The Room

The Room

Starring Tommy Wiseau, Greg Sestero, Juliette Danielle, Philip Haldiman

Directed by Tommy Wiseau

The Story:

Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) is engaged to Lisa (Juliette Danielle), but she doesn't love him anymore, so she sleeps with his best friend Mark (Greg Sestero) behind his back.

The Synopsis:
Back in 2003, this little-known film made hardly a ripple in the world of cinema, and for very good reason: it's absolute garbage.  Tommy Wiseau - an enigma in itself - wrote, directed and starred in this pet project, and his best friend Greg Sestero served as a script supervisor as well as an actor.

Sestero later went on to write the book "The Disaster Artist" about the insane behind-the-scenes events that led up to the film which, surprisingly, was even more outlandish than the film itself.  This drew the attention of James Franco, who went on to direct and star in the film of the same title, starring as Wiseau while his brother Dave starred as Sestero.  The film - "The Disaster Artist" - has already gone on to earn a Golden Globe nomination for Best Comedy/Musical, and Franco won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.  It's due to this film that "The Room" has received a resurgence of popularity, playing at several sold-out theaters for special midnight showings, resulting in a cult following all its own.

"The Room" has even been called "the Citizen Kane of bad movies," and it more than lives up to that mantra.  There's very little positive I can actually say about this film, in its original state.  It's supposed to be - I think anyway - a heavily dramatic work about a forbidden love triangle between two best friends and a woman, but if that was the original intent (Wiseau now says it was supposed to be bad, but no one believes that) then it fell harder than anyone who falls in this film (and there's a lot of people who fall in the film).

The acting is atrocious.  It's worse than a high school play and looks about as bad as one.  The script - if you want to call it that - was as nonsensical as trying to write a story in your own unique language.  There's several subplots - Johnny's friend encounters a drug dealer that's never mentioned again, Lisa's mother says she has breast cancer that's met with as much emotion as ordering a pizza, a random couple makes out in Tommy's house, Lisa tells several people Johnny hits her to no emotional response, they play a lot of football - that never go anywhere, and several lines are repeated ad-nauseam ("don't worry about it," "I don't love him," "he's my best friend," oh, hi!").  

Yet, there's something magical about this trainwreck.  I think it's because it's soooooo bad, it's actually good.  Not in a good sense of it actually being good by the definition of good (this film is so stupid it's making me sound stupid), but it's fun to watch just to see the abomination that it is.  It's an enigma, a conundrum - much like the mysterious Wiseau himself.

The Summary:
While I generally tell people to avoid bad films, I feel like everyone should see "The Room" just to say that they've seen the worst movie ever made.

The Score: F