麻豆视频

One of the things I didn鈥檛 do during the Christmas break was bother with cramming into a packed theatre after paying over $50 to see the new Star Wars film, The Last Jedi.聽

I instead watched The Disaster Artist, which is better than Star Wars because it accomplished storytelling properly, which is the foundation any good movie stands upon.聽

The Disaster Artist is a semi biographical story about the creation of one of the worst films of this century, The Room. Tommy Wiseau acted in and directed The Room and it was released in 2003. At a cost of about $6 million, its box office results were closer to $1,800 than into the millions.聽

Greg Sestero, who played a lead role in The Room, wrote an entire book entitled The Disaster Artist, which is about the creation of the film and the insanity and mystery that is Tommy Wiseau. The book very recently was adapted into a movie and it has been making its rounds through various independent cinemas around the world.聽聽

Wiseau was an immigrant who fled Europe鈥檚 Eastern Bloc around the time the Soviet Union was killing people in Czechoslovakia and Hungary to send a message, to other Eastern Bloc countries about where renitence to the Soviet Union will get you.

He ended up in Paris where he was living in a sort of halfway house. While he was there he ended up being abused by police as a result of being mixed up with drug dealing. By the time he landed in the United States, his identity back in Europe was gone, his name was changed, and by 1998 he was a millionaire with an honest dream of wanting to make a great award-winning film.聽

One of the most famous and ridiculous things Wiseau did that got everyone working on The Room really concerned was he bought all the equipment for the production of the film instead of renting it. Pro-grade movie equipment then and now is expensive to purchase, but Wiseau did it and that was only one of the many odd unexplainable quirks Wiseau had. The people who worked with Wiseau on The Room were more his victims than his employees because Wiseau was very difficult to work for.聽

The Disaster Artist tells a story about how Sestero and Wiseau became friends to make it in Hollywood and how Hollywood and Wiseau鈥檚 bizarre behaviour tore that friendship apart.聽

The Last Jedi, on the other hand, is bad because it is a marketing gimmick. Additionally, there is evidence that Disney gave people jobs on that film because of their skin color. That is called affirmative casting and it unofficially happened with its director talking about his feelings towards the under-representation of people of color in past Star War films.聽

Affirmative casting or affirmative hiring when it comes to business is almost always a public relations stunt.聽

The most obvious marketing ploy was the Prog Owl, which existed in the film to have little kids yelling at their parents to buy it for them. Also the mass production of Star Wars memorabilia devalues the concept of collecting. I buy and sell antiques all the time and people collect things to have something special and rare, but if there are 10 trillion Prog Owls in circulation why collect it? You might buy it because you like the film, but if there are trillions of them out there, you don鈥檛 feel a need to take care of it or keep track of it.聽

To me everything about The Last Jedi rings loud of a cash register, and when the foundation of a movie is not storytelling but rather marketing strategies, that is when a movie just sucks.聽

The Room has been a lasting joke for a long time and so has Wiseau himself; that isn鈥檛 really the case anymore. The Disaster Artist does what all good movies do and that is tell a story. Storytelling is an inherent part journalism and if I wrote this column about how great Star Wars or The Disaster Artist is without even mentioning some things wrong with the film or even acknowledging what the critics had to say about the film that would feel like sponsored content to me. That type of content isn鈥檛 any different from the ads this paper runs to keep us operating, and the new Star Wars movie to me feels like a giant commercial with explosions.