Oh hai there Tommy.
Yep, earlier this year I took a watch of part one of Tommy Wiseau
and Greg Sistero’s comeback Best F(r)iends, a…strange little film as you might
expect. Telling the story of a Los Angeles drifter that hooks up with a kooky
mortician, it set up threads of distrust and theft while interspersed with all
the strangeness and awkwardness you come to the expect from the pair that gave
us the classic crappy masterpiece of The Room. It was considerably better
directed and shot, and while certainly giving you a fix of Wiseau, probably
lacked certain things like a strong storyline to hook anyone who doesn’t
understand why entire film classes like to throw spoons at the ceiling.
Now comes part 2—I admittedly expected from the trailer for
it to go totally gonzo with Tommy embracing his born role as a vampire, or
something. And…it doesn’t really go that way. For one the focus is
predominantly on Greg, with our nationally unidentifiable disaster artist more
interspersed about. Here, Sistero is journeying with his girlfriend Kristen
Stephenson, journeying through the American southwest with an ATM that’s also a
safe, while evading everyone from crazed rednecks to Tommy himself wearing a
knightly crusader helmet. Yeah, that’s the sort of thing this is.
There’s definitely a much stronger story this time
around—hell, some would say there’s an actual story here. On their road trip
through the dusty pathways of Arizona, there’s some actual moments of tension
to grab your attention, and enough characteristically bizarre side-characters
like a Clint Eastwood-mimicking uncle to give you a chuckle. There’s even
gunfights and fights among desert rocks like an old episode of Star Trek…and
hell, for those Room obsessives, there’s even extraneous greenscreen that
inexplicably appears between shots even though it wasn’t there a moment ago.
It’s not directed by Tommy, but it certainly has his style, even it’s more
refined and the awkwardness is perhaps more deliberate now.
Sistero’s performance is certainly on point…as the one sane
man in a world of oddballs and off-kilter plot developments, as he certainly
may have felt while making The Room. And when the film cuts away to show him in
the captivity of Inexplicably Helmeted Wiseau, he all too carries that
expression of ‘dear god I’m not sure what this is but I can’t look away’ that we
all watched when confronted with that gem hewn from crap from 2003. Both him
and Tommy claim this two-parter was inspired by their road trip they undertook
before committing to that project, and while obviously the details are spun out
for entertainment—or at least I hope to god they are—there’s definitely more
undercurrents than that you feel pertains to their actual relationship.
So, would I recommend this? It’s certainly more watchable
than part 1, but to get the most from it, you do have to be someone who has
been through the rite of having hundreds of people yell ‘FOCUS!’ around you while
amassing plastic cutlery. And if you don’t know what I mean, well, you might want
to skip this one. But if you do…well, it’s got Tommy, it’s got Greg, it’s got
Tommy fighting in a helmet in the Arizona desert. If that sounds like something
you’re after, hell, you’re partly down the rabbit hole of uniquely bizarre
filmmaking already—this ain’t going much deeper…
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