WatercressBaby

For as much as I enjoy watching and subsequently pontificating on movies, I’m surprisingly not well versed in the classics—classics like The Room. It is a failing on my part, I won’t lie. It’s puzzling how I’ve chosen, quite on a lark it should be noted, to watch the movie based on the making of said classic. Through pure cultural osmosis, I know enough to realize there’s really nothing to know about Tommy Wiseau. The man is intentionally an enigma, surviving and thriving off rumors, gossip, and a game of Hollywood telephone.

Which is why it is frustrating to see James Franco’s The Disaster Artist fail to analyze Tommy in any meaningful way beyond the cult following. All that is repeated is what is already known about him: he speaks in broken English, spends ludicrous amounts of money, and was a prick to his crew. Nothing unique is shown beyond James Franco’s spot-on imitation. In fact, while I don’t claim to have read it, the book this movie is based on has a lot more unique things to say about Tommy. It dares to call out his narcissism, his blatant sexism, and, more mundanely, where he’s from. All of these things this self-indulgent movie can’t and will not do.

I had originally planned on being nicer to this movie in my ratings—I did have a fun time watching it. I laughed at parts, I yelled “YOU’RE TEARING ME APART LISA” along with it, I had fun. But writing down my thoughts here, the more I come to kind of loathe this film. It commits a major cinematic faux pas in my eyes: it fails to add anything back into the ecosystem of movies. Much like Tommy Wiseau himself, this movie is a black hole of self-centered narcissism that only cares about getting off on and celebrating its bloated ego.

Ratings

The Audience (How entertaining was it?):

I had fun with this, I won’t lie. I giggled and played along with its indulgence of Tommy Franco, cringed when the movie wanted me to.

The Director (How technically sound was it?):

There’s nothing here that really…speaks in any interesting way. Of course, everything in a film is there for a reason, no matter how mundane or even coincidental. Even then, however, I still find it all so boring. The only thing saving it is the cast, I won’t lie.

The Artist (How thematically compelling was it?):

Fuck this movie. I truly think it fails on a writing level and many others. It is the film equivalent of stuffing the same image into an AI image generator over and over and over and over again.

The Critic (How could it have been better?):

Do literally anything but suck Tommy Wiseau’s dick?

Aggregate Score: