WebVideo Reviewing a review show. How very meta.
Brows Held High, as you know, is a video review show where Oancitizen talks about arthouse cinema.
It's pretty good. This show is, I believe, a sign of video review shows moving on from pure Accentuate The Negative onto being able to describe the good parts of a movie/comic book/video game, as well as give the viewers a sense of why it was good.
Oancitizen pulls this off beautifully. He is almost never negative, puts massive amounts of research into his reviews, and his running commentary on symbolism, character studies and thematic connections remains interesting.
I have seen Zardoz, Naked Lunch and Antichrist before I discovered Brows Held High, and I didn't understand most of what was going on. But afterwards, I can look back on those movies and suddenly "get it".
- Oh, that's why Burroughs shot his wife twice. Oh, that's why the cabin was called "Eden".
The negative stuff on this show mostly comes from the movies themselves. This show requires you to have some Brain Bleach on hand. A good thing, however, is that almost none of it is on screen, instead only implied through hilarious censor bars. This takes away some of the squick.
Brows Held High takes a good, long look at arthouse movies, invites you to follow along, and makes you smarter for watching it. Four stars.
WebVideo Fridge brilliance
A good metaphor for Oancitizen would be the Snob cross-bred with The Happy Video Game Nerd. Whereas the Snob is obviously a spoof character, Oan genuinely seems like the well-mannered, unassuming guy he plays - making his reaction shots pathetic as well as really funny.
The irony is that while Brad Jones does occasionally review some skeezy material, most of it pales to the average Oan review. This is a perfect illustration of the extremes art house filmmakers can go while declaiming their "message". The worst Cinema Snob review pales in comparison to any given Larry Clark work!
Or maybe it just seems that way. It might be a difference of budget and pomposity.