[7.6/10] If I had my druthers, I’d go into every movie cold as cold can be. No trailers. No synopsis. Nothing but a reliable recommendation that what I was about to see will be good. If I can manage it, I prefer to be surprised by a film, to let its wonders and splendors unfold without any preconceived notions or expectations.
I could hardly have gone in less cold for The Disaster Artist.
I’ve watched The Room at least once a year since I first saw it in 2010. I’ve shared it with friends and (reluctantly) family. I’ve gone to midnight screenings where plastic spoons are thrown and audience members shout ripostes and inside jokes back at the screen. I’ve heard Greg Sestero himself provide live, running commentary on his most infamous on-screen appearance. I’ve seen predictably awkward interviews with Tommy Wiseau and struggled through his disjointed jumble of a sitcom. I’ve read the book, by Sestero and Tom Bissel, that The Disaster Artist is based on. And I’ve quoted and ruminated and formed deep, committed opinions about Wiseau’s unlikely, unintentional masterpiece and everything that’s spun out from it.
Which is to say that mine is an inherently unfair opinion when it comes to The Disaster Artist. Because rather than taking the film as I find it, I cannot help but compare it to what I know of the story it’s interpreting, the ways that it reflects and condenses both the book and film it’s based on and around, and my own expectations for how that story should be told. It’s the sort of thing you can try to compartmentalize and set aside, but it seeps in, if for no other reason than that it affects how the movie feels to me, however much I might like to take it in as though I were wholly unwashed.
Apart from my personal hang-ups, The Disaster Artist is a fun story of a young man and his oddball friend finding the world’s most bizarre-but-earnest way to ever “make it” in Hollywood. It is a thoroughly funny flick, one made by individuals who clearly have plenty of affection for the source of their fun, and seem to have as much sincere joy in recreating it as they do any derisive schadenfreude from pointing out how inept a film The Room is. There’s a lot of love in The Disaster Artist -- for The Room, for Wiseau and Sestero, and for the idealism and determination it takes to make a movie, any movie, that can earn such a reaction from its audience.
But there’s not a lot of complexity or darkness. That’s fine in a vacuum. Lord knows there’s plenty of grim and gritty takes on a myriad of lighter properties out there. But it strips one of the most interesting features of the book -- its revelation that Tommy Wiseau was not just the deluded but harmless object of fun that fans of The Room had (somewhat patronizingly) constructed him as, but could instead be scary, or repugnant, or genuinely horrible to the people in his orbit.
The Disaster Artist grazes this idea, showing Tommy to be unreasonable and think-skinned at times, but it mainly wants you to root for him, to succeed in this strange quest and, to be frustrated with him at times, but ultimately to hope that things work out with his improbable hopes. There’s nothing wrong with that. Like most characters translated from real life to the silver screen, the Tommy Wiseau of The Disaster Artist lacks many of the rougher edges of his flesh and blood counterpart, more of a naive and fearless dreamer, albeit an inept one, than the difficult figure he cuts in real life.
Despite the quirks and kinks that are sanded down for the cinematic translation, James Franco is Tommy Wiseau in the film. The Disaster Artist may leave out uncomfortable details of Wiseau’s life and personality, but Franco captures every bit of his mannerisms and demeanor without resorting to caricature and makes it all look effortless. He disappears into the role, one that could easily have been a series of tics and exaggerated impressions, which instead makes this larger-than-life, almost unbelievable individual feel like a real human being, regardless of his eccentricities. It’s the biggest achievement in The Disaster Artist, and one that speaks to Franco’s commitment to the character and the real man underlying him, who is so faithfully translated in his presence and bearing, if not in every detail of who he is both on and off the set.
The same is true for Franco (who also directed the film) with regard to the The Room itself. The Disaster Artist faithfully recreates scene-after-scene from the ignominious original with clear reverence for the source material. The movie parcels out these remade sequences judiciously, making them enjoyable but not tedious for longtime fans, and true enough to pique the interest of first-timers who may not realize how accurate the recreations are. There is an attention to detail on display, demonstrating how Franco & Co. did their homework.
Thankfully most of the comedy comes from the characters, or original takes on situations described in the book, rather than mere efforts to prompt the audience to point and laugh at reenactments from The Room. Seth Rogen in particular steals the show with his sarcastic comments as the film-within-a-film’s on set director. The Disaster Artist is anchored around The Room, but its creators have the good sense not to just cannibalize the curio they’re aping.
