SECOND SCREEN
Back in 2003, a hastily assembled film crew spent several million dollars shooting a film about a San Francisco love triangle. It was called The
Room and was directed, written and produced by an exotically accented man called Tommy Wiseau, who also took the starring role. It is, by all accounts, one of the worst films ever made but has, over the years, gained a cult following for its sheer creative ineptitude.
The Disaster Artist (15A) ★★ ★, which James Franco merely directs and stars in, is the dramatised story of how The Room came to be made. It has its moments but, for me, not quite enough of them, although a supporting cast that includes Sharon Stone, Judd Apatow and Melanie Griffith should help it at the box office. The Man Who Invented Christmas (PG) ★★is the rather frantic and over-imagined story of how Charles Dickens shrugged off three flops in a row and mounting financial worries to write A Christmas Carol. Downton’s Dan Stevens gives it his best as the celebrated author without ever quite making the part his own. Elsewhere, Christopher Plummer is decent as Scrooge while it’s nice to see Simon Callow settling for the role of his illustrator, John Leech. Watching Michael Haneke’s Happy
End (15A) ★★★is a bit like taking an exam in advanced European art-house cinema. Watch it by yourself or in the wrong mood and you won’t crack a smile: fail. But watch it with a knowledgeable crowd, who know their Haneke and the genre of the bourgeois French family that he gently mocks here, and… well, you won’t be falling about laughing, but you will have passed.