Movie Review: The Disaster Artist

The Disaster Artist **** / *****

Directed by: James Franco.

Written by: Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber based on the book by Greg Sestero and Tom Bissell.

Starring: James Franco (Tommy Wiseau), Dave Franco (Greg Sestero), Seth Rogen (Sandy Schklair), Alison Brie (Amber), Ari Graynor (Juliette Danielle), Josh Hutcherson (Philip Haldiman), Jacki Weaver (Carolyn Minnott), Zac Efron (Dan Janjigian), Hannibal Buress (Bill Meurer), Nathan Fielder (Kyle Vogt), Sharon Stone (Iris Burton), Melanie Griffith (Jean Shelton), Paul Scheer (Raphael Smadja), Jason Mantzoukas (Peter Anway), Megan Mullally (Mrs. Sestero), Casey Wilson (Casting Director), Randall Park (Male Actor), Jerrod Carmichael (Actor Friend), Bob Odenkirk (Stanislavsky Teacher), Charlyne Yi (Safoya), Bryan Cranston (Bryan Cranston), Judd Apatow (Judd Apatow).

 

It is entirely possible that had The Disaster Artist never been made that I would have spent my life never have seen Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. I, of course, long ago heard about Wiseau’s 2003 film – now legendary as the worst film ever made, a cult hit at midnight screenings, etc. – but I have never been one of those people who watch movies that “so bad, they’re good”. For the most part, I just think those movies are bad – and I don’t much enjoy watching them, nor do I particularly like watching something while holding myself deliberately above it – as if I am better than the film being watched. Yes, it could also be because I don’t much like midnight screenings in general and my days of getting drunk and watching movies with friends to laugh at them are long behind me. But because of The Disaster Artist – which got great reviews out of TIFF – a couple of months ago, I did sit down to watch The Room one night. Yes, it was past midnight, but I was alone in my basement, and stone cold sober. It really was horrible, and I really didn’t have any fun watching it. It was painful – as I knew it would be. Still, now having seen – and thoroughly enjoyed The Disaster Artist – I can safely say that I am glad I saw The Room – and also safely say I don’t think I’ll ever watch it again. The Disaster Artist though – I may well watch that again.

 

The film, directed by and starring James Franco as Wiseau, is similar to another film about the supposed worst film ever made – Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994) – which mainly centered on the title character as he made Plan 9 From Outer Space. Both films certainly have a fair amount of fun at their protagonist’s expense – yet the reason why both films works is that mainly the films have a genuine affection for them as well. The films they made were horrible – but dammit all, these guys went for it, and delivered, well, something anyway.

 

As Wiseau, Franco gives his best performance since Spring Breakers. It doesn’t matter that he’s too young to play Wiseau (or maybe, he isn’t, since Wiseau never does say how old he is) he completely nails the strange, Eastern European accent Wiseau claims is from New Orleans, the weird mannerisms and body language, etc. He also gets into Wiseau’s head, and is brilliant at portraying a man with complete and utter lack of self-awareness. How utterly out of it do you have to be to make a film like The Room – and do it completely straight, as if you really are making a dramatic masterpiece to rival Tennessee Williams?

 

Franco casts his brother Dave as Greg Sestero – the other lead in The Room, and Wiseau’s friend. This makes it a little weird, since there is barely subdued homoerotic subtext between Wiseau and Sestero (all one way), but Dave Franco excels at playing this bland, handsome everyman – who goes along for the ride, even if he kind of knows it’s leading nowhere. The supporting cast is filled with famous faces perhaps too filled, although I don’t know who I’d cut. The movie charts the making of The Room – a disaster in itself, and is out and out hilarious for the most part. The movie really only gets dark in one scene – a sex scene, where director/actor Wiseau goes too far.

 

The film really is a delicate balancing act. Go too far, and the film may just come across as a bunch of famous people mocking the guy who made this legendary disaster. Go too soft, and it feels like you’re pulling your punches. I haven’t like Franco the director before – but I think he, his cast and the excellent script walk that fine line just about perfectly. This film in the end will do nothing except bolster the reputation of Wiseau, and The Room – which is really all he ever wanted.

