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199 of 210 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
It's like sitting on an atom bomb that's about to explode!, August 23, 2007
I have now seen Mr. Tommy Wiseau's cinematic tour-de-force, `The Room' three times. With each viewing, `The Room' becomes more complexly entangled in and inseparable from my own life. I no longer know where The Room ends and I begin.
It is, without question, the worst film ever made. Including movies made on beta max video cameras in special education high school classes. But this comment is in no way meant to be discouraging. Because while The Room is the worst movie ever made it is also the greatest way to spend a blisteringly fast 100 minutes in the dark. Simply put, `The Room' will change your life.
It's not just the dreadful acting or the sub-normal screenplay or the bewildering direction or the musical score so soaked in melodrama that you will throw up on yourself or the lunatic-making cinematography; no, there is something so magically wrong with this movie that it can only be the product of divine intervention. If you took the greatest filmmakers in history and gave them all the task of purposefully creating a film as spectacularly horrible as this not one of them, with all their knowledge and skill, could make anything that could even be considered as a contender. Not one line or scene would rival any moment in The Room.
The centerpiece of this filmic holocaust is Mr. Tommy Wiseau himself. Without him, it would still be the worst movie ever made, but with him it is the greatest worst movie ever made. Tommy has been described as a Cajun, a Croatian cyborg, possibly from Belgium, clearly a product of Denmark, or maybe even not from this world or dimension. All of these things are true at any one moment. He is a tantalizing mystery stuffed inside an enigma wrapped in bacon and smothered in cheese. You will fall in love with this man even as you are repelled by him from the first moment he steps onto screen with his long Louis the Fourteenth style black locks and thick triangular shoulders packed into an oddly fitting suit, and his metallic steroid destroyed skin. Tommy looks out of place, out of time and out of this world. There has never been anything else like him. Nor will there ever be.
The Room begins with `Johnny' (Tommy Wiseau) and his incomprehensibly evil fiance `Lisa' (played by a woman with incongruously colored eyebrows and a propensity for removing her shirt) engaging in some light frottage, joined by, Denny, (played with a deft sense of the absurd by Phillip Haldiman), their sexually confused teenage neighbor who is clearly suffering from a form of aged decrepitude. When Denny, who looks like the human version of Gleek the monkey from Superfriends, says, in a slightly creepy yet playful tone of voice, `I like to watch!' as Johnny and Lisa roll around the bed in a pre-intercourse ritual revolving around rose petals, you know you are in for a very special movie.
After a lengthy lovemaking scene (not to worry if you miss it the first time, they show it again in its entirety later in the movie) in which Tommy's bizarre scaly torso and over-anatomized rear-end are lovingly depicted over and over again as he appears to hump Lisa's hip, we discover that Lisa, for no particular reason, has become bored with Tommy's incessant lovemaking and decides to leave him.
Just when you think the movie might lapse into an ordinary, pedestrian sort of badness, Johnny's best friend Mark, a man who's job seems to be to wear James Brolin's beard from Amityville Horror, shows up and electrifies the screen with a performance so wooden that it belongs in the lumber section of Home Depot. Incidentally, Mark is played by Greg Sestero, who, in addition to being described as a department store mannequin, was also the line producer on `The Room' and one of Tommy Wiseau's five (5!!!!!) assistants on the movie. Lisa forces Mark, amid his paltry, unconvincing protests, to have an affair with her on their uncomfortable circular stairs. For no apparent reason Lisa decides that she is made of pure evil and wants to torture her angelic and insanely devoted fiancé, Johnny.
Lisa receives pointed advice from her mother who casually announces that she is dying of breast cancer and then never mentions it again. But Lisa is determined to make Johnny's life a living hell, in spite of the fact that she, according to her mother, "cannot survive on her own in the cutthroat 'computer business'". But not before they recycle the sex scene from earlier in the movie where we get another bird's eye view of Johnny's ludicrous naked body. Denny gets into trouble with a drug dealer. Mark shaves his beard. Tommy gets drunk on an unusual cocktail made from mixing whiskey and vodka. Lisa lies and tells everyone that Tommy hit her in a drunken rage.
A balding psychologist appears out of nowhere, offers some advice, then apparently dies while softly falling on the ground in an attempt to catch a football thrown by Mark.
All of these seemingly disparate events build up to two cathartic moments. The first is when Tommy expressively yells at Lisa with the line `You are tearing me apart Lisa!'. You will cheer at this line as you realize that the film has been tearing you apart the whole time. And the second is at Tommy's birthday party where the worst actor that has ever been born plays a unidentified man wearing a silk shirt who utters a phrase that perfectly describes the experience of watching The Room,
`It feels like I'm sitting on atom bomb that is going to explode!'
The shocking ending will leave you pleading for some kind of sequel.
See this film at all costs. See it twice. Or three times. Or as one kid that I met from Woodland Hills has, 12 times! See it until you can recite every precious line of dialogue this movie has to offer. Let The Room become your new religion and Tommy Wiseau your prophet preaching the gospel according to Johnny.
My dream is to someday buy a theater and run The Room 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until the print disintegrates. I hope it becomes your dream as well.
