“Oh, Hai!” The Room’s Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero Are Coming to Montreal

Start polishing those spoons and down some scotchkas; The Room‘s infamous star/ writer/director/producer/man of mystery Tommy Wiseau, and co-star Greg Sestero, will be in town on March 23rd to celebrate the film’s 10-year anniversary. The event is promising a meet-and-greet with both Wiseau and Sestero, as well as an autograph session, making this a de-facto Room convention.

Often cited as the worst film of all time, The Room is a nearly inexplicably bad psychological thriller, filled with off-kilter characters that sprout dialogue that sounds like it was written by someone with a very shaky grasp of the finer points of the English language (which it was). The movie is nearly impossible to describe or categorize; at it’s core, it’s akin to an episode of Day of Our Lives, if the show took place in the Twilight Zone. Characters appear and then vanish for no reason, and are greeted fully each time they are spoken to (“Oh hai Mark!”) There are also exhaustingly long and creepy sex scenes, stilted conversations that are completely out of place (“I got the results of the tests back. I definitely have breast cancer.”) and the film’s centerpiece, a perplexing back-alley game of football played by men in tuxedos.

The film has become a cult legend over the years, spearheaded by comedians like David Cross who caught the film’s initial run in Los Angeles, and spread the word about this strangely incompetent film they’d discovered (in no small part due to a  billboard  for the film which hung over Hollywood Boulevard for a full four years). It has since made its way from pirated VHS home viewings to Rocky Horror Picture Show midnight screenings on the cult circuit, and is now the subject of a currently in-development film being spearheaded by none other than Hollywood weirdo James Franco.

For an amazing primer into the surreal experience of filming The Room, be sure to seek out star Greg Sestero’s new book, The Disaster Artist. The book reads like a classic whodunit, with even Wiseau’s good friend Sestero still unable to fully resolve Wiseau’s mysterious life and backstory. Sestero will be selling and signing copies at the screening, and it is definitely worth picking up.

The only way to truly experience the sublime weirdness of The Room is to see it in a theatre full of die-hard fans, who yell out comeback lines to the characters, shout out the myriad of storytelling inconsistencies, and lob handfuls of plastic spoons at the screen.

Suggested attire: a tuxedo, of course.

Love Is Blind Tour: The Tenth Anniversary of The Room
March 23, 2014
Dollar Cinema
6900 Decarie Square
Tickets, $15 in advance and $20 at the door are available now at http://www.dollarcinema.ca/