You shouldn’t watch The Room.
You shouldn’t watch The Room because it is a terrible film. The acting is terrible, the editing is garbage, the writing is insipid, the plotting is abysmal and the lead actor’s accent is so thick as to be almost unintelligible. It is a bad film in every way a movie can be considered bad, an absolute and pointless mess that proves that maybe Hollywood does know what it’s doing from time to time. At the very least their shit is more coherent.
You should watch The Room because all of those elements, all of those aspects of bad filmmaking, somehow meld together into a comic masterstroke of a movie. Not just a bad movie, but The Bad Movie, a farcical tour de force that elevates artlessness into an art form. There’s no logic to it, no common sense to be had, just something that needs to be experienced for oneself to be believed. Forget Manos, forget Mac & Me, this is the only movie you need.
It is this inherent contradiction that has fueled the explosive cult popularity of The Room, and it is The Room that fueled the creation of The Disaster Artist, which joins Get Out in the list of most recent films I’ve covered for the Marathon. Based on the 2013 book of the same name, David Franco stars as Greg Sestero, a struggling young actor and model living in San Francisco in the late 90s. Greg’s career prospects are looking bleak, until one day he meets a fellow actor by the name of Tommy Wiseau (James Franco). Tommy is a mysterious mess of contradictions, he claims to be from New Orleans yet he talks like he’s from some vague Eastern-European country, he claims to be in his 20s yet he looks far older, he seems to have no solid job yet endless amounts of money, and he wants to be a famous actor despite not really knowing how to do it. The two bond over a shared love of James Deen and a dream, even moving to Los Angeles in order to pursue it, but then Los Angeles is full of actors trying to grab that brass ring. Feeling despondent with failure after failure, suddenly the question is asked: Why not make our own movie? Well a lot of reasons, namely a lack of crew, equipment, scripts or money, but it’s soon clear that none of that is an issue for Tommy. Come hell or high water, he’s going to make this movie, this classic tale of human behavior, and Greg is coming along for the ride. This is story of The Room folks, and it’s pretty wild.
When talking about a movie like The Disaster Artist, comparisons are obviously going to be made with Ed Wood, the Tim Burton biopic about the man behind Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda. They’re both films about the directors of infamously bad movies after all, with the moral that you should always strive to accomplish your dreams no matter what anyone else says (even if it’s everyone you know). However Ed Wood, aside from having that unique Burton aesthetic, always felt like more of a cynical film to me than Disaster Artist does. I mean they’re both willfully ignorant and emotionally manipulative to a degree, but Ed Wood comes off as more amped up and aggressive compared to the perpetually sedated Tommy. Which works to the Disaster Artists benefit, because in spite of Tommy’s capricious and mercurial behavior you never quite get around to hating him. Annoyed, morbidly curious, but never hate.
You also get the impression that The Disaster Artist was made from a place of love, which might be lacking from Burton’s film. Depp might be a great actor when he wants to be, but he’s not really Ed Wood the man in that film, he’s Ed Wood the idea. James Franco is Tommy Wiseau, he looks like him, he talks like him, and in the numerous scene reenactments from The Room he acts like him as well, getting very close to perfectly mimicking Wiseau’s distinctly unusual mannerisms. It’s an incredible amount of dedication to devote to such a remarkably unremarkable film like The Room, but that just goes to show just how magnetic this movie can and has been since its release.
More than anything else though, it’s a movie about friendship. Friendship between Greg and Tommy certainly, but in general how important companionship is for people. How a friend can push you to try things you never have before, or encourage you to think of things in a different manner, or sometimes just to be a helping hand when the world is being shitty. Friendships can change the world for the better, even if its only for two people.
If you’re a fan of The Room, you’ve probably already seen this movie already. If you’re a fan of films about filmmakers, like Ed Wood or American Movie, then you might’ve seen this movie already. And if you’re not really either of those things, then this still gets the recommendation for being a funny, heartwarming film, at least as heartwarming as you can get with a goof like Wiseau involved. Those attempting to do a The Room/The Disaster Artist double feature this Halloween are advised not to do so without the presence of a paid medical professional.
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