A Room Of Our Own

Note: I wrote this review of The Disaster Artist over a year and a half ago, after I saw a preview screening of the film. I watched it on opening night to learn that not only was it not substantially changed, not a frame other than the opening and closing credits was touched. On a second viewing, I'm a lot colder on the film, but I stand by the feelings I express in this review. It just doesn't have a lot to offer other than a one-time gimmick. Once that's used up, there's no reason to return to that well whatsoever.

Year: 2016

Director: James Franco

Cast: James Franco, Dave Franco, Sharon Stone

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I’m a huge fan of oddball auteur Tommy Wiseau’s bad movie masterpiece The Room. So much so that it’s not even listed on my index in the section that’s sorted by rating, because that would have broken the system entirely, not to mention my credibility. I’m also a huge fan of Greg Sestero’s behind-the-scenes book The Disaster Artist, which is hands-down the most fascinating nonfiction book I’ve ever read. It’s not only an insight into the twisted mind that birthed The Room, but the story of a man rattling against the bars of the cage of normalcy who would eventually become that twisted mind's best friend.

So when I heard they were adapting that very book into a movie, I was mighty intrigued. When it was announced that stoner comedy icon by day/berserk artistic soldier by night James Franco would be directing, I was concerned, but realized there’s hardly anybody better to bring that madcap, deranged nightmare to life.

I was wrong.

You’re tearing me apart, James Franco!

In The Disaster Artist, Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) is a young aspiring actor in San Francisco who meets the mysterious, ineffably accented, appallingly dressed Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) in an acting class. The shy young man comes to respect Tommy’s bravado and total lack of elf-awareness. They become fast friends and move to L. A. to pursue their dreams. However, Greg’s success at finding an agent (Sharon Stone) and a girlfriend (Alison Brie) makes Tommy dangerously jealous.

When they decide that the industry isn’t ready for them, they agree that they should make their own movie. They assemble a crew (Seth Rogen, Paul Scheer, Charlyne Yi…) and a cast (Ari Graynor, Josh Hutcherson, Zac Efron, Jacki Weaver…) with Tommy’s bottomless pit of money and it’s off to the races!

Oh hi, cult classic.

At its heart, The Disaster Artist is about the relationship between Greg and Tommy more than it’s about The Room itself. This is as it should be. And as a movie adaptation of said story, some details are changed to smooth the narrative along. This is also as it should be. As much a fan as I am of the book, I understand and respect that certain choices had to be made when adapting the material. However, the end product is both completely unrecognizable as the original true story and kilotons less interesting. The quasi-horror story of a dark, twisted friendship between a bipolar lunatic and an insecure ingénue has been transformed into a wacky, whitewashed buddy picture about never giving up on your dreams.

It lurches so hard to fit a three-act structure that it’s gut-churning. And again, to make myself clear, I’m not upset that they streamlined the casting process or combined multiple characters into one or cut out the subplot about Retro Puppet Master (OK, maybe I’m a teensy bit upset about that one). I’m upset they capsized years of bizarre behavior, manipulation, homoeotic tension, and drama in favor of a bog standard “girlfriend jealousy,” man-child, Apatow-approved plot structure, which they go ahead and totally ignore in the third act, arriving at zero resolution for either character. And this is not a “true stories don’t have endings” situation. By this point, everything true about this story is rotting under a stack of old TV Guides at the landfill.

I guess they were too chicken to commit to their story. Cheeeep, cheepcheepcheep.

That’s not to say that The Disaster Artist isn’t funny. It completely misses the point of its own story but it still has the juice to be pleasantly amusing. It’s not an uproarious affair, but there is plenty of that awkward comedy that’s rampant in The Room itself, especially in any scene where Tommy has to interact with people out in the real world. It certainly helps that James Franco completely disappears into the role, delivering a pitch-perfect imitation of Wiseau’s haunting strangeness. His comic timing is on point, and frankly he saves the movie from itself, the cuckoo center of the maelstrom of muddled plot elements.

