We’ve booked a couple of rooms here at the Definitive Movies Blog, so check in and settle down for some badly informed comment and weak gags. First up is the self appointed ‘Citizen Kane’ of bad movies, ‘The Room’ from 2003. This pile of crap has enjoyed something of a renaissance recently with ‘The Disaster Artist’ starring James Franco being a bio-pic of a dreadful film.
So what makes a bad film? Is it just technical ineptitude and a poor script liberally sprinkled with terrible acting or is there something more? For me, a bad film is a boring one that’s quickly forgotten. You can’t say that for ‘The Room’ as it is as memorable as it is enjoyable. I know the film has cult status with people going to screenings dressed up and throwing spoons, that’s nice for them, but a bit tiresome really.
The film is written, directed and stars Tommy Wiseau whose performance has to be seen to be believed. He’s like a mash up between a wrestler and a Bond villain. He has long unkempt hair and a droopy eye. He is quite muscly and struggles with dialogue. That’s fair enough as he’s of Polish origin but it’s hard to take a leading man seriously when he mangles his lines and emphasises the wrong parts whilst waving his arms about as if in distress.
He has to accept all of the blame given that he wrote the script too. The plot would fit on the back of a stamp with trampy Lisa basically banging two blokes in turn whilst displaying a random character trait in each scene in which she appears. To be fair at one point someone describes her a pyscho, so if you accept that, at least some of the plot will make sense.
The film opens with Johnny (Tommy) buying Lisa a nice dress. They make love and talk of their upcoming wedding. In the next scene she tells Johnny’s friend Mark that Johnny is boring and they make love. Johnny then comes home having failed to land a promotion at the bank. They get drunk and make love. Mark then comes over to tell Lisa it’s over, they make love.
It’s essentially a soft core porn flick that seemingly cost $6m to make. They must have spent the money on footballs and pretzels because it’s certainly not on the screen. There are more bizarre moments and plot twists like a drug debt story that goes nowhere and several scenes of various characters throwing a football around for no discernible reason.
‘The Room’ is a strange title in itself and the word is never uttered in the film. To be fair they only have two rooms as sets, so it must refer to one of them. The one with the candles and the roses where the shagging takes place, is my guess. There may be some subtext that ‘the room’ is a psychological state or it refers to the walls of madness that close in on us all when we are betrayed by a skanky girlfriend. I doubt it’s that deep - in fact I’m certain, as this is just a bloated vanity project that allowed a weirdo to fulfil his dreams and get his buns on screen.
I’d say fair play to him - it’s very easy to pick holes, but it is an object lesson in how difficult it is to make a film and how many parts you need to get right. ‘The Room’ manages to get most of them wrong but it’s a fun ride and definitely worth seeing. The sex and fight scenes are the best but I also liked the flower shop ‘Hi doggie!’ and party sequences, which were laugh a minute.
I’d recommend that you read the book ‘The Disaster Artist’ first so that you can learn about the genesis of this important and memorable work - and so you can look out for all the cock ups.
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