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Released in 2003, Tommy Wiseau’s The Room has vaulted to the top of the bottom rank, challenging Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 From Outer Space for the title of worst movie ever made and, even more impressive, dislodging the venerable Rocky Horror Picture Show as America’s most popular audience-participation ritual. I’m not about to watch The Room again—ever—so I’ll just quote from my original review: “Wiseau stars as an eerily placid and good-natured banker whose live-in girlfriend is secretly getting it on with his best friend, though the filmmaker often strikes out in different directions, only to bump into the wall and come back. As someone who’s watched more bad movies than you can imagine, I’m mostly immune to the so-bad-it’s-good aesthetic, though I can see how, viewed in a theater at midnight after a few drinks, this might conjure up its own hilariously demented reality.” For this live event, Wiseau will reprise his role from the movie, abetted by a cast of local players. —J.R. Jones Opens October 21.
My Week With Marilyn
Some movies you want to see because you think they’ll be good, and some you just want to see. For me, this one falls into the latter category. Directed by British TV veteran Simon Curtis, My Week With Marilyn dramatizes the stormy relationship between Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) when they costarred in the British romantic comedy The Prince and the Showgirl (1957). At that point the imperious Olivier was among the most revered actors in the world, while Monroe was considered a dizzy lightweight so fragile she had to be treated like an exotic flower. Olivier, who also produced and directed the movie, took an instant dislike to Monroe, and he really hit her where she lived when, setting up a scene, he suggested she “try and be sexy.” Most actors crash and burn when they try to portray icons of the silver screen: for every modest success (say, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator) there are a hundred trainwrecks (Rod Steiger in W.C. Fields and Me, James Brolin in Gable and Lombard). When such portrayals work, it’s usually because the actor shares some elemental quality with the star being portrayed, a good omen for the delicate Williams and the vainglorious Branagh. —J.R. Jones Opens November 4.
Hugo
Given his forays into multiple genres—crime, thriller, horror, comedy, biography, music documentary, music video, historical drama, spiritual drama—you may think Martin Scorsese has done it all. Think again. Here comes his first 3-D children’s fantasy, an adaptation of Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning illustrated novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The title character is a boy living inside the walls of a Parisian train station at the turn of the 20th century (moved up to the 1930s in the film), and his adventures involve an automaton and a mysterious toymaker. That might sound like a tale more appropriate for Steven Spielberg than the director of Cape Fear and The Departed, but it also must have spoken to Scorsese’s abiding love of film history: the character of the toymaker was inspired by Georges Méliès, the brilliantly innovative fantasy filmmaker of the 1890s and early 1900s. John Logan (The Aviator) wrote the screenplay, and the cast includes Jude Law, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Michael Pitt, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winstone, and 89-year-old Christopher Lee, who may turn out to be immortal after all. —J.R. Jones Opens November 23.
Moneyball Adaped from the nonfiction best seller by Michael Lewis, this is the true story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who revolutionized Major League Baseball by using complex statistics to evaluate players more accurately. Bennett Miller (Capote) directed. Opens September 23.
