Film Matters Magazine

The Disaster Artist (New Line Cinema, 2017)

When James Franco brought Tommy Wiseau up on stage to accept the Golden Globe for best actor in a musical or comedy, the circle for the cult film The Room had finally been completed. A cultural phenomenon since its initial release in 2003, The Room, directed, produced, and entirely funded by Wiseau, had finally been given the mass recognition Wiseau dreamed of. Deemed the Citizen Kane (1941) of bad movies, The Room has garnered a cult following (rivaled only by The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Jim Sharman, 1975) with quote-a-long midnight showings, spoon-tossing audience participation, and random screening appearances by Wiseau himself. Even after its release, Wiseau kept The Room in theaters for two weeks so it could qualify for the Academy Awards. In Wiseau’s mind, The Room had always been destined for greatness, regardless of the film’s critical impact. Simply put, The Room, is a symbol of accomplishing one’s dream through friendship, experience, and passion for one’s work. Ultimately, it is not the reception of the art that matters, but the journey and memories that the art creates. Nearly fifteen years later, The Disaster Artist (2017), a film based on the book of the same name written by The Room costar Greg Sestero and journalist Tom Bissell, explores these concepts by following the apparent true story of the making of The Room. Unlike The Room, The Disaster Artist is a truly great piece of cinema that is incredibly funny, honest, and that serves as a ballad for independent artists everywhere. Continue reading →

The Salesman (Filmiran/Memento Films Distribution, 2016)

The Salesman is the story of a play that outplays a play. Asghar Farhadi’s postmodern version of Death of a Salesman portrays the true face of a developing society, in which tradition and modernity encounter in chaotic patterns. The play within a play is the story of Arthur Miller’s modern drama, but it is also the story of many Iranians, who fall in the schism of a changing society. Filming began in 2015 in Tehran, and the movie was released initially on May 21, 2017, at the 69^th Cannes Festival. It stars Shahab Hosseini (Emad Etesami) and Taraneh Alidoosti (Rana Etesami) as a married couple, who are also the actors of Miller’s characters, Willy and Linda. The Salesman is not only an adaptation of the important scenes in Death of a Salesman but also a realistic problem drama, which voices the cultural challenges in Iran today. The film could have taken Farhadi to the Oscars for a second time, after his 2012 A Separation. However, Farhadi boycotted the ceremony, refusing to receive his award due to political differences triggered by Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13769, believing that such measurements against Iranians are unjust and therefore objectionable. Similarly, in his movies, he tries to implicitly show the real ambience of Iranians’ lives, when going through national and international changes, caused and influenced by global issues and policies. Continue reading →

The Dreamers (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2003)

One of the most undervalued films of the last twenty years is Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003), a masterfully wrought picture that serves, in equal parts, as a panegyric on the power of cinema and a warning to those who abandon that power in pursuit of pure aesthetics. The film, set amidst the popular riots that swept through Paris in 1968, follows the hedonistic sojourn of three young cinéastes: Matthew (Michael Pitt), a young American studying in France, and Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green), a set of Parisian twins whom Matthew meets and befriends at the Cinémathèque Française. Despite the turbulent, historic backdrop of the film, however, Bertolucci largely ignores the rioters; instead, the camera’s gaze is directed toward the three characters who, despite professing an ostensible solidarity with the ideals of the revolution, increasingly withdraw into a sequestered and sybaritic world of their own creation. And it is in this dissonance–between the power of ideas and the sterile, indulgent lives of those who hold them–that the true beauty of the film shines through. Continue reading →