By Mathew Kumar

Are you sick about being told to watch The Room, yet? If you’d personally known us across the last few years—and you still hadn’t seen it—you would be. An almost personal crusade of Torontoist is to show it to as many people as possible (heck, we even asked Edgar Wright about it, just to be sure), there is no film ranked higher in our esteem as just a real good time (other than possibly Commando), and the only thing that surprises us about there finally being a big screen showing for the film tonight at the Royal is honestly that we didn’t set it up (congratulations to the other local fans who did).
Of course, a cinema showing is kind of an unusual thought. There are a lot of known rituals to perform if you’re watching The Room in a cinema, and to someone who has never seen it that way there’s the worry that feeling cued to chuck spoons at the screen takes away from the stark beauty of Tommy Wiseau’s work; indeed, there’s the sense that we might just be annoyed by the rest of the audience. If there’s anything we’d like to say it’s that if you’re new to The Room or a die-hard fan already, let’s make Toronto’s showings their own—throw away the “rulebook“; take part how you see fit. As Wiseau says, in all situations, “You can laugh, you can cry, you can express yourself, but please don’t hurt each other.”
Admittedly, there are other films to be seen this week. There’s G-Force, the latest children’s film to feature talking animals; this time it’s guinea pigs (be prepared to watch local news stories about a rush on buying them as pets), and this time the talking animals sure like to handle guns. More interesting is the (heavily advertised) Orphan. It looks entirely stupid, and it’s likely never going to live up to the glory of the still-chilling The Bad Seed, but Eye‘s Adam Nayman calls it “a bad-taste classic in waiting,” which is alluring.
And on release is the first film from Jennifer Lynch since, well, bad-taste classic Boxing Helena, Surveillance. It’s completely kicked to bits by NOW‘s Norm Wilner. “A decade and a half after [Boxing Helena], she still doesn’t have the slightest idea how to make a movie.”
Also out this week: two different music docs with Rocksteady: The Roots of Reggae and Soul Power; bland-looking rom-com The Ugly Truth; a new Agnès Varda doc, The Beaches of Agnes; comedy The Girl From Monaco; and the hard-to-summarize Humpday, which features two straight men deciding to have sex with each other to prove how straight they are. Or something.