The Disaster Artist (2017)

The Disaster Artist (2017)

IMDB Rating 8.1/10 (as on 23.12.2017)

R | 1h 44min | Biography, Comedy, Drama

When Greg Sestero, an aspiring film actor, meets the weird and mysterious Tommy Wiseau in an acting class, they form a unique friendship and travel to Hollywood to make their dreams come true.

Director: James Franco

Writers: Scott Neustadter (screenplay by), Michael H. Weber (screenplay by) | 2 more credits »

Stars: James Franco, Dave Franco, Ari Graynor

 IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆ 

Franco's 'worst film ever' homage has room for improvement

Peter Bradshaw

The hugely prolific actor and film-maker James Franco started his career on TV’s Freaks and Geeks and has also directed adaptations of Faulkner and Steinbeck. Now he combines his funny and serious sides in a ratio of about four to one in this entertaining, if weirdly incurious and incomplete true-life story. Tommy Wiseau was a bizarre man of indeterminate age and background who became a cult figure in Los Angeles in 2003 for The Room – a toe-curlingly awful film he financed, directed, wrote and starred in. He also paid for cinema hire, a lavish premiere and a prominent billboard. Connoisseurs of irony and awfulness were intrigued: terrible dialogue, car-crash emoting, leaden editing, ridiculous sets. The movie gradually took on a Rocky Horror life of its own, and came to Britain on a kind of so-bad-it’s-the-best-ever tour in 2009. Underemployed masochists can watch it on YouTube.

Franco himself plays Tommy, the bizarre, long-haired dude with the weird accent and a lot of money. Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, the wide-eyed, unemployed actor Tommy persuades to come to LA with him and be in the film; The Disaster Artist is adapted from Sestero’s 2013 memoir of acting in his anti-masterpiece. Seth Rogen plays the long-suffering script supervisor, and there are many big-name stars coyly cast in small roles, winners whose presence underlines the comedy of loserdom.

Franco is often very funny as Tommy, the crazy guy who we first see trying out for theatre productions in San Francisco, baffling directors with his wordless primal-scream improv spectaculars. Poor Greg is dazzled by Tommy’s pure life force and accepts his invitation to accompany him to LA to make it in the movies and live with him in a modest apartment that Tommy appears to own. Getting nowhere as an actor, Tommy resolves to make his own film. The rest is history – and tragicomedy.

So-bad-it’s-good is an accepted genre. I first came across it with Kenny Everett’s Bottom-30 hit parade of pop horror on Capital Radio in the 70s, and the accepted approach is that we forgive ourselves for our malice in laughing at these people by coming to celebrate them affectionately as modern-day Quixotes. Johnny Depp played hopeless B-movie auteur Ed Wood Jr as a never-say-die idealist who rescued Bela Lugosi from unemployment; Meryl Streep gave life to the deluded classical singer, Florence Foster Jenkins, who was rich enough to pay people to listen to her off-key warbling. In real life, Jerry Lewis bankrolled his own sentimental Nazi comedy The Day the Clown Cried, but no one had the chance to mock and then forgive that because it was withdrawn from view. In fiction of course there is the musical Springtime for Hitler in Mel Brooks’s comedy The Producers, the tax-cheat flop that becomes a hit.

But wait. Where was Tommy’s money coming from? And where, come to that, was he from? Those squeamish about spoilers or financial reality had better look away now, because the film never answers these questions. There are rumours, only hinted at here, that Tommy hails from Poland or Romania. But the funding for his film? Dodgy dealings? Money laundering? Or is he just that most banal of things, a rich kid who wanted to be a supercool movie star? These important facts are withheld from the audience, and it gave me the uncomfortable feeling that we are still being played, just a bit.