Instead, Franco and his team use The Room and the story of its creation, to deliver an Ed Wood-esque lesson in the beauty of making something you believe in, that can affect people and be the culmination of your dream and your hard work, even if what you produce doesn’t meet traditional standards of quality or garner the reaction you imagined. The Disaster Artist seeks out the beauty in the singular-if-inept qualities of The Room, in the misguided but idealistic Tommy Wiseau, and in the rocky but rewarding friendship between him and Greg Sestero. That is certainly laudable.
It just doesn’t line up well with reality. That’s not necessarily a problem, or at least it shouldn’t be. That’s the beauty of storytelling and adaptation, it can plumb the depths of real life and mine it for nuggets of truth and purity from the inevitably more complicated affairs of real people, and transform them into something digestible and heartening.
But there’s an irony to that process in The Disaster Artist because The Room wasn't just supposed to be Tommy Wiseau’s magnum opus. It was meant to be his star-making debut and self-feting. Johnny of The Room is clearly Tommy’s idealized version of himself: generous, surrounded by friends, and meant to be seen as underappreciated for his magnanimous nature by anyone and everyone in his life. The Room is meant to reveal Tommy Wiseau as an artist and a talent, but it’s also a personal calling card, one where the thin veneer between Tommy and Johnny unveils a man who not only thinks of himself in terms of these delusions of grandeur, but believes this film would instill those same delusions in other.
And yet, as all great art does, The Room ended up revealing the real parts of its creator, and they were not as attractive or commendable as Wiseau tried to present them on the screen. The Room does evince a sense of idealism, yes, but also a clear sense of vanity, of perceived martyrdom, of inescapable misogyny. Wiseau tries to present an idealized version of himself, and ends up showing his true self, problematic warts and all.
The irony is that in creating a dramatized “behind the scenes” version of the “real” Tommy Wiseau, it’s The Disaster Artist that presents an idealized version of him. The Tommy of this film is too lacking in perspective to realize how unlikely his dreams are to be realized, but persists nevertheless. He can be difficult at times, but primarily because he values his project and his vision. And he can be a bit overly possessive, but it’s always framed out of a sense of hurt, of believing in a friendship he doesn’t know how to properly reciprocate.
The film meant to show us the true Tommy Wiseau instead gives us Wiseau’s best self, while the man’s own attempt at hagiography puts his worst impulses on display. That too is the glory of film, where one man can be the subject of two films, each presenting very different versions of who he is, and both can be true after a fashion. The Disaster Artist may not present the Tommy Wiseau I’ve come to know through his work and words and choices before and after The Room, but it uses what he represents, more than what he is, to lionize the medium itself and the fools who would dare fraternize with it, when it recreates him and his work on the silver screen, and in that way, does more justice to Wiseau than even the man himself could.
I just stepped out of the theatre and I'm ready to write this review for you all. So, let me start off by saying, this movie is nothing like the other Star Wars movies. I was expecting something like Rogue One, but as soon as they started making jokes I knew it was going to be something different. I liked it though, I did. It was action packed, quite funny and a bit romantic. I dig it. The action scenes were probably my favourite thing about this movie, those were very well done.
Alden Ehrenreich did Han Solo proud. I didn't really know the actor before this, but he's good! Sometimes it almost felt like I was listening to Harrison Ford. It was great to see him and Chewbacca together en find out how their relationship started in the first place. I really enjoyed seeing them bonding and all that. Woody Harrelson never ceases to amaze me, to be honest. He is a brilliant actor if you ask me. I felt like his character stayed a bit in the background throughout the movie but I think Tobias Beckett sure made an impact on Han. Talking about making an impact, let talk about Qi'Ra (probably the coolest way to write Kyra). First off, I adore Emilia Clarke. I think she's a great actress and she's absolutely gorgeous. I had to get used to the idea of her in a space movie but she did very well. Her character is still a bit of a blur, to be honest, but I think Qi'Ra could be an interesting character to explore further. Donald Glover as Lando is perfectly cast. They truly did a great job. My brother said, "I thought he was the son of the original Lando". I think when people say that, you've done a pretty great job. I liked L3 as well, she was a bit much sometimes but she brought some humour to the movie.
Overall it sure was a fun movie to watch. It all looked very beautiful and the special effects were great. The only thing that bothered me was some of the creatures they created. I think they could've been "more real". I don't know if that makes sense, but maybe you notice it too when you're watching the movie. It could also just be me, I don't know, it confuses me a bit. I really liked getting a glimpse of Chewbacca's story and a closer look at the Millenium Falcon. That's one great ship with way too many buttons, isn't it?
I enjoyed Solo: A Star Wars Story and I'm going to rate it with a solid 7. I'm pretty sure there's more where this movie came from so I will be waiting patiently till then.
