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The Forgotten

For some movies, it takes a few minutes for you to realize how bad they are. For some, it could take an entire movie. For The Forgotten, the crucial scene comes about 80 minutes into the movie, when Julianne Moore, playing a distraught and potentially insane woman looking for a son that no one else thinks exists, is confronted by a cop, played by Alfre Woodard. Woodard is searching for Moore, and has finally come around on the idea that Moore may be right about the existence of her son. She’s reaching out to the fragile, broken woman, explaining that she finally believes. All is well, until an invisible force literally sucks Woodard into the sky, never to be seen again. Now, if that sight doesn’t get your attention, what will? Though I won’t go too much further into the plot’s particulars (yes, aliens are involved, because why not?), The Forgotten is ridiculously overbaked.

What’s worse, this movie has a pretty good cast; at the very least, the cast’s not as bad as the story is, but they don’t elevate it out of the dumpster. Alongside Moore and Woodard are Dominic West (playing a variation of Jimmy McNulty from The Wire), Anthony Edwards, Gary Sinise, and Linus Roache. Not the best cast, but there aren’t any clunkers here. So what went wrong? The story is too sincere, and the script is too lazy; Woodard’s not the only one who gets sucked into the sky (and again, I’m not using that as a metaphor of some kind; people get sucked into the sky in this movie), and each time, it happens as a machination of the plot. The final explanation just makes no sense. Why not, next time around, make a movie about a woman who thinks she’s sane, while everyone else thinks she’s insane….and the woman’s wrong? It’d be depressing, but it’d be realistic, and Moore would be up to the challenge of bringing such a character to the screen. Until then, check out this piece of crap for a laugh.

The Room

Being fair, The Room stands out on the list for a few reasons. The first is that it features no famous actors, and wasn’t distributed by a big (or little, for that matter) studio. The second is that, no matter what its writer/producer/director/star says, the movie is not meant to be a comedy. It’s meant to be serious. The other four movies on this list also say the same, but even after being embraced as bad movies, none of those films’ directors have changed their tune, saying that the stories were meant to be terrible. No, the man behind The Room, Tommy Wiseau, would like you to believe that his film, about a man who’s spurned by his fiancée and his best friend, is a winking nod at…something, though I’m not sure what. What makes The Room so iconic in its badness isn’t the story; it’s everything else.

The performances, from Wiseau’s as Johnny to every other amateur in the cast, are awful. The dialogue is pretty crappy, or it’s being delivered poorly by the strangely accented Wiseau (“You are TEARING me apart, Lisa!”). The set, mostly revolving around Johnny’s apartment, is boring. The sex scenes, of which there are four, are set to the same ridiculous R&B song, and feature two spectacularly unattractive people (yes, I realize that’s shallow, but since these scenes make up a good 10 minutes of the film, it’d help if they looked all right with no clothes on). The supporting characters vanish and reappear randomly, and have subplots that are never followed up; the famous one is where the fiancee’s mother says, in a cheerful tone, “I got the results back, and I definitely have breast cancer”, with no further discussion. You’ve heard of The Room. Now, go experience it.

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