The Citizen Kane of bad movies
For those people who haven’t seen it, The Room screens this Friday and Saturday night at the Film House. This is a film that is awful in every respect: the script, the direction, the editing, the acting, the soundtrack, even the sets are terrible. There’s nothing to redeem it other than the enjoyment you’ll have seeing it.
The Room is the best of what’s bad, an enduring cult phenomena that’s still routinely screened in cinemas over a decade after its release, often at midnight with audiences yelling at the screen and throwing stuff in a manner similar to the rituals surrounding The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s being screened at the Film House so audiences can take it in before the much-heralded film it inspired, The Disaster Artist, begins its exclusive December run at the Film House.
Tommy Wiseau wrote, directed, starred in, produced and financed The Room. Inexplicably, the mysterious Wiseau dumped $6 million of his own money into realizing the vision for his cinematic atrocity that was released in 2003. Intending to make a romantic drama, Wiseau ended up making one of the funniest films of several decades, one many critics cite as the Citizen Kane of bad films.
The Room is so inept, and hilarious because of it, you feel sorry for anyone out there who takes an honest-to-goodness shot at crafting comedy for the screen. When
something like The Room generates so many laughs perhaps the hard work of humour should be handed over to hacks, switch out the monkeys’ typewriters for cameras and wait for comedic gold to be inadvertently created.
Of course, the laughs in The Room hinge on irony, a style of humour that we keep hoping we’ll exhaust but are compelled to employ in order to match elements of our lives like news of the world.
Owing to its inherent duality, the ironic is often a cul-de-sac that leaves little place to go. Undaunted, the talented and ambitious director and actor James Franco has decided that The Room is so incredible, it’s worthy of, well, another film. Based on a tell-all style book by Wiseau’s friend and co-star Greg Sestero, Franco has created The Disaster Artist.
Opening exclusively at the Film House on the day of its national release, The Disaster Artist has garnered great praise for preserving the uncommon humour of The Room while also telling the story of the passion and creative drive that brought it into existence.
Hollywood loves to make films about itself. Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the Cohen’s Hail Caesar!, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Altman’s The Player make a short list of examples, but The Disaster Artist might be the most tragicomic self-reflective look at filmmaking to date. And Hollywood lined up to be part of it. The Room stars Seth Rogen, Dave Franco (brother of James), Alison Brie and includes bits by Sharon Stone, Zac Efron, Melanie Griffith and Bryan Cranston.
Critics are heaping praise on The Disaster Artist. Franco has explained his aim was not to make a parody of The Room but to explore the human need for acceptance, the challenge of communicating a vision to others, and taking life’s hard knocks and creating from that experience. Franco’s empathy is what gives The Disaster Artist its charm. It recognizes Wiseau as an outsider artist, but an artist all the same.
Two screenings of The Room and ten exclusive screenings of The Disaster Artist are sponsored by Niagara’s Oast House Brewers.