The Disaster Artist

Here we go again. Another film that is a critical darling, won a lot of awards, and is a stinking piece of shit. I mean that sincerely. There is nothing to like in this little turd of a movie. Not a single element. Not a single frame. It sucks, from beginning to end.

It’s about a man named Tommy Wiseau and the making of what many people call the worst film ever made: The Room. Wiseau is hard to describe. Stupid? I don’t know. Actually retarded? It’s a possibility. He is played by James Franco (a highly overrated actor) as a moron with a speech defect. It is pure freak show, and though Wiseau really is some sort of freak, I found it distasteful to watch it.

He has money from somewhere. I don’t think anyone really knows from where, nor how much, but it’s a lot. It is plenty to indulge some of his most idiotic notions, such as buying 35MM movie cameras instead of renting them, like everyone else does. Huge waste of money. He also insists on shooting it on both 35MM and digital HD, another way to shovel money down the toilet. The crew he hires, to their credit, try to point out to him that this isn’t how movies are made, but he won’t listen, and they decide that his money is as good as anyone else’s, so they do it his way. He ends up spending around $6,000,000, and the film earns $1,800 in a two-week run. That’s not a typo, I didn’t drop the 000 at the end. $1,800 total.

But he had the last laugh. Turns out there is an audience out there just as stupid as he is. The Room has become a cult movie, with that “so bad it’s good” crowd. I am not of that crowd. I will admit to watching a handful of terrible creature features from the ‘50s, but that’s all. To me, a bad picture doesn’t become good or even watchable just because you can laugh at the ineptitude of it. Nor does it become a good subject for a movie about making the movie.

I learned a lot of this by reading the summary at Wiki, because we bailed out at the halfway point. I mean, I hadn’t laughed once. There’s a lot more I could say about this celluloid abortion, but I’ve already wasted too much of my life on it.