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Room, The
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Year: |
2003
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Director: |
Tommy Wiseau
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Stars: |
Tommy Wiseau, Juliette Danielle, Greg Sestero, Philip Haldiman, Carolyn Minnott, Robyn Paris, Mike Holmes, Kyle Vogt, Greg Ellery
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Genre: |
Drama, Trash |
Rating: |
         3 (from 1 vote) |
Review: |
Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) thinks he is in a secure relationship with his girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Danielle), who he lives with in their San Francisco home. Their friends think nothing of wandering in and out of the place, friends like Denny (Philip Haldiman), who Johnny is assisting financially to get him through college, and has something of a crush on Lisa, so much so that when the couple tells him that they're going to have some alone time in the bedroom after Johnny has given Lisa a new dress, Denny joins them on the bed for a pillow fight. They manage to persuade the boy to leave, then get down to making sweet love...
Actually, there's a bit too much of the sweet lovemaking in The Room, but for some that was part of the attraction. Indeed, every misstep in this poor little production was part of the attraction to its fans as after a few years since its release it became a bona fide cult favourite due to its perceived terrible quality. Not that it was difficult to perceive much that was decent about the film, as on the face of it The Room was just your ordinary low budget vanity project which somehow made it to cinemas, but such was the ineptitude it put on display that many found themselves responding to it with a curious affection.
Every few years there comes along a film that attracts a Rocky Horror Picture Show style of fanbase in that there will be groups of moviegoers who attend its screenings and turn it into an audience participation event, but much as their creators would have hoped their project had legs, hardly any of them have the lasting allure. After all, how many people still visit their local arthouse to wave coathangers at Mommie Dearest or yell the lines along with Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls? But The Room looked to beat those odds and turn into a minor phenomenon, so much so that its hapless writer and director and star would turn up at screenings, evidently pleased that his work had found someone who enjoyed it passionately, endlessly quoting his dreadful dialogue.
It might have been nicer for him if they were not hooting with laughter all the way through it, but beggars can't be choosers. The plot maps out the doomed romance of Johnny and Lisa, played with a baffling lack of skill in the case of the former, and an admirable struggle with an apparently insane character in the case of the latter. Wiseau speaks his lines in a thick accent, and in spite of having the role tailor made for him - by himself - Johnny has the look of being recently discovered in a glacier and thawed just before the production began. Certainly his attiitude towards the Lisa character appears to have been informed by an unreconstructed male perspective, if not the point of view of someone hailing from another world. Lisa, you see, is not the source of Johnny's happiness, but actually the architect of his undoing.
No matter how loving she seems in the first ten minutes, and get used to the dreadful thought that Wiseau is trying to turn you on with the love scenes as there are a lot of them, she is in fact the Queen Bitch from Hell who has her sights set on Johnny's best friend Mark (Greg Sestero, whose fascinating book on this film was turned into James Franco comedy The Disaster Artist). He reluctantly falls for her charms, and suffers massive guilt, but we're not supposed to blame him at all as it's clearly set out as the woman's fault. If this suspiciously misogynistic narrative were not deranged enough, marvel at the incidental lunacies such as the males' insistence on tossing a football about, even when dressed for a wedding that mysteriously never happens, or the amount of times establishing shots of the city are used without rhyme or reason. Nobody in this acts rationally, it genuinely does seem like a space alien wrote it while trying to pass for human, and possible Conehead in disguise Wiseau's dropping in of a James Dean line is but one instance in an obliviously ludicrous film. It's like a demented sitcom that thinks it's a drama. Music by Mladen Milicevic.
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Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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