I had never heard of The Room so went over to IMDB. The reviews they have there are all awesome. Highly recommended
Choice quote:
It is, without question, the worst film ever made. 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.
Oh, wow, I just did my periodic check and it turns out Amazon is finally offering the Region 1 DVD of The Room at a reasonable price as part of the Global Store thing. I’ll finally get to see it! This would, of course, happen just weeks after I disconnected my multi-region DVD player. Good thing I didn’t sell it yet.
So I watched it. While it’s great, I have to say it didn’t quite live up to the hype. At least, not after seeing things like Fateful Findings, which I contend is immeasurably worse (and hence better). Wiseau does at least seem to understand the basic concepts of film-making, even if the execution is off. And while it’s cheap, it’s not absurdly so.
The L.A. Times hosted an interview with the cast of the Room and the Disaster Artist, which produced this delightful exchange between Tommy Wiseau and James Franco:
James Franco: “How did you have faith in me to tell your story? When you gave me your life rights.”
Tommy Wiseau: “I think you you will do a good job, based on the movies that you always do. I tell you same thing .”
James Franco: “Because of ‘Sonny?’”
Wiseau: “Yes! Yes!”
Franco: “Directed by Nicolas Cage, ‘Sonny’”
Wiseau: "Yes, because you have everything there! "
Franco: “What do you mean, everything?”
Wiseau: “Drama, you have comedy, you have sexuality, you have relationship, you have, you know, all kind of different detailed stuff, detail detail detail. In The Room, people are laughing at this, laughing at that, but we have also detail, detail, detail. That’s why your movie (Sonny), I knew you would be doing a great job.”
In case you need a primer on Nicholas Cage’s directorial debut:
It’s like “The Bad and the Beautiful” with the ending of “Sullivan’s Travels”! We really enjoyed this. The Francos were great. James Franco has been compared to James Dean and his emotional squint-acting since his Freaks and Geeks days, and he’s able to trade on that here. Tommy may have been a creepy old Eurotrash dude, he may have been a vampire rapist, but he had a deep and abiding love for film, and especially for the Method-ish guys like Dean and Brando.
In some ways, The Disaster Artist really is an inspiring story. Two regular guys (one with unfathomable resources) just went out and made the movie they wanted to make, since they couldn’t get there through traditional paths. Sure, their movie was terrible, but they did it, dammit.
Some of the score is too on-the-nose, and some of the casting is too full of recognizable funny folks from TV that crossed over to movies. Franco treads a fine line with self-indulgent recreations of the worst hits of The Room, and saves what could be too much for post-credit sequences.
Worth seeing. Maybe seeing The Room first isn’t completely mandatory, but viewers should at least catch a YouTube clip of its worst parts before seeing The Disaster Artist. Just to see Tommy Wiseau is a real person badly playing a version of himself, not just a silly creation from the guy that came up with Penis-face. We laughed and laughed at this weirdo, but somehow, at one point, Franco made us feel like heels for doing so. I don’t know how he pulled that off.
“You can’t blame us [for putting the scene at the end],” Franco tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Because [Wiseau’s] main stipulation was that he have a scene in the movie, and then he kept demanding that it be opposite me.”
As it turns out, Wiseau had made his scene a contractual obligation when the producers were buying his life rights. But for someone whose rather unique appearance and voice make him almost instantly recognizable, the filmmakers had hoped they could put him opposite absolutely anyone but Franco.
“We just tried to explain to him: ‘Tommy, I don’t mean to insult you, but you just can’t play anyone other than yourself,'” says Franco.
But Wiseau wasn’t having it. “They tried to give me different guys,” The Room director tell THR. “And I was like, it doesn’t work for me.” It had to be Franco.
“So we wrote a very short scene,” he says. “In our defense, we had to make it disposable, because he was insisting on doing it opposite me. It was like, there was no way that that was ever going to work in our movie. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Saw this last night. The movie was good, but I liked the book a lot better. They glossed over a lot of the ups and downs of Greg and Tommy’s relationship, which was the most interesting part for me. The movie seemed to focus more heavily on the making of The Room, and treated the film with a lot reverence. Personally I feel The Room is a little over hyped but I really loved the Disaster Artist book, so that’s where I’m coming from here.
I imagine you will love the film if you’re crazy about The Room. James Franco is amazing as Wiseau, and really the only thing that made this a particularly good movie for me. The whole cast is really solid with tons of top tier comedic actors playing small parts.
Same reaction here. Loved the book, the movie was good too, but it felt unfocused. There were so many great details lost from the book. Was thinking of it like “My Favorite Year”, but that isn’t what we really got.
I thought this would be a more serious character study and musing on the relationship between Tommy and Greg, but the fake room shooting gets in the way a bit, as they have a lot of fun with it.
Also, I think that if you go to this without reading the book, you might enjoy it more.
This movie damn near made me cry at several points. Some of that could be that I’m getting soft from lack of exposure to quality, but the passion these two had definitely came through. Plus James Franco nailed Tommy Wiseau.
I thought the movie was great, and I haven’t read the book (though I want to now).
One of people we saw it with was going into it completely blind – she had never even heard of Tommy Wiseau or The Room. She probably enjoyed it the most of all.
She kept telling my wife “I don’t believe that this was a real movie,” and then she saw the side-by-sides at the end.
By the way, if you haven’t read the book, the Audible version is great. I picked it up so I could listen to it on my commute, and it’s just so much fun to listen to because narrator Greg Sistero is incapable of repeating anything Tommy said without doing a dead-on impression of Tommy.
