Guilty Fissures

At Christmas, I gave myself and my family the gift that is Tommy Wiseau's The Room.  I'd long heard the hubbub, but the DVD isn't on Netflix (it's only $8.99 at Amazon; the film will apparently be screened on March 20th at the Village East) and the title's just not as enticing as Troll 2 or Manos: The Hands of Fate.  It's as wonderful as either of those.

The Room is the sort of awful movie that doesn't get made, anymore, a self-unaware vanity project from someone who lacks both talent and filter.    Every cent of its six million dollar budget missed the screen.  The plot - a great guy's life is ruined by an affair between his beautiful, selfish girlfriend and his best friend - reeks of revenge and self-pity.  There are long, genuinely uncomfortable softcore sex scenes; equally long, uncomfortable cutaways to scenery.  The framing in some scenes is so off it's almost ineptly artful.  (The film - the whole film, not just a test - was simultaneously shot with film and high-def video cameras mounted side-by-side because Wiseau couldn't make up his mind which he wanted to use.  He now aspires to write a book comparing the two formats.)

Writer/director/star Wiseau has the presence of a lump of armpit putty (according to his Wikipedia page, he was "trained" in "acting"), but his nondescript East European accent and bald determination to convince you of his inherent decency make him sort of captivating.  The auteur has gone deep in denial over the project.  After it achieved success as a howler at midnight screenings, he started promoting his film as a "black comedy;" in interviews he maintains that the script is the result of "intensive research" and takes the serious issues (drug use, breast cancer) it tosses out as non-sequiturs very very seriously.  For Wiseau, each piece of inept evidence just provides another talking point.

The script offers up a discount buffet of mundane quotables, but there is a single emphatic "Stella!" moment that will stain you forever.

Long before I was a warped, frustrated old man, I was a warped, frustrated young one.  One of my very favorite records for far too long was Rollins Band's The End of Silence.  I hadn't listened to it for years, but the first time I watched Wiseau clench his paws and give his awkward blahstial wail I couldn't help but transplant his line into one of Rollins' old songs.

You might best now know Henry Rollins as a talk show host or a stand-up comic or whatever, and maybe his best quality is that he's not afraid of embarrassing himself.  End of Silence is a relentless bout of indulgence.  Its shortest songs creep up on five minutes, five are longer than eight.  The music is pounding and sludgy and jazz-noodley.  Rollins speaks exclamation marks, a combination of Tony Robbins and Tony Little and a fist down your throat, orders and encouragement and criticism.  "You've gotta keep your self-respect!  You've gotta jump back!  Keep your self-respect intact!  You've gotta keep it like that!"  Drop and give me twenty!  "Ah!  It's a mess!  Don't get messed up!"  Okay!

The album is embarrassing, it is ridiculous.  But if catharsis isn't embarrassing you're probably doing it wrong.  When he screams, "This ain't no... bloooooooooz song!" (in "What Do You Do?" - which is followed by a track called "Blues Jam") he sounds a little like Jandek.  He sounds a lot less like Jandek in the anti-drug "Another Life:"  "Bad monkey!  Bad monkey!  Monkey see!  Monkey do!  Monkey will destroy you!  Bad monkey!  Bad monkey!  No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! Nooooooooooo!"  Henry Rollins is not satisfied with underlining and emboldening his words, he's gonna tattoo them on your fucking eyeballs in ALL FUCKING CAPS.  And backwards, so they're right there in the mirror looking back at you.

"Believe me when I tell you:  Life will not break your heart!  It will crush it!"  Semantics!

Included are, of course, a few post-love songs.  (It's unfortunate that "Another Life" isn't one of them; as your attorney I strongly advise you to shoot up and have Bad Monkey Sex right now.)  And though Henry's harder on himself than Tommy could ever be, Rollins' songs square nicely with Wiseau's world of betrayal.  "When I touched you, did you feel it?!  Did you ever feel anything at all?!"

So consider this clumsy, slight - and seriously, dumb - offering as a belated Valentine present, directed at the one other person on this planet who might find it funny.  Everyone else move along.

Rollins Band with Tommy Wiseau - Tearing (For Lisa)(mp3)(buy real version)

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Yodel me this!  As expected, Craig Ferguson ended his run of lip-synching puppets.  Not because he was embarrassed with the fuzzy things - lately he's been opening the show with a tennis ball on a stick; my guess would be that either song rights or rehearsal demands were dissuasive.  The bit might have lost its luster, a little, but I was still sad to see it go.  In the first post-puppet opening - the only second of the program that hasn't been diligently uploaded to YouTube, it's on an unembeddable (bastards) full-show stream at CBS - Ferguson walked out, read my mind, and said, "I can sense your disappointment."

But - BUT!!!!  I finally got to see the latest film from Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) and lookee here:

I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK is an asylum-set romance between a woman who refuses to eat because she thinks she's a machine and an anti-social man who kleptomaniacally acquires abilities.  It can get consciously quirky, and it goes on way long, but Park gives you some great visuals - his set designers should be bronzed - and there's none of the oppressive nihilism of his revenge stuff.  Cyborg doesn't seem to be on DVD in the U.S. (there's probably a Region 0 out there), but it's scheduled to run a few more times on the Sundance Channel.

And for closure, here's Ferguson's last yodeling puppet opener:

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When I blathered about Crash last week I had no idea the IFC Center was about to launch a midnight series with that very flick.  (I'm only timely by accident.)  It's a weirdly curated line-up - IFC, you're no Film Forum - and I disagree with a lot of what Terrance Rafferty said in the Times this weekend... but they're all at least three-star flicks.  Spider is well-told (considering its inarticulate protagonist) and Fiennes is fantastic, but once you're familiar with the director's work it feels a bit like a greatest hits compilation.  eXistenZ is a frothier remake of Videodrome, Dead Zone is a fine Stephen King adaptation.  The other titles are all greatness, but it's hard to take seriously a list of "Cronenberg Classics" that's missing Dead Ringers; arguably that's not much of a "midnight movie," but then Spider isn't either (whereas almost all his early films would be).

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tags: craig ferguson  the room  rollins band  

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