There are some funny scenes, and Franco’s crazy, strangulated, glottal-stopped voice is incredible; it reminded me of Benny Hill’s notoriously offensive Chinese or possibly Japanese guy shouting: “You sirry iriot.” If Tommy didn’t exist, Judd Apatow would have to invent him, and Apatow duly makes a cameo appearance as a Hollywood producer, having dinner at a restaurant and mortified when Tommy comes up and tries to interest him in his career. His agonies getting his film made are fascinating because they are the same problems faced by talented people: handling actors, equipment, time schedules. His own incompetence makes the nuts and bolts of indie film-making visible.

But there are limits to how interesting so-bad-it’s-good really is. I am more afraid of so-good-it’s-bad: middlebrow ghastly good taste, period drama from the classiest of names, often garlanded with Oscars. In the end, The Disaster Artist teaches us a great truth. Life is too short for anything except so-good-it’s-good

Read complete review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆ 

James Franco gives the worst film ever made a fun Hollywood gloss

 Tim Robey

Hollywood has always loved its behind-the-scenes lore, showing us the making of Citizen Kane in RKO 281; Psycho in Hitchcock; Mary Poppins in Saving Mr Banks; or Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire.

The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 vanity project, is a classic of a different kind. Nearly 15 years after it first opened, it sells out midnight screenings around the world. But it’s the film’s epic ineptitude, weirdness and extra-terrestrial bad acting these audiences come together to celebrate.

A wannabe-Sturm und Drang relationship drama between characters barely recognisable as human, The Room became a cult phenomenon for obvious reasons, because there’s no possible doubt in the matter: it’s obliviously terrible in ways just about anyone could see, save for its notorious creator, who poured $6 million of his own mysteriously-gotten savings into the project.

The story of its production is a field day for James Franco, who directs and stars in The Disaster Artist as the film’s profoundly sinister, deluded and malevolent-looking director-writer-producer-star, and nails his impersonation to the wall.

No one knows where Tommy Wiseau comes from – he says New Orleans, despite an accent thick with Transylvanian menace – or how old he is, when he arrives in Hollywood to try and get noticed, and ends up succeeding in all the wrong ways. Anyone who has come to revel in his strangled vowels and facial contortions will appreciate the full-bore mimicry on display here, which explodes at times into gleeful caricature and doesn’t stint on the greatest hits.

Franco’s brother Dave plays Greg Sestero, Wiseau’s new-found buddy, line producer and good-looking co-lead – the Mark character in The Room, who can’t have had any idea that a simple greeting (“oh hi Mark!”) would entangle him in one of the most persistent memes since the internet began. The pair met at acting classes in San Francisco in 1998, which gives the film a great opening: Sestero is stricken and sweating on stage, hopelessly self-conscious, and then sits back in awe of this bizarre ogre of a person, who writhes around screaming “Stellaaa!” as if Tennessee Williams’s stage directions required ripping the set down with your bared teeth.

The monstrousness of Wiseau’s ego didn’t have to be this film’s only subject, but it pulls focus so much – because of Franco’s inspired acting, and everyone else standing back – that any other point gets dwarfed. The film could, for instance, have used the farrago of The Room’s making as a cunning means to satirise the worst vanities of Hollywood at large. Instead it feels very much like the “quality” Hollywood system – complete with Judd Apatow’s cameo as a truth-telling producer – pointing at a rank outsider and noticing everything he did wrong.

Franco is too shrewd not to see this as a problem, but his solution is a slick, entertaining cover-up, lacking the almost spiritual affection for bad artistry which distinguished Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Copying the model of many of his previous vehicles with Seth Rogen – who has the supporting role of a baffled script supervisor – Franco plays up the odd-couple bromance between Wiseau and Sestero, which gives him the like-hate-love trajectory an audience can find reassuring, and equips the film with a ready-made happy ending. There’s incestuous novelty, at least, in beholding a bromance actually starring brothers, and Dave’s performance – a put-upon delight – keeps things smoothly afloat all the way.

Time-travelling back to The Room’s 2003 premiere would be quite a privilege, given the cult that’s now built up around it. Here, watching the room turn on The Room, as it were, has an air of unreality, because the script is compressing a decade’s worth of in-on-the-joke audience reactions into one night’s Eureka moment.

