How not to make a movie

Rating: 8/10 (13 April 2018)

'The Room' is a movie famous for being so bad it's good; and 'The Disaster Artist' is a fictional telling of how it was made. In places it's hilarious, and there are obvious echoes of 'Ed Wood' (and its eponymous lead character), or of the documentary film 'American Movie'. Those two films were both stories of everyday losers, living on the edge and clinging to a dream, in spite of their lack of any evident talent. 'The Disaster Artist' is slightly different, and less interesting, because 'The Room' was made not by a deluded auteur willing to starve for his art, but by a (mysteriously) wealthy man whose decision to blow six million dollars appears to have been made essentially on a whim. While he clearly has his own delusions, there's also a sense of life-as-play which is absent in those other stories; and the decision to end the film on a best-friends-forever-live happily-ever theme seems to fit less will than a suicide would have done, even if (happily) this is how things turned out in real life. Which is not to say 'The Disaster Artist' isn't funny; but is a peculiar tale, one of those stories you couldn't make up.