THE ROOM (Tommy Wiseau) Rating: N (movie) NNNNN (movie with Q&A). At the Royal from Friday (April 22). See listings.
Oh hi, reader! Perhaps you’re wondering why we’re talking about The Room now. After all, Tommy Wiseau’s hypnotically abominable melodrama has been playing midnight shows at the Royal since the summer of 2009.
But this week Wiseau himself is in town to introduce five screenings of The Room – two each on Friday and Saturday, and a third on Sunday – and to hold Q&As after each. And that means this shit just got real.
Will some savvy audience member finally get Wiseau to reveal what the movie means? Can we expect some insight into what motivates his character Johnny, a San Francisco ladies’ man whose glad-handing ways mask a terror of abandonment? Might he explain his incomprehensible decision to shoot the film simultaneously in HD and 35mm, with two cameras locked together on a platform so neither shot is ever properly centred? Will he admit that The Room was never intended to be a comedy, and the only way he can save face is by convincing people they’re laughing with it rather than at it?
Don’t expect any revelations. Journalists and bad-movie buffs have been trying to unlock the inscrutable Wiseau for years, and they can’t even figure out where he’s from. His Toronto visit is simply the latest stop on a never-ending publicity tour designed to keep people coming to see his awful, awful movie.
And guess what? It’s working.
