7:00 PM, 15th September, 2018
** EXCLUSIVE CANBERRA PREMIERE SCREENING OF TOMMY WISEAU AND GREG SESTERO'S LATEST FILM, PRESENTED IN TWO PARTS IN ONE EPIC DOUBLE FEATURE **
Jon (Sestero) is a drifter wandering the streets of Los Angeles following a family tragedy which he may have made up. Harvey (Wiseau) is a mortician who carries out his business in a highly unusual way. When Harvey offers Jon a job at the morgue, both find themselves caught up in shifty business associates and betrayals, developing a strange kind of friendship that may also destroy them.
This is probably the closest spiritual successor we’re ever going to get to The Room, the Wiseau-Sestero collaboration from 2003 that made them cult heroes as the creators of the worst movie ever made. Their accompanying history was explored in James Franco’s The Disaster Artist last semester, and their new film is as much commentary on the relationship between the two of them as it is a story in its own right. It’s weird and twisted but with a heart to it.
With Sestero in the writer’s seat this time, Best F(r)iends is a tad more coherent than The Room, and while, yes, a runtime over three hours across both films is a bit of an investment, sometimes you need to just invest in the strange. Guaranteed to be like nothing else showing this semester.
Simon Tolhurst