Review: "The Disaster Artist"

I am a virgin to “The Room,” at least the movie from end to end, though it exists as such a monumental cultural touchstone now that it’s impossible to be totally ignorant of its sideways charms.

Often called “the Citizen Kane of bad movies,” it has gone on to become a cult hit for its atrocious acting and nonsensical plot, with people packing midnight screenings to howl in laughter and shout out the dialogue in unison with the film, the same way their parents did for “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Google it and you’ll find a multitude of gifs and memes, often centered around writer/director/producer/star Tommy Wiseau’s hilariously inept line delivery (“You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!”), vague Eurotrash accent and odd looks -- like an ‘80s hair band singer unaware of the passage of time and the fading of fame.

Showbiz people have long been fascinated by “The Room” and Wiseau, and indeed “The Disaster Artist” begins with a montage of (mostly) recognizable celebrities talking about how gobsmacked they were by the film. Director and star James Franco, along with screenwriters Michael H. Weber and Scott Neustadter, have clearly created their movie as combination homage to/mockery of Wiseau.

He may have been a ridiculously inept filmmaker, but nobody can deny the man his commitment and passion, reportedly sinking $6 million of his own money into the project. No dummy, Wiseau has spent the years since “The Room” came out proclaiming that he meant it to be a comedy all along.

James Franco nails Wiseau’s Schwarzenegger-meets-Phonics speech patterns and odd affectations, and we get a great deal of amusement out of him and the film. I’m not sure if the movie ever truly gets us deep inside his head and reveals what makes him tick. As the closing scroll reminds us, to this day nobody is exactly certain of where Wiseau is from, how he got his fortune or even his real age.

Tommy befriends a wannabe teen actor, Greg Sestero, played by Franco’s real-life brother, Dave. Together they move to Los Angeles to be struggling young actors… although they don’t really struggle too much, as Tommy drives a white Mercedes and already had an apartment in L.A. in addition to the one in San Francisco. He resists any questions about his background, claiming to be from New Orleans, or the source of his prodigious wealth.

Greg is tickled to have someone supporting him financially and emotionally, and the pair set about the usual round of auditions and agency interviews, with hilariously predictable results.

At an acting class, Tommy is distraught when the teacher tells him he’s a natural screen villain, refusing to be laughed at or placed in a box. To buck him up, Greg says he should make his own movie, and we’re off to the races.

Tommy cranks out a script, drops a load of cash on a fourth-rate movie studio and hires a bunch of film veterans before they’ve barely finished their introduction. Seth Rogen gets in a lot of comic digs as the script supervisor who often acts as the de facto director, as Tommy’s on-set antics and abuse continue to spiral as the shoot goes along.

June Diane Raphael, Ari Graynor, Josh Hutcherson and Jacki Weaver play members of the cast, actors who desperately want a paying gig on a feature film but soon recognize they’ve signed up for a one-man disaster parade. They’re the real unsung heroes of “The Room.”

The primary dynamic of the movie is the relationship between Tommy and Greg, who gets cast as the second lead in “The Room.” Greg gradually begins to realize he must separate himself from Tommy’s chaotic influence, helped by the urging of his new girlfriend (Alison Brie). The Franco brothers play off each other very nicely, keeping things comedic without tipping over into daffy.

Bad movies are not exactly a novel concept for good filmmakers. Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” lampooned a man far weirder than Wiseau. “Troll 2” might argue about which film truly deserves the crown of “Best Worst Movie,” as it also had a documentary made about it that used that title.

“The Disaster Artist” is a very fun and entertaining film that amuses and informs, without every truly getting below the surface of these characters. Purely on amusement factors, I give it Hi Marks.

Video review: "Paper Towns"

The teens and early twentysomethings we see in the movies bear little resemblance to actual youth as it is experienced these days. “Paper Towns” is the rare exception, a film that regards young people as complex, fallible and capable of a grace even they couldn’t have envisioned.

Nat Wolff plays Quentin, a band geek who’s coasting through high school, just waiting for it to end so he can transmogrify into someone better, and less invisible. As a kid he used to pal around with his neighbor Margo (Cara Delevingne), who is the adventurous yin to his timid yang, but they grew up, and apart.

