Oh hi, reader.
I can usually watch some pretty bad movies, I consider myself thick skinned when it comes to what I can see or hear. But what I witnessed today may very well be the worst movie ever made. Yes, worse and any Uwe Boll film, or Ed Wood film (Except the movie Ed Wood with Johhny Depp), and worse than any Michael Bay boom film. I saw “The Room”. Yes, “The Room”. Tommy Wiseau’s magnum opus. Famous for being a bad film, and even earned the status of Cult Classic, but for all the wrong reasons.
The story revolves around Wisseau’s character Johnny. (No joke, the whole movie is all about Wiseau and his wonderful acting skills). Johnny is a banker, apparently, who is about to marry his long-term girlfriend Lisa, played by Juliette Danielle. But Lisa is now disinterested in Johnny and his nice ways, like helping an orphaned kid with his finances and schooling, and wants to be more adventurous. So she cheats on his originally reluctant, but eventually willing best friend of Johnny, Mark, played by Greg Sestero. Johnny gets suspicious of her cheating ways, and her lack of interest in getting married, and all hell breaks loose.
If you are reading the synopsis and thinking that it doesn’t sound like that bad of a movie, trust me when I say this, it is. The summary is the bits and pieces that I gathered from watching it and making assumptions. There is so much padding with pointess scenes involving footballs and stuff, it’s difficult to know what’s going on. As an example, the movie has 3 unnecessary sex scenes in the opening 20 minutes of the movie that makes you WANT to fast forward. No joke, we timed it. Hell, a lot of the movie are pointless shots of San Francisco as filler and segways into the next scene. And that pianist, where is that pianist, I want to beg him to stop with the piano.
The biggest problem with the movie, among many, is the fact that everything is so disjointed and clumsy. The dialogue is all over the place. You get the feeling that the movie is intending to be sounding as if you are having a normal conversation, but there is no rhyme or reason as to why they are saying what they are saying. They jump around from idea to idea, and every time it happens, you have to react with a shake of the head, and the urge to rewind to figure out what that was all about. Then when they don’t know how to end a conversation, it’s the same redundant phrases, like “I don’t want to talk about it” or “Don’t worry about it”.
Let me give you a perfect example of what I mean. The mother of Lisa, played by Carolyn Minnott, is in a conversation with her daughter about the brother and her inheritance (what this has anything to do with the plot is beyond me at this point), then all of a sudden, the line she delivers is “I got the results of the test back – I definitely have breast cancer.”, and without a bat of an eye, the conversation continues, and no mention of cancer is ever mentioned throughout the movie. When she delivered the line, she acts so nonchalantly, that it’s like she was mentioning she had Eczema, or a haircut, as if breast cancer is not a big deal.
In fact, most of the movie can be described with the words blunt and confusing. Even the plot, both main and side plots, make no sense and have no purpose in the grand scheme of things. All the actors show no emotions and deliver their words like robots. The only emotion we really see is when Wiseau delivers his famous, “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa”, causing uncontrollable laughter from the audience at the delivery. All the scenes are in four different sets that they rotate. Even the technical aspects of the movie, like the editing, the camera, the Foley, even the stage direction is all over the place. It’s mind boggling.
This movie needs to be shown to aspiring directors, writers and actors to show what NOT to do to a movie, because nothing is right in it. This movie is a disaster written all over it. I needed a shower after watching that, to clean all that stench off. There really is no positives to the movie, so it’s hard to write a review.
If you still wish to torment yourself to watching this, I highly recommend seeing it with another person. It’s one of those movies where you’ll turn it off after the first half an hour by yourself, but with another, you can laugh and point out all the plot holes and wacky dialogue all over the place. I had a chance to watch this with Puneet from 2 Guys 1 Movie a Day (which by the way, if you haven’t had a chance to check that site out, I highly recommend doing so immediately following this), and we had a blast just ripping this movie a new one. It made the movie more fun and less treacherous to watch with someone to laugh along with, otherwise it’s a chore.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to write a letter of apology to Michael Bay for calling him the worst director of all time, and need to watch an Uwe Boll marathon to wash away all that funk.