The real event, one assumes, can only have been a far more darkly uncomfortable mix of emotions, not least for the actress playing Lisa (Ari Graynor in this), whose horrendous treatment by Wiseau on set the film does lightly reconstruct.

It’s been said that every film is a documentary about its own making, and the best one possible about The Room remains The Room. There’s just so much perversity, self-regard and miscalculation poured dementedly into every frame. The Disaster Artist is a lively companion piece, though, and nothing if not a fun gloss. It’s The Room with a view from people with talent, sniggering with a veneer of generosity to save face.

 Read complete review at Telegraph

How to Fail at Moviemaking

 MANOHLA DARGIS

An ode to bad taste and dubious intentions, the ha-ha comedy “The Disaster Artist” involves one of the favorite topics of the movies: itself. It’s another story of crushed Hollywood dreams, one that unfolds through the eyes of Greg Sestero (Dave Franco), an aspiring actor who hitched himself to a phenomenon when he met Tommy Wiseau (James Franco, Dave’s brother). A would-be auteur, the real Mr. Wiseau became a minor cult figure after he released a 2003 specialty item, “The Room,” that some anointed the worst movie ever made. In time, its notoriety started to pay off; in 2013, Mr. Sestero wrote a tell-all book.

Based on that tell-all (which Mr. Sestero wrote with Tom Bissell), “The Disaster Artist” recounts both the making of a friendship and the absurdly inept movie it produced. Greg meets Tommy in acting class, where they’re both bombing out. Greg comes off as simply incompetent as he flatly fumbles through a scene from “Waiting for Godot,” one of the movie’s first jokey meta-moments. (“Let us do something, while we have the chance!,” Vladimir exclaims in “Godot,” much as Tommy soon urges Greg.) Tommy, by vivid contrast, captivates the agape class — particularly the inhibited Greg — by turning up the volume on Stanley Kowalski while thrashing about as if demonically possessed.

 James Franco, who also directed “The Disaster Artist,” swoops through the movie like a star, one who has no idea that he never achieved liftoff. His face framed by a dramatic curtain of inky black hair and noticeably if discreetly modified by prosthetics, Mr. Franco certainly looks the part and sounds it too, having perfectly captured Mr. Wiseau’s puzzling accent and arrhythmic intonation. Yet even at its most convincing, Mr. Franco’s performance retains an interior lightness, a playfulness, including when Tommy goes emotionally dark. Mr. Franco isn’t making fun of his character, at least not entirely; rather, he’s put distance into the mix, as if to point out that Tommy is very much a self-made man, a construction.

The making of “The Room” gives “The Disaster Artist” its point and much of its broad comedy. Filmmakers love making movies about movies, and Mr. Franco is no exception. (He mined similarly reflexive terrain in the very dissimilar “Interior. Leather Bar.,” an experimental feature that he directed with Travis Mathews about the making and remaking of “Cruising.”) Mr. Franco recreates the production of “The Room” — and the escalating behind-the-scenes nuttiness — with an assured, energetic touch, some fitting burlesque and an appealing cast that includes Jacki Weaver and Seth Rogen, who gives his deadpan a workout to play Tommy’s put-upon script supervisor.

Written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, “The Disaster Artist” is a straighter, more obviously commercial-minded project than some of the other movies that Mr. Franco has directed. It’s a divertingly funny movie, but its breeziness can also feel overstated, at times glib and a bit of a dodge. In “The Room,” Mr. Wiseau comes across as somewhat menacing, with an underlying intensity that can’t be entirely laughed away. (That’s part of what makes the unwatchable almost watchable.) Mr. Franco’s performance keeps you hooked, in large degree because of its entertaining visual spectacle. Tommy’s wardrobe, for one, suggests a commitment to the 1980s and a familiarity with the defunct catalog International Male, a source for padded briefs and Jack Sparrow frippery.

