My daily happenings, sometimes recorded.

Lets start off with the basics.
Ok, on base level he can appear to be a good actor. He delivers lines with the right inflections and pace to compliment whoever he’s working off. And wording that with “working off” was not a mistake.
He works off people, now that means he relies on what others bring to the table to fuel his performance, and now I’ll tell you why.
You watch a film he’s in, then watch another, then another, then another. You’ll notice something, nearly every character he plays (I say nearly because I haven’t seen everything he’s in) is James Franco wearing the mask of the character. Not the character with tiny traits of James Franco mixed in. I say that because you can never 100% become a character in acting, it’s dangerous to even get close to that, so you have to work out what part of ‘you’ is your grounding point, and that part of you is unchangeable. James Franco’s grounding point changes all the freaking time, at least from what I’ve seen.
Take Gary Oldman for example. He’s what I refer to as a chameleon. He is a completely different man in every single role he plays but there is still an element of ‘him’ in each role, and it can always be found if you know what you’re looking for because it is always the same thing.

Basically Franco appears to know nothing of technique. Every role I see him in, it feels to me like a rehearsal take.