The House That Drips Blood on Alex

Well, it had to happen, didn't it? Tommy Wiseau, director, writer, producer and star of The Room, a man who most resembles Vincent D'Onofrio's alien-wearing-a-dead-human's-skin character from Men in Black, has produced another film, this time the bafflingly titled The House That Drips Blood on Alex.

I mean, The Room, as terrible as it is (and it is terrible), had enough of its own undeniable charisma to make it ultimately more profitable than Wiseau might have hoped. Every frame and line drips sincerity. Wiseau's intentions are as apparent in The Room as the complete lack of recognizable human behavior. His dreamed-of drama of a wronged man and his devilish fiancee and disloyal best friend (who curiously is freed of blame at the film's end, leaving the horrible, horrible woman wholly responsible) is undone by the sheer incompetence of Wiseau's writing and acting. Its particulars are well documented, and are obvious after watching even a fraction of the film. What made this terrible film so magnetic was the singular way it was terrible. Wiseau's brand of mangled English, his unwavering dedication not to resolve subplots, and nigh-surreal plotting is unlike anything else in film--it is entirely Wiseau, and it is this glimpse into the mind of a man unlike any other that makes The Room worth seeing.

But poor Tommy Wiseau, despite all claims to the contrary, knew that people were laughing at him, not with him. This would be kind of tragic if these same people weren't also giving him their money. But they are. And Wiseau wanted more. And so comes The House That Drips Blood on Alex. I was excited at the prospect of further Wiseau, but upon its release a few days ago, I learned this film's fatal flaw--it's intentionally funny. Which is to say, in Wiseau's case, not funny. What's even worse, it's not even written by Wiseau, but some crappy sketch comedy group looking to cash in on the Wiseau glory.

Wiseau kills any possible spark when he winks at the audience. When he implicitly says "Oh hi guys, isn't this movie so silly? Listen to the weird stuff I'm saying," he's undermining the inscrutably weird sincerity that made The Room work. And it's sad--because The House That Drips Blood on Alex could really have been hilarious. I realize it's kind of cruel that I'm saying Wiseau's films can only be enjoyed when they unintentionally expose the vaguely non-human elements of his mind--but who cares, everyone knew that already.

Even the title shows Wiseau's newfound self-awareness. The Room is famous for its non sequitir title, as it is unclear exactly which room is the room in question. So what better way to have another funny title than to have a comically long one which excessively describes the film's ridiculous plot? I don't have an answer, but the title's not that funny. Wiseau's character, Alex, is, like The Room's Johnny, a doofus who acts in supremely strange ways that are completely accepted by the rest of the world. Unlike Johnny, the situations in which Alex does so are located firmly in punchline land. It wouldn't be past Wiseau to be amazed by a quill pen, but The House... has him saying "it's like writing with a duck" and quacking after being presented with the pen in a scene ripe with calculated foreboding. Cheaters host Joey Greco (who is actually great in this--he's ever so smarmy and clearly having a great time) plays the realtor who sells Alex the titular house. He mugs and smirks, his character taking no effort to hide his evil intentions. He presents Alex with a deed for a house on 3 Blood Street (pronounced "blewed," he insists--Wiseau's attempts to pronounce "blewed" are a highlight), written in Gothic calligraphy and the aforementioned quill pen with an ink well filled with blood. Greco's character seems to genuinely enjoy passing off cursed houses on people, so gleeful is his performance. Of course every thing he says is met with a misunderstanding from Alex, a conceit clearly supposed to make the audience say "Ha ha! That doofus Alex!" but that mostly falls flat. Alex says the ink reminds him of something. Greco replies with an exaggerated "blood?" "I was going to say ketchup. I love ketchup," is Alex's response. It's all so set up, so much like a sitcom. It may have worked in someone else's hands, but the scene falls flat here.