Franco has also assemble a veritable A-Team of essential comic actors for lightning quick cameos, though – mysteriously – some of them (including Dirty Grandpa-redeemer Jason Mantzoukas) aren’t even given any real gags to work with. My favorite would be John Early, who plays a major agent's assistant and needs to get noticed by more people immediately. But frankly, the non-Tommy/Greg cast of The Room are given short shrift in a series of rapidfire scenes that blast through the actual making of the film. Only Ari Graynor (as Juliette Danielle, who played the blonde temptress Lisa) and Zac Efron (as Dan Janjigian, who played the psychotic drug dealer Chris-R.) make any sort of impression as the film completely ignores them. Seth Rogen also livens up several scenes from the peanut gallery, eking comedy around the edges.

To be completely honest, the film’s only acting liability is Dave Franco, who puts almost no effort into crafting a distinct personality out of Greg Sestero. Where James is playing Tommy Wiseau, Dave is just playing Dave Franco, coasting on his looks, his stock mannerisms, and a truly pitiful fake beard that looks like he got tarred and feathered by Fozzie Bear.

You are NOT my favorite customer, Dave.

The film has its ups and its downs, but it’s only half bad. It feels more like a home movie of celebrities hanging out than an actual work of cinema, but there’s certainly a place for that. I do wish it spent more time on the process of creating The Room (in fact, the longest segment of the film is the totally pointless premiere scene, where we get to sit with the actors and watch their weird facsimiles of actual scenes from The Room for what feels like hours. I’ve already seen The Room. I don’t need to watch fans watching a fan recreation of it, celebrities or not), because that’s where the more interesting story lies (in this watered-down version, anyway). And as it stands, if you haven’t actually seen the film, you’ll be flummoxed by the whole process. But I don’t mind spending 90 minutes with these people in this setting. If you’re a Room acolyte, seek this movie out. If not, leave your stupid wallets in your pocket.

TL;DR: The Disaster Artist is an oddball biopic that misses the story mark but lands the humor.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1189

It Ain't A Lemon Party Without Old Dick

Year: 2016

Director: Dan Mazer

Cast: Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Zoey Deutch

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Would you believe me if I said that Bad Grandpa is the best comedy film I’ve seen in years?

No, neither would I. Aside from the fact that my yearly rewatching of Airplane! would inevitably preclude such a claim, Dirty Grandpa is a swollen hernia poking from the torso of Hollywood. And I’m saying this as a person who actually watched this movie on purpose. It’s perhaps the most January-ish January comedy ever released, lazy and charmless in all the wrong ways. But let’s not beat around the greying bush, let’s dive on into this sucker!

The things I do for you people.

In Dirty Grandpa, Jason (Zac Efron) is a Stepford grandson. He lives a yuppie fantasy, working at his dad’s law firm, wearing sweater vests, and preparing his wedding with the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Meredith (Julianne Hough) a controlling shrew so ludicrously unpleasant that she passive aggressives Jason into picking his rehearsal dinner tie color during his grandmother's funeral. When Jason agrees to drive his bereaved grandfather, Dick (Robert De Niro) to Florida for a couple days, the old man reveals that he’s hot to foxtrot and hijacks the trip, taking Jason to Dayton Beach for some raucous carousing with filthy co-ed Linor (Aubrey Plaza) and her friend Shadia (Zoey Deutch), Jason’s high school classmate with whom he has an instant rapport. 

Oh, they also have a gay friend who’s about as reductive a stereotype as poor Meredith (though without being actively sociopathic), but he’s also black so De Niro can have a two for one deal on offensive material that screenwriters think old people can get away with. They get to Daytona, De Niro makes approximately one kiloton of vulgar jokes that are only intermittently recognizable as humor, and then more plot attempts to happen at the very end.

Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get it up!

The thing about Dirty Grandpa is that it so obviously adheres to the male bonding sex comedy formula that it literally doesn’t even need to go through the motions. You can so intimately understand where the plot is going from the very first scene that it almost feels like you’ve watched an entire film even when it only skims through the story at its broadest points. Much in the same way that Julianne Hough’s shrieking beast of a character exists solely to make the boring, kind of deluded Shadia seem desirable in comparison, the plot falls back on lazy comedy movie stereotypes so it seems like it actually exists.

