The Disaster Artist

Would you like to see my Greek theater masks?

Grade: C +

Director: James Franco

Starring: James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Alison Brie, and Ari Graynor

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 45 min.

The Room is an awful movie. Not in a so-bad-it’s-good way. More like so-bad-you-can’t-believe-it-got-made. It’s regarded as one of the worst movies ever made, which as these things go also positions it as an enduring cult film, the kind where inebriated audiences gather at midnight cinemas to hoot as the screen and throw things around the theater.

All of that is more fun than The Disaster Artist, a loving yet slight retrospective on The Room and the relationship between its gonzo, long-haired creator, Tommy Wiseau (James Franco, who also directs), and Greg Sestero (Dave Franco), The Room’s co-star and Wiseau’s friend and housemate. They meet in July 1998 while living San Francisco, bound by a love for movies, particularly James Dean. They decide to strike out for Los Angeles to pursue their acting dreams. While Sestero finds irregular work in commercials, Wiseau is a train wreck, his overwrought emoting further hamstrung by an indefinite accent that sounds like a combination of Borat and Gru from Despicable Me.

There’s heady mirth in witnessing how Wiseau made The Room. It’s a disaster shoot, for sure, but one fortified by seeing an absolute novice manage to assemble the elements of a movie production, including the maddening yet impressive choice to shoot the entire movie in 35mm film and high-definition video using an apparatus that housed both cameras side-by-side and required two crews to operate. If anything, Wiseau’s incompetence illuminates the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. Wiseau fritters away his seemingly endless resources, insists on playing the lead role even though he can’t remember his lines, and generally abuses his crew—there’s a rather ill-timed sequence during which he insists on filming a love scene while nearly nude to the demonstrable discomfort of his powerless female lead actress (Ari Graynor). Wiseau’s caustic approach only worsens once Sestero moves out and in with his new girlfriend (Alison Brie). As hapless script supervisor Sandy Schklair, Seth Rogen serves the function of the Greek chorus, echoing and affirming the audience’s bemusement.

Tim Burton’s Ed Wood is another hagiography about a notoriously bad filmmaker, but Burton delved beneath inanity and explicated the motives and make-up of the man (along with those of his latter-day muse, Bela Lugosi). The Disaster Artist, adapted from Sestero’s 2013 memoir of acting in The Room, accomplishes no such feat. No one knows Wiseau’s age, where he originally hails, or the source of his unusually sizable wealth. They’re mysteries The Disaster Artist tout like badges of honor at film’s end, trying to capitalize on its protagonist’s enigma. Unfortunately, that lack of enlightenment merely reinforces a quasi-biopic shrouded in its secrets, never bothering to dig below the accents and eccentricities. Instead, Franco extends Wiseau redemption in real time culminating with The Room’s 2003 premiere, where Wiseau and his film are granted instant cult status from the audience instead of the ghastly greeting it actually received.

Prior to the closing credits, Franco’s inserts a reel of side-by-side comparisons between memorable scenes from The Room and Franco’s reenactments made for The Disaster Artist. The facsimiles are exact but superficial. They, like Franco’s performance and his film a whole, are exercises in affectionate mimicry.

Get Hard

Exactly who is carrying whom?

Grade: C

Director: Etan Cohen

Starring: Will Ferrell, Kevin Hart, Craig T. Nelson, Alison Brie, Edwina Findley Dickerson and T.I.

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 40 min.

Given the fact that Get Hard is premised around the offensive prejudices held by one of its lead characters, it’s sadly ironic that the film spends the bulk of its running time and attempts at comedy exacerbating racial, gender and sexual stereotypes. It starts with the inherent double entendre in the movie’s title, which is repeated to exhaustion throughout. It ends with a climax whose utter laziness is preferable to offending another demographic before the closing credits roll.

The teaming of Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart sounds like a match befitting the comedic zeitgeist, and even through this muck of a movie, that impression proves accurate. Ferrell plays James King, a wealthy hedge-fund manager engaged to a spoiled trophy wife-to-be (Alison Brie) whose father (Craig T. Nelson) is James’ billionaire boss. James’ elitist life is upended when he’s framed for securities fraud and sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin. Fearing the perils of prison life, James hires Darnell (Hart), his car washer and thus the only black person anywhere in his orbit, to teach him how to “get hard” and survive on the inside.

Here’s the hook: James presumes Darnell has been to prison because, well, he’s black. But Darnell’s closest brush with the law is inserting himself into a recitation of the plot to Boyz n the Hood. With the guidance of his gangbanger cousin Russell (the rapper T.I.), Darnell morphs into a state pen sensei training James on the fine arts of mad dog faces, crafting shivs and “keistering.”

