Saturday, November 13
Room 107, Star Metro, 7:05
I photographed the bathroom before we left and got a slightly different image from the one I expected. I had not expected to find myself in the picture.
The flight left late and slowly. The flight, we learned, would take seven hours and forty minutes.
On the outbound flight the crew could not get the entertainment system to work, which scarcely mattered because we left late in the evening and flew through the night when all good passengers should don their eye masks, curl up, and sleep. This time it did matter and, hooray, the entertainment system had begun working before we sat down.
I spent the first part of the flight watching The Disaster Artist, a movie I had vaguely wanted to see for years. By the time it finished I had tears of mirth rolling down my face.
James Franco directs, and stars as Tommy Wiseau, a man trying to make a movie with little or none of the required skills. Franco does one of those “more than acting” jobs that fills the entire screen. He captures perfectly what one critic said about Wiseau’s performance: he performs like “Borat trying to do an impression of Christopher Walken playing a mental patient.”[
Tommy Wiseau actually exists, as does the movie in the movie, called The Room, which(in real life) people have described as “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”. It has now (of course) become a cult classic.
By the time I land I desperately want to see this movie.