The Room
First thing’s first: a movie called The Room should be about a room.
This film is not about a room. It’s really about one man’s ego and his obsession with making a movie when he has no business being anywhere near a camera. But I doubt calling it Tommy Wiseau’s Narcissistic, Masturbatory Attempt at Creating High Art would have looked as good on a poster. Or a billboard.
To quote Roger Ebert (who sadly, never reviewed The Room), “I hated, hated, hated, hated this movie.” I spent the first ten minutes with my finger over the “Close Window” button. I spent the next twenty minutes hopping back and forth between the movie and Wikipedia’s plot summary, hoping the many plot elements would coalesce. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) I then spent the next hour watching this movie like I would watch a train wreck, unable to look away as the characters shuffled around with no real purpose, said their lines with no emotion, and destroyed things with no sense of rage. At the end of the movie I cried with relief and wondered how the hell I had managed to sit through The Room in its entirety when I turned off Punch-Drunk Love after the first eight minutes.
Movies like The Room are why we still need movie studios. The Room needed an editor to look over the script and say things like “Look, peppering your dialogue with cliches like ‘love is blind’ or ‘does anyone really know what women want?’ is lazy writing” or “You know, if my mother told me she had breast cancer, my first reaction wouldn’t be ‘don’t worry about it.'” The whole movie feels like a first draft, which is the biggest insult I can think of to a property that was previously both a play and a 500-page novel.
I detest movies that insult my intelligence, such as when a movie studio dumbs down its R-rated film to appeal to a PG-13 audience. As an adult, I want to see movies aimed at me and my adult comprehension. Not every film has to be Primer, but movies should at least make me think (if only a little) and The Room doesn’t. Characters spend so much time telling the audience (and each other) how they feel, I don’t even need to watch the movie; the actors could have recited their lines in sound booths and I could have followed along. The movie feels less directed and more like I’m watching rehearsals at my local community theater. The production values are on a similar scale; sets look cheap and every outside shot looks like people are standing in front of CGI backgrounds. (Which, according to this article, they were.)
But enough about the bad directing. Let’s talk about the bad (nonexistent?) writing. For a tightly scripted drama (or maybe black comedy?), The Room feels ripped from the pages of Tommy Wiseau’s junior high school diary. There’s no pacing. Characters are shallow. Character arcs are nonexistent. Character reactions demonstrate a lack of basic understanding about how people react to news and events. Cliches abound. Dialogue is repetitive. And dialogue is repetitive.
…
(Shit, Tommy Wiseau’s writing is rubbing off on me. Must end this review soon before I start greeting everyone with “Oh hi there.”)
Today I did what I thought was impossible: moved Batman & Robin down on my personal list of worst movies ever filmed from #1 to #2. In its place I put a commercial flop that has inexplicably become a midnight movie in vein of Rocky Horror Picture Show. I don’t get it. Maybe, maybe, I would want to see The Room again, but I don’t want to give Tommy Wiseau the impression that I approve of his choices as a filmmaker. To be blunt, I don’t want to give him any money. And neither should you.
tl;drs (Warning: hyperbole ahead)
Blank is a blanker version of blank: The Room is what happens when Satan gets bored with Legally Blonde 2 and decides he needs a new movie with which to torment the masses for all eternity.
Screen credits over/under: Under; this is the first movie I’ve ever seen that does’t seem to have a screenwriter. Ostensibly, there is one screenwriter credit, but I can’t see any on-screen evidence that Tommy Wiseau wrote a line.
Recommended if you like: hitting yourself in the head until you pass out. Losing IQ points. That scene in Star Wars III where Darth Vader throws up his hands and cries “Nooooooooooo!” as recreated by a smiling village idiot.
Better than I expected: N/A
Worse than I hoped: Everything.
The Room would work better as a(n): video game, maybe? Would it look better in 3-D?
Verdict: I have crowned a new champion on my personal list of the worst movies ever made.
Related reading: This Wired article Tommy Wiseau’s Reddit AMA
