The trailer made this film look like it would be a lot less phony than it was

Rating: 5/10 (16 March 2018)

I was very excited for this film as soon as I saw the trailers. I missed it in theaters but immediately rented it when it became available.
As soon as the movie starts I knew something was wrong. It starts with a bunch of actors (that you are probably tired of seeing everywhere) discussing how amazing The Room is as phenomenon. It already feels like the movie is trying to tell you how to feel instead of showing you what is so amazing about this ridiculous movie.
It also comes across as incredibly insincere. I can't help by wonder if these people even saw the movie or just were given lines to say. It's as though they are gripping on to the back of a band wagon that was already at top speed and already full of hilarious interpretations and reactions. All they can really do is repeat how wonderfully bad this movie is and how amazing it is that it got made. It feels like they are repeating this perspective because that's what all the kids are saying these days...right?
After that you get an incredibly cheesy soundtrack and a storyline about two people following their dreams in LA and how totally famous they will be. It tries to be sentimental when even the goal is incredibly shallow and hard to care about.
Once the production of the room finally happens it picks up a little speed with some humorous interactions here and there. But it's so choppily directed and edited that a lot of the humorous moments fail to even build properly. This movie feels like it was rushed to quickly get through the clips they've seen on Youtube montage videos of The Room.
It also has some obvious fake portions added in for entirely no reason. Running into Bryan Cranston and him casually offering a job was a tad silly. Also we know that the original movie premiere did not go down in the lighthearted way this film tried to portray. Not to mention how the movie was utterly ignored for years until internet culture found it and took it over.
The Disaster Artist could have knocked it out of the park with the hilarious content to work with. The funniest portions was just when they reenacted some of the original scenes. Give us more of that please.
Also Dave Franco as Greg was terrible. He didn't act like him at all and was constantly smiling and reacting positively to nearly everything. It was uncanny and made the movie feel even more saccharine.
All in all, just enjoy the clips of The Room on Youtube and happily saying "Oh hi Mark" when the time calls for it on comment threads. It's much more funny and natural than anything this movie tried to do.