Yet if Mr. Wiseau is a bona fide eccentric, he proves to be not an especially interesting one in this incarnation. The filmmakers try to complicate Tommy, including with some self-referential layering that never meaningfully develops. At one point early on, Greg and Tommy visit the site where James Dean died, a pilgrimage that at once nods to Mr. Franco’s breakthrough role as Dean and telegraphs one of the more ludicrous scenes in “The Room.” Dean becomes Greg and Tommy’s inspiration, a success story that they invoke while struggling to make it. But there’s no sense that either remotely grasps Dean’s art, which might have made their failure and “The Disaster Artist” more resonant.

Mr. Wiseau has made the most of his 15 minutes, which have already been generously extended by “The Disaster Artist.” His website for “The Room” suggests that he’s a busy man. It lists where and how you can see the film, sometimes with him in attendance. In the synergistic spirit of Disney (but with lavish misspellings), the website also features a line of tie-in products like “Room”-themed watches, backpacks, jackets and men’s briefs emblazoned with Mr. Wiseau’s name on the waistband. It’s funny and somewhat depressing, which also pretty much sums up the “The Room,” one of those cultish attractions that is so terrible it makes you wonder if the laugh finally is on us.

 Read complete review at New york times

Movie Rating ★★★★☆

A sympathetic look at the worst film ever made

Geoffrey Macnab

When it comes to critics’  lists of the worst films ever made, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1956) used to nestle very near the top. Its place has now been well and truly usurped by Tommy Wiseau’s sublimely awful The Room (2003), the making of which has been dramatised in comic and poignant fashion in James Franco’s latest feature, The Disaster Artist.

Franco’s own career as director hasn’t been entirely blemish-free. (Witness his deeply dreary William Faulkner adaptations, for example.) That is presumably why the actor-writer-director-conceptual artist treats Tommy Wiseau with such sympathy here. He is not sneering at his subject, whom he also plays. Tommy is a kindred spirit, an artist who doesn’t give up, even when everybody else wishes that he would. He is a comic and preposterous figure – but, in his own warped way, he does have integrity.

Tommy is mysteriously wealthy, speaks in a Slavic mumble, and looks like an uglier version of Gary Oldman’s Dracula.  He is utterly unselfconscious. He’ll rehearse Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams plays at full volume in a diner as other customers are eating their food. He’ll writhe around on stage as if he having a fit. He is also ignorant and naive, a would-be method actor who has never heard of James Dean and doesn’t appear to realise that Stanislavski has been dead for 80 years.

On one level, this is a buddy movie. Tommy is befriended by his fellow drama student, the blandly good-looking Greg Sestero (Dave Franco). Tommy soon has Greg under his spell. They head off to Los Angeles together to try to break into the movies. Before they go, Greg’s mother (Megan Mullally) meets Tommy very briefly. Like everyone else, she is utterly bemused by him. She warns Greg that “you have to be talented” to make it. The whole point of this film is that you don’t.

Greg and Tommy do just as badly in Hollywood as we expect. Greg at least gets an agent (largely because of his looks) and finds a girlfriend, but Tommy is rejected everywhere. In one excruciating scene, he approaches a big name producer in a restaurant who berates him and tells him that even if he had “Brando’s talent”, his chances of success are a million to one.

The hostility is too much, even for someone as thick-skinned as Tommy. That is when Greg comes up with the brainwave. If no one is going to hire them to be in a movie, they can make one themselves. Tommy will finance it, write it, produce it, direct in it and star in it.  

One of the most tantalising questions here is where Tommy’s money comes from. This is not a secret that Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber’s screenplay divulges. Nor do we learn anything about his family background or even when his passion for acting began.

The comedy works by a process of attrition. The funniest scenes tend to be those when Tommy is appearing in front of camera. His performance is ludicrous. He can’t remember the lines he himself wrote and when he does finally deliver them correctly, they don’t make sense anyway. He’ll laugh uproariously when someone tells him sad or disturbing news.

