Best F(r)iends

Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero have ingrained themselves in pop culture by making strange and indisputably terrible movies. The Room – perhaps you’ve heard of it? – has been deemed the worst movie ever made but has had many rebirths through midnight screenings and a secured cult status. The oddball pairing are back with Best F(r)iends, another doozy of a movie best shared with good friends and maybe a drink or two (dozen).

Showing in most theaters for two nights only, Best F(r)iends follows Jon (Sestero), who arrives in L.A. with not much but a bloody t-shirt to his name. He drifts along the streets, with no place to go or anyone to talk to, barely saying a word himself. He meets a strange mortician named Harvey (Wiseau), who is willing to help Jon out with a place to stay and some work at his morgue. Desperate for a few bucks, Jon doesn’t hesitate to take on a job with Harvey, despite not knowing much about it.

“As Best F(r)iends mixes genres, things get more baffling and the composition choices made are requisitely puzzling…”

While snooping around Harvey’s morgue, Jon runs into his vast collection of gold teeth, which are pulled from dead bodies. He learns that there is a business right at his fingertips and he begins selling the scraps on the black market. Once Jon realizes there is a great deal of money to be had doing this, he confesses to Harvey and persuades him to be a part of his business.

Seems strange enough, right? An offbeat, odd couple story about selling teeth. But this is Wiseau and Sestero (who wrote the screenplay) so simply being strange won’t cut it. As Best F(r)iends mixes genres, things get more baffling and the composition choices made are requisitely puzzling. We wouldn’t expect anything less.

The movie was made in 2017 but has the grainy, micro-budget feel that suggest they made it once they called wrap on The Room. Directed by Justin MacGregor, the movie is montage heavy in its capturing of L.A. skylines, trying to establish a noirish feel once the movie switches gears thematically. Most of the frames are composed of shades of grey and blues, so sweeping shots of L.A. can’t really distract from the film’s garish washed-out aesthetic.

“…could offer a night of fun with some of your closes f(r)iends. It’s terrible. Try and see it.”

We could be here all day talking about how bad this movie is but one must stop and wonder if that’s the point. Do Sestero and Wiseau actually think they made a successful film? Or were they just happy to be back together and capitalize on their The Room fame? (They couldn’t help but slide several winks to film in there.) It helps they were sprung back into the spotlight with James Franco’s The Disaster Artist, which chronicled the making of the midnight hit.

Tone deaf at almost every turn (there’s a sequence where Harvey brings a body back to the morgue, named Mr. Lee, and insists they order Chinese food to celebrate the man), Best F(r)iends won’t have the same legs as The Room but could offer a night of fun with some of your closes f(r)iends. It’s terrible. Try and see it.

Best F(r)iends (2018) Directed by Justin MacGregor. Written by Greg Sestero. Starring Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero.

Grade: D (But who can actually say?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu9N40E_MI