Movie Review: Child of God

Child of God
Directed by: James Franco.
Written by: James Franco & Vince Jolivette based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
Starring: Scott Haze (Lester Ballard), Tim Blake Nelson (Sheriff Fate), James Franco (Jerry), Jim Parrack (Deputy Cotton).

With his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God, James Franco proves two things – first, that he has impeccable taste in source material, and second, he has no idea how to adapt that material. McCarthy is arguably the greatest living American writer, and his novels are sparse, spare, raw and deceptively simple. In order to effective adapt McCarthy; a director needs to find a way to do cinematically what McCarthy does with his prose. The Coen’s were able to do this with No Country for Old Men (although, to be fair, McCarthy’s novel met them half way) and John Hillcoat did a very good job with The Road. But Franco doesn’t have the directorial chops to pull it off in Child of God – sometimes even resorting to putting whole swathes of McCarthy’s novel on screen because he cannot come up with a better way to replicate it on screen. Child of God is perhaps the simplest of McCarthy’s novels – the story of a man ostracized from society, who gradually goes insane, becomes a necrophiliac, murderer and a cave dweller. The novel is simple in terms of plot, so you might think it would be simple to adapt - but I don't think that's the case. While it would certainly be easier to write a screenplay for Child of God rather than other McCarthy novels like Suttree or Blood Meridian, you can make the case that it probably should not be adapted at all. The novel is so interior that any movie would have trouble making that cinematic. Franco's film fails miserably at that.

The movie is about Lester Ballard (Scott Haze), who at the beginning storms his family’s old land with a rifle to try and get them from stop auctioning it off. He fails, of course, and after another short stint in the county jail, he ends up in his rundown shack in the middle of nowhere. He spends his days wandering around the forest with his rifle, killing animals. When he does run into people, he’s so socially awkward that things end up spiraling out of control almost immediately. He cannot relate to any of the people he meets, yet he longs for some sort of connection. Eventually, he’ll find a dead body of a woman, and she becomes his “companion”. And then, when he loses her, he’ll do what he must to replace her.

From the beginning, Franco tries very hard to make everything seem dirty, grimy and “realistic”. He undermines himself at the start with those passages from the novel appearing on screen, and his attempt to replicate the novel’s structure of multiple narrators. Thankfully, he abandons this fairly early on, but the movie never settles down and finds it rhythm. For one thing, every time a recognizable actor appears on screen – like Tim Blake Nelson, overacting his way through his role as a Sheriff, or late in the movie, Franco himself, they stand out from the rest of the cast like they don’t belong there.

The bigger problem though is Haze’s performance as Lester. I give Haze credit for a willingness to immerse himself in the role, and go for broke. But his performance is so over the top and mannered, that he never seems like a human being – even one as damaged as Lester is. He speaks with some strange combination of speech impediment and accent that makes ninety-percent of his dialogue unintelligible. Haze would have been better served going for a more natural performance.

There are other problems with the movie as well. The necrophliac scenes, which should be disturbing in the extreme, are so clumsily handled that that verge on being unintentionally funny. As the final sequence, which is largely wordless, requires a director with more visual command than Franco currently has to pull off.

Still, although I think Child of God is a failure on pretty much every conceivable level, strangely, I still think it shows some promise for Franco as a director. What he needs to do is find a simpler story, and tell it in a more straight forward manor. There are isolated moments that work in the film. Child of God may be a horrible movie, but at some point, I have a feeling Franco is going to make a good movie.

Note: This review is based upon a screening at TIFF 2013. As far as I am aware, the film has not changed since then, so the version being released in limited markets today in America is the same as the one I saw.