He behaves equally strangely off set, insulting the leading actress, refusing to turn the air conditioning on and berating his crew, who snigger at him behind his back. There is a wonderful moment when the script editor (Seth Rogen) visits the bank to cash his first cheque from Tommy, convinced that it will bounce. When it goes through safely, he looks as if he has just witnessed the second coming.

At times, The Disaster Artist resembles Casey Affleck’s spoof documentary about Joaquin Phoenix, I’m Still Here (2010). You suspect that Tommy will suddenly reveal himself as a conceptual artist; we will learn that The Room was made as a prank in the first place and the joke is on us, the viewers, for ever having believed the story was real.

If Tommy is goosing us, he doesn’t let on. Besides, it takes a kind of genius to act and direct as badly as he is doing here. If you set out to make the worst film possible, you wouldn’t succeed. Tommy manages the feat because he does it instinctively. He has a flair for extreme banality.

At the end credits, we see footage from Tommy’s “real” version of The Room next to the same scenes as they were recreated by Franco for The Disaster Artist. The difference between them is minimal. Any irritation viewers might feel about the absurd accent Franco adopted when playing Tommy dissipates as we realise this is exactly what the real Tommy sounded like.

The Disaster Artist is bound to spark yet more interest in The Room. Wherever it screens, so will The Disaster Artist – and vice versa. The two films are now joined at the hip. It’s a nice irony that one of the worst movies in recent history has enabled James Franco to make one of the best films in his own chequered career.

 Read complete review at Independent

'The Disaster Artist' Is A Loving Tribute To An Inimitable Individual

Dani Di Placido

Watching The Disaster Artist is at times, a downright surreal experience. Few “fans” of The Room would have ever imagined that one day, James Franco would adapt the story behind the “Citizen Kane of bad movies,” and take the trouble to portray Tommy Wiseau himself.   

For The Room is the kind of film you watch ironically, with film-geek friends (preferably intoxicated), an unintentional comedy that will make you belly-laugh from the incredible ineptitude of every single aspect of production. But Franco has overseen a surprisingly faithful recreation, and provides a fascinating look at the friendship between Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero.  

The only problem is, you can’t laugh at someone who knows they are funny - you laugh with them.  A phenomenon like The Room, the singular vision of the world’s least self-aware human being, cannot be recreated intentionally. There’s an important difference between a sincerely terrible film, and an intentionally bad movie like Sharknado; there’s simply no substitute for genuine earnestness, no matter how accurately you try to replicate it. While most of the comedy scenes fell flat to me, the story behind the making of The Room is genuinely interesting, and the narrative offers a surprisingly optimistic message.

Where The Disaster Artist shines is the story behind the scenes, the unlikely duo behind the film, rather than the many, many references to the film itself. But Franco does a stellar job portraying the peculiar Wiseau; he doesn’t resort to caricaturing the man as one might expect, but humanizes the often-mocked figure.  

His first appearance, however, is rather unsettling. This is obviously famous Hollywood actor James Franco dressed up like Tommy Wiseau, like a cheap Halloween costume. But as the film continues, you somehow forget Franco is in there. He disappears into the role, capturing the unique eccentricity of Wiseau, the odd mannerisms and bizarre accent with remarkable accuracy. It really is an impressive performance, of someone who genuinely unhinged, someone who isn’t quite seeing reality, but nonetheless, understands when he’s being ridiculed.  

I actually found him quite sinister, and wondered if the film restrained from showing the darker side of Wiseau; his controlling, jealous side emerges only briefly. But the relationship between Wiseau and best friend Greg manages to shake off the incredibly creepy undertone, and becomes strangely inspiring toward the end.

Their odd partnership, impulsive move to L.A. and doomed pursuit of a career in Hollywood results in Tommy boldly taking his destiny into his own hands, and he certainly makes an impact, even if he doesn’t get the reaction he intended. He’s almost like a real-life version of Forrest Gump, “succeeding” despite the impossibly vast odds stacked against him.