[7.0/10] I love the texture of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies. There are few filmmakers working today who are better at evoking a particular time or place with all the light and color of the cinema. As in the seminal Boogie Nights, Anderson again conjures an image of Southern California in the 1970s that is simultaneously nigh-magical and viscerally real at the same time. To dip into one of his cinematic worlds is a treat in and of itself.
But I don’t really like Gary Valentine. I don’t really like Alanna Kane. And while there’s something to be said for Anderson putting together a slice-of-life collage of a peculiar childhood, I don’t need to see those vignettes hung onto the spine of a dysfunctional romance between an adult and a high schooler. Licorice Pizza is nice to dip into for the craft on display in almost every moment. But it doesn’t just feel shaggy. In places, it feels pointless, and sometimes even unpleasant.
Mainly that comes down to the two main characters and the fact that Anderson and company anchor the movie around a romance I don’t really want to see blossom. I can set aside the age difference for the purposes of cinematic storytelling. Gary and Alana look and act similar in age, so while intellectually there’s a discomfort in the distance of years between them, the look and level of maturity between them seems to put them on the same level psychologically for a work of fiction.
But there’s not much to latch onto in their relationship. Gary Valentine is an operator, a schmoozer, who lures Alana more than he ever seeks an honest emotional connection with her. That’s fine! He’s fifteen! People thrice his age struggle to make honest emotional connections with people. It’s just hard to invest in a relationship founded on that, especially when Valentine calls to mind the practiced preciousness of indie movie teens like Max Fischer in Rushmore without ever having the sort of humbling and turn toward the true and earnest that Max does.
For her part, Alana is a combative jerk, ready to respond with any show of affection or interest with a proclamation of “Idiot!” or some other insult, occasionally accompanied but mild but menacing physical violence. There’s parts of her personality which are endearing -- her sense of being the black sheep and wanting to get out which put a chip on her shoulder -- but her combination of nigh-teasing friendliness paired with frequent, jarring acerbic turns makes her a hard one to warm to.
That’s life though. If there’s a defense for Licorice Pizza in that regard, it’s that as one character says toward the end of the film, “They’re all shits.” It seems meant to remind Alana that she’s met a lot of assholes over the course of the film, but for all his immaturity, Gary’s the only one who’s actually shown care and kindness to her. But it fits as something broader, where all the general jerkery that goes on between Alana and Gary can be chalked up to real people having dysfunctional friendships that are messier than those we normally see on the silver screen.
There’s two problems with that though. The first is that much of the time Licorice Pizza plays like a fantasy, or certainly a very heightened reality. Supposedly the screenplay is based on actual life events of one of Anderson’s friends as a kid. Suffice it to say, the experiences of being a child star flown out to New York for press junkets, opening a waterbed store and pinball palace, running into Hollywood bigwigs who leap flaming pits on motorcycles or threaten bystanders over gas shortages, and helping to manage a mayoral campaign seem downright fantastical, and certainly unrelatable, to those of us apparently unlucky enough not to have grown up in Encino in the 1970s.
The upshot is that there’s a disharmony between the seemingly exaggerated world that Gary and Alana occupy and the “warts and all” friendship the film wants to dramatize between them. It’s hard to take the messiness as real when it’s juxtaposed with a hodgepodge of over-the-top adventures that seem to have little tether to reality or clear cause and effect between them.
The second is that Alana and Gary suck to each other. Okay. They’re young. They’re impulsive. They’re still both works in progress. But their entire M.O. throughout the film is for one to be aloof to the other until the other one makes them jealous, which starts the cycle anew. Even if you can get past the age difference, it never feels like a healthy relationship, or one that could blossom into that, just two kids taunting and poking at each other until they decide the rest of the world they’ve been chasing sucks even more.
The key is supposed to be that when the chips are down, they look out for each other. Gary’s mistakenly arrested for murder (another bizarre interlude in the conveyor belt of disconnected episodes here), and Alana races to the station on foot to help him. Alana falls off the back of a motorcycle during a stunt, and while everyone’s eyes are on the actor who makes the jump, Gary rushes to look after her. Running is a recurring visual motif here, brought back at the end of the picture, when the two young people run in search of one another and exalt when they both finally admit their affections.
These scenes are meant to show that despite the outward prickliness and schmoozing, deep down the two truly care for one another. But it’s not enough to make up for the other ninety percent of the movie where either they play cruel games for one another or, at best, don’t seem like a healthy fit.
