Sal

9 of 10 stars. James Franco Directs this film raw, and I mean that in a very good way. It brings to mind brilliant Directors like John Cassavetes. I know Martin Scorsese has a great appreciation for raw Directors like John Cassavetes, and Scorsese always seems to have a degree of this type of Directing in his films, but his film 'Mean Streets' is the one that comes to mind to me. The Cassavetes film (though they are all raw, with different nuances) would be 'The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie'.

It is refreshing to see this type of Directing which is incredibly hard to do, and let's face it, other than Scorsese and aspects of Stanley Kubrick, Directors typically do not have commercial success with this type of Directing; these films are made for Film lovers that like watching beautifully filmed and performed movies. So I appreciate that.

During certain scenes, Franco will use unique close up angles, have the camera stay on the person listening instead of talking, go from a close up to filming from around the corner, go from a focused close-up to a blur of the ceiling. A bunch of little marbles that keep the movie unbalanced but having a clear Direction both at the same time; all those little marbles add up to a huge pile of marbles that bring Directors like Cassavetes to the forefront of my mind, and the artistic feelings he would bring to his films.

Franco stars alongside Val Lauren. Franco is really only in one scene and we mainly hear his voice as the Director of a play that Sal Mineo is rehearsing for. Lauren plays Sal Mineo great, and really hits the mark highly, without overreaching.

The film mainly focuses around the last day of Mineo's life.

This film should not get mixed reviews, and I understand why, it's 'artistic' in its approach, but it's a great film, a great piece of Cinema.

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.

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.

Someone once told me when I was in college, "When the writers don't know what to say, you will surely end up with a bad movie". They must have seen this picture in their radar. This movie goes minutes without speaking lines and there is no motivation for the silence. This isn't film making, this is wasting film and time. Turned it off half way thru simply because this is absolute trash. The person playing Sal bears no resemblance to Mineo, but that really doesn't matter: fortunately, his skills as an actor are up to par with the requirements of the script.

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!