The Room

As a few WGWers probably know, Showgirls has long been my favorite bad movie of all time. At long last, it has a successor in the form of The Room, the ambiguously Eastern-Bloc accented Tommy Wiseau's woefully deformed, self-funded brain child.

The Room was originally released back in 2003 as a would-be chamber drama that though itself in the same league as a Tennessee Williams play. Being unintentionally hilarious, it quickly bombed. What saved it from falling into obscurity, however, was the attention it via an enormous billboard advertisement on an L.A highway. Wiseau decided to parlay the interest of film geeks into monthly midnight screenings- which have been wildly popular. Like the Paul Verhoeven before him with Showgirls, he of course has tried to say that it was supposed to be a "black comedy" all along.

The movie, boiled down to is essence, is the story of a love triangle. Johnny (played by Wiseau) is devoted to his girlfriend Lisa (played by a clearly off-the-bus Juliette Danielle). She, meanwhile, is cheating on him with his handsome best friend, Mark (Greg Sestero). This, all by itself, is comical for a variety of reasons. One, to say that the incredibly creepy Wiseau is an unlikely leading man would be kind. He is a pockmarked, wonky-eyed, weirdly muscled mess sporting a long mane of tangled drugstore black hair. What makes this even odder is the fact that his character is supposed to be a banker. Banks and similar financial institutions are famous for having extremely conservative dress and grooming codes. Secondly, the character of Lisa fully embodies the "informed attractiveness" trope. The other players of the film ooh and ahh over her beauty, and she is clearly intended to be a Sharon Stone-esque femme fatale. While her IMDb profile pictures reveal her to be a very pretty girl in real life, this film does absolutely nothing for her. She resembles in this role, as one reviewer put it, "the bloated corpse of Britney Spears." Her hair is styled into a bleach blond crimped bob with straight bangs teamed with dark eyebrows and the on-set stylist clearly hated her.
Mark is actually the only mildly believable, if dull, member of this love triangle.

But that's not all. Random characters and elements pop in and out of the plot. Lisa's mother, Claudette, mentions casually that she has breast cancer. We never hear about it again. Denny, the Chris-Chan-esque kidult whom Johnny has taken under his wing, gets in trouble with some drug dealers. We never hear about this again. Dialogue is bizarre, with characters repeating the same phrases over and over again. Wiseau presents a laughable portrayal of male companionship, which apparently involves throwing a football around at random, inside, three feet away from each other. The movie is set in San Francisco but was filmed in Los Angeles. Rooftop scenes, instead of being shot outside, are shot on the world's most obvious green screen. The entire thing drips with earnest ineptitude. Need a laugh? Find clips from The Room on youtube.

Oh, haiii, movie thread.

I, ahem, don't get it. I did a search for this topic and it didn't come up. What's the major malfunction here?

I know I read about this in a magazine somewhere (I think it was TIME) and I know the article I read on it trumpeted it as brilliant avant-garde masterpiece. They said the funky dialogue and the general badness was an artistic statement about language. Or some shit. I don't know, I just thought it sounded really stupid.

So now I guess all you have to do to make a bad movie not bad is to grow a beard and start mumbling to interviewers about how "avant-garde" it is and about how critics "just didn't get it". Than all the critics will be rushing to ferociously masturbate over your movie-shaped piece of shit in a desperate attempt to show that they "get it" and that they're hip and artistic and smart. Than everyone will be watching your movie and discussing and dissecting it in a similarily desperate attempt to "get it" and be as hip and smart as the critics.

Meanwhile you laugh all the way to the bank, while everyone else faux-orgasms over a horribly shitty movie that never even had a meaning in the first place.

Achtung Baby wrote:

Mark is actually the only mildly believable, if dull, member of this love triangle.

You know what the really weird thing is? I used to know a guy who looked almost EXACTLY like the guy who plays Mark, except the guy I knew was really skinny. Everytime I see The Room I get this kind of deja-vu feeling.

Quote :

Denny, the Chris-Chan-esque kidult whom Johnny has taken under his wing, gets in trouble with some drug dealers. We never hear about this again.

Ohhhhh, that doesn't begin to cover the sheer WTFery that is Denny. I mean, the kid likes to watch while his best friend/surrogate father and said best friend/surrogate father's "future wife" make out. And he says so.