My love for The Room has not been an easy road. It took months of fine tuning, refinement, some conformity and skipping doses of my meds to get down to the level of Tommy Wiseau and his unmitigated cult masterpiece. Whether you’ve seen the movie in its true form, whether you’ve seen it play on the April Fool’s Day airings on cable television here in America, whether you were there during the great tirade of Wiseau on online critics, “The Room” and its charms are almost impossible to ignore. It’s a movie so bad, so inept, so unbelievably painful, it’s almost impossible to comprehend anyone thought it would be great on-screen, “The Room” is a film I constantly quote to this day–ohai Mark!
Whether or not you want to believe the cult clout for this was intentional or not is up to you, but that’s the mystery of “The Room” and the allure. It’s like sitting through a night club magic act and watching the magician flub through one gag after the other until eventually you look around wondering “Is he really this bad, or is this some sort of performance art?” An affront to everything independent cinema, “The Room” can be seen in festivals and art house showings all over the country, and to describe it as something of a brilliant blunder is an understatement in every definition of the word.
Ohai Mark! I can still fondly recall waking up one night after a nap to see “The Room” playing over the normal programming on cable television. After the oodles of bad dialogue and profoundly disturbing repetition of sequence after sequence of football throwing and wearing grooms suits for no reason, and my screaming “What the fuck is this shit?!” over and over again, I thought that maybe this was all a trick. Maybe somewhere deep down in the excesses of a boil within the black hole in the Andromeda Galaxy there is a good movie to be had about a man whose wife refuses to stop boning his friend Mark. There’s something about a young man who just can not stop watching them have sex. There’s a woman who refuses to die from cancer.
There’s a sub-plot about drugs that goes nowhere. There’s a visit to the flower shop! And there’s a heavy fixation–and almost a near fetishizing–of football and formal tuxedos. It’s almost as if director Tommy Wiseau had no idea what Americans did on their free time and just assumed they threw footballs around in dark alleys and large public parks. And he used this as a form of method acting and improv that fails on all conceivable levels. Who actually plays football without actually playing the game? Wiseau shows the audience how! And how do you construct the most restrained outbursts of all time while mimicking chickens?
Wiseau shows his audience how! “The Room” has been a juggernaut of cult fandom since its confusing introduction almost ten years ago. To this day fans believe this to be one hell of a bad movie you can enjoy on the basis that it’s just so ineptly made and poorly written you can’t help but laugh at the disaster that unfolds before our very eyes. Wiseau insists the film was never meant to be taken seriously. And yet he’s very quick to flex his litigious muscles whenever he feels the need to take his anger out on the world and show how fed up he is at poor Lisa, who just wants to get laid by anyone but this slumped fore headed goon, goddammit. You can never be sure with madman Tommy Wiseau these days. Cheep Cheep cheep!
