DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
There are a lot of bad movies out there. Most fade into obscurity, as what makes them so awful is that they’re simply forgettable wastes of time. Yet every now and then a bad movie comes along that becomes a timeless classic based solely on its staggering ineptitude. These films set the standard by which all other bad films of their time or genre will be judged. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians may be bad, but it still can’t reach the depths of Plan 9 From Outer Space. And as cringeworthy as Ernest Borgnine and William Shatner are in The Devil’s Rain, that film is Citizen Kane when put up next to Manos: The Hands of Fate. And so it is with The Room, which does for indie dramas what Plan 9 did for alien invasions and Manos did for satanic cults: demonstrate, hilariously, exactly how not to make these kinds of movies.
What makes these films truly fascinating – for longer than the unintended hilarity alone would warrant – is the thought that there are artists with personalities so strong and visions so clear that they can actually see these films through to completion. So, into the pantheon that includes Ed Wood and Harold P. Warren, let’s also admit Tommy Wiseau, the writer, director, star, producer, and executive producer of The Room. And, based on these interviews conducted by the Onion A.V. Club and LAist, either a certified nutjob, or a modern-day Andy Kaufman.
Wiseau plays Johnny, a regular guy with a heart of gold and the most improbable head of hair ever found on a banker. His fiancée is a fickle creature, who no longer loves him. We know this because she tells her mother this fact in nearly every other scene, as if it’s brand new information. Her mother may have other things on her mind, though; as she mentions offhandedly in one scene, she’s just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Not that we ever hear mention of that seemingly important piece of information again. This just scratches the surface of the funhouse mirror of nonsense that is The Room, a cult hit on the west coast finally making it to E Street’s midnight movie series for the next two weekends. This is best seen with a crowd, otherwise you might not believe that you just saw a pickup game of football in which four characters are inexplicably wearing tuxedos. Or a timeline that doesn’t seem to follow conventional rules of time and space. Or a priceless scene in which one character is nearly murdered and admits to owing money to drug dealers, but, like mom’s cancer, it is never brought up again. The list could go on and on. Cinematic travesties this complete only happen once in a generation.
View the trailer.
Friday and Saturday at midnight, this weekend and next weekend at E Street.
