A guy named Johnny lives in a San Francisco apartment with his girlfriend Lisa. They have sex, hang out with friends, and have an odd relationship with a teenage boy named Denny—they start making out in front of him, then when Denny tries to make it a threesome, they boot him out. Out of the blue, Lisa confides to her mother that she's no longer in love with Johnny and she starts an affair with Johnny's best friend Mark. Lisa starts telling people that Johnny hits her, though we know that's not true. Johnny suspects that Lisa is cheating on him so he plants a tape recorder near the phone and soon has evidence. Johnny goes to Peter, a psychologist friend, for advice. There's a party, some horseplay with a football, a visit to a flower shop, and finally a confrontation which ends tragically.
The badness here is pretty much in all categories: script, acting, and execution. Wiseau wrote, directed and played Johnny, and does all three things like an amateur. Characters aren't consistent and most don't act in recognizably human ways: we don’t know why Lisa is unhappy with Johnny—to be fair, Wiseau does play Johnny like a half-asleep manchild with a heavy unidentifiable accent, but we assume he's always been like that, so we never know what changed to make her tired of him. Lisa's mother announces that she "definitely" has breast cancer, but nothing happens to that plotline. As far as Denny and Mark, well, who knows what the hell their motivations are. For the most part, the actors are not at fault. Most of them aren't pros, but you can see they're trying; they're just not getting anything from the script or the director. There's enough potential here, however, that you can see that this might have worked except for Wiseau's extraordinarily weird performance in the lead role. He goes from barely acting (his constant asides of "Oh, hi…”"to everyone who enters the scene) to going over the top (his delivery of "You’re tearing me apart!" in homage to James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause).
What makes this movie particularly interesting is how much we now know about its production. Greg Sestro, who plays Mark, wrote a book called The Disaster Artist about the film and his relationship with Wiseau, who comes off alternately as a mentor, a buddy, and a jealous would-be lover. After reading the book and watching the film made of it by James Franco, I wound up having sympathy for Wiseau, although for all the exposure he gets, he remains a man of mystery. This movie was obviously a labor of love for him—as were, I assume, the other self-published movies I've covered previously—and trashing it becomes a little harder to do. Well, not harder (I could fill another blog post relating all the things in the movie that make me laugh or stare in stupefaction), but maybe a little less fun. What looking at these four movies has done is made me realize that some bad movies represent the long, hard work of many people who are trying to express themselves through art. I'm inclined to be a little more forgiving while watching these small-scale films. A poorly-produced film is still a bad movie and may well deserve to be trashed by MST3K or in the privacy of a viewer's living room, but maybe they don't deserve the acid commentary they often get. A.I., Signs, Showgirls, and other awful works from Hollywood big shots still deserve it, but maybe we should be a little kinder to The Room. But I'll still go about chuckling as I recite lines like "You're my favorite customer" or "Me underwears" (The Room) or "…solar panels…" or "…such as seals" (Birdemic) or the all-purpose, "Oh, hi Mark!" And I should add that the Rifftrax guys who riffed on both The Room and Birdemic actually made watching these films fun and interesting; had I popped those movies into my DVD player cold without the riffing, I might not have finished them. (Pictured above is Mike "Me underwears" Holmes.)
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