Film Brain

I actually consider Film Brain to be one of the best reviewers on bad comedies (especially bad romcoms), because he doesn't fall into the trap of saying "This joke isn't funny!" non-stop. He'll attack a joke for a variety of reasons; for being lazy, for being random for the sake of random, for being immature/childish, for being in poor taste, for not meshing well with the story, etc. In fact, he doesn't even really attack the joke so much as he attacks the person who wrote it.

PATREON.

Why is no one discussing Film Brain anymore? He still does reviews, after all.

This week: Love is Blind.

Oh great, yet another magical autist... Like we didn't have too many of those already. Awful film.

And yet another example of a clueless creepy "romance" story.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 10th 2019 at 2:08:23 PM

I was wondering if there was a critic that tackled romance movies, but I didn't realize that was Film Brain's forte. I'm definitely going to check him out.

Well, Film Brain actually covers a wide-range of films, romance films just being a part of it. His current show Projector is focused on covering recent releases in the UK, so there's a lot of variety and he does a really thorough analysis no matter what genre its in.

Also, has anyone else been listening to his podcasts? I think they're really entertaining and worth a listen. His most recent one covered The Lion King (2019) and the recent Disney remakes.

There's a moment where they comment on James Earl Jones phoning it in somewhat, and also having been dragged back for his role as Darth Vader in Rogue One, and clearly being done with these roles, and that kind of hits at what is the problem with Disney (and to some extent Hollywood) these days: they just can't let go of their past successes. This is why we get so many Disney remakes now that don't really do much new with the material. Even with Star Wars, The Force Awakens was playing it so incredibly safe by basically retreading A New Hope. There is an apparent fear of doing new things, of letting go of the past to explore new stories.

This is also, incidentally, my main problem with the new Star Wars trilogy: it is, at its core, still that same story of the original trilogy. Even when the second movie changes things up, it still heavily relies on the original to MAKE those changes. I wonder what they will do when IX is out. Will they try to retread that original trilogy again? Or will they try and retread the prequels, instead? At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they did do a retread of the prequels.

Edited by Redmess on Aug 10th 2019 at 1:54:21 PM

For the next trilogy, maybe…

That's what I meant, the next trilogy after IX.

Because I am pretty certain that there WILL be one. They are going to milk Star Wars until everyone will be quite sick of it all, similar to how the Harry Potter franchise keeps being milked rather shamelessly.

Huh... didn't realize we had a thread specifically for Film Brain on here. I tried looking for one, just after I created the page for Projector by moving examples that were on the Bad Movie Beatdown page, but couldn't find one, apparently I somehow managed to miss this thread.

Anyway, he just recently posted a new Projector review of Animals, a film adaptation of a book that was described by reviewers as Withnail and I but for girls.

The premise of Love Is Blind reminds me of Bunny Girl-senpai for some reason…

Anyway, I like this guy's Projector reviews. They're quite thorough and analytical despite dissecting movies that just came out.

He sure knows his movies.

And he just posted his review of The Angry Birds Movie 2.

There's a second one? Oh gods...

Here is the review of the first one to refresh your memory of that stinker:

From what I've heard, the sequel's much better than the original.

The really sad thing is even the first movie probably ranks as one of the best video game movie ever made by being merely a mediocre, soulless, past-its-relevance cash grab.

Which tells you something about the average video game film's quality.

That bit about Angry Bird 2 not really utilizing it's voice talent is something I've also seen with the MLP movie. In that case, the marketing was clearly banking on a (long) list of star actors, who ended up each playing supporting characters alongside the main cast, who thankfully were voiced by their show V As. It's this idea that an animated movie HAS to have famous movie stars voicing characters.

Lindsay Ellis also recently did a video on this trend in her Aladdin review.

Film Brain's review on Blinded by the Light, a film based on a true story about a teenager who become inspired by Bruce Springsteen's music.

Funnily enough, I first heard about this movie yesterday when I saw a trailer for it before Spider-Man: Far From Home. Funny coincidence there.

ninja'd

Edited by Anddrix on Aug 16th 2019 at 11:31:04 AM

And he's just posted his review of Angel Has Fallen, the sequel to Olympus Has Fallen and London Has Fallen.

The only thing I remember about those movies is that the French distributors had accidentally released the first one with the title of the other White House movie that came out with it.

I actually wasn't even aware there were sequels… Didn't miss much apparently. What does Mathew mean by "politically hateful" when he mentions the second one?

A lot of Islamophobia, from what I recall.

I remember hearing London Has Fallen has a scene where Butler's character kills a terrorist and says "Head back to Fuckheadistan".

Yeah, it's one of those movies...

You mean someone did a live-action adaptation of Holy Terror? >.>

And Film Brain just added his review of Horrible Histories: The Movie - Rotten Romans:

I think that's the first time I've even seen Mathew compare a film he's reviewed to one he's actually appeared in.