Every era of story telling is a golden age of something - right now it's dark times for rom coms and medium level thrillers, say, but its a golden age for low budget art house, expensive comic book spectaculars, and cable TV drama. It's also great to see Hollywood's capacity for producing crap classics has come back in a good way - movies like The Room and Birdemic are the equal to the golden era classics like Robot Monster and Glen or Glenda?
The Room is hard to describe - at it's core it's meant to be a melodrama about a love triangle involving two friends and the woman who comes between them, resulting in tragedy (a good, standard basis for drama which means the heartbeat of this film is essentially sound)... but it goes off into all sorts of tangents and subplots. The girl's mother with her once-mentioned-and-that's-it breast cancer, the guy's "ward" and his drug habit, the random scene in tuxedos, the repeated mention that the girl is sick of the guy and the guys are best friends, the random friends who pop up and disappear. I can't think of a movie that sets up more subplots which aren't resolved and scenes which aren't explained.
There are also continuity errors galore, campy acting, cinematography that goes in and out of focus, hilarious sex scenes, and most of all the magnificent performance of it's creator, Tommy Wiseau, which has to be seen to be believed. Performance wise the best friend Mark (Greg Sestero) is at least handsome and Robyn Paris is decent as Michelle.
This totally holds up on it's own as a piece of entertainment watching at home alone but the crowd participation is also fun with some first rate running gags, eg saying "Alcatraz" every time you see the island or bars, throwing spoons at all the spoon imagery, crying 'you're doing it wrong" during sex, and mocking the film's misogyny. (Although at the screening I saw some guy kept yelling "slut" every time Juliette Danielle appeared - I think he thought it was really funny, but it wasn't especially as there was such hate and aggression in his voice.)
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