Palo Alto

Earlier this summer, James Franco came up just slightly short in his campaign to raise enough money so that underprivileged kids could receive the benefit of James Franco’s stories of privileged kids. But fortunately, he didn’t have to rely on the generosity of ordinary strangers to get a movie out of his Palo Alto short-story collection. He just needed Gia Coppola, whose entry into the family business, like her aunt Sofia, begins with making a movie about bored, beautiful, rich people, and therefore finds a kindred spirit in Franco’s loosely autobiographical stories about growing up bored, beautiful, and rich. Fulfilling all the necessary dimensions of Franco, Franco himself plays a soccer coach who takes far too much interest in a teenager (a plotline ripe for psychological interpretation), while all around him various actual teenagers do teenage things, like getting drunk, driving recklessly, and mouthing off to the police. One of them is even played by Jack Kilmer, son of Val, giving this story of alienated, affluent adolescents another layer of verisimilitude. [via Vulture]