Tommy Wiseau, the anti-visionary director behind the cult classic, The Room, has been busy. This time he's tethered to a much smaller screen: your laptop. Growing media giant, Machinma, provided Tommy with a venue to express his various eccentricities. He is the host/subject of a weekly web series called The Tommy Wi-Show.
On the Wi-Show, Tommy generally sticks to playing video games, although he occasionally drifts off into the stranger corners of his mind and viewers are rewarded with comedy gold. His trademark "Ha, Ha, Ha..." laugh makes many appearances as well. The production values aren't excellent, but they're good enough to fully capture the force of nature that is Tommy Wiseau.
I can't tell if I feel sorry or envious of the poor souls that are behind the camera for this one. It is a rare opportunity to be able to film one of the strangest human beings alive, but it's impossible to imagine how absurdly long it takes to make a series of 10-minute episodes. During the filming of one scene in The Room, Tommy reportedly took 33 takes to do a scene in which he had two short lines.
Props to Machinma and their crew for creating this.
Exclamation points are usually a bad idea when writing because they often convey too much enthusiasm. However, after reading that James and Dave Franco are set to direct and star in The Disaster Artist a.k.a. a movie behind the making of The Room, exclamation points seem more than warranted.
A film about the "Citizen Kane of bad movies" is long overdue, and James Franco seems like the perfect combination of consummate and weird to make it work. Production is still in its early stages. Only Dave Franco has been cast as Mark, the film's protagonist.
Franco's real challenge will be casting one of the strangest people in the history of show business, Tommy Wiseau. Wiseau, if you don't know, is the man entirely responsible for The Room. He wrote, directly, produced, edited and, of course, starred in the movie. There are few actors with the combination of skills and physical appearance to capture Tommy's alien qualities. Whoever takes on this role, despite not being the protagonist, will shoulder much of the burden of the overall quality of the film. Let's hope the Franco brothers are up to the task.
You should rewatch The Room to brush up on your knowledge or at least read my article. Until then, I'll just leave this here.
(Okay, this one is a little predictable, but it needs to be said) For the last few years, the nearly unrivaled cinematic catastrophe that is The Room has slowly been percolating through movie-going circles. Many fans are calling it the worst movie since Plan 9 from Outer Space.
A big part of what makes The Room so bizarre is also what makes it hard to describe. There are a series of almost completely unconnected subplots that weave in an out of a strange, almost bipolar love triangle between the main character, Johnny (Tommy Wiseau), his friend, Mark (Greg Sestero) and Johnny's fiance, Lisa (Juliet Danielle). These awkward relationships are characterized by intermittent, extremely intense, and definitely uncomfortable sex scenes.
The Room, not unlike The Happening, the last bad movie I wrote about, is incredibly entertaining. The madness of each subplot (perhaps most memorably: a woman tearfully discovers she has breast cancer and proceeds to never mention it again) is matched only by the oddness of the dialogue. All that can be said of Tommy Wiseau's portrayal of the main character is that it will leave you astonished.
The guys over at CinemaSins did an excellent job skewering The Room. Frankly, I'm surprised how short this clip is.
As a bonus, here is writer, producer, director and main actor, Tommy Wiseau talking about his experience creating The Room as well as, wow, the finer points of comedy (see part 2). Apparently he's a misunderstood expert in the field. Enjoy.
Note: The man does seem like a nice guy, I'll give him that. He's no Uwe Boll (who's up next).
Most movies run the gambit in quality from mediocre to pretty good. Every so often a movie is great, and a few films manage, despite a great deal of effort and money, to be terrible. Once in a few years, a film arrives on screen that manages to stand out, even with other great movies (many critics are saying Boyhood might be one of those films, you can watch it and decide for yourself).
However, as many movie goers familiar with M. Night Shyamalan's recent work know, there are also some movies so bad, so transcendently awful, so magically inscrutable, they manage to jump to the other end of the quality spectrum and become just as entertaining as the excellent movies. Sometimes a film is just so terrible, it becomes good. More than good, it can be great. One of my favorite films is in this category. The same might be true for you as well. This is the first installment in a series that could potentially be very long.
Note: Some terrible movies are god-awful because the film is lazy or basically engineered to suck. Those, generally, are unwatchable (see Transformers franchise).
The Happening-currently at a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes
Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel tried their hardest to make this good. The infamous Mr. Shyamalan did as well, I assume. It was to little avail. If you haven't heard of The Happening, it is a adventure-horror flick based around the idea that nature has had enough of pollution. The premise is even a fairly creative one. Plants have begun excreting a pollen (or something) that makes people commit suicide. Could be kinda cool if done well, right? We will really never know. The dialogue is so honky it's funny. Characters speak out of character constantly, state the obvious, and talk to fake trees (below).
Interestingly, the most fun in watching The Happening comes from the idea that is supposed to inspire the greatest amount of fear: the death sequences. The suicides in The Happening are so absurd it almost seems like creative genius. In one instance, a violinist is hit with the sickness mid-recital and proceeds to attempt to swallow his bow. It's great.
The Happening is a movie I strongly regret not seeing in the theatre. A friend of mine had the privilege of catching it right as it came out, so the theatre was packed. He related to me the experience of seeing it as one of the best he'd ever had in a theatre. The whole audience, one by one, slowly realized the utter horribleness of what they were watching and united to insult and make-fun of every terrible scene that came on screen. The Happening, it turns out, is a movie that brings people together.
The Room is owning every discussion of bad movies I've heard recently, and this movie certainly deserves a shot, so watch The Happening. Check out the clip below for a taste.
Also, watching with the RiffTrax commentary is a great idea. The MST3K people are doing god's work.