One night Margo takes Quentin on a magical journey of wrong-righting and right-wronging, which she promises will be the best time of his life. And it is. But then Margo disappears, and Quentin and his small circle of friends launch a quest to solve the mystery, track down Margo and – in Quentin’s mind, anyway – close the loop and make her his girlfriend.

Things don’t go that way, though I won’t spoil the wondrous ways in which expectations are subverted. Suffice to say, Quentin finds the thing he didn’t know he was looking for.

Based on the book by John Green, and written by the same guys who adapted last year’s hit “The Fault in Our Stars,” “Paper Towns” is a wise, sad, funny and realistic portrayal of what it’s like to live, love and yearn as a teenager.

Video extras are tremendous, and you don’t have to pay more for blu-ray to get some good stuff. The DVD edition comes with a feature length commentary track by Green and director Jake Shreier; photo gallery; four promotional featurettes; and “lightning round” dialogues between Green and his two main stars.

Upgrade to blu-ray and you add five deleted or alternate scenes, a gag reel and three making-of mini documentaries.

Movie:



Extras

Review: "Paper Towns"

"Paper Towns" is one of those films that starts out well, grows steadily stronger, makes you think it's going one way and then head-fakes in the other. When it reaches its destination it's a refreshing surprise, smarter and subtler than we'd imagined, and yet as we think back on the journey we realize it couldn't have arrived anywhere else without seeming false and forced.

Like last year's "The Fault in Our Stars," also based on a book by Indianapolis author John Green, it is keenly observant of teens not as we would like them to be, but closer to the actual neurotic, self-doubting, self-aggrandizing, glorious young adults they are.

Oops, I used "the words" -- young adult, abbreviated to YA, employed to describe, and often dismiss, an entire sphere of literature. Green is known to despise the term, with some justification.

All I'll say is that these young adult characters are believable, approachable and relatable.

Perhaps that's not a surprise, since the same screenwriting team behind TFIOS, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, penned this script as well. They also wrote "The Spectacular Now" and "(500) Days of Summer," which, along with the Green movies, pretty much comprises the list of the best films about young people of the last few years.

(I'd add "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," too.)

Nat Wolff plays Quentin, a dweeby band geek and academic overachiever who hasn't really stretched his wings his entire life. He grew up next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman (Cara Delevingne), an adventuress with a zest for mischief and boundary breaking.

But he resisted her siren call, and as their senior year of high school unfolds, she's become the popular wild girl and he's become... rather invisible. He mostly hangs out with fellow nerds  Radar (Justice Smith) and Ben (Austin Abrams), commiserating about the suffering existence they can't wait to leave behind.

Then one night Margo shows up at his window, and urges him to join her for an evening of revenge-taking and thrill-seeking.

"Tonight we are righting some wrongs. And wronging some rights. Basically, this is going to be the greatest night of your life," she insists. Margo insists a lot, and people generally go along with it. She also believes in random capitalization within words, lIke tHis, because "it's so unfair to the letters in the middle."

The proceed so have the promised night, which I won't spoil. Quentin is, needless to say, deeply smitten. But then something strange happens: Margo disappears. Days go by, no one has a clue where she is, her parents are used to this sort of nonsense and dismissive. Quentin is left to deal with the consequences of their antics, including Margo's best friend Lacey (Halston Sage), who feels wronged.

They launch an amateur Hardy Boys expedition, seeking out clues the mystery-loving Margo may or may not have left them as to her whereabouts. Eventually Quentin and his two buddies resolve to go on a road trip halfway across the country in search of her. Lacey tags along, as does Radar's girlfriend, Angela (Jaz Sinclair). (This is the sort of movie where even band geeks sometimes have girlfriends.)

None of this makes a terrible lot of sense for smart, ambitious young people who want to go to college and become oncologists and such. But it is good for them to occasionally get out of their comfort zone, especially the self-limiting Quentin.

The title comes from a real thing map-makers did, creating fake towns to prevent forgers from copycatting their work. It's also a knock at Orlando, the place where the characters live and also my own hometown, which often gets dismissed as ersatz and artificial -- usually by tourists who never make it far enough away from Disney and Universal Studios to glimpse O-town's actual downtown. Margo sees paper everywhere, searching for something authentic in life; like Holden Caulfield, she has a tendency to see phonies all about.

