One person’s vision can change the world. If it weren’t for Newton looking at falling things we never would have had gravity. If it weren’t for Georgia O’Keefe we would not recognize how much a flower really does look like a vagina.
The thing mankind must recognize is that the vision of one can benefit the many, or in the case of The Room, inflict a kind of pain that transcends time and space.
The Room was written, directed, produced and stars Tommy Wiseau. It is also a disaster; a disaster to such an extent that at some point its drama is turned like magic into comedy gold. In the history of cinema there have been plenty of bad scripts, bad directors and bad actors, but rarely have we seen someone who was as bad at all of those aspects as Tommy Wiseau.
The Room is a fairly recent occurrence, becoming a cult movie due largely to its comically bad dialogue mixed with its amateurish actors, whose ability is limited only by their lack of any training whatsoever and its horrible directing. These all coupled together leads to the strangest cinematic experience one can see.
There are enough soft-core sex scenes to make a Skinemax movie blush, enough short football throwing to create a 50:1 scale model of a real football game and enough b-roll of San Francisco to call it a tourism video.
The film begins with Johnny (Wiseau) coming home to his girlfriend Lisa (Juliette Daniel) with a red dress. As they go up to “take a nap,” Denny Phillip Haldiman) enters, and as a college student has no idea that when Johnny and Lisa mean “take a nap” they actually mean sex, so he follows them to the bedroom, assuming I guess that they are all going to take a long nap.
It is also at this point where the weather goes from sunny (as Johnny enters the house) to pouring rain (when they are in the bedroom), as is the usual weather pattern of San Francisco.
Johnny’s accent is something else. There is no indication or ever any clue as to where his accent is from, which is an odd, Eastern Europeanish accent that does not fit either the actor (Wiseau was born in New Orleans) or the character, who seems to be American.
There are many scenes in The Room that have almost gained Meme status. Confrontations with Chris R. (Dan Janjigian) and the odd conversations about cheating Johnny has with his friend Mark (Greg Sestero) have become fairly popular on the Youtube machine.
There are problems with dubbing, with many scenes appearing blatantly dubbed such as the famous “Flower Shop Scene,” which is a 20 second scene that ends with Johnny saying “oh hi, doggy.”
There is simply not enough time to say how many things are wrong with The Room, or how many errors there are in the dialogue. All that can be said is that it is a failure on such an epic proportion that it is worth seeing.
The mysteries of the Room are plentiful, and like most movies in theatres now, you should not watch this alone, not due to it being a horror movie, but instead because it is horrible.
