My girlfriend thinks that fantasy baseball is a waste of time. I’m starting to agree with her, because if it wasn’t for fantasy baseball, I may have never watched or even heard of The Room.
Earlier this year, I joined a fantasy baseball league through my friend Carl and was told that everyone’s team names were references to The Room. Since I never saw The Room, or even heard of it before this, I named my team Never Saw The Room. Naming your team Never Saw The Room in a league of devotees to The Room leads to people telling you that you have to see the movie.
It turns out I really didn’t.
The Room is hailed as one of those it’s-so-bad-it’s-good movies and has developed a cult following similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. People go to midnight screenings dressed as the characters, and Adult Swim ran it once as an April Fool’s joke. Unlike Rocky Horror, there are no catchy songs and the acting is much, much worse.
It’s on par production quality-wise with your average Skinimax movie. There’s the cheesy synthesized music, the slow-cam sex scene (behind a gauze curtain no less!), and very crappy acting matched with very crappy dialogue.
The director, writer and star of The Room, Tommy Wiseau, scares me on many levels. He’s a mess of White Snake era hair atop a roided up Long Island guido. But he can’t be from Long Island with that accent that stems from the “Ridiculous” region of Europe. He has the freakiest laugh in existence. It’s creepier and more off-putting than The Joker’s and he throws it into every line he can for his character Johnny. I imagine each of Johnny’s lines in the script looks like:
Oh, hi Denny.
(creepy laugh)
The scariest thing of all is that in Tommy Wiseau’s mind, The Room isn’t only a good movie, it’s a great movie. No, I take that back, his laugh is definitely the scariest thing. It hooks its way into your brain and could slowly drive you mad.
Tommy Wiseau also thought that viewers would want to see his lumpy, shaved body in multiple sex scenes. If you watch this movie, you will probably have the same thoughts I did during each sex scene, “Why are these guys all fighting over this chubby girl in the mom jeans?” and “Why is this roided up guy with the funny accent and red rose fetish so lumpy?” and “Why am I still watching this?”
The Room is definitely the worst movie I’ve seen this year. In fact it might be the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I’m amazed that people want to watch this more than once. It’s like sadomasochism for cinephiles. It’s cinemasochism.
WARNING: If you watch the interview with Tommy Wiseau about the movie that’s on the DVD, your brain cells might decide “Fuck it” and commit mass suicide.
The one good thing about watching The Room was catching the references of team names in my fantasy baseball league, like Denny, Scotchka and Favorite Customer. A couple had to be explained to me after the fact, namely Wizzo (soundalike for Wiseau) and Sestosterone (nickname for Greg Sestero, who plays Johnny’s back-stabbing pal).
But even here The Room disappoints. Half the league doesn’t have The Room specific names. Rookies, El Sid and Bone In have nothing to do with The Room at all. This whole time I assumed that Griffey’s Aces was the only non-The Room name. Hey, I get it, the guy is obsessed with Ken Griffey Jr. and doesn’t want to tow the line, that’s fine. I’ve been wondering for weeks what the hell a Bone In was and got no answer from The Room. It turns out it just refers to the nickname of the guy who created the team.
I think my friend Carl put it best when he described The Room: “Rarely has one put so much effort into making something great and misfired so spectacularly in every single way possible.”
Moral of the story: Stay away from fantasy baseball, kids. It’s a stepping stone to much darker things.
I don’t know where to begin.
First of all, your opening statement is flawed, as I described The Room in depth after the Knicks game in February. In fact, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t mentioned it earlier, considering I had been obsessed with it since seeing in June. So the fantasy baseball league is not at fault. Not that anything is to be blamed, because “The Room” rules.
What exactly were you expecting? When the movie is universally described with phrases such as “stunningly awful,” “jaw-droppingly inept,” “profoundly bad,” etc., etc., you can’t really take the movie to task for being a lousy movie. It’s not “Patch Adams,” which we all know is the worst movie ever made. The whole point of “The Room” – and what makes it so compulsively rewatchable (not cinemasochistic) – is that it fails so completely, so miserably, so thoroughly, that it breaks through the misery that accompanies watching a bad movie. It succeeds as something else entirely – a vastly entertaining unintentional comedy. How can you not watch, say, the flower shop sequence, without laughing hysterically? The dialogue is beyond stilted and absurd – coupled with Tommy’s earnestness – it becomes inadvertent genius.
“The Room” is not unlike those old DuPont commercials where the chemist accidentally creates plexiglass – he intends to make a certain something, but ends up creating something else entirely – something far more wonderful and beneficial, and something that the world will reap the benefits of for eternity. That’s how I feel about “The Room.”
And you want catchy songs? Here you go –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx-Fc0iVF2A
Billy,
I think you need to see this again. I’m not sure you got it. Love the rest of the blog though.
Favorite Customer
And you should really rename your team – something clever from the movie – like 5 minute breast cancer.
Any review of The Room that doesn’t include the words “Unencumbered by trivialities like plot and a basic understanding of human interaction…” is missing something.
That said, it had me craughing my ass off. “Cheeeeeep cheepcheepcheep cheeeEEEeeEEEp!”