Best F(r)iends: 5 Reasons It’s Better Than The Room (& 5 Reasons The Room Is Better)

Tommy Wiseau is probably one of the most bizarre figures in cinema because of his 2003 cult film The Room. A movie that’s so bad that it’s good, The Room was written, directed, produced by and starred Wiseau in a really strange human drama. But the film has had quite a devoted following with its quotable lines and terrible overacting. James Franco’s film The Disaster Artist brought a resurgence in the cult of Tommy Wiseau as it told the story of the film’s making revealing that Tommy Wiseau is a man as strange as his on-screen personality.

In 2017, Wiseau broke his hiatus starring in a film with his Room-co star Greg Sestero in a dark crime comedy called Best F(r)iends which was released in two volumes. Here’s how this film compares with Wiseau’s magnum opus.

10 Best F(r)iends: Self-Aware Humor

Best F(r)iends is by no means a great film but Greg Sestero’s screenplay is filled with moments that capitalize well on Tommy Wiseau’s mysterious, loud personality. Viewers know that the film is as ridiculous as it gets but unlike The Room (which Wiseau wrote thinking it’s a masterpiece), Sestero knows that this twisted tale of friendship is not to be taken seriously.

The ludicrous plot involves a drifter working at a morgue, whose boss has a fascination with collecting gold teeth and crafting face masks for the dead. The drifter suggests selling the teeth in the black market to make a quick buck but this throws the two leads in a downward spiral of crime. ‘Are you going to stand out there like the Statue of Liberty?’ Such random dialogues and metaphors are thrown all over the movie for random reasons, making it almost a satire on Wiseau’s strangeness.

9 The Room: Wiseau’s Vision

Unlike Best F(r)iends, Tommy Wiseau had full creative control while making The Room. Even though it’s meant to feel like a moving drama around a man undergoing a mid-life crisis, the film is filled with comedy gold such as the whole ‘I did not hit her’ monologue and even the death scene towards the end.

The Room is way better than Wiseau’s next acting venture because it seems to be made only from his perspective. There’s no attempt for the movie to replicate anything else. Whether viewers love it or hate it, they cannot deny that The Room is a wildly original ride of emotions.

8 Best F(r)iends: Sostero’s Vision

If there’s any person who can truly understand Tommy Wiseau, it has to be Greg Sestero, and even he doesn’t know what’s Wiseau’s age or from where does his strong accent comes from. Sestero considers himself as Wiseau’s best friend behind the scenes too, and it’s his memoir that gave fans of The Room the real story behind the making of the cult hit.

Even if Sostero claims that Best F(r)iends is inspired by true events, it seems like an exaggeration considering the almost-Lynchian directions the film steers to. Yet, it’s really amusing to watch Best F(r)iends as a guilty pleasure that’s still not as weird or incomprehensible as The Room. This is mainly because while Greg Sostero himself is no legendary writer/actor, he still has some ideas of real-life, unlike the ‘alien’ Wiseau.

7 The Room: Not Overshadowed By Any Film

A reason why The Room is a better film than Best F(r)iends is the aforementioned originality it yields. There are plenty of references from the 2003 film in Best F(r)iends like Wiseau greeting Sostero’s character Jon saying, ‘Oh, Hi Jon’. Then, there’s another scene where both protagonists are talking while playing catch with a basketball like the classic baseball scene in the first film.

Even if director Justin MacGregor’s two-part film is by no means a sequel to The Room, it still gets overshadowed by the mythos of the classic and hence, stands on weak ground when seen on its own.

6 Best F(r)iends: Fitting Tribute To Wiseau’s Legacy

Best F(r)iends is not a good film in critical standards but it was never meant to be a good film in the first place. The movie is a fitting tribute to the ‘Ed Wood-like’ legacy of Tommy Wiseau and his work in The Room.

The film clearly seems to respect its fans as it does provide the quirks and gags that made the first film so cherished. The execution is clearly different but Best F(r)iends makes for great fan service, whether it be in an ironic or unironic manner.

5 The Room: No Conscious Attempts To Be Artistic

The Room is a film that’s unapologetic in its approach. The Disaster Artist shows that the film’s crew knew that Wiseau’s techniques were very unprofessional and yet Wiseau ended up doing his thing crafting a film that became a phenomenon.

In comparison, one can see conscious efforts in the 2017 film for it to be an indie arthouse film of sorts. The dialogues are overlapped and attempt to replicate realistic conversations. The lighting and cinematography too attempt at having a documentary-like look. But it just ends up showing that the film is trying hard to be an art film when it just ends up being a bizarre experiment with polarizing results.

4 Best F(r)iends: The Friendship

As the title suggests, a somewhat heartwarming aspect of Best F(r)iends is the friendship. One can’t judge how real the film’s story is but Sestero and Wiseau’s friendship seems pretty genuine and emotional. The Room too featured both actors as friends but it reduced Wiseau as a more self-centered tragic hero while Sestero was mostly a crybaby.

In Best F(r)iends, there are some genuine moments of raw anger and frustration too as both characters engage in rapid fires of loud dialogues. Sestero’s frustration adds a sense of realism as it would indeed be quite a Herculean task to handle Tommy Wiseau (both on-screen and off-screen).

3 The Room: Limited Runtime

While The Room is heavily entertaining from start to finish, it plays safe with its runtime of 99 minutes. Best F(r)iends on the other hand gets pretty stretched with two installments that seem to be going nowhere with the plot.

Both volumes collectively clock at over 3 hours and 20 minutes. Even die-hard fans of Tommy Wiseau’s personality would have a tough time following the narrative until the very end. The Room, on the other hand, shows love-making, friendship, betrayals, melodramatic monologues, and a deadly finale all in a tight duration. Even if it’s all bad, The Room has something or the other going on and hardly feels dragged.

2 Best F(r)iends: Makes Best Use Of Idiosyncracies

It has its fair share of flaws but Best F(r)iends can surely be enjoyed if it’s seen as an experimental film. Director Jason MacGregor knows very well what he’s dealing with and makes the best use of the idiosyncrasies of its leading pair.

The director does give enough breathing space to Tommy Wiseau to be himself with his weird physical mannerisms, his accent, and random ad-libbing. Greg Sestero too gets enough liberty to pull off a decent enough performance that’s genuinely good at parts.

1 The Room: It’s The Room!

Regarded as the ‘Citizen Kane of bad films’, The Room definitely is an unforgettable film for the masses. What places it at a level higher than Best F(r)iends is the sheer fact that The Room was an accidental gem. A film in which every scene is worthy of marveling at can either be the product of a lot of effort or just accidental disaster.

Even though the latter is true for The Room, viewers can also see a certain earnestness in the way its lead and amateur ensemble pulled it off altogether. No one knows from where did Wiseau get the money to finance the film, but it’s surely one of the most well-known independent films of all time.

About The Author

Shaurya Thapa
(727 Articles Published)

Shaurya Thapa is an Indian freelance journalist who mostly dabbles in writings on cinema, music, and human interest features. When it comes to Screen Rant, he writes lists on a wide array of subjects ranging from international films to mainstream Netflix series and comic book trivia. He also hosts a podcast called ‘BhindiWire’, an Indian parody of IndieWire.

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