The Room -(Ungradeable) I've hit a point in my life where, for the most part, I can't enjoy watching a movie for the 'camp' value any more. I just don't have the patience to watch 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' these days because as my life goes on, I feel that time I spend chuckling ironically over 'Monster-a-go-go' or some Golan-Globus schlock fest could've been spent watching a genuine film made with care and commitment. As a case in point, I've only watched about fifteen minutes of Uwe Boll's crapfest, 'Alone in the Dark' before I switched off. (You know, it's the one where Tara Reid plays an anthropologist. Yeah.) While I get the trope of 'So Bad It's Good', just fine, most movies that fall under that rubic are...well, just bad.
It's because in this day and age, anything hacked out cheaply for the lowest common denominator is usually done by indifferent technicians, like Uwe Boll, above. There are other examples, naturally. Michael Bay shoots films like he's still directing Pontiac car commercials, the Seltzer/Friedburg guys who excrete those 'Scary/Date/Epic' movies. You get the idea. It's because there's so much money at stake, any films like 'Manos-The Hands of Fate' haven't got a hope in hell of ever getting made. These days, one million dollars for a budget is basically no-budget cinema.
So here's Tommy Wiseau's debut, 'The Room'. How bad is it? Let me put it this way: Jerry Lewis made an as-of-now unreleasable film, 'The Day the Clown Cried', which is part of Hollywood lore as possibly the worst film ever. (Brief synopsis: Lewis plays a washed-up circus clown in Nazi Germany named Helmut Doork. He drunkenly insults a Nazi official and is sent to Auschwitz. There, he finds a job entertaining condemned children on their way to the gas chamber. Comedian Harry Shearer, from the Simpsons, has seen it and calls it, 'A Perfect Thing', in that its sheer awfulness is as close to missing the mark on movie-making as you are ever hoping to get. If you think about the initial premise, and shoot downwards in your estimation on how bad such a thing could be, you're giving Lewis too much credit...)
The Room is Tommy Wiseau's 'Perfect Thing'. Every possible way a film can fuck up, this film fucks up. The story is incoherent. Subplots fall away to nothing. The acting is community theater-awful. Actors disappear and their lines are given to other people. Pointless establishing shots and even more pointless green-screen shots are splattered high and low. There is no sense of time passing. The camera goes out of focus. This is, beyond a doubt, the worst movie I've ever seen in my life.
And yet, it has a weird fascinating pull to it, for two reasons: one, the star, producer, writer and director, Tommy Wiseau. He's a clueless little middle-aged, lumpy troll with a mop of curly black hair and a strange foreign accent who tries to pass himself off as 'a regular, nice guy' in this film. (That's him in the above poster.) So here's the story, such as it is: Tommy plays a 'great guy' who works at a bank, doing something, we're not sure, and is about to marry his fiancee, Lisa, in a month. After a couple of soft-core love scenes where Tommy tries to screw her belly-button, apparently, Lisa decides that she doesn't want to marry him, and cheats on him with his best friend. He finds out about her betrayal, flips out at them at a party, then kills himself. There's a couple of subplots, where Tommy is supporting some retarded kid who owes a drug dealer money, and Lisa's mom tells Lisa that she has cancer, and nothing comes of them. Oh, and there's this other friend of Tommy and Lisa who's a shrink, and he tells them to work out their problems, but the actor playing him quit halfway through, (wonder why?) so the shrink's lines go to this guy we've never seen before. (It makes Ed Wood substituting his chiropractor for Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 look like Scorsese.) Tommy Wiseau shoots this film the same way he acts, with a clueless oblivion that I've never seen before and I will never see again, hopefully. Wiseau has literally made art in reverse.
The other impression I've gotten from this movie is that, as inept and weird as it is, it's come from a very deeply personal place from Tommy Wiseau. In his past, some heartless bitch screwed him over, tore his heart out and stomped on it with a pair of golf cleats. And this movie is his revenge, his cry of pain, his soul laid bare. I'm kind of sad to have seen it, for I know that what ever Mr. Wiseau chooses to do in the future will never come close to the sheer ineptitude and goofiness of this, his magnum opus. He can only go up from here.
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