“Anyone have any questions for me? But just in case…No, I can’t go smoke some weed with you. Or maybe you guys don’t do that at this school.”

James Franco came to Hopkins yesterday to show his film, The Broken Tower, which is about the life of the poet Hart Crane, about whom the Hopkins Writing Seminars professor John T. Irwin has just published a book. Did that sentence make grammatical sense?

Anyways, the movie was one of the top 10 worst films I have ever seen. Sorry, James Franco. My sister and I (and many others in the audience) fell asleep several times. It was disjointed, confusing, uninteresting, and most of the film was of Franco’s back and the back of his head. He had written the film in college and recently directed and starred in it. He told us he had asked Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Paul Dano to play the lead, but they were both busy, so he “had” to do it. I can see why they were busy.

Anyways, Franco is still a really nice guy. He was really polite when leaving, telling us, “I’d normally stay and sign things and take photos with you guys, but they tell me I have a train to catch.” I might not have believed him, but the way he hovered around the stage, tried to shake hands and take pictures with as many people as possible led me to believe he was sincere.

My sister and I sat in the third row, and I got a quick hand slap/touch as he was leaving.

I’m not a big “OMG IT’S A CELEB SQUEEE” person, and I’m not even a huge James Franco fan, but this was my first ever celeb encounter. Hollywood celebrities, to me, are like these 2D images on screens—computer or television or cinema screens. They don’t exist off the screens, because even when they appear “in real life” on the news they’re still on some kind of screen. So seeing a Hollywood celebrity in the flesh was really interesting—I was reminded that these people are just flesh and blood like me. That they’re not imaginary people made of pixels; they’re just some regular joes who got lucky and became famous.

Franco, for example, slouches. And he seemed sleep-deprived yesterday. I took a bazillion pics of him and his eyes are closed in almost every one. In a lot of them, he is rubbing them or touching them. His hair also looked a little oily, like there was too much gel in it. Yes, he’s gorgeous, but his face is less handsome than it is very distinctive (in Vietnamese, we would say he has “duyen”). He’s tall. He has a great smile. He talks exactly the way you’d imagine him to. He’s a regular guy. The perfect word, I think, would be cool.

Is it weird I got the most excited when he told us he had had a phone conversation with Cormac McCarthy? I’m such a nerd.

Anyways, I just wanted to add that when I got home and told my dad I had touched James Franco, he turned to me and asked me, “Where did you touch him?!” I love my dad.

There are some celebrity trademarks that I can’t get enough of.  Rhianna’s bold fashion sense, Katy Perry’s hair, but Lauren Conrad eyeliner is one of them!  Check out our top 9 celebrity trademarks that we are dying to copy!