Director Jake Schreier, helming his second feature, elicits layered and effusive performances out of his young cast. Wolff is slyly charming, while Delevingne has the unenviable task of having to seem larger than life, and does.

But legends are embellishments of the truth, and in the end "Paper Towns" is more about busting myths than building them up. This is an intelligent, funny, sad yet hopeful take on the folly of waiting for big miracles, instead of creating small ones of our own.

Review: "The Fault in Our Stars"

"The Fault in Our Stars" is an exhausting movie. And I mean that in a good way.

It's been awhile since a film left me so emotionally wrung out. This tender-yet-sharp drama about two teenagers with terminal cancer falling in love, based on the best-selling YA book by John Green, promises to be the no-BS version of tragic young romance. And, mostly, it is.

"This is the truth. Sorry," introduces/apologizes our heroine, Hazel Grace (a remarkable Shailene Woodley).

Hazel, 17, had thyroid cancer which has spread to her lungs, forcing her to constantly breathe with the aid of an oxygen tank and counting her dwindling days on this mortal coil. Smart and realistic, she attends a church support group for young cancer patients, mostly to appease her loving but slightly smothering parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell).

There she meets Augustus Waters, an exuberant character exuberantly played by Ansel Elgort. A former cancer patient himself -- his right leg is prosthetic, rendering him a cyborg, he boasts -- he's mostly there to support his best friend, Isaac (Nat Wolff), who sacrificed one eye to the disease and is in danger of losing the other.

Augustus is a braggart and a charmer, the sort of fellow who coasts through life buoyed by his own outsized expectations for himself, telling the group he fully expects to live "an extraordinary life." But it's the retiring Hazel he can't keep his eyes off of, and soon the pair have struck up a deep friendship that dances right up to the line of love in full bloom.

The chemistry between Woodley and Elgort is terrific, with her the wary, inner-directed girl obsessed with damaging as few other lives before she dies, and he the world-conquering hero who knows not fear or hesitation.

Screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who wrote the terrific "(500) Days of Summer," don't go in for a lot of storytelling tricks to endear the couple to the audience. Rather, they focus on building the connection between Hazel and Augustus, and through them we are drawn in.

Director Josh Boone mostly stays out of the way, eliciting strong performances from his cast while remaining as true to the book's tone as possible. (It's unread by me, but from what I've gathered it appears to be an extremely faithful adaptation.)

Soon after meeting, Hazel and Augusts each invite the other to read their favorite book. His is the novelization of a video game ("Counterinsurgence 2"), showing that Augustus is bright if not worldly. Hazel gives him "An Imperial Affliction," the tale of a girl who dies of cancer, written by a mysterious author named Peter Van Houten who has decamped to Amsterdam, eschewing his fans and promising never to write another word.

Later, Hazel and Augustus will get a chance to travel to the Netherlands to meet him, a trip filled with magic and discovery, except for the actual part where they meet their beloved author (Willem Dafoe).

(Here's a pro tip on the interpersonal skills of writers: Expect to be disappointed.)

The film is set in Indianapolis (Green was born and lives here), though it was shot in and around Pittsburgh. (Darn those miserly Indiana film tax incentives!) If you look hard one can spot a few cues in the background, most notably a picnic scene at the "Funky Bones" outdoor art exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art's 100 Acres. Augustus also rocks a Rik Smits jersey at one point.

"The Fault in Our Stars" is ultimately a life-affirming film, if one that favors sour realities over saccharine fantasies. "I don't want this particular life," Hazel admits. This movie is not afraid to show the bottom of being 17 and knowing you are soon to die, and that's pretty low. But the view from there is still uplifting.

Review: "The Spectacular Now"

The irony inherent in the title of "The Spectacular Now" is that living in the moment means you could be jeopardizing all the moments ahead of you. So it behooves you to make the right now terrific -- or at least convince yourself it is.

Perhaps that's why Sutter Keely is a walking fountain of self-affirmation, constantly commenting rosily on whatever his current situation is: "This is awesome!" "I love all of you guys!" "Together, we're invincible or something!"

