The Room (2003, Tommy Wiseau) (Patreon)

11/100

Rating's slightly inflated relative to the film's single-digit "quality"—it arguably deserves my ultra-rare zero, but I laughed way too much (even without a primed midnight audience around me) for either hatred or boredom to take root. At the same time, though, uncomfortable memories of the William Hung phenomenon prevented me from embracing it as a so-bad-it's-good lark. Likewise the nonstop misogyny that seems to have been Wiseau's primary motivator. Fact is, it's just plain difficult to faux-objectively assess something that's this hilariously, jaw-droppingly inept. Having watched a highlight reel on YouTube way back when, I was fully prepared for terrible acting (including Wiseau's bizarro-world approximation of a normal, cool dude), ludicrous dialogue, blatant greenscreen backdrops, pointless establishing shots, and multiple anti-erotic sex scenes accompanied by bad slow jams. But I somehow had never heard how utterly and insanely random Wiseau's ostensible narrative is. New characters suddenly appear without explanation or context, in one case inspiring me to yell (through a guffaw) "WHO THE FUCK ARE THEY?!?" Conversations shift topic in mid-sentence, practically. Apparent subplots are introduced only to be instantly forgotten. I've never before experienced this particular sort of cognitive dissonance, as even the worst movies I usually see make a sincere effort to tell some sort of vaguely coherent story, rather than just have guys toss a football to one another (often from like three feet apart) whenever the screenwriter can't think of anything else for people to do between repeating the same banal arguments over and over again. I only watched this because The Disaster Artist is among the handful of critically acclaimed 2017 films I never got around to at the time, and I wanted to be fully familiar with the source of its merriment. But it was worth gaping at once for its own sake. You've seen Garfield Minus Garfield; now take a gander at Porno Minus Porn.