Apparently the aliens from Contact who watch our TV broadcasts and try to find ways to respond to us have been eyeing late night cable drams with "sin" or "temptation" in the title and this is what they sent back. Or else the kids from the remedial English class got their hands on a camcorder and decided to make an internet sex tape, and the aliens from Contact were watching that...
If anybody has a better explanation for how a movie like this, a movie with no conception of human behavior or interactions on any level could exist, I would love to hear it. Even the worst movie makers manage to hit a correct dramatic note every once in a while by sheer statistical accident. But here, the writing and acting manage to fail with such unerring consistency that it is almost an achievement. Words such as 'surreal' do not begin to describe the experience of watching this movie. Its sheer terribleness on every possible creative level exceeds description. If you took ninety minutes of clips from a South American soap opera, spliced them together in random order and got blind street junkies to come with dubbed dialogue, you would still have a more coherent drama. The Room is so totally bad for every moment of its running time that it becomes a master class on cinematic ineptitude. The dialogue is awful, yet the actors still manage to make it seem much worse than it is by mistiming lines and giving inappropriate responses throughout the movie. The pacing of every scene, every exchange, seems off. And despite a reported budget of $6 million (??!) everything looks cheap and hurried, like a film class project that was left to the last minute.
The story construction is so inept that almost nothing that happens pushes the story forward, and virtually none of the plot threads get resolved. In fact, most of them are mentioned once and never come up again. Early on, for example, the mother casually discloses that she has cancer, and that is all we ever hear about it. This however is the film's secret virtue. When no plot point is important or connected to anything else in the movie, the viewer is free to play connect the dots.
For instance, Johnny's announcement that he failed to get a promotion at his bank shows his underachievement in the financial world. As financiers are sometimes called 'big swinging d*cks', this could be hinting that Johnny is underachieving anatomically as well. This would explain Lisa' perpetual dissatisfaction with him. Or perhaps Lisa' attitude is actually outwardly redirected self-loathing over all of the Weight Watchers meetings she has been missing. Mark's perpetual surprise over how Lisa's undressing indicates that she wants sex and not something else could be masking his own disappointment that she wasn't handing him her clothes to put on for some cross dressing role play. Such disappointment would go far in explaining the sternness of Mark's resistance to her chubby charms. Danny's drug purchase explains his apparent disconnection from reality throughout the film. The kid is clearly on goofballs. Has the mother's cancer spread to her brain? Memory impairment might explain why she keeps having the same conversations over and over. These are all ripe food for thought, and The Room's arthritic pacing gives the viewer plenty of opportunities to toss them around like footballs thrown by guys in tuxedos.
If anybody has a better explanation for how a movie like this, a movie with no conception of human behavior or interactions on any level could exist, I would love to hear it. Even the worst movie makers manage to hit a correct dramatic note every once in a while by sheer statistical accident. But here, the writing and acting manage to fail with such unerring consistency that it is almost an achievement. Words such as 'surreal' do not begin to describe the experience of watching this movie. Its sheer terribleness on every possible creative level exceeds description. If you took ninety minutes of clips from a South American soap opera, spliced them together in random order and got blind street junkies to come with dubbed dialogue, you would still have a more coherent drama. The Room is so totally bad for every moment of its running time that it becomes a master class on cinematic ineptitude. The dialogue is awful, yet the actors still manage to make it seem much worse than it is by mistiming lines and giving inappropriate responses throughout the movie. The pacing of every scene, every exchange, seems off. And despite a reported budget of $6 million (??!) everything looks cheap and hurried, like a film class project that was left to the last minute.
The story construction is so inept that almost nothing that happens pushes the story forward, and virtually none of the plot threads get resolved. In fact, most of them are mentioned once and never come up again. Early on, for example, the mother casually discloses that she has cancer, and that is all we ever hear about it. This however is the film's secret virtue. When no plot point is important or connected to anything else in the movie, the viewer is free to play connect the dots.
For instance, Johnny's announcement that he failed to get a promotion at his bank shows his underachievement in the financial world. As financiers are sometimes called 'big swinging d*cks', this could be hinting that Johnny is underachieving anatomically as well. This would explain Lisa' perpetual dissatisfaction with him. Or perhaps Lisa' attitude is actually outwardly redirected self-loathing over all of the Weight Watchers meetings she has been missing. Mark's perpetual surprise over how Lisa's undressing indicates that she wants sex and not something else could be masking his own disappointment that she wasn't handing him her clothes to put on for some cross dressing role play. Such disappointment would go far in explaining the sternness of Mark's resistance to her chubby charms. Danny's drug purchase explains his apparent disconnection from reality throughout the film. The kid is clearly on goofballs. Has the mother's cancer spread to her brain? Memory impairment might explain why she keeps having the same conversations over and over. These are all ripe food for thought, and The Room's arthritic pacing gives the viewer plenty of opportunities to toss them around like footballs thrown by guys in tuxedos.