As played graciously by Miles Teller, Sutter is the very model of self-composed joviality. He works so very hard at appearing laidback and uncaring. He's fine-tuned his patter to such a perfect pitch, fooling teachers, parents and fellow high school seniors, that he's even bought into his own myth.

Sutter is a man without a plan, and stubbornly so. When we first meet him he's crafting a college application essay sure to get a quick toss from every reputable institution in the U.S. He's writing blithely about getting dumped by his girlfriend, Cassidy (Brie Larson), with whom he was half of the most popular couple in school.

He blows off the breakup, and quickly latches onto Aimee Finecky (Shailene Woodley) on the rebound. She's a quiet, driven girl who practically disappears into the crowd of their school -- in other words, she's Sutter's polar opposite.

It's pretty obvious to anyone watching that Sutter is hoping to inspire enough jealousy in Cassidy to spur her back into his arms, but she soon hooks up with an overachieving jock (Dayo Okeniyi) and Sutter finds himself stuck.

It's also rather evident that Aimee is completely clueless in the ways of romance, even the teen kind, and takes all her cues from Sutter. He sort of latches onto her, and part of his personality begins to bleed into hers.

One of the primary ways is drinking. While occasionally getting blackout drunk at weekend parties, Sutter has achieved functional alcoholism at age 17, skating through the day with a near-constant buzz. He carries a flask and spikes his omnipresent oversized soda to keep it going.

Soon enough Aimee is following suit, and we sense it's only a matter of time before their pairing leads to disaster. Woodley, so good as the frustrated daughter in "The Descendants," practically aches with innocence, so clearly thrilled to finally "have a thing," aka to be defined in some way -- even if it is as the class cutup's girl.

Director James Ponsoldt, who directed last year's largely unseen "Smashed," is clearly fascinated by stories of addiction and self-destruction. While alcoholism isn't as front and center as it was in that film, "The Spectacular Now" is the story of people who are on their way to serious problems.

Alcohol is easily accessible, taken as matter-of-fact, and consumed copiously. Parents are largely absent or indifferent.

I especially liked the way Ponsoldt strives to make his actors seem like real teens, blemishes and all -- quite literally, in fact. Teller and Woodley display the spotty complexions and scars of flesh-and-blood young people.

The screenplay is by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who wrote the wonderful "(500) Days of Summer" a few years ago, based on a novel by Tim Tharp. Its strength is never feeling forced or constructed, the dialogue and exchanges organic and unforced.

At times, though, I felt like the story focused too much on Sutter's problems and not enough on Aimee's motivations and emotional identity. He is the subject of the movie, and she is the object whom he acts upon.

But even if it is a character portrait rather than a star-crossed love story, "The Spectacular Now" lives its moments with bravery and truth.

Video review: "(500) Days of Summer"

One of the unexpected delights of the cinematic year, "(500) Days of Summer" was the sleeper hit that reminded us romantic comedies don't have to be formulaic and gooey.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel play the couple, who, unlike in most films of the genre, don't spend 80 minutes clashing with each other before suddenly realizing they're in love.

They hit it off right from the start -- mostly because Summer is a fearless gal who makes the first move on office drone Tom -- and spend the next 500 days riding the ups and downs of modern romance.

Director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber coyly shift the timeline back and forth, using numbered titles to let us know which day we are in the progression. So we know that Tom and Summer hit a rough patch somewhere around Day 320, while Days 50-100 are that love-stupid phase where everything seems magical.

Extras aren't exactly huge in scope, but are fairly substantive and engaging.

There's a little over 14 minutes of deleted and extended scenes. Most of it is the usual extraneous stuff that deserved to end up on the cutting room floor, except for a hilarious opposite-day version of the musical number set to Hall & Oates' "You Make My Dreams," with this time everything going awry -- the passer-by bumps Tom instead of smiling, the bird poops on his shoulder, etc.

Webb, Neustadter, Weber and Gordon-Levitt team up for a nicely bantering commentary track. Among the revelations is one of the writers confessing that "about 75 percent" of the fracturing relationship depicted in the movie actually happened to him. Talk about suffering for you art.

Told with original verve and hipster irony, "(500) Days of Summer" is funny, charming and smart filmmaking. It's a romantic comedy even the boyfriends will love.

Movie: 3.5 stars
Extras: 3 stars