Cheap Date: The Room

After watching The Room, one critic remarked that it seemed as if every expense had been spared on cast, crew, location, and production.

But that didn't stop us from paying $10 for an autographed copy of the DVD.

The film opens with the film's stars, a banker named Johnny with unprofessionally long greasy hair and an unidentifiable (and probably fake) accent and his fiancee Lisa, engaging in a pretty mundane conversation. Somber, ominous music plays in the background. Within five minutes, the soundtrack abruptly switches to a generic R&B song to accompany a painfully long, awkward, and gratuitous sex scene. There's another five minutes of stilted dialogue. And then another five minute sex scene (which reuses shots from the first one).

We don't normally like things that are so bad they're good, but The Room makes box office bombs look like amateurs. After a scene in which Johnny's best friend Mark (who's also listed as a personal assistant to the director in the credits) quizzes Johnny on his new client, and Johnny responds, "I can't tell you it's confidential. Anyway how is your sex life?", you begin to wonder if even Stanley Kubrick could have made this film on purpose. The film's missteps (and, as far as we can tell, there are only one or two lines that don't count as missteps) prove to be comedic gold.

The Room has regular screenings in New York and LA, but the director is making a stop in DC this weekend.

So if you're in town tonight, get your ass down to the E Street Cinema. And take a picture with Tommy Wiseau and send it to us at datethedistrict@gmail.com.