Goodness gracious, this month. With the moviegoing year winding down, distributors large and small are bringing out their big guns – so this month’s indie preview includes hopefuls a-plenty for year-end awards and best-of lists, plus more great documentaries than you can shake a stick at. See them all. Nothin’ else going on, right?
The Disaster Artist
RELEASE DATE: December 1
DIRECTOR: James Franco
CAST: James Franco, Dave Franco, Seth Rogen, Ari Graynor, Jacki Weaver
This dramatization of the making of the Bad Movie masterpiece The Room has so many inside jokes, big reveals, and little winks to the source material that it’s hard to know exactly who it’s for; I can’t imagine seeing it without seeing The Room, and its celebrity-testimonials opening sequence aside, not that many people have seen The Room. But the people who have are going to love this. And to be fair, there’s more to it than just the origin story of a particularly inexplicable (yet quotable!) piece of junk; director Franco and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (The Spectacular Now) slyly explore the artist’s essential need to risk looking stupid and how that confidence can translate to blissfully bad art, but also – audience implication alert! – how the desire to point and laugh at bad art so often does a disservice to all involved.