Wiseau’s tale makes self-awareness seem less like a virtue and more of an obstacle, standing firmly in the way of success. A boatload of suspiciously-sourced money certainly helps him realize his dream. But at heart, this is a film about an eccentric who pushes against societal expectations, somebody who is never frightened to be himself, even when, perhaps, he should be.

I can’t quite decide if someone who hasn’t watched The Room is going to enjoy this film. If you haven’t seen it, many of the references are going to fly over your head, and Wiseau’s character might seem bizarre beyond belief. Then again, the infamous bad scenes from the movie would appear completely fresh, and most likely, fictional.

This is a strong effort to recreate one of the strangest stories to come out of the warped reality of Hollywood, but the film left me strangely unsatisfied, craving to see the real behind-the-scenes story instead of a self-congratulatory recreation. In fact, there exists such a film, a documentary, called Roomful of Spoons, which boasts genuine behind-the-scenes footage of The Room. Wiseau even tried to block the release of the documentary, so it must be good.

The Disaster Artist marks a significant step forward for James Franco. His performance is the best thing he’s done in years - it almost feels like his impersonation of Wiseau should be some sort of vicious antagonist in a gritty, Oscar-winning drama.

Interestingly, the film was praised by Tommy Wiseau himself, who stated that he approved 99.9 percent of it, but noted that “I think the lighting, in the beginning, a little off.” That kind of delusion simply can’t be replicated - it’s real.  

 Read complete review at Forbes

James Franco scores on both sides of the camera in this wildly funny Ed Wood-esque ode to great, bad moviemaking

 Michael Rechtshaffen

For the uninitiated, an oddly accented man named Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed, financed and starred in a film called The Room, which opened in two Los Angeles theaters back in June 2003, grossing all of about $1,200.

That normally would have been the end of the story, except for the fact that the $6 million production would go on to achieve a rabid cult following, earning dubious praise as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies” while Wiseau was dubbed a new millennium Ed Wood.

It has since gone on to inspire live stage readings, a video game and, now, thanks to director James Franco, The Disaster Artist, a rollicking “making of” satire that was shown late Sunday night as a "work in progress" at SXSW. Judging from the roaring reception given the film by a packed audience — a majority of whom were clearly well-versed in the source material — it works quite fine just the way it is.

Franco, who’s absolutely hysterical as the brooding, deluded Wiseau, leads a parade of familiar faces, including his brother Dave, Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, Josh Hutcherson, Melanie Griffith and Sharon Stone, delivering a winning, Ed Wood-esque blend of comedy and pathos that could very well earn its own cult status when Warner Bros. locks in an as-yet-undetermined release date.

Based on the behind-the-scenes memoir of the same name by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell, the film is seen through the eyes of Sestero (Dave Franco), an inhibited aspiring actor who strikes up an unusual relationship with the certifiably odd Wiseau in a San Francisco acting workshop led by Griffith.

With his long black hair, dark shades and fondness for wearing multiple belts, James Franco’s Wiseau could easily be taken for an aging Sunset Boulevard rocker with a vaguely Eastern European accent, even though he insists he comes from New Orleans.

Taking Sestero under his wing, he brings him to Los Angeles where he has an apartment he seldom uses, and while Sestero quickly finds an agent (Stone) and a girlfriend (Brie), the eccentric Wiseau isn’t as readily embraced. So he ultimately decides to call his own shots, writing and directing and starring in a self-financed would-be drama called The Room, instantly establishing himself as a triple threat — not in a good way.

James Franco, meanwhile, makes for a terrific double threat. While he’s clearly having a blast in the role of his career, he’s also a generous director who gives his all-star ensemble — which also includes the likes of Judd Apatow, Megan Mullally, Zac Efron, Zoey Deutch, Bryan Cranston and Jacki Weaver — ample opportunity to shine.

Equally satisfying is the adaptation by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (the team behind 500 Days of Summer and The Fault in Our Stars) that strikes a giddy, winning balance between hilarity and heart.

Read complete review at Hollywood reporter