2nd Greatest Movie Ever Made - The Disaster Artist - Film Review

The Disaster Artist is directed by James Franco and stars him, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Allison Brie, Zac Efron and Paul Scheer and is based off of Greg Sestero's non-fiction book of the same name.

Plot
Based off the book The Disaster Artist, it tells the story of Greg Sestero (Dave Franco) meeting Tommy Wiseau (James Franco), moving to LA with him, and the making of the movie The Room.

Review
I saw this movie last night and now I'm gonna tell you what I thought about it.

I said in my review of The Room that it's the greatest movie ever made, so by that logic, The Disaster Artist is the second greatest movie ever made.

This is one of the best movies of the year, this is in my top 5 movies of 2017. I can understand why this got a standing ovation at the SXSW film festival back in March.

I know I've brought up that I don't like Rotten Tomatoes, but I forgot to mention this in my review of The Room. This film got a 94% on there. Understandable, a lot of critics liked it, but The Room got a 26% rating. That's the same as Suicide Squad. Suicide Squad is much better than The Room, so I don't get why those two have the same rating. But it's Rotten Tomatoes, so who cares?

I have not read the book, but I really want to after seeing this. I've heard that it left out some parts from the book, like how the movie makes Greg look like a failure, despite being in other movies like Retro Puppet Master. But I haven't read the book so I'm just going by the movie.

Let's talk about James Franco as Tommy Wiseau. James plays Tommy very well, it's like he is Tommy Wiseau.

They bring up that Tommy doesn't reveal anything about himself, his age, how he got all that money, or where he's from. Tommy Wiseau said on Jimmy Kimmel that he came to the US from Europe and then grew up in New Orleans (that might be true). In this movie he keeps saying he's from New Orleans even though that accent says otherwise.  A user on Reddit came up with a theory that Tommy is most likely Polish.

However, it's unlikely we'll learn how old Tommy is or how he funded The Room. Although he once claimed to have funded some of the movie by selling and importing jackets from Korea. That's a lot of jackets. And he was pretty wealthy before production started. The Room cost $6,000,000 to make.

Back to James Franco, he is amazing as Tommy Wiseau and sounds just like him, it's almost a little scary how well he plays him.

Stay after the credits for a scene with James and the real life Tommy.

Dave Franco doesn't feel like Greg Sestero. He doesn't really sound like him and he doesn't feel too much like him. Not saying he was bad, he wasn't, but he didn't feel like Greg Sestero unlike James who feels just like Tommy.

One of my favorite supporting characters was Sandy Schklair (Seth Rogen), he pretty much directed some of The Room as Tommy was caught up in his acting role.

Zac Efron is in the movie as Dan Janjigian, who played Chris-R in The Room. I really liked his scene where he acted out his scene with Denny, who was played by Philip Haldiman in The Room and Josh Hutcherson in The Disaster Artist.

Allison Brie as Amber is fine, but there isn't much to her.

All the other actors are good in here too.

This film says that the infamous rooftop "Oh Hai Mark" scene took 67 takes, when in real life it took 32.

They also showed in the movie that the reason Tommy showed his rear end in the movie was because he was inspired by a movie where Brad Pitt did it. I actually knew that before I saw this.

Apparently Tommy had no AC on set and showed up four hours late to set one day.

He also had a bathroom made only for himself in the set that was just a toilet and some curtains, but Seth Rogen's character points out that there is an actual bathroom with doors on set. There was a funny part where Paul Scheer comes out of it after using it.

Some of the characters in the movie bring up that some of the subplots never come back again, as Carolyn Minnott (Jacki Weaver), who played Claudette in The Room asks if the breast cancer subplot comes back, and Tommy says it's a twist.

There is a lot more that he did during filming but I can't remember them all.

Tommy planned for Johnny to be a vampire with a flying car in The Room. Unfortunately, he didn't do that.

Something they didn't bring up in the movie is that Tommy originally wrote The Room as a play that he was unable to get produced, then as a five-hundred page book that he was unable to get published, and then the movie that we all know and love.

There's a scene during the premiere of The Room where Tommy walks out of the theater crying because people are laughing at his "serious" movie, but Greg comes out and talks to him and reminds him that people are loving his movie, but not in the way he intended. He goes up in front of the screen and tells the audience that he meant for this to be a comedy.

In the opening, we have famous people talking about The Room such as Kevin Smith, J. J. Abrams, Keegan-Michael Key, Adam Scott and a few others in sort of a documentary style.

This was a really fun time at the theater and a lot of people were laughing out loud in some parts.

Overall, this is definitely in my top 5 favorites of the year, I think you should check it out even if you haven't seen The Room.

10/10

Previous review - The Star Wars Holiday Special 
Next review - The Empire Strikes Back

Read my review of The Room here.