YAY!!!! I get to be the 9,000th person on the internet who makes fun of "The Room"!!!

Heather got me a fascinating batch of birthday presents a coupla weeks ago---everything was in couplets. Two albums by The Brian Jonestown Massacre (“Strung Out in Heaven” and “Thank God for Mental Illness”) two books by or about Punk Rock/Counter culture legend Penny Rimbaud and a DVD copy of Tommy Wiseau's “The Room”, accompanied by its companion piece, Greg Sestero's making-of-the-movie book, THE DISASTER ARTIST (Don't get me started on the James Franco biopic. He's a tourist in this neighborhood at best---a condescending hipster colonialist with the stench of Hollywood Trash all over him----to quote John Waters, “here in Mortville we don't like social climbers!!!!”)

So, last night we finally cracked open “The Room” and watched it, and by the last half hour Heather was apologizing to me, which was unnecessary, but...

SWEET JESUS!!!! What the hell, Tommy Wiseau?????

I mean, I've seen enough comedic breakdowns on this thing to where I knew everything about it and everything that happens in it, but to see it all laid out in front of you, unexpurgated, back to front, naked, raw, ugly and sad, that's different....

My relationship with “The Room” has become a complicated one—I remember waking up one night  and throwing on “Adult Swim” only to see “Tim and Eric”----in fact, AS's ENTIRE SCHEDULE—was pre-empted by this horrid soap opera-looking thing where some greasy freak named Johnny was racing around having conniptions over who knows what and all the other cast run around wringing their hands over him, and I'm like, “who the fuck is this Johnny idiot and why am I supposed to care?!”

Years later, here it is, full on, and if that's not call enough for a Silkwood Shower, go pay attention to politics for a while.

Wiseau in recent years has usurped Ed Wood for the worst filmmaker ever mantle. To be fair, Wood never deserved that. His naïve charm, his pure gumption and his love for his profession rose above his deficiencies, or in many cases created a nice melange. Wiseau, likewise, probably doesn't deserve such distinction, as luminaries such as James Nguyen and Neil Breen are already making him look like Eisenstein. Wiseau, to his credit, seems to have an understanding that there is this thing out there somewhere called cinematography, and that it can be a nice creation.

If there's any value to “The Room”(Outside the memeworthy quotes---”oh hai Mark! Oh hai Lisa! Oh hai Denny! Oh hai Doggy! Oh hai gun barrel!”) it probably exists in the incredulous conversations one can have during or after (“Oh---damn---that was an hour and a half of my life!”---”What the hell were they thinking?!”). It's a similar phenomenon to what happens in the wake of “Cannibal Holocaust”, except that, with the former, there are bigger questions about the morals of filmmaking, beyond even the intended metanarrative, whereas with “The Room”, it kind of dies on the level of “The Room”----that was terrible, amirite?! Let me count the ways in which it was terrible...

As kind of a side note, a trailer is included on the DVD that undoubtedly happened after “The Room” started attaining cult status...Wiseau was trying to remarket it as a “Black Comedy”. HOLD ON. BULLSHIT. Sorry----you are not permitted to enter Annexia. I am the Black Comedy Police, and I said, NO. I'm an aficionado of Black Comedy----I'm a Black Comedy PURIST, a Black Comedy FUNDAMENTALIST, and my crazy-ass Black Comedy Madrasa says, NO, for the love of Yossarian, you don't get in, sir! Tough titty.

Not that I fault the guy for trying to make a buck, but NO---your pretensions of Black Comedy stop on the end of my fist, sir.

I could rip up “The Room” on any number of fronts---bad green screen, shit performances (although I have a hard time faulting the actors for being unable to convey a script that has no idea what it is to be a human), the sheer, destructive egomania of the auteur---but what I'm going to focus on is the real elephant in the room (or the elephant that ate the room)---the writing.

Great Googly Moogly. Let me take a second out to run my hands across the top of this desk just to make sure there are actual MOLECULES there. Okay. Okay. Okay. I think the universe is stabilizing. So, first you get the “Johnny” character (Wiseau himself), and he's a nice guy, very trusting and altruistic and he's all goodness and light, and (in view of the narrative) a man beyond reproach. It's almost like “Rashumon”, minus any of the cynical, knowing irony.

