The Room (2003)

R, because this movie is super pervy.  I think that Tommy Wiseau wanted to make this a late night Cinemax movie.  You know?  He aimed high.  He really was a classy guy.  (In case you don't understand, this movie lacks all the class.  It's really gross.)

DIRECTOR:  Tommy Wiseau

The good news is that I'm finally caught up with my reviews.  I can start watching movies again because I now don't have to worry about the insanely long list that I fell behind with.  The bad news is that I'm closing on some really low hanging fruit.  If you don't know of this movie, this is almost universally known as one of the worst movies ever made.  I try not to hate watch stuff, but there's no other way to watch it.  I was such a hipster with my ironic viewing of this movie.  What motivated me to finally sit down and watch this trash was the teaser for the new James Franco comedic biopic about this movie named The Disaster Artist.  So much has been said about this movie that it is almost stupid to review this movie formally.  But then again, I set a mandate that I had to review every movie I actually sat down and watched.  I didn't count Mystery Science Theater movies because they are edited and you aren't really getting the director's vision with the commentary over the movie.  I also don't count movies that I half-watched, like when I looked up from my playing of The Legend of Zelda to catch my favorite moments from Wet Hot American Summer.  But I full on watched it.  And I guess I have some feelings with this movie.

There's a theory that Tommy Wiseau himself propagated.  He says that the movie is remarkably self-aware and that he's a genius.  That's the biggest lie that I've ever heard.  There's no way that this movie is self-aware.  The greatest genius in the world couldn't pull off a movie self-aware enough to explain what is being shown on screen.   The movie is really bad and all of that lies at the hands of Tommy Wiseau.  I've heard of him in connection to this movie and the more I know about him, the crazier he comes off.  He wrote, produced, directed, and starred in this.  He's obviously eccentric.  This is not something that is discovered over time.  Listening to him for a half-second, there's a very clear disconnect from reality.  It might be easy to write him off in a slightly racist way, but the faults in this movie have nothing to do with the fact that he is not a native born American.  The faults lie in the fact that he has no grasp on what reality is like.  There are moments, right in the absolute beginning, when the film credits run over establishing shots, when this movie looks like it could be a normally bad movie.  The shots are functional and the music establishes a neutral tone that makes the movie seem okay.  Then Tommy Wiseau shows up.  I have to give some credit to the other actors because they are taking some absolutely bananas dialogue and acting like that is what someone would say.  

Tommy Wiseau is trying to make people sound like normal people.  But this isn't just community theatre writing; this is writing that a child would produce.  I gave credit to the other actors for doing the best that they could with a bad situation, but I really wonder how they could not know what they were signing up for before.  The premise of the movie is Johnny, portrayed by cro-magnon (How much better would this movie have been if Johnny was ACTUALLY a caveman?  I don't mean to rip off the Phil Hartman bit, but this movie would have been something truly special had that been the premise) is being cheated on by his fiancee', Lisa.  They have a kid that Johnny took in and financed and he just wants to watch them in intimate moments.  Lisa is cheating on Johnny with his best friend and that's about as far as I can take the summary.  The problem from this moment is consistency in the script.  Characters make the oddest choices when it comes to characterization.  In some scenes, Lisa is seen as sympathetic.  She is a girl who has fallen out of love with a good man and doesn't know how to let him down while trying to placate a mother who doesn't want Lisa to lose that security.  There are other times when Lisa is a raging psychopath, trying to napalm the world with the drama she is creating.  These are two fundamentally polarizing personality traits.  There can't be a character who is afraid of disappointing Johnny while trying to destroy him.  Johnny, unsurprisingly, has the same personality problem.  He is mostly characterized as this almost messiah character, taking care of all of the people in his life simultaneously while demonstrating that he is the world's most amazing love.  (Spoiler: he isn't.)  Then he flies off the handle and insults people around him while screaming to the rooftops of the injustices around him.  I'm not saying that being a banker is a personality trait, but he's definitely not a banker.  I could go down this list and talk about character inconsistencies.  My most optimistic excuse for what could have happened in this movie is that there were multiple cuts of the movies that were all smooshed together and the version of The Room we see was the chaotic nightmare  of a mental patient. 

The very nature of hatewatching something nowadays bums me out.  I knew this movie was going to be absolute trash, yet I still watched it.  It's like watching a trainwreck.  I wanted to see how bad it could get.  I mentioned in the MPAA section that I always did that this movie is very pervy.  I can't stress this enough.  There are four sex scenes, all of them completely unnecessary.  I also feel like they are entirely exploitative of the girl who plays Lisa, who is treated as an object on screen.  It's so odd that I can put this completely in the hands of Tommy Wiseau, who is just a horrible individual at this point.  I didn't know how creepy this movie was going to be before I started it, but I'm going to take the moral high ground and tell you not to watch it, despite the fact that I'm only spreading the evil word about how bad this movie is.  I know that there is someone who is now super curious about how bad this movie is and I entirely discourage you from watching this movie.  If you want a representation of what this movie is like, simply watch the YouTube clips to get ready for The Disaster Artist.  That's all you really need to know.  Tommy Wiseau has the worst delivery out of anyone that has ever been on screen.  I'm not saying hatewatching movies is the worst thing.  I do it myself, although I'm not exactly proud of that.  But this movie is really gross.  The people who are in this movie should have known what they were making.  There is no way that this script came their way and they didn't know how gross this movie was going to be.  I will say that there is a lot to laugh at.  The constant football tossing is a hilarious idea what it means to take place in male companionship.  The "cheep" sequences look like they are pulled directly out of Arrested Development.  The movie as a whole is what I imagine the first real AI film will look like.  These are warped funhouse mirrors of what reality should look like.  Yes, some guys like to toss the ball around and friends often rag on each other.  But it never, ever looks like this.  I don't know if Tommy Wiseau is so removed from basic human interaction or if he thinks that he is so infallible that he doesn't think that these moments need another take, but I don't know why anyone would let this go to the screen.  

But I guess you can say the same thing about Birdemic.