Review: THE DISASTER ARTIST

Tommy and Greg meet at a theatrical audition in San Fransisco. Greg fenceposts his way through a scene from Beckett. Tommy storms through the iconic "Stella!" moment from Streetcar. They pair up as potential acting buddies. Moving to L.A. they fail steadily until the inspiration strikes and Tommy decides that the only way out of the vicious circle is for them to make their own movie. Using Tommy's apparently bottomless pit of money they buy equipment, hire crew and cast actors and off they go to make a film that has become the world's current champion of cinematic rubbish. Through this we get Tommy's erratic mood swings and exhausting delusional behaviour and a premier that would crush the thickest-boned film director in history. This is a true story. Or is it?

Writer/director/star James Franco doesn't seem to mind. He fashions a polished account of the psychological maelstrom that created a film as a vanity project, beginning with a series of recognisable Hollywood figures attesting to the phenomenon of the film, The Room, before plunging into an imagined origins issue. Sometimes going for the laugh, sometimes starkly mocking, sometimes appreciative of the effort, Franco never gets close enough to his subject to find any single anchor point from which to float any comedy, drama or any substantial development. What we get is very little more than the late night screening audience's responses of the original film.

This is the problem. My reservations about the film were from a worry that the young and confident Franco, a contemporary Hollywood winner, would spend his screen time punching down. But who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Well, he does. Beyond the merest smudge of recognition that Wiseau might have serious problems Franco goes for the jugular in the hope that it's close enough to the funny bone to grab some collateral laughs so this can be both a pisstake and an earnest tribute to force of personality.

Comparison's with Tim Burton's Ed Wood are impossible to ignore. Burton took pains to tell us how, for all his risible missteps and gormless optimism, Ed Wood at least wanted to make good films and had ideas about how to do that. Cast above reality as a kind of bright lesser god we had no problem seeing the admiration at the heart of the laughter. If you watch Plan 9 or Glen or Glenda without expecting a laugh fest you will see real movies in there, ineptly executed but made for real. Burton also gives as perspective with a fictitious meeting between Wood and the genuine film god Orson Welles who, drinking in defeat, lets Ed know that the problems in cinema Olympus can be as niggling and infuriating as they are down there on Skid Row. James Franco gives as a Saturday Night Live sketch stretched wincingly over an hour and three quarters, ignoring the opportunities already in the screenplay (e.g. that Tommy would make a better villain than romantic lead) that might have led him to create something more powerful and profound with the forces of avowed fiction.

I went to a screening of The Room with a friend who had been to several. It began at midnight and we took our seats after arming ourselves with a bag of plastic spoons handed to us by the ushers. Lights down and the session started, the titters starting with the name of Tommy Wiseau on almost every credit. And then from the first scene on the heckles stormed from the audience. Every time a set of decorative spoons appeared on screen there was a rain of plastic spoons aimed at it. At first resistant I joined in, really finding it funny, throwing spoons, the lot. I laughed till it hurt.

But what did I find funny? The Room is a poorly made movie with a serious error in judgement every few minutes. Poor acting, bizarre action blocking, a narrative that lifts and falls like an autumn leaf in winter and an overall dreariness that saps the lifeforce of any of its audience members. In the crowd I succumbed willingly, joining the tidal response the way that Winston Smith is caught up in the shouting during a Hate Week screening in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Everyone would. If you didn't you would suffer the worst spite alienation since that time at primary school. If you watched it alone you wouldn't laugh; you would turn it off after a few scenes from annoyance or boredom something similarly oppressive. The midnight screenings of The Room are neither film appreciation nor interactive like Rocky Horror sessions, they are the Bear Pit and the Orwell Hate Week of today. To be in that crowd is to join the purgative good taste that Picasso correctly warned us was the chief enemy of creativity, a philistinism that shouts as deafeningly and laughs as woodenly as only norm-seeking cutlural explosions can: it brings us back the great middling void and from there we get to guffaw openly at this lame little misstep. When I checked Youtube for phonecam clips of midnight screenings I heard every single taunt I'd heard at the screening, each last one learned by rote and uttered as though fresh, night after night.

