Review of The Disaster Artist (2017) by Alan W — 13 Dec 2017

It takes something truly unique to channel and fully utilize the wacky artistic temperaments and creative talents of multi-hyphenate James Franco and he found his muse in Tommy Wiseau, the similarly producer-writer-director-actor star of the notoriously bad film, The Room.

Based on Wiseau's co-star and best friend, Greg Sestero's book, this is a meta and postmodern film about the madness surrounding the making of another film and while you don't have to see the original to enjoy this, I am glad that I did.

(And if you haven't, you will certainly get a taste of it at the end, with side by side comparisons of a few choice scenes from the original and Franco's detailed and hilarious remakes). James Franco's Wiseau is an enigma wrapped around an unplaceable East European accent inside a Fabio Russian doll.

I've never rated Franco much before, but he perfectly captures Wiseau's determined yet self-deluding essence here on-screen and Dave Franco's befuddled and exasperated Sestero is his perfect straight man to bounce off on.

Almost every speaking role, big or small, are played by familiar faces: from Melanie Griffiths and Sharon Stone to Seth Rogan and Zac Efron, giving the subject-matter a glitzy all-star treatment that the original film could only dream of.

Proving art and life can collide, let alone imitate each other, in strange and wonderful ways, a thoroughly entertaining and effortlessly funny film blossomed from a laboured and truly awful one without being mean or sycophantic, and I loved every deliriously bizarre moments here in what is probably my comedy of the year.