Bad Movie Beatdown/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • I don't have the hatred of Film Brain that many other people do (perhaps because I've never seen Equilibrium), but there was one really daft moment involving him: in his review of Darkness Falls, he yells at the film for having one of the characters refer to the protagonist as Connor when his name is Kyle. The thing is...the actor actually does say Kyle. He doesn't enunciate it very well, but he does say the right name.
    • But, if people can't tell that he's saying "Kyle", then it is a valid argument. Granted it's not the argument that he stated, but if a guy can't enunciate well enough to be understood... Or maybe it's a British accent/American Accent thing, I honestly don't know.
    • I, the original poster, am British. Maybe Film Brain just has poor hearing. Or I have good hearing.
    • To be completely honest, I spoke with Mat when he started really focusing on BMB (My name actually appears in the "special thanks" credit of nearly every episode.) and when he sent some of us a preview of Darkness Falls, I said, "Dude. He said Kyle, not Connor." Mat would not be convinced otherwise, claiming reference to "Movie Mistakes.com", even though everyone he showed it to said the same thing. We admitted it was garbled at best but Mat was insistent on leaving the joke in. On a side note, had I gotten a full preview of Monkeybone, I could have saved him from calling a T-Square a "pick axe".
  • I assume it has something to do with college, but was there a reason given for the three-week break between the Hudson Hawk and Mega Piranha reviews in October '10?
    • Apparently, it was a combination of classwork and illness.
  • Minor quibble, but since he normally show his work and I'm a biochem major, it bugged me: in his review of Mission: Impossible 2, he snarks at the movie for saying the supervirus destroys red blood cells, saying that makes no sense since viruses use red blood cells to replicate. Thing is, a lot of viruses do just that to the cells they infect. While there are some that sort of "bud off," leaving the membrane of the cell intact, most viruses basically just hijack the cell's protein-synthesis machinery and produce more and more viruses until the whole thing falls apart and they're all released.[1] For instance, this is why the HIV virus damages the host's immune system so badly; it reproduces in white blood cells (responsible for fighting infection), and kills them in the process. While it's true the movie probably needed a biology lesson, viruses destroying their host cells is not one of the reasons why.
    • I haven't seen either MI 2 or the review in question, but is he criticising the destruction of the cell or that it's red blood cells? Because if it's red blood cells, I guess the criticism would be that red blood cells lack a nucleus and most organelles, including, I presume, those that would allow a virus to be replicated.
  • I hate to ask about something so off-topic, but what is the song at the end of The Riddle?
  • Warning: nitpick. In his review of The Tourist, he goes something along the lines of "that's pirate, not British". Ignoring the fact that Johnny Depp's voice used both in that scene and the Pirates of the Caribbean quadrilogy, tetralogy, whatever, isn't a "piratey" accent at all, wasn't Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow performance based on Keith Richards? A British person?
    • I think that the point was using that accent for Sparrow kind of killed the audiences' ability to take it seriously when Depp uses it in other movies.
  • For his Pirates of the Carribean 3 review, why does he insist on calling it a kid's movie. It's generally made for teens and adult audiences but he keeps calling it a kid's movie. He does this for Transformers Revenge of the Fallen. Those just have a vestigial kids appeal and marketing, they're intended for older audiences.
    • Because Pirates started as a fun light hearted movie with dark elements (ie the zombies) while Pirates 3 is Darker and Edgier.
    • Also, because Pirates is based on a Disney attraction while Transformers is based on a toy and cartoon franchise. Both have a more family-friendly audience so, it was more targeted towards kids (hell, if you want to be technical, The Dark Knight has toy marchendising). So that's why Film Brain is shocked to the edginess of Pirates 3 or the rather adult (albeit immature) humor in Transformers 2 (After all, there is PG-13 movies who are targetted toward a more family-friendly audiance).

  1. And then there's the herpesviruses like chicken pox that splice themselves into the host's genome, but we won't go into that.