Too Smart for The Room?

I've seen worse movies than The Room.  Few qualitatively challenged movies are as watchable.  I understand the tribal impulse to have a mass smart-alecky conversation at it while it's playing in a theater, but I prefer to experience it at home, giving it the full command of my attention with no comments from the peanut gallery.

Several elements redeem it:

1. Casting and acting - Unconventional, universally fascinating actors.  A cast you can't adjust to since important new characters are continually added with no explanation and even the main characters behave in contradictory ways with unfathomable motivations.  The performers to a person run with it, partaking in and contributing to the singular world of the movie with equal flair.

2. Writing - For a spare story it has an impressive density of jaw dropping good chunks.  Randomly introduced and just as rapidly dropped plot points; head scratching motifs such as sporadic intermissions for tossing of footballs; stream of consciousness dialogue that turns on a dime from badinage to chaos and back and is alternately somewhat reminiscent of the way actual adults communicate and random and repetitive to a Beckett (or first grade reader) like degree.  The result is a hypnotic and attention holding rhythm that keeps you bemused and off guard.

3. Score - Actually pretty good throughout; not least, the songs that accompany the sexy 
bits.  All of it original music written for the movie.

4. Camera movement - The film was shot in 35 mm and HD video interchangeably, with no apparent rhyme or reason; however it moves quite a bit for a low budget movie and despite an occasional slightly out of focus moment or two, it works.  From the opening travelogue shots of San Francisco under the titles to the emotionally fraught ending there is a good variety of pans, crane shots, helicopter shots, closeups, medium and long shots and effective visual techniques such as dissolves and fades.

5. Editing and pacing - The editing is brisk -- e.g, 202 cuts in the first 21 minutes up to and including the full infamous flower shop scene by my count (until I discovered someone had counted for me).  That said, it's not out of control.  If anything, moments that are on the surface weird and anomalous are redeemed by the way they're put together.  Not a great deal happens in the span of its 99 minutes, and what does occur sometimes has an almost spastic quality to it, but from sex scenes to philosophical dialogue to bursts of discord and threatened violence, things are held together in a compelling way.

To me the most appealing thing about The Room is how little, given its lack of artifice, it resembles harsh, ugly reality.  It emulates a kind of plastic and pretty California culture with a seamy underbelly but the resemblance is more superficial than an Entertainment Tonight interview.   In spite of its aspiration to worldly themes, there's an innocence that animates the spirit of the movie, permeating the proceedings and giving an extra kick all its own to the darker edges of its plot.  While it doesn't pack the wallop of a Mulholland Drive or even a Basic Instinct, there is a gooey center to it that sticks with you as well as on you.  Most importantly, it permits an escape from care and logic that is complete while maintaining an internal logic worth caring about on its own terms.

What more can you ask from a couple of hours in the dark?