Brickyard Jimmy from Los Angeles, CA
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wacky, awful, and sublime, January 24, 2009
Let's assume that you've seen The Room. Imagine that Lisa's eyebrows matched her hair. Imagine that Johnny was about twenty years younger and a person that you actually wanted to see naked, with a decent haircut. Imagine that the movie's budget allowed for more than three or four sets. Imagine that characters didn't keep repeating the same meaningless lines over and over again--"Johnny is a good man." "Johnny is my best friend." "I don't want to talk about it." "Well I have to go now." Imagine that instead of being a simple Jekyll/Hyde caricature, Lisa was actually a complicated and real-seeming person, torn between security/domesticity and freedom/passion. Suppose that the revelation that her mother is dying of breast cancer actually contributed to her inner conflict. Imagine that the minor characters were adequately introduced and actually came across as real people with their own problems/motivations instead of simply allowing the filmmaker to kill some time while he waits to advance his plot. What would we have then? A simple morality tale (actions have consequences!) that no one would ever want to buy on DVD. Instead, we have The Room.
I first heard about The Room in the December 19, 2008 edition of Entertainment Weekly. I immediately tried to put it in my Netflix queue, but it was unavailable, so I came here, to Amazon, and was delighted to find that I could own this intriguing piece of cinema for only 8.49, so I bought it. I have watched it twice and have been trying to figure out what makes this movie so awful and yet so oddly entertaining ever since. Now I must admit I am a huge fan of bad movies--I can debate which is worse, Plan 9 from Outer Space or Manos: The Hands of Fate with the best of 'em. I have a tradition of watching Showgirls with the excellent commentary from David Schmader every Fourth of July, because it's so much better than fireworks, and you don't get caught in a traffic jam. I think it is hard to pin down all the disparate elements that make The Room sublime. Still, I agree with the EW article--it is the Citizen Kane of bad movies.
For those of you who haven't seen The Room, the plot goes something like this: Johnny is a guy who loves his live-in girlfriend, Lisa. He brings her presents. They have sex to horrible R&B-lite tunes. Their creepy teenage neighbor, Denny, tries to watch them having sex, but luckily they kick him out before things get too hot and heavy. Lisa seems to enjoy the sex, but it turns out Lisa is a big faker. Lisa doesn't love Johnny, but she thinks his best friend Mark is pretty hot, and apparently, no one can resist Lisa. To paraphrase what David Schmader said about Nomi in Showgirls, Lisa immediately pulls people into her orbit and makes them fall in love with her, because...well, we don't know why. Lisa and Mark have sex. Lisa and Johnny have sex again, just to make sure Lisa's duplicity is obvious enough. Lisa's mom is dying of breast cancer. Denny pisses off a drug dealer. Lisa encourages Johnny to drink too much and then makes up a story about him getting drunk and hitting her. A psychologist advises Johnny. Lisa and Johnny make out on the sofa in their house, except now they are played by two entirely different actors. Oh no, wait, these are different, unknown characters making out on their sofa. There is a midly amusing incident with Lisa's mother and the unknown young man on the sofa and his underwear. We see the incident, and then it is repeated verbatim for us in the next scene. Johnny, Mark, and Denny play football while wearing tuxedos--ha ha! Lisa hosts a birthday party for Johnny and announces that she is pregnant, and then confesses to a friend that she's really not. Lisa then hits on Mark during the party, even though they had agreed to end their affair. Johnny finds out his beloved girlfriend is not really a human being, but is instead an evil robot. Disaster ensues. Actions have consequences!
I find that the movie makes more sense to me if I imagine that the character of Johnny is actually mentally challenged, but everyone is too polite to say this explicitly. (Once you hear Tommy Wisseau's odd accent and the strange cadence and emphases to his speech and his dorky laughs, not to mention what he's actually saying, it's actually not much of a stretch at all!) Johnny maybe has a rich, powerful uncle somewhere who has gotten him a handsomely-paid job fetching coffee at a bank. He's mentally challenged enough that he doesn't realize he's going to be the coffee boy forever, and he thinks his money-saving ideas for the bank are going to get him promoted ("Hey, if we stop giving away free toasters with new checking accounts, we could save money!" "That's a great idea, Johnny. Now go get me some more coffee. And a bagel. Cinnamon. Light on the cream cheese. That's a good man! We should think about promoting you to bank president, eh, Johnny? Heh heh!") Lisa is getting tired of having a mentally challenged boyfriend. Even though he is good to her, he has started to disgust her. And it's kind of understandable, really. It also explains Johnny's melodramatic reactions to everything.
Anyway, that's the backstory I have invented for The Room, but you could easily invent your own, and that's the great thing about this movie. The gaping holes in character and plot really encourage the viewer to use her own creativity. Whether you're throwing plastic spoons at the screen or trying to make up plausible reasons for the nutty behavior, it's a lot of fun, so buy this movie right now!!
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's not "A Room", It's *THE ROOM*., January 23, 2007
Well, what can I say?
After showing this at a party to a few friends, a round of applause followed the ending. This film is hilarious, and for all the wrong reasons!
After seeing an old trailer for this film, I remember seeing the terrible acting and bizarre mixed European accent of Mr. Wiseau, with him screaming "YOU ARE TEARING ME APART LIIIIZA". Having been shown this, this film was on my 'to get' list. Pure genius!
I don't know why, however, the trailer was changed. I also don't remember it being marketed as a 'black comedy' on this trailer I saw. But still, this film has the potential to be a cult classic over here in the UK, as everyone I've shown it too has laughed their arses off. Memorable quotes include, "We are expecting, AH HAH!", "Hi, doggy!" and the conversation that shows Tommy talking to his 'best friend' about clients at work, then the conversation switching suddenly with Tommy asking him, "Anyway, how's your sex life?"
Even if you don't like films that are funny because they're bad, watch this.. It's well worth the money, and you'll have something to show your friends which *WONT* disappoint them ;D
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