Good Bad Movies

01/05/17

Tags Film

I have a few friends who like B movies and will watch really, really bad movies for fun. I can’t do that, but I do enjoy the occasional good bad movie. It’s hard to pin down exactly what makes a good bad movie. They are strangely watchable, usually very earnest, and always low budget.

The Room (2003) is a cult film about a young woman who has fallen out of love with her fiancĂ© and begins having an affair with his best friend. The film is quite insistent that they are best friends. I get the impression writer, director, and star Tommy Wiseau is working out a seriously bad breakup with this movie. (I was good to you, and you wronged me, and now you’ll be sorry.) The film has lots of odd segues and at least four overlong and tedious sex scenes. Most of the dialogue serves to reinforce how good the main character Johnny is and how immoral his fiancĂ©e Lisa is. Wiseau had difficulty with his lines, so some of his dialogue was dubbed in post-production.

Greg Sestero (best friend) wrote a book about the experience, the Disaster Artist. The trivia page on IMDB, which appears to be sourced primarily from the book, actually explains a lot of the incongruities in the film. IMDB says James Franco is trying to make the Disaster Artist into a film. I think a retrospective documentary would actually be pretty engaging. One of my favorite documentaries is Best Worst Movie, which is about the making of Troll 2 and its later cult status.

The best of the Room does a nice job of encapsulating the experience. There are ending spoilers, naturally.