What is a Beat without a movie?

Lest any deceased poet feel left out, there's not one but two Beat movies making the rounds at the London Film Festival. "Howl" still echoes across the blogosphere, and Charles Thomson has decided the Huffington Post needed yet another rehash of the film. He offers few new insights about Franco, Ginsberg, or the poem, and this about sums up his summation:

Ginsberg comes across variously as a hopeless romantic, a genius social commentator and an insufferable beard-stroker. As he chain smokes his way through an interview in his apartment he offers profound insights into the American literary scene in the mid-20th century, but he also spends significant screen time doing little more than contemplating his navel.

Thomson then goes on to discuss Ginsberg 's real-life supporting role in Yony Leyser's "William S Burroughs: A Man Within." The film is a patchwork of home movies, interviews, TV clips and brief animations, but still does little to illuminate the man inside the man who was Burroughs. Or something like that:

Featuring contributions from John Waters, Gus Van Sant and Iggy Pop, the movie comes across more as a love letter to the deceased icon than as a truly probing documentary. What emerges is a sad picture of a lonely man, constantly battling his inner demons and never quite feeling as though he belonged.

Like his friend Hunter S Thompson, William S Burroughs has become a victim of his own larger than life personality, which constantly overshadows his work - and this movie sadly does not serve as an exception to that rule. If you walk into the cinema not knowing a whole lot about Burroughs' work, you'll walk out in much the same way. The film pays scant attention to the author's groundbreaking literature, focusing instead on his love of firearms, his eccentric obsession with weaponry and his decades of substance abuse.