Somebody tell me this: When, precisely, did Hollywood forget how to do the only thing it ever truly did well? I speak, of course, of making really entertaining trash. There should be no trick to it. Get one slumming director, a few hungry young television actors, and a handful of character actors who have mortgage payments due. Put them in a film that gives them an excuse either to take their clothes off or kill each other — preferably both. And, voila! You have "Damaged Goods," or "Baby Doll," or "Porky's," or any of a thousand other films that made the National League of Decency see red and made unscrupulous producers see green.

 
So we have a film out now called "The Roommate," which did very well last weekend, and it's essentially a remake of the 1992 thriller "Single White Female," in which Jennifer Jason Leigh decides she likes housemate Bridget Fonda so much that she'll become her. That film was both solidly made — it was directed by French New Wave filmmaker Barbet Schroeder and the two leads are skilled actresses — and entertainingly trashy. I mean, this was a film in which Leigh provides Fonda's boyfriend with some erotic attention before killing him with her shoe, which, were I condemned to death and allowed to choose the method of execution of my choosing, sounds like it might be a pretty good way to exit this vale of tears.
 
There's a similar scene in "The Roommate," except it leaves out both the erotic attention and the shoe. And that about sums up the film. It has the ingredients, but somehow managed to forget how they're supposed to be put together. So we have the slumming director, Christian E. Christiansen, who was nominated for an Oscar in 2007 for his film "At Night." We have a cast of comely television actors, primarily Minka Kelly from "Friday Night Lights" as a college student and Leighton Meester from "Gossip Girl" as her bonkers roommate. We have the character actors, including Francis Fisher and Billy Zane, who were both in "Titanic," and Zane, in particular, is usually a sign that a film is not going to be afraid to wallow in the dirt a little.
 
And, to be fair, the film has one fun detail. Meester demonstrates her madness early on by being a fan of artist Richard Prince, who is famous for reprinting photos of cowboys in cigarette advertisements as his own art, and photographed Brooke Shields when she was 10, completely unclad. Meester has a special affection for a series of paintings Prince did where he took the covers of old nurse romance novels, blew them up, and then made them creepy by painting masks on them. Best of all, Meester — and perhaps the filmmakers — didn't get this. She stares at one and says, rather dimly, that she loves the way Prince painted the nurse's eyes. Um … he didn't paint the eyes, sweetie. Whoever illustrated the cover of "Man-Crazy Nurse #2" did.
 
But that's about the only moment in the film that's entertainingly batty. It doesn't help that the two actress underplay their roles to such a degree that they could easily have been swapped out for articulated mannequins and nobody would have noticed. Kelly feigns fear by pouting very slightly, while Meester feigns madness by, well, also by pouting, although less slightly. Worse still, the film decided it needed to explain Meester's behavior. I don't need it. She's cinematically crazy, which is whatever madness the plot needs. Does there need to be any additional reason she ties Kelly's lesbian best friend to a bed, seemingly for days? No. That's just what crazy people do in films!
 
But, at one point, Kelly finds a bottle of pills in Meester's drawer, and they're to treat schizophrenia. And now the film is not about cinematic madness, but real mental illness, and that raises all sorts of issues. For one thing, Meester doesn't have any actual symptoms of schizophrenia. For another, schizophrenics are the victims of criminal violence far more often than they are the perpetrators of it. And, finally, schizophrenics are about as likely to become violent as anybody else in the world. It's one thing to portray the mad as murderous when they're a pretend mad; it's reinforcing a troubling stereotype about the mentally ill when you give them an actual illness.

As I cannot recommend "The Roommate," I shall instead point you to an earlier masterpiece of filmic trash, "The Stud" from 1978. The film ostensibly is about a gigolo who runs a London discotheque, played by Oliver Tobias with the confused looks that dogs get when they are mating. But the film properly is about the stranger sibling relationships in history, that of author Jackie Collins, whose book this film is based on, and sister Joan Collins, who stars in it.
 
