movies
BY ANDY VALENTINE
Love is Tommy Wiseau
Assaulting your Eyes
Until You Go Blind
The Room puts itself, Casablanca to shame
THE ROOM: Written and Directed by Tommy
Wiseau. Starring Tommy Wiseau, Greg Sestero,
Juliette Danielle. Wiseau Films, 2003. R. 99 minutes.
44444
T
he way I see it, there are four types of
movies: those good, those enjoyably
bad, those so bad they are no longer
enjoyable, and those so much worse than
that they become enjoyable again. This
last category is reserved for only the most
devilishly atrocious, crusty, moth-bitten
movies — the ones that, far from receiving
the label “fi lm” or “art,” are so terrible they
transcend the realm of human expression
and launch the audience into a cosmic state
of disbelief. In short, such fi lms deserve to
dwell permanently in one of two places: for
those that don’t get it, the landfi ll; for those
that do, the DVD player.
Insane Clown Posse’s Big Money Rustlas
(2010) comes to mind, as does pretty much
anything made by the production company
The Asylum. But at the end of the day, the
paste-jewel-encrusted crown of rust and
dust belongs to The Room.
There are dualing schools of thought
regarding the tired-faced, ambiguously
European-accented celebrity behind The
Room: One declares that Tommy Wiseau
(star, director, writer and producer) is worth
no more than a chocolate frying pan full of
fecal matter when it comes to talent, while
the other considers him an absolute comic
genius.
I happen to be of a third school of
thought that claims Wiseau as an accidental
success: a man with enough sprezzatura to
realize that his surreal work of fi ction is a
fl op, re-label it as a “black comedy” and
start counting the Benjamins.
So what is this atrocity? This bizarre
freakshow of a midnight movie that Wiseau
calls a comedy? Most people are surprised
to fi nd that the fi lm contains no gore, no
vampire slaying, no zombie horde, no
anything remotely related to the B-horror
stuff that regularly fi nds its name in fl ashing
lights at late-night art cinemas.
In fact, The Room is a melodrama of
the worst variety — the characters aren’t
likeable, the acting is god-awful, and the
storyline trundles along as smoothly and
swiftly as a tricycle with a broken wheel.
All in all, Wiseau’s movie is like a
deranged, disjointed psychedelic trip
through a hall of horribly misused idioms,
failed wordplay and general phantasmagoria
— but it’s not a bad trip. Au contraire: This
is the most fun you’ll ever have watching
a fl ick.
On paper, the plot should read simply
and concisely as follows: The character
Johnny is engaged to the character Lisa.
Lisa is cheating on Johnny with the
character Mark.
In reality, the plot reads like this: Johnny
(Wiseau) is a banker (or something; no
one really knows, just another ambiguous
characteristic) who is engaged to Lisa
(Juliette Danielle). Together, they sponsor a
victim of extremely malnourished character
development named Denny (Philip
Haldiman).
Denny is involved with drugs, it turns
out, and owes money to a beanie-sporting
hoodlum named Chris-R (Dan Janjigian).
Their friend Peter (Kyle Vogt) is a
psychologist who, apparently, gets fed up
with the friend-group contradicting itself
all the time, so he up and vanishes midway
through the movie.
Lisa’s mother, Claudette (Carolyn
Minnott), is the worst mother ever and
coaches her daughter to stop cheating on
Johnny with his best friend Mark (Greg
Sestero), because — and only because —
Johnny is fi scally capable of supporting her.
While this is happening, two characters
named Mike and Michelle (Mike Holmes,
Robyn Paris) fi nd themselves needlessly
included in the storyline; in actuality, they
are just a college couple that use Johnny and
Lisa’s living room to do blowies in.
The plot’s true power is in the barbaric
chemistry between the dimwitted Mark and
the ever-“sexy” Lisa. Oh, and football and
tuxedos might have something to do with it
too. I’m not sure.
They say time fl ies when you’re having
fun — this movie proves “they” wrong.
The Room is the only movie in history
that is incredibly entertaining from start
to fi nish while still emanating a palpable
sluggishness. One can only imagine what
the confusing dialogue (“the barbeque
chicken was delicious rice, was cool”),
unraveled-and-then-never-fully
woven
yarns (“I got the test results back; I defi nitely
have breast cancer”) and visually assaulting
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and oh-so-wrenchingly arduous sex scenes
(of which there are fucking FOUR) must
be like to watch while actually tripping on
psychedelics. Thankfully, Wiseau has made
it so you don’t have to endure that — it’s a
placebo entirely by mistake.
Far from being coherent, The Room
also fails wholly at being philosophical,
meaning that it succeeds at being inane
and confusing. Lines like “love is blind”
and “live fast die young” weasel their way
into the dialogue at completely inopportune
times — the latter shows up during a scene
involving quick jogging, for instance —
and this fact lends itself well to conspirators
attempting to disprove Tommy Wiseau’s
claim that he is American.
Johnny’s accent is an enigma — a
downright jawbreaker of a puzzle. Multiple
words are spoken with completely
confl icting emphases throughout the movie
(look out for “world,” “chicken” or pretty
much any other word spoken by Johnny),
and then there are the incessant chuckles
that serve no other purpose than to fi ll the
gaps where, I presume, Wiseau forgets
his lines. To summarize, Tommy Wiseau
walks, talks, writes, directs, produces and
acts like an amalgam of approximately 90
different, half-studied cultural stereotypes.
The fi nished product ain’t pretty.
So, yeah, apart from critics completely
analrapizing the movie, fans slowly learning
to love it for entirely the wrong reasons, and
the whole shebang probably manifesting
itself as a shame-covered ulcer in the pit of
Tommy Wiseau’s stomach, The Room is a
success. What more can you expect from
a movie that was advertised entirely by a
single billboard?
And now for the million-dollar question:
Is this movie worth watching? As Wiseau so
eloquently puts it: “I’ve thought and I think
that a lot of people were relate to it, so The
Room is a place where you can go, you can
have a good time, you have a bad time, and
a safe place.”
Ladies and gentlemen, these are the
words of an accidental genius.
ew
The Room plays 10:30pm Friday, March 23, at Bijou Art
Cinema; late-nite passes accepted.
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EUGENE WEEKLY MARCH 22, 2012 21