Then you've got Lisa, Johnny's fiancee---we learn over the course of the film that Lisa is “very beautiful”, a litany repeated endlessly by Johnny and others---she's also callous, duplicitous and completely self-serving, as evidenced by her mantra, “I'm going to do what I want.” You hear THAT a lot, too, as well as her constant response to anyone else's woes, “oh, don't worry about it, it'll be okay!” Lisa would probably qualify as a sociopath, but that's assuming, for five seconds, that “The Room” had any remote understanding of how human beings work.

Third of all you have Mark. Mark is Johnny's best friend. We know this because he repeats it continually, usually while preparing to bone Lisa. In fact, half the dialogue in this film is so repetetive and constant it's like an endless mobeius loop....to quote Heather, “if you made a drinking game out of half this dialogue you'd be clinically dead by the end!”

The last main character is Denny, a weird and disturbing boy-man who also lives in the building. We learn along the way that Johnny thinks of him as a son and pays both his rent and his college tuition. Denny is arguably the creepiest character on the story---he's a constant tagalong/human dingleberry and he has an unhealthy desire to be with Johnny and Lisa especially when they're trying to get intimate. Why? I don't know why.

There are other characters and other plot points, too (I'll get to those in a sec) although the main gist of it is the very simplistic structure of Lisa and Mark's betrayal of Johnny leading to his eventual hissy fit and suicide at the end. Other characters and plot points pop in and out for no reason whatsoever. Some rando couple pop into Johnny and Lisa's apartment and have sex for no discernible reason. Characters appear and disappear. Lisa's mother announces she has breast cancer, with all the crushing gravitas of last week's fender bender. Lisa blows off this revelation like she does everything else in the movie and it is never mentioned again. Denny is in trouble with a local drug dealer. This becomes an issue once and is then completely forgotten about. There is a scene at a coffee shop where we are treated to two sets of customers placing their full orders and being seated before Johnny and Mark come in, place THEIR full orders and are seated, whereupon the “important” slice of dialogue starts. WHAT THE HELL IS THIS-----SILAS MARNER???? Fuckin' TOLSTOY????

Throughout the story people behave in a way that is categorically unlike the way humans act ANYWHERE. People perpetually show up for visits or deep, heart-to-heart conversations that last 3 to 5 minutes and resolve zilch before getting back up and saying, “well, I've got to go,” and walking back out the door. I mean, this motif is CONSTANT. It's COPIOUS. It HAPPENS IN AN ENDLESS STREAM.

And then there's the football. THE FOOTBALL. THE GODDAMN FUCKING FOOTBALL. MEIN GOTT. Not that actual football games are taking place, but a perpetual bit of recreation and bonding the males in this movie engage in is that they go off somewhere with a GOD DAMN FOOTBALL and they all run around and toss it back and forth...these endless games of catch with the goddamn football!

So my theory is that Tommy Wiseau is actually a space creature---his mission is to report back to his alien brethren regarding life on earth and that “The Room”, rather than an actual film for human consumption, is his report back to the homeworld about us and what he believes we're like. His hypothesis is laughed out of the building and now he's stuck here, a la “The Man Who Fell to Earth”.

Heather did me one better and suggested “The Room” is actually a sly reboot of “Robot Monster”. Tommy/Johnny is actually supposed to be Ro-Man. Lisa is the oldest daughter Ro-Man must kill but develops feelings for. Mark is a hybrid of the patriarch/scientist and also the alpha male boyfriend of the daughter. Denny is the kid who dreams the whole thing (or DOES he???) Lisa's mother...? She might be one of those lizards they crib in from a different film, pretending it's a “dinosaur”. Yeah. I'm sure that's it.

There seems to be this whole school of film criticism out there, now, that encourages you to throw any sad, demented theoretical comparison out there, and posit it whether it can be backed up or not. Heather's “Robot Monster” theory is as sound as any of the others. I think it's time to nominate her for a Rondo....

In the meantime, do yourself a favor and check out “Robot Monster”----it's better than “The Room”. Or check out “Plan 9 from Outer Space”. Or “The Star Creatures”. Or “Manos: The Hands of Fate”. Okay---that last one was a tough call...nope. Sticking to it.

Later on we got some better entertainment going----ALL THE COLORS OF GIALLO featuring four hours of classic Giallo trailers with commentary by the great Kat Ellinger. A much more rewarding experience, and, dare I say it? Infinitely better than “The Room”.

UP NEXT: “The Meat Factory” (previously unpublished!) plus 2019's long range-but-attainable goals

'Til then....Aloha!