Cinema Scopin'

Sharp shot of Mike in my living room holding up a copy of the DVD to The Stud.

Blurry shot of Joseph in my living room holding up a copy of the DVD to The Stud.

I have both The Bitch AND The Stud but I'm not certain which came first. I actually have yet to see The Stud, and I have only seen the opening sequence to The Bitch because I simply can't get past that hilarious disco theme song that plays while Joan Collins is getting boinked in the shower (:::whakachoowhakachooo::: BITCH! Uh-HUH!). But hey they were cheap at my store and held the promise of being unspeakably bad. Sometimes unspeakably bad can potentially wind up as being unutterably good. Not so much, perhaps, when it comes to the following film, although I quite adored it myself:

I first heard about Tommy Wiseau's The Room from my pal Wemblee, who has seen it in Los Angeles where Wiseau himself was there to take some Q&A and appeared every bit as, uh, strange as his character appears in his film. I had also been hearing from friends at one of my message boards that this movie gets shown regularly at that same L.A. theater and has become a cult classic of the Rocky Horror vein, with people doing callbacks and throwing articles at the screen (namely plastic spoons). I ordered it from Amazon but when I told Joe about it he insisted that we watch it with a room full of people to fully appreciate the film as it was meant to be, but with the exception of Mike and sometimes Alvin coming over on Monday nights for video games we rarely do much "entertaining" as we are reclusive hermit-types that hate all humanity and what they stand for. But about two weekends ago after one of our Sunday breakfast bunch collectives Mike and new friend Cindy came over and that gave us at least two members of a captive audience to view this picture in its proper setting.

And, wow... what can be said about this man's "vision"? Bad acting. Bad script. Bad dialogue. Bad editing. Bad bad bad UNBELIEVABLY bad MUSIC, but if you watch it with the closed captioning like we did the lyrics spell out right under the screen during the appalling lovemaking scenes so you can sing along if you dare. Basically written, produced, directed and starring Wiseau as (Wemblee pointed out) what may be the most blatant "Mary Sue" in movie history, he's the kindest, sweetest, bestest boyfriend, best friend, mentor, provider, AND father figure to all and everyone -- and yet his ungrateful scheming fiance sleeps with his best friend and even appears unfazed at her own mother's announcement that she has breast cancer, a storyline that is soon immediately dropped. Another storyline suddenly dropped is Wiseau's character's young ward, a teenage boy with a drug problem that suddenly gets swept under the proverbial rug. But overall this messterpeice (supposedly played straight and meant to be taken seriously, though I hear that since it was laughed out of respectable theaters it's being remarketed as a "black comedy") as bad as it is was still wildly entertaining, mostly when you have two classic improv riffers like Mike and Joe in the same room, and I thought Cindy was going to snap in half the way she was doubled over and howling along. We didn't have any plastic spoons to throw (Wemblee says there's something about a scene where for no explainable reason there is a framed picture of a spoon sitting on a desk but I still have yet to find it) but fun was had and I highly recommend this being seen in a room full of as many people as you can cram (believe me, four is about our max cap) and let me know if you find THE SPOON because I got me a big bowl 'o nuthin' right there.

This whole post is reminding me that I might not have ever fully posted about the films of Greydon Clark. Ohhh, Greydon. You'll have your own blog entry next time. I promise.

It's 5:30 am. Cough or no cough. I need to get some shut-eye.