disliked the fact that Landau was such a small part to the story, in fact, by the end, he was forgotten about entirely. One could say that nearly all the secondary characters were forgettable in the sense that if you blinked, you would literally miss them. Director Rydell was so excited about having a biopic about Dean in his repertoire of films that he didn't seem to care that Dean was built upon the people surrounding him. Landau, Kazan, and even Angeli didn't seem to match (or even remember) up to what this film needed to be. What I wanted to see, and what this film needed to be a pivotal biopic about James Dean, were a foundation based around strong supporting characters adding to the destabilized life that Dean lead. All I witnessed from the actors involved were a slight movement of their hands, an occasional bit of emotion, and a small segway into the life of Dean – nothing that one could build a mountain upon. I believe this is why the film's ending was so futile. We weren't shocked or surprised by the ending, because by that point in the film we just didn't care – apathy had set in, and we were dumbstruck to resist it.Finally, I would like to say that when you are making a "made-for-TV" movie, there is no need to give it the feel of a "made-for-TV" movie. In fact, most of the films that go beyond that point do very well (i.e. see some of Stephen King's miniseries), but for James Dean it felt rushed, fast, and completely underdeveloped. I have already mentioned about the acting, but the story, which surrounds these actors, was just as weak. Nothing worked, nothing was exciting, nothing was jaw-dropping at all, basically, we had a couple of unknown actors doing what little they could to afford their current rent checks. How embarrassing is that … especially for the Dean estate? We needed force, power, drama, and humanity all rolled into one, but instead we just found a shallow actor doing a weak impersonation (if one could even call it that). Not that I could really give away the ending, but there seemed to be about two hours missing from the climax between Dean and his father and the iconic crash. The crash wasn't even worth the film it was printed on. Slow motion drama with a random unknown in the passenger side (not unknown, but again, lacking the development) – weren't these techniques mastered and forgotten about in the late 80s? After watching this film I felt cheated, because I love Dean's body of work and what he represented in Hollywood, but this film captured nothing of the sort.Overall, I thought this was one of the worst biopics that I have seen in my time of watching films. It was shallow, disrespectful, and pointless to the end because you walk away knowing less about Dean than when you started. Nothing congealed in this film because of both the shabby acting as well as the under-developed (which is a word I used too many times and is not shrew enough) story which completely debunks itself as the final credits roll by using the lines, "Most of this film was based on fact... some was an educated guess." Who ends a film like this? Imagine turning in a term paper with the phrase at the bottom, "I couldn't get all the facts correct, so I guessed on most of it" – would the Professor accept your paper? I think not my friend, which is why I cannot accept this film as a "real" biography of James Dean. This one should be stricken from the record books. I am sorry Mr. Dean – this film is not what should remain as your legacy.Grade: * out of *****

My only negative comment about the film is that I thought the various Hollywood personnel of the time (early 1950s) could have been somewhat more realistically impersonated (for a better job see, for example, "RKO 281"). I suppose in real life Dean did display an aura of shyness and inattentiveness, and performed cartwheels and pratfalls in the presence of others. POSSIBLE SPOILER, although I'm sure that just about everyone reading this knows how Dean died. The automobile accident at the end is not exploitative but is depicted in vague and extreme slow motion. Had I not known better I would have assumed early on in the film that Dean would die from lung cancer, as he is shown in almost every scene with a cigarette dangling from his lips.