You Are Tearing Me Apart

The Room (2003)
Dir - Tommy Wiseau

This movie is bad... but in all the right ways.  I originally saw it at the same theater last year and had a blast. When I heard the man behind it all, writer/producer/director/star Tommy Wiseau, was going to be on hand for a screening I got my tickets as soon as possible.  Getting to the theater two hours early was good enough to put us waaaaaay back in line, but it was nice to be on the balcony to see when Tommy entered to thunderous applause and chanting of his name. Wiseau stayed in the lobby tossing around a football with ravenous fans and signing autographs for a little over an hour before the film and his Q&A.

Highlights of the pre-movie evening
- Tommy entering and being dressed just as I expected (with no less than two belts)
- Football throwing that resulted in someone dropping it on the balcony down into the open roof lounge below, hitting some guy on the back and knocking over a few beers
- Tommy announcing one of his favorite films is "James Dean"
- Co-Star/Line Producer Greg "Oh, hi Marc" Sestero making a surprise appearance
- An errant football cannoned from the back row slams into Tommy resulting in him dropping the microphone and groans from the sold out crowd.
- And pretty much anything Tommy said during the Q&A... what a weird dude

Then the movie started...

It's a lot of fun and I have no real problem with the whole audience participation/riffing on bad movies thing but this was just ridiculous. I was on a Rocky Horror Picture Show cast for five years, around 300 or so shows, and it was never this bad. There was just so much extraneous chatter from the majority of the audience with conflicting, mostly unfunny, lines and bad timing. You could barely hear any of the dialogue/delivery that was being mocked. The few funny lines I did hear that people actually said together are mostly just recycled jokes from RHPS. Oh well.

I will still watch this again, though probably not in that setting. Twice might be enough. I'll just get the DVD and laugh from my couch. Or I could wait for the upcoming Blu-Ray that Tommy teased.