Dual Movie Review: Cruising (1980) & Interior. Leather Bar. (2014)

Cruising (1980)
Directed by: William Friedkin.
Written by: William Friedkin based on the novel by Gerald Walker.
Starring: Al Pacino (Steve Burns), Paul Sorvino (Capt. Edelson), Karen Allen (Nancy), Richard Cox (Stuart Richards), Don Scardino (Ted Bailey), Joe Spinell (Patrolman DiSimone), Jay Acovone (Skip Lee), Randy Jurgensen (Det. Lefransky), Barton Heyman (Dr. Rifkin), Gene Davis (DaVinci), Arnaldo Santana (Loren Lukas), Larry Atlas (Eric Rossman), Allan Miller (Chief of Detectives), Sonny Grosso (Det. Blasio), Ed O'Neill (Det. Schreiber), Michael Aronin (Det. Davis), James Remar (Gregory), William Russ (Paul Gaines), Mike Starr (Patrolman Desher), Steve Inwood  (Martino), Keith Prentice (Joey), Leland Starnes (Jack Richards).

Interior. Leather Bar.
Directed by: James Franco & Travis Mathews.
Written by: Travis Mathews.
Featuring: Val Lauren, Christian Patrick, Brenden Gregory, Brad Roberge, Robbie Acklen, Osbaldo Daniel Alvarez, Andres Barcelo, Samantha Barrows, Nick Buda, Seana Carroll, Collin Chavez, Jol Devitro, Julie Diaz, James Franco, Brianna Getrost, A.J. Goodrich, Jonathan Howard, Caleb James, Anna Kooris, Michael Lannan, Eva Lauren, Loc Le, Tatiana Leipet, Tyson C. Lenard, Travis Mathews, Matthew McKelligon, Joel Michaely, Chervine Namani, Adrian Pena, Ben Phen, Liz Phillips, Jake Robbins, Scott Schwenk, Jay Sosnicki, Lane Stewart, Iris Torres, Rob Vincent, Keith Wilson.

In 1980, William Friedkin made Cruising with Al Pacino. The production was beset by protests from the gay community, because they feared that it would portray them badly – as nothing but perverts. The film is set in the world of S&M, leather bars in New York, where a serial killer is finding and killing his victims. The police Captain in charge of the investigation, Edelson (Paul Sorvino) wants desperately to solve the case, so he gets a “rookie cop” Steve Burns (Al Pacino, then in his late 30s, so far too old) to go undercover in this world because he “looks like the victims”. Burns isn’t gay, and is uncomfortable with his new assignment. When he descends into this world, it’s like descending into hell. The film had to be radically cut after Friedkin finished it – 40 minutes in all were said to be trimmed to get a R rating – but those 40 minutes apparently had little to do with the plot, and were about the world of the leather bars. Was their hard core fucking in those minutes? We’ll never know, the footage was never released, and many believe the studio destroyed it. It came and went a commercial and critical failure, and then was mainly buried by the studio – who didn’t release it on VHS until 1996 and not on DVD until 2007. But it has become a cult film – many among gay viewers.

In 2013, James Franco and Travis Mathews made Interior. Leather Bar which was marketed as a film that “reconstructs” those lost 40 minutes of Friedkin’s film. That marketing is a lie. Interior. Leather Bar is actually about Franco and Mathews making those 40 minutes – and their lead actor Val Lauren, who is not “playing Pacino” but is “playing the same character Pacino played” and his discomfort with the project. Like Pacino, and the character he plays, Lauren is not gay and is uncomfortable descending into this world. In his first meeting with Franco and Mathews, he confesses that he “doesn’t understand” the project or its vision. But he’s a longtime friend and collaborator of Franco’s – so he trusts his vision. The whole shoot of those lost 40 minutes seem to happen all over one long day – a day in which Lauren grows increasingly uncomfortable with what he’s watching. How much of Interior. Leather Bar is staged, and how much is real? It plays like a behind the scenes documentary, but there is enough evidence to suggest that the whole thing is staged.