There are obvious aspirations of Trading Places at play here—a scene where James and Darnell crash an aryan biker hangout also borrows from 48 Hrs. Writer-director Etan Cohen—who once wrote Idiocracy and Tropic Thunder, but also Men in Black 3—squanders the marriage of Ferrell’s blowhard doofus and Hart’s machine-gun mania on base humor with broad resonance. Beyond the race and gender gags, the plot constantly returns to prison rape yucks and a conception of even causal homosexuality centered around predatory practices and bathroom rendezvouses.

What’s equally regrettable is that there’s actually the kernel of an insightful comedy here. You glimpse it when James educates Russell’s Crenshaw Kings pals on the vagaries of white-collar crime, leading one to astutely declare that its even more “gangsta” than standard issue stickups.

These flashes can’t overcome the rank wrongheadedness of a script that compounds its insipidness with jokes and set-ups that will feel dated by the time you reach the theater’s exit door. It’s an Adam Sandler movie with funnier front men—not exactly the trading places the filmmakers had in mind.

The Five-Year Engagement

 

Grade: C +

Director: Nicholas Stoller

Starring: Jason Segal, Emily Blunt, Chris Pratt, and Alison Brie

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 4 min.

Beyond the requisite nude and crude guffaws, The Five-Year Engagement is a formulaic Judd Apatow production that strikes a creaky chord of monotony as a rom-com built around the deconstruction of a seemingly sturdy relationship. Off that basic premise, the film has already co-opted elements from 500 Days of Summer, Blue Valentine, and Like Crazy, and that’s just looking back through three years of cinema.

The film’s purported hook is that it begins where most romantic comedies end: a boy and girl, deep into a long-term relationship, deciding to finally tie the knot. Substitute Emily Blunt for Mila Kunis, and Five-Year Engagement could be the unofficial sequel to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, both collaborations between writer-director Nicholas Stoller and star Jason Segal.

Life becomes complicated as soon as Tom (Segal), a sous chef working in a high-end San Francisco restaurant, and Violet (Blunt), an aspiring academic psychologist, get engaged. Their impending nuptials are first upstaged when Tom’s oafish chef buddy Alex (a scene-stealing Chris Pratt) and Violet’s sister Suzie (Alison Brie) hook up and hurriedly hold a shotgun wedding. Then Violet, after being rejected by Berkeley, is accepted to a two-year research post at the University of Michigan. Tom, on the cusp of being named top chef of his own eatery, rather willingly leaves his job and moves with Violet to Ann Arbor.

The laughs in Five-Year Engagement—a film that feels as long as its title suggests—come in fits and spurts, filtered through a series of disjointed segments and sketchily written side characters. The acting talent often outstrips the material, particularly Violet’s coterie of college classmates (played by Mindy Kaling, Kevin Hart and Randall Park) and their pervy department head (Rhys Ifans), and Violet’s daft mom Sylvia (the wonderful Jacki Weaver). Chris Parnell slots in as a fellow faculty husband with a penchant for deer hunting and knitting. Brian Posehn—who plays Tom’s boss at Zingerman’s, a renowned hangout where Tom finds work making deli sandwiches—is basically asked to occasionally pop up and say something risqué. And Molly Shannon is onscreen for literally no more than 15 seconds.

So much feels off-kilter, including the fact that nothing is really impeding Tom from launching his own restaurant in Michigan, or that a bustling college town like Ann Arbor is cast as a barren, Dakota-esque winterscape that would trigger Tom’s descent into depressive cabin fever.

The appeal of Five-Year Engagement leans heavily on the interplay between Segal and Blunt. The two work well together—they practiced being as love interests in Stoller’s version of Gulliver’s Travels—but don’t seem completely at ease in their roles. Segal works best as the endearing goof (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I Love You, Man, The Muppets, and even Bad Teacher). He’s less convincing as the long-term love interest for Violet or a young, obsessively energetic minx like Audrey (Dakota Johnson), Tom’s flirtatious coworker. Frankly, Blunt doesn’t exude a tenth of the chemistry with Segal that she did with Matt Damon in the sci-fi thriller The Adjustment Bureau.

The Five-Year Engagement rambles along in the same vein as Tom and Violet’s courtship, with good parts that are generally worth enduring the mundane ones. But, the film is also like the stale donuts Violet uses in her oddball college research experiment: not very satisfying.

Neil Morris