I approved of James Franco‘s The Disaster Artist (A24, 12.1) in my 10.25 review, but at the same time I called it a curio — a decent stab at conceptual humor that generates a kind of chuckly vibe on a scene-by-scene basis.  Watching a clueless asshole (i.e., Franco’s Tommy Wiseau) behave like a clueless asshole isn’t all that funny if you’re watching what that’s like on a line-by-line, incident-by-incident, humiliation-by-humiliation basis.

Then something happened two or three days later. I began recalling a seriously weird moment from the film, and then it became an ear bug — playing over and over in my head. I’m speaking of a moment when Wiseau performs a spazzy, primal-scream thing during a San Francisco acting class. “Aagghhhh! Aaagghhhh! Aaaggghhhhh! For some reason I can’t get this screaming out of my head, which is probably an indication that Franco has done something right. Now I’m thinking it might be a classic bit.