A Disasterpiece of Epic Proportions
- The Room review by griggs
Watching The Room is like being trapped in a soap opera written on cocktail napkins and staged in someone’s living room. Every scene is an unholy cocktail of wooden acting, inexplicable dialogue, and subplots that vanish before they make sense. It doesn’t so much tell a story as trip over one, pick itself up, and carry on as if nothing happened.
Tommy Wiseau’s performance is its own spectacle — part Shakespearean meltdown, part blank stare. He screams, he laughs, sometimes both at once, and it’s impossible to decide if he knows what he’s doing. The film insists on sincerity, even as it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
And here’s the punchline: it’s glorious fun. Watched with an audience, it mutates into performance art — spoons flying, lines shouted in chorus, the crowd laughing at every misstep. The Room is cinematic failure elevated into comedy by sheer accident. A wreck, yes, but an endlessly entertaining one.
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Either a work of total genius/hilarity or one of the most narcissistic things ever committed to film
- The Room review by Timmy B
When I first heard about The Room, it was spoken about in almost revered terms: this was a film which was either an incredibly seriously-made drama with unintentional hilarity due to it's appalling acting & directing by it's ego-manic star; or it was a work of genius, fooling people into believing it was profound when it actually was anything but, whilst it's creator cackled in the only way he knows how.
For me however, it is actually something else, although with a lot of the 1st view in the mix: Wiseau did set out to make a serious drama which was unintentionally hilarious, but he was also completely genuine in his want & at times desperation to be seen as/deliver an incredibly profound performance. The other caveat with this is that (when you know the full behind-the-scenes story as told by Greg Sestero,) Wiseau had at his disposal for a big chunk of the production a highly professional & competent crew who he treated atrociously & then proceeded to burn through 2 more of when the 1st team quit en masse. His treatment of the actors was also equally as bad, but most of them couldn't afford to quit. In the grand scheme of things, it was only Wiseau's vast wealth that meant this movie even got out of pre-production.
But when it comes to the actual film, how much fun you have with this is almost entirely down to the individual viewer. I've given it 3 stars because as much as I had some serious laughs & fully embrace it's idiosyncrasies, it also at times is very hard work to watch, plus the endless repetition of certain lines didn't get funnier as the film went on. For example the constant "Oh, hai!" was funny the first couple of times, but then it just was like: OK is there anything else you can say to start a sentence with? And the multiple protracted sex scenes again just feel like padding which wasn't funny & become quite monotonous.
However, when this movie is great, nothing beats it. Whether it is the numerous subplots which go nowhere, the unbelievably bad line delivery by Wiseau, the terrible film sets/CGI or the end freak-out by Wiseau that sees him trash a room with the same effectiveness as a frail 100-year old man, it is hysterical. And the vanity of all of it just makes it even funnier. Wiseau fills his screen with actors who go from an attempt at emotion to standing in the background looking like they just wandered onto the screen by accident & decide to stay in order to not draw attention to themselves, giving Wiseau center-stage to humiliate himself.
This film is also full of more quotable lines than Withnail & I and Snatch put together. My favourite, delivered by Lisa's mother about a devastating health diagnosis, is brilliant precisely because of how the actress was directed to say this line. And the response from her daughter was just the icing on the cake. But the most well-known/the one most people will have seen in some context, is the "I did not hit her" line. It is both terrible & brilliant at the same time.
The best way to watch this film is with a group of mates, on a Friday night, preferably with lots of alcohol & enjoy the hell out of it. Despite my star rating, I will quite happily watch this film & have seen many deconstructions of it as well (YouTube The Room nostalgia critic for the best IMO.) But with some trimming to the run-time/removing a couple of the idiotic sub-plots (there are SO many that the fun won't be impacted,) this could have been actually a lot snappier in the grand scheme of things.
But in its own way, it's still a riot
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