An homage to a love of movies and making them

Rating: 8/10 (10 December 2017)

Tim Burton showed how much he loves movies by giving us Ed Wood, and James Franco has shown a similar affection with The Disaster Artist. Although I firmly believe Troll 2 is a far worse movie than The Room, it was only a matter of time before someone made a movie about the making of a movie considered by many to be the worst movie ever made.
That's not fair, of course, to The Room. What made The Room a cult classic is that it is not the worst movie ever made, but simply a jarring sequence of non sequiturs, whether dialogue-based or editing-based, and a handful of side plots which barely spin up, never to be returned to again. It's a cult classic not because it's a bad movie, it's a cult classic because it's unfathomable that anyone could make a movie like that with so much passion and think it was a masterpiece, but that's what Tommy Wiseau did, and as Greg Sestero points out, not even Alfred Hitchcock was talented enough to accomplish that.
James Franco proves we need a stronger word than Schadenfreude at times, perhaps "super-duper-über-schadenfreude." Much like the neon sign shaped like Hitchcock's face in Rope, we see that Tommy and Greg live in an apartment building called OJAI ("O hai!") and wow does Josh Hutcherson look terrible with Denny's hair.
Too bad Franco chose to open the film with real-life "tributes" from such famous film critics as Adam Scott, and too bad he chose to close the film with a series of side-by-side comparisons of his version against the original Wiseau vision. Those last scenes smacked of Peter Sellers and the blooper credits from Being There, so out of place that many believed they cost him an Oscar.
Tommy Wiseau is not as mysterious as he wants to be. He's probably a vampire. Who cares?