Getting back to Cruising, it is at best a flawed film for Friedkin. The original protestors were somewhat right about the film. The identity of the killer (if he really is the killer, or should I say the only killer) does represent kind of the worst sort of “killer Queen” stereotypes that upset gay viewers to this day. Yet, it is also true that Friedkin never really does any moralizing about the clubs themselves. There are two blatantly homophobic cops near the beginning of the film, but they are portrayed as such. Sorvino’s Edelson is more than sympathetic to the victims and wants to find the killer. There are gay characters – like Pacino’s neighbor – that don’t fit into the stereotypes we normally associate with gay characters (at least completely). Friedkin’s camera captures what was happening in the leather clubs, but doesn’t make it look sick or disgusting and doesn’t judge the people in them. This is mainly why the film has become a cult hit among gay viewers – it’s one of the only films of its era that addressed gay characters at all – and almost works as a look back to a more carefree, hedonistic time in gay culture – before AIDS came along and ruined it. There are certainly elements to the film beside the “killer Queen” angle that come across as slightly homophobic – the giant black man in a leather G-string who is apparently on the NYPD payroll just to beat gay people during interrogations for example – but it almost seems accidental. I believe Friedkin when he says he never saw the film as about gay culture, but rather a murder mystery set in gay culture. And if the film is dark and nihilistic, offering a very bleak view of humanity, well’s that’s perfectly in line with the filmmaker who made The French Connection, The Exorcist, Sorcerer, To Live and Die in LA and Killer Joe. He has never been the cheeriest of filmmakers.

What sinks Cruising for me though is the central character played by Pacino, who is a character you never really get a handle on. The ending of the movie implies some things about him, that doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the movie. There is a darkness to him to be sure, but as much as the movie implies? Perhaps that what was what the missing 40 minutes really were – something that explains why Burns does what the movie implies (but never states). I can see any numbers of things that happened during that time making the ending make more sense. There are other problems with the film – Karen Allen as Pacino’s girlfriend for example is given nothing to do except to be there when he wants to fuck a woman to remind himself that he’s heterosexual – but it’s the confusion of the ending, that strains for profound ambiguity but doesn’t make it – that makes the film a somewhat ambitious (perhaps even honorable) failure.

Interior. Leather Bar is an interesting film, but in some ways has the same problems as Cruising – in that it wants

ambiguity and ends up with confusion. Watching the film, I was never sure what I was watching was reality or staged – which I think is part of the point of the film but one that I found increasingly annoying. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that’s more about itself than Interior. Leather Bar is. Lauren admits he doesn’t know why the film is being made – and when he asks Franco, the director, he admits he doesn’t know either. Franco has a few monologues about how he doesn’t like how he’s been conditioned to except “normal” to be heterosexual, and expressing frustration that you can show pretty anything in a movie you want to – but not sex, which is the most natural thing in the world. He wants to make Interior. Leather Bar, with real, un-simulated sex, in part to show it as a beautiful thing. Lauren is unsure. What will this do to his career? Franco is a major star, so he can do whatever he wants. But will Lauren become just the star of the “Franco faggot film” and his friend on the phone calls it.

Watching Interior Leather Bar I couldn’t help but think that the whole thing was really just an elaborate joke on Franco’s part. He is a celebrity who has done his best to become anonymous but in the opposite way most celebrities do who crave it do- which is to be reclusive - Franco instead is seemingly everywhere, doing everything. You can never get a read on who the “real” James Franco is, which is how he wants it, and makes him an exciting actor to watch – because you never know what the hell he’s going to do next. He has been dogged by “gay” rumors for years – his entire Comedy Central Roast last year was basically 90 minutes of his friends calling him gay – and Franco decides to play with that in this film. He’s not “in” the film – just directing it. But he’s in the film as the director “James Franco” which may or may not be the real James Franco. Who knows? Who cares?

The film is interesting in many ways. It does contain some interesting material about all the gay stars of the films – basically unknown actors who show up for a casting call, some of which know Cruising, some of which don’t – and are willing to do whatever Mathews (who seems to be the only one directing the film within the film, as Franco recedes to the background if he’s on set at all) wants them to do – including a real life couple who actually do have sex on screen.

What is Interior. Leather Bar really about then? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps it’s about an actor confronting his own discomfort with gay sex, or about flipping the idea of what a film featuring gay sex is really about. Basically though, it’s about itself and its own making. Strangely, although the film itself plays like a making of documentary about itself, I would like to see the making of documentary about the making of Interior Leather Bar. But then again, perhaps that is what I already saw.