The Room

Ben and I had the privilege of viewing Tommy Wiseau’s magnum opus, The Room, this friday.  You may have seen The Room on Youtube:

This is not an isolated example of this movie being weird.  If anything, this is TAME compared to the rest of it.  It doesn’t make sense.  No matter how you try to justify this film’s existence every explanation peters out before the finish line.

Wiseau spent $6 million dollars of his own money to produce this (where did the money come from?), hiring a serious film crew to produce his masterpiece.  He could not decide which format to shoot in so he commissioned a special machine that juxtaposed a 35 millimeter camera and an HD camera and shot in both formats at once, causing horrible framing problems.  He wrote, directed, and stars in the film, but none of the dialogue seems even remotely human.  There’s also a very enlightening behind the scenes doc and a truly amazing Director’s interview (sadly, no commentary track).  Oh, but perhaps the best thing – that scene on the roof?  It’s shot in a basement. In fact, all the exterior roof scenes were actually shot indoors WITH GREEN SCREENS.  This is because after filming them once in an alley Wiseau thought they lacked that extra punch, so he had all those scenes reshot ‘outside’.  Makes sense, right? I don’t need to mention that the acting is just stunning. More after the jump.

It’s hilarious, of course, but about halfway into it Ben and I had the feeling that maybe we shouldn’t be laughing.  It’s possible that Mr. Wiseau is actually just a very highly functioning mentally handicapped individual in which case this movie is pretty impressive.  But then how do you explain his evident independent wealth?  These are the possibilities we weighed:

1. Tommy Wiseau is a highly-functioning mentally handicapped person.  Perhaps like Aspergers or something.  Ben’s idea was that he’s like Charlize Theron in season three of Arrested Development.  Lots of money, sometimes makes sense, but still a MR.F.

2. Tommy Wiseau is a cast-away alien attempting to fit into our human world who constantly gets in hot water thanks to his hilariously misguided attempts to relate to people.  He’s lovable, sweet, yet fierce when he needs to be!  I guess he has a lot of space-money or something.  [Seriously, I should write the pilot for this.]

3. Frankenstein monster.  Actually, if you think of the whole movie with Tommy Wiseau as a Frankenstein monster it’s a lot more poignant, sweet, and sad.  He has all this money because he can live forever, duh, and he stumbled across some nazi gold in Dracula’s castle which has been great for financing his budget art-house flicks. And yes, this makes the movie a lot more believable.  But then you still have to explain why people act so strange even when he’s not around. Visually, though, I think it’s a great match:

So at this point I’m not sure what to say.  But I’m definitely going to see it again and spread it to as many people as I can find.  Kind of like a veneral disease, only, well, actually, I guess it is a lot like a veneral disease.