There are flashes of Wiseau's trademark ability to present lines, situations, and actions no normal human could conceive of. See Alex's refusal to acknowledge his house drips blood on him. Taken by itself it's a pretty standard joke, but when you consider Alex's method of showing it--he claims he doesn't even like the bloodstained shirt and proves it by ripping a hole in it. There! That proves the house doesn't drip blood. I guess. His friend Thomas welcomes Wiseau to his new house brandishing a happy-meal style cardboard box emblazoned with the words "Pizza Party" on the side, cheerfully exclaiming "I brought a pizza party!" Wiseau's moving boxes consist of "house stuff," (specifically a lamp, oven mitt, and flashlight) "pillows," and "gifts for mother." In The Room these would be seen as some of Wiseau's crazier conceptions of life. But in this, their artificiality is clear, a side-effect of words being put into Wiseau's mouth. He isn't an actor capable of performing someone else's work, or really performing at all. The only possible value in his work is its exposure of his fascinating self. For example, in The Room, Wiseau tells his friends a so-called "interesting" story about how he met his fiancee. In a disinterested deadpan, he tells the tale of seeing his fiancee in a coffee shop, thinking she was attractive, and talking to her. On their first date, she paid for dinner. His companions roar with approval. The entire exchange is so bizarre and so sincere--it's played as legitimate character development. Wiseau seems to have wisened up about the public's perception of his material. In this film, he begins a similarly described interesting story. He begins in the same cadence, only managing to recall his memories "as a little girl" before being interrupted. Apparently the film's trying to be slyly self-aware of his own weirdness, but Wiseau lacks the range to convey sarcasm or humor in general.

The dripping blood is eventually explained via a trip to a Turbo-Cooker-housing attic and the discovery of a poorly explained and not scary source. The film then switches back to a pointless frame story, in which Wiseau is telling his tale to two unwilling girls in a movie theatre. It turns out that Wiseau's story is mirrored in a trailer for "3 Blood Street," a fake movie with some Jared Leto-lookin' fool in the Alex role. The girls look back at Wiseau and he looks exactly the same! They scream in horror! Or maybe it's a prop made to look like Wiseau's desiccated corpse. It's hard to tell, really.

At least The House... is only 12 minutes and saves the viewer from too much punishment. This film's obvious jokiness kills many of its scenes--even Wiseau's vaunted accent seems exaggerated in places. As a straight comedy, it's terrible. Not Wiseau terrible either, not the kind of terrible that made The Room a sensation--it's just plain vanilla terrible from some plain vanilla bad writers. The sets are laughably cheap (count the amount of bare white walls characters stand in front of) and the sketch group's cinematography is infuriating (it seems every conversation must show the speaker and the back of the listeners head, and slide the camera so that the listener's head blocks the speaker's). But it isn't a total wash. Joey Greco, still the king of leading bouncers, cameramen, and a jilted lover into the love nest of a stranger, shines in his brief, shameless, gloriously hammy appearance. And despite it all, Wiseau manages to wedge some honest-to-goodness what the fuck moments in there. From the way he must constantly say his friend Thomas's name every time he speaks to him, his insistence on the nonexistent nature of both shit houses and shit offices, and his startling nonchalance toward blood dripping on his face.

I'm not usually a huge proponent of the auteur. Most great art is forged with compromise and limitation--imagine how Jaws would have suffered if it had a fully functional shark able to be shown in every scene--and avoiding collaboration almost always corrodes creativity. However, Tommy Wiseau is an actor who undeniably must only work when reading his own scripts. He is a miserably talentless actor, and any work he finds is clearly just an attempt to tap into the kind of unfathomable energy The Room is so famous for. But that energy isn't just the voice, the craggly, jowly face--it's the glimpse into what makes this man tick, this man who hates women, loves football without seeming to understand that there is an actual game beyond playing catch with it, and claims to be from New Orleans despite having a speaking voice closer to Borat than...some sort of character known for being from New Orleans. There is no one in the world like Tommy Wiseau, and human curiosity is naturally drawn to the perfect storm of incompetence, confidence, and uniqueness he embodies. No one wants to see him act, inhabiting the role of another--they want to see him. In his own work, every word spoken by every character shows more about the weirdness of Wiseau. The House That Drips Blood on Alex wants to exploit this weirdness but misunderstands what made it so alluring.

Janelle Monae is everything that is right with music

Whoa ghost town all up in here. Here is a new thing I wrote. Sorry if it's a bit slapdash--I just wanted to write something because I hadn't in a while.




Janelle Monae is everything right with music today and if you care at all about originality, creativity, and enthusiasm in music then you must support her as soon as possible. Her latest album, The Archandroid, is one of the most ambitious, unpredictable albums in recent memory. If you’ve heard it, you likely understand me and love it; if you haven’t, you really should.

Monae’s music is thankfully worlds away from the standard, commercialized, easily categorized R&B the music industry expects from black female artists. The Archandroid accomplishes a startling feat for an album of 18 tracks lasting nearly seventy minutes: it is never once boring, repetitious, ordinary, or redundant. To say that every track works would not be true—but the mere fact that every song is different is mind-boggling in modern music.