James Franco does not convince me that he's doing anything more than repackaging the mediocrity of these screenings, getting a chance to double the fun by playing the delusional narcissist at the phenomenon's centre with an accent as perfect as the wig. He can find none of the meaning Tim Burton found in Ed Wood and is left with another syllable correct heckle refined from a Youtube moment. And, really, when the warmest and most satisfying moment of your feature length film happens after the credit sequence it's time to reassess the expense of your time and effort.

Review: PALO ALTO

When you're bored, horny and under twenty the days go slow. Two friends sit in a car in a carpark because they might as well and play what if games. Even these are too involved and when one of them refuses the other one's rules the latter drives the car into a wall as a big loud, impacting and pointless exclamation mark. As this film progresses with a kind of checklist of teen movie essentials it gathers the same kind of ennui as it's depicting but there's method in this and by the end its form has cooked and set almost because it might as well. And that's a good thing.

Teddy, blonde and cherubic has a limited talent as an artist but at least he uses it. He makes his own trouble but is aware of it. His best friend Fred is a barely controlled miasma of boredom and anger who would get anything he wanted if he wanted anything. His harvesting of pranks, thrills and backyard blowjobs only seems to lead him back to powerlessness and anger. April has a crush on her soccer coach (the ubiquitous and irresistible James Franco) and he has a crush on her and her babysitting nights with his son flick the intimacy meter needle toward danger. That kind of thing.

This film's narrative fashions an arc from a group of short stories that blend seamlessly enough to feel like one, if the creative writing class threads can be a little bare. A light motif about reversing one cigarette out of a new pack as a lucky one is used like a homework assignment (find a folky habit and use it to bring two characters together). Other moments play like character keynote exercises. Perhaps there are a few too many scenes which clog rather than widen the flow (the friend's stoned dad coming on to Teddy) by diverting from the already fragile central weave about the teens. While the grownup world is kept at arm's length there is enough of it shown from an adolescent point of view to emphasise authority here and light-on care there. When we are sitting among the teens at their slobbering, crapulent parties, wincing at their doughy morality or waiting listlessly with them as they sit and stare into the surrounding inertia.

Most of the setups here are medium or close, intimate. The wide or long shots are used conventionally for scene establishment. However, this film does not come across as form-chasing as the short stories for beginners mentioned o'erhead. If anything, the approach reminded me more of Gus Van Sant's Elephant than Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Both of those are worthy entries in the teen genre but the former feels more of a model here for the admission it encourages of a lighter touch. Light is what you get here but, as it's Bloomsday at the moment I'll pun, light is what's needed to see what depth there is, and there is.

Is it too neatly wrapped at the end? Maybe. But maybe that is in tribute to the short fiction at its source. But there is a moment of pure cinema that I wish had been held longer. A character is driving against the traffic at night. Cars are swerving to avoid a collision. Apart from the clean analogy of the best defence against forces of chaos there is such a beautiful and gripping motion to it, a kind of weightless choreography that would be mesmerising ... if it were just a few seconds longer. Anyway.... whatever, dudettes.

The stream of Coppola's that sprang in the 70s with Francis and some monumental cinema is, like the poor, trickles still. And for all the Jason Schwatrzmans and Nick Cages there are Sophias. And for all of Sophia's formless Somewheres there are the stronger fabric of a Marie Antoinette or a Bling Ring. Now there's a Gia. I saw this film as a surprise given me by friends for my birthday. I saw the credits only at the end. Oh .... that's what it was chosen.

I had refused to put my specs on to read the title on the ticket given me and my friends honoured my wish to carry the surprise to the credits. I'm glad all that happened. Knowing the Coppola brand attached might have weighted my perception unfairly toward or from but the merits and drawbacks stood and it was with a smile that I saw the name come up. It didn't have to be good bad or indifferent but I happily recorded it as a curate's egg with a few genuinely impressive cinematic moments which the name sealed. Apocalypse no. But neither a retrod Heathers or Mean Girls. Most hauntingly, there is the solid empathy with a recently lived adolescence and a clear commitment to put it on screen. Next one, please.