So with the plot comfortably out of the way, Dirty Grandpa frees itself up to crap all over Robert De Niro’s legacy. Hell, it craps all over Zac Efron's legacy. The High School Musical trilogy doesn’t deserve this. How does Dirty Grandpa’s humor suck? Let me count the ways…

1) Are you a minority? Screw you.

Mind you, Dirty Grandpa’s “old people are racist and homophobic and ableist and make rape jokes apparently” shtick is less prevalent than some of its illustrious peers, but when it crops up, it’s all the more painful for its halfhearted commitment to its abrasiveness. They seem to think that they can render gags that are both insanely offense and stale acceptable by having a character point out just how offensive they are. Nice try, Dirty Grandpa, but you can’t cover your ass. It’s swaying gently in the wind, exposed to the elements. Speaking of, this kicks in at about the 20-minute mark, at which point the twelve people in my theater are reduced to six.

2) “Sandra Bullock in Gravity” gags

Certain one-liners just drift through the void of the film, haphazardly colliding into scenes at the most inopportune times. My current working theory is that the original draft underwent a heavy rewrite, but the script editor forgot to delete certain lines, leaving them jammed into the middle of scenes like rocks diverting a stream. That’s the only possible explanation for the mind-boggling preponderance of non sequiturs that crash into the middle of otherwise unassuming scenes.

3) Grandpa is a felon

In the middle of his wacky erotic rampage across the Florida coast, nobody seems to notice that Grandpa Dick is a straight-up psychopath. When an old man assaults a guy with an improvised beer cannon that inverts his nose, that’s not the time to sigh and go, “Oh, Pop-Pop.” That dude belongs in freaking jail for that and many other violet criminal acts that are treated like the mayhem caused by a toddler. There is more or less a pile of steaming bodies in this guy’s wake.

4) They break the laws of physics to force jokes to work.

There’s a scene that requires a stuffed animal that is manifestly present on the ground to not be there, so it vanishes without a trace. There’s a scene that forgot it could have been set up an hour ago, so a hacker on a moped materializes from thin air to bridge the gap. Almost every scene has a square joke being rammed into a round hole, because nobody realized that, if they took the time to sand the edges, it would actually fit the way it was supposed to.

5) There’s a grandpa rapping scene.

Yes, this is that kind of movie.

The dream of the 90’s is alive and well.

Not only is the humor scraped off the bottom of a crusty plunger, it’s not even presented well. The editing hops, skips, and jumps around dialogue actively destroying punchlines by cutting around lines and arbitrarily inserting over-the-shoulder shots in a manner so conspicuous that I suspect no cast member could actually complete a take without breaking down into heaving sobs and cursing their agent’s name, forcing the scene to be cobbled together in ADR. The editing has the rhythm of a drunk woodpecker and it totally obliterates most of the film’s potential.

But do you want to know the absolute worst thing about Dirty Grandpa? It has some damn hilarious scenes, Mind you, there’s as widely scattered as M&M’s in cheap trail mix, but they’re there. These moments are almost exclusively provided by Adam Pally as Jason’s indecorous cousin and Jason Mantzoukas as the friendly neighborhood drug dealer. My sense of moral integrity wants to believe that their lines were entirely improvised, but I’ll be fair and give credit to the screenwriter for allowing these two characters their moment in the sun. Frequently, their scenes are actively gut-busting and quotable, which makes the film even more disappointing because here’s actually a reason to endure the cinematic napalm that forms the remainder of its runtime.

The one other savior of Dirty Grandpa is Aubrey Plaza, who is delightful for about 75 percent of the time. When she’s forced to flirt with De Niro, her discomfort is palpable, especially taking into consideration the film’s weird aversion to actually depicting sexuality despite its rampant vulgarity (as far as I can recall, there’s not a single topless woman in the movie, and the film’s only scene of the sex act is between two people who are more or less fully clothed and evidently plan on using their own underwear as contraception.) 

Well, there you have it. Even Dirty Grandpa doesn’t want to watch Dirty Grandpa. So why should you?

TL;DR: Dirty Grandpa is a lazy, wheezing waste of your time.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1246