PLEASE don’t feed the Tommy Wiseau

So, The Room is a 2003 film written, directed by and starring Tommy Wiseau, who we believe is from a country in Europe. If you’re wondering what it’s about … well, it’s not about anything. Technically, it’s the story of a man living in San Fransisco whose girlfriend cheats on him with his best friend. He finds out at the end of the film that she betrayed him, but before that we get a creepy obsessed teen, the oddest flower shop scene ever put on celluloid and lots of shenanigans involving a football. The Room also has sex scenes featuring Wiseau’s bare ass. No one should ever have to see that.

If you can’t tell yet, The Room is an awful film. Just so very, very bad. It’s up there with Troll 2 and Plan 9 from Outer Space in terms of badness, except those movies actually have plots. But like these older movies, The Room is accidentally hilarious and has been mocked all over the internet.

In the last week or so, Lindsay Ellis of thatguywiththeglasses.com — which has featured reviews of The Room before — went to a live screening of the movie and recorded some of her experience. Assuming it would be a Rocky Horror sort of experience, I was looking forward to a funny video. Unfortunately, it was much more somber than I expected.

Before anything else, I need to get this out; it’s frustrating to me that there was so much hate in the theater towards the main actress in this movie. Because we all know women are just fat slutty slut-sluts, right? Come on guys, she had to make out with Tommy Wiseau — hasn’t she suffered enough? It makes me angry that while watching a movie featuring Tommy Wiseau’s face and ass (both highly unappealing) so many of the drunk assholes in the audience just decided to focus on exaggerating all the flaws of the female character. I’m not particularly surprised that this happened … it just makes me sad. Like on the internet itself, if you give douchebags the anonymity of a crowd, you could very likely get a no-holds-barred onslaught of misogyny. OK, I’m stepping off my soapbox … now.

More than the unappealing sexist comments from the drunks, there was something that deeply disturbed me about this screening. Namely, Tommy Wiseau was actually there. And worse, audience members began cheering when he came into view.

Listen to me very closely … no one should cheer Tommy Wiseau. He didn’t do a good thing making this movie. It might be hilarious and entertaining to watch in small doses, but this is not a project that deserves praise. And this is certainly not a filmmaker who should be encouraged.

And this is my problem with this kind of event. The Room shouldn’t be watched in a packed theater. It should be watched in the shameful secrecy of your own home, with friends brave enough to endure it with you and clever enough to riff it with you. You can enjoy mocking the movie, but you shouldn’t be actually enjoying the movie. And Tommy Wiseau is going to these screenings believing you love the movie and love him.

The best case scenerio now is Wiseau lives off the movie’s successful cult following and doesn’t make another film in his whole life. The worst case scenerio is he uses this cult status to eventually raise funds for a new movie. I really hope that doesn’t happen. I mean, we’re already getting a Birdemic II …  in 3-D no less! The only thing I want to see less than The Room 2 is The Room 2 in 3-D. So please, please, please … don’t feed Tommy Wiseau’s ego.

Clacked by Katie Schenkel
on Jul 02, 2011 @ 10:00 EST5EDT