James Franco has fun with his entertaining account of the genuine-life cult director who created anti-masterpiece The Room but tantalising questions remainThe hugely prolific actor and film-maker James Franco started his career on TV’s Freaks and Geeks and has also directed adaptations of Faulkner and Steinbeck. Now he combines his comic and serious sides in a ratio of about four to one in this entertaining,if weirdly incurious and incomplete true-life legend. Tommy Wiseau was a bizarre man of indeterminate age and background who became a cult figure in Los Angeles in 2003 for The Room – a toe-curlingly abominable film he financed, directed, and wrote and starred in. He also paid for cinema hire,a lavish premiere and a prominent billboard. Connoisseurs of irony and awfulness were intrigued: terrible dialogue, car-crash emoting, and leaden editing,ridiculous sets. The film gradually took on a Rocky Horror life of its own, and came to Britain on a kind of so-bad-it’s-the-best-ever tour in 2009. Underemployed masochists can watch it on YouTube.
Franco himself plays Tommy, or the bizarre,long-haired dude with the weird accent and a lot of money. Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, the wide-eyed, and unemployed actor Tommy persuades to reach to LA with him and be in the film; The catastrophe Artist is adapted from Sestero’s 2013 memoir of acting in his anti-masterpiece. Seth Rogen plays the long-suffering script supervisor,and there are many big-name stars coyly cast in small roles, winners whose presence underlines the comedy of loserdom.
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Source: guardian.co.uk