That wouldn’t be such a big problem if it weren’t the skeleton the rest of the movie is built around. Take away the romance, and all you have is a bunch of random vignettes that work better as individual snippets rather than part of a larger narrative. Licorice Pizza is a patchwork quilt of these standalone portraits, vaguely united by the common characters involved, but mostly an excuse to stitch together a random assortment of stories from someone’s SoCal youth without any real connective tissue or sense of build or unity between them.
And yet, I’d take many, if not most of them on their own. Anderson knows how to construct a scene, even if the broader compendium of them comes off a little wonky and misshapen. Harriet Sansom Harris nearly steals the show as an eccentric but memorable child talent agent in a one-scene wonder. Tom Waits is as garbled-yet-effervescent as ever as an old director who spurs his actor buddy to perform an impromptu stunt. And Joseph Cross offers the most touching interlude in the film, as the boyfriend of a mayoral candidate torn up over how the clash between political aspirations and their homoseuxality leaves him always having to put his needs to the side. Some of the episodes in the film go a little too over the top, but there’s something there, something worth keeping, in almost all of them.
Occasionally, that comes down to the pure craft of the moment. Anderson and co-cinematographer Michael Bauman are wizards with light. Whether it’s evoking a smoke-filled bar in low light while an old actor tells his tales, brightening the cacophony of colors of 1970s fashion and decor, or lighting Alana in silhouette from a distance, the two of them and their team evoke moods and simply present striking images which take full advantage of the medium.
At the same time, Anderson pulls off still more of his famously well-choreographed longer takes. There’s a regular sense of motion in this film, with extended shots that follow the characters as they walk down one throughway for another, capturing the energy of movement and even chaos as it stalks them around the streets of these Los Angeles neighborhoods. You may not always love the people pounding the pavement, but you will almost always feel like you’re there.
Maybe that's enough. Perhaps without the nostalgia for this time and place, it’s harder to connect with people like Gary and Alana. It’s tough to wonder why Anderosn didn’t just release a series of shorts about a grab bag of experiences in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, rather than smushing them all together when they don’t fit. It’s more difficult to see why we should root for a romance between two people who don’t seem to know how to be kind to one another, even if they do like each other.
But Licorice Pizza does bring you into their world, the peculiar ecosystem of eccentric Hollywood stars, child entrepreneurs, and luminous dreams that painted block after block and row after row. Wherever Anderson goes, he takes you with him, and that’s worth something, even if you’re not enamored with the fellow passengers he’s selected for the ride.
Jesus Christ Bruce Willis has gotten horrible. Even in the movie he doest look like he wants to be there i imagine it was the same feeling on set. He’s basically getting a check to continue whatever vices id imagine lol.
Htf is Bruce’s character so fucking stupid!!!! You make this wire seem so important but yet hang up on the man!!! This movie is frustrating asf. He’s acting like a god damn child. Can you tell how much i hated these stupid dialogues?
And why does every damn character seem like a dirty cop or their acting so horrible you start to think their suspicious.
What idiot cop would say all that incriminating shit on their own phone lol. A wire agent just called you a few minutes ago :joy: this doesn’t even make since he cant be that stupid.
Maybe someone from Ireland could tell me if I’m wrong but I’m going to say that was a horrible Irish accent no?
Damn that hidden camera wasn’t very hidden lol. That thing is huge, what is it 1967?
Why is the agent of 18 years so shocked by someone getting shot?
The oath speak was corny asf
With how long the army was on the property they still couldn’t find him?
The only thing i saw in the whole movie that made accurate sense was the guys heard the silencer shot which is true, you would hear it, it would just be less noise than a regular gunshot but not completely quiet.
The timeline on the movement of everyone is ridiculous. What was the guard downstairs from the wire room doing all the time the agent was helping the cartel guy survive?
Why tf would you hesitate to shot Officer Mike when you watched him kill the other guard downstairs :joy: this show is so fucking stupid
The baseball didn’t even make a sound :joy: at least throw it hard against the severs.
Survival 101, pick up the shotgun from the guy you just killed dummy.
At least the headshots look good. First person i seen in a long time that doesn’t waste damn bullets.
Theres a safe in the office. Doesn’t ask for the code lol
Fakest gunshots ive seen in a while. Is this a d rated movie? With a D rated budget? I guess i should have looked up reviews before wasting time watching.
Lol someone with ringing ears and disoriented can get the drop on two armed gunmen.
Ok so this movie has made me never want to watch another movie that isn’t a triple a high budget movie jesus the acting was horrible.
Cool movie concept but with horrible acting
if you got through my rant I’ll end it with this. DONT WASTE YOUR TIME WATCHING THIS.