Joan was 39 when she made this film, but looked 50, although she looked terrific for 50. She spends most of the film in an assortment of fetish undergarments and kinky boots, acting as Tobias' tour guide through the sexual perversity of the very rich, including an orgy in a Parisian home that seems to consist entirely of an indoor jungle scene, with waterfalls and screaming tropical birds. He seems discomfited by the whole tour, in the way children will sometimes panic halfway through a haunted house on Halloween and beg to get out. But Joan seems to be having fun, and the film has fun, with the dialogue often sounding like somebody had hired Oscar Wilde to script porn. There is a sequel to it, called "The Bitch," but I can't recommend that as strongly, as it feels like a television movie of the week, swapping out the first film's fascination with the perverse for a rather uninspired plot about stolen jewels and con artists.
 
Getting back to "The Roommate" for one second, there was one thing I just remembered that I liked about it. Specifically, I saw it at Block E. And so the pleasures the film itself could not provide were offered by the audience, which was small, consisting of maybe 13 people, and almost all female. They shouted back at the screen for every plot point, with one woman crying out "Oh no! She's crazy!" whenever the antagonist would get a little antagonistic. She said it with such surprise that I could help but be thrilled by her — how could this surprise her! Didn't she know what movie she was seeing? Of course the film's villain is crazy! It might as well have been called "I Have a Roomate Who Is Crazy!"
 
This same woman also made a cell phone call during the film's climax, which I could have done without, but that's always a risk at Block E.

One last note: Block E is kitty-corner to Thom Pham's newish restaurant, Wondrous Azian Kitchen, which is a perfect re-creation of 1970s Chinese restaurant kitsch — the whole thing is done in red lacquer, and it looks glorious. I went there before the movie, not to eat — my God, no! The restaurant was ranked number two of the most egregious health violators after a January inspection. It's entirely possible they have since fixed whatever the Department of Regulatory Services had an issue with, but they don't seem to have publicized the fact. They have an ongoing issue with publicity in general — for a little while, the restaurant was going to be called "Wanderers," because the business's publicist misheard the name.
 
One presumes the restaurant has dumped that publicist, whose problems weren't limited to not listening very well — a recent City Pages story revealed a sordid collection of alleged misbehavior, including identity theft. All this might make for a better film than "The Roommate," but it's not really what you want associated with a dining establishment, especially at the corner of 5th and Hennepin, which is famously cursed, having had so many different restaurants open and close in the past decade that a business would be wise to sign an hourly lease on the place. Health violations won't help Wonderous, and neither will neglecting to get the word out when they're fixed. But I didn't go in for food, but instead a cocktail, which seems to me it must be pretty safe, as it's essentially made of antiseptic.

I wanted to get their Wondrous Punch, which, after all, the restaurant is named for. But the drink costs $25 and it's suggested that at least two people be on hand to drink it. Now, I'm not afraid of alcohol poisoning — after 20 years of battling liquor, we've reached detente. But $25 is a bit rich for my blood. So instead I opted for their version of the Singapore Sling, which they say is the original recipe, from an actual bar in Singapore — the Long Bar, which is in Raffles Hotel. That's a hell of a claim, seeing as nobody actually knows what the original recipe was, and it has been repeatedly modified over the years, but whatever recipe they're using, it's a good one. This is a tropical cocktail that uses gin as its base, rather than the more usual rum, and includes cherry liqueur and the sweet Benedictine herbal liqueur beverage, which is sort of ingenious. Gin, after all, has a rustic juniper flavor, tasting a bit like you were running through some Northern woods and fell with your mouth open into a pine tree. As a result, people are usually a bit nervous around gin. But the sweet cherry flavor of the drink plays off the gin well, and then they toss in pineapple, and, her, there we are, now it's a party.
 
It's very hard to find a well-made tropical cocktail in the Twin Cities, and Wondrous makes it well. So I'll be going back before my Block E moviegoing, at least until the locations curse works its spell on the restaurant, or alcohol decides to break its uneasy truce with me and poison me when I am not paying attention.