The industry would much prefer all artists to produce exactly the type of music they would most easily be identified with based on their appearance. White dudes with glasses? Indie rock, please. Black guy? You better be a rapper. Black guy with glasses? Your raps better reference comic book characters. This way makes it much easier for the industry to classify music, and cater to specific audiences, giving them exactly what they want and what they expect. Some people might love getting a steady stream of the familiar, and it certainly makes money, but it also stifles artistic growth and creativity. Janelle Monae is amazing and defies expectations like it’s her job.

For example: she releases a 70 minute, 18 track concept album about how she was sent from the future and had her genes stolen to make an android named Cindy who has superpowers and is the only one who can help some oppressed masses and some other stuff. It’s all very hard to follow and poorly explained. She’s heavily influenced by Fritz Lang’s Impressionist film classic Metropolis, both in the style of the cover art and in the lyrics themselves. These themes don’t exactly cohere or anything—but good lord, man, when was the last time you could say that there was so much excess meaning in an album of frigging pop music? How often does a pop musician even take the effort to put something strange or out of the ordinary in their work? One of the most complimentary things one could say about The Archandroid is its all-too-rare quality of never being the same. The listener isn’t numbed by 70 minutes of the same style repeating over and over. Monae’s schizophrenic mishmash of influences, themes, and styles is welcome even with its flaws, because what else is there in music today? When we have musicians like Ke$ha who seem almost willfully ignorant of good taste, every little bit of originality is a blessing.

And dang if Monae is ever original. She opens the album with an orchestral overture, moving into a slow, understated, bass-heavy groove, then an upbeat, peppy piece of guitar funk, into a classic piece of soul wondrousness that would make Stevie Wonder proud, then a languid, ambient ballad, then a drum-destroyingly propulsive rock-soul banger, and caps it with “Tightrope,” an impossibly funky horn-assisted masterpiece whose repetitive yet ripe-with-emotion vocal performance recalls the best of James Brown. The eleven songs following are no slouches—highlights include a folk-styled hymn with a standard R&B chorus showcasing Monae’s traditional vocal strengths, and a diabolically sleazy slab of punk guitars and funk bass over which she shows she can screech and scream with the best of them—but man, those first seven songs are all five-star instant classic winners. The Archandroid demands repeat listening, if for no other reason, than to re-experience that opening stretch, one of the most exhilarating you’ll encounter from any album, in any genre, in any era. Yes, I’m serious.

Some later songs misfire, but at least they do so in interesting ways. Monae isn’t perfect—her voice is perfectly acceptable and versatile, but she’s not on her way to being the next Aretha Franklin. What she is, however, is brilliant, ambitious, and unhindered by what she thinks she has to do as a musician in her genre. If I had to compare her to any musician, the only choice that presents itself, honestly, is Michael Jackson in his prime. Like Jackson, she breaks barriers of genre, has an ineffable charisma, and is quite simply producing dance music completely different from everyone else. I know MJ is an untouchable icon to many—even more so after his death, when people stopped making pedophile/plastic surgery jokes and realized, man, this guy made some unimpeachably brilliant music—and I don’t mean to say that Monae, a relatively new artist, is on the same level as he, but she is doing something monumentally rare in modern popular music. It’s something Jackson did and something hardly anyone else does (Andre 3000 seemed like he was going to, but then I guess he decided to stop for some reason): she is making music completely fearlessly, with no regard to real or imagined constraints, discontent to stay in one place for too long. Technically, experimental groups like The Residents or whatever do this, but I’m speaking about pop music specifically here, the kind of stuff meant for “the people,” the stuff that gets stuck in your head and gets you on the dance floor.

So you can keep your bland, samey singers wailing cookie-cutter lyrics over a manfactured electronic dance beat polished to a mirror sheen by Pro-Tools wielding producers. I’m sure Monae isn’t going to dispel all the Britneys, Ke$has, and Gagas in the world overnight. But if you want something more out of your music—effort, ingenuity, insight, creativity—there’s Janelle Monae waiting for you. She offers something you’d be hard pressed to find in her peers. Specifically, her music isn’t something you’ve heard before. It’s influenced by the great musicians of yesteryear, but it’s changed, interpreted, flipped, made new. In an industry content to tread water, Monae moves forward into the unknown. She is everything right with music and art in general and if you care at all about creative expression spread the word and give her your money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc