Author: BRWC

Break The Game: Review. By Jake Peffer.

Break The Game is a documentary that follows Twitch streamer Narcissa Wright. Narcissa had built a huge following on Twitch, but it all came crashing down when she came out as trans. Watching her once great streaming success go down to almost nothing Narcissa doesn’t know what to do.

Nasty comments and threats force her to contemplate suicide, but a few friendly fans help keep her sane. To win the rest of her fans back, Narcissa decides to break a record playing the newest Zelda game and live stream every minute of it. 

Documentaries are the hardest genre to cater towards the masses as they usually have a very specific topic they focus on and unless you’re a fan of that topic or have an interest in it, then the documentary may not be for you. The best documentaries go beyond that and make audiences interested in a topic that they may not have ever even known about. Unfortunately, with Break The Game it suffers from not having an engaging topic. Video games are great and there’s a huge audience for them, but this story isn’t executed well enough to sustain an entire movie.

The intentions behind the movie are good and director Jane M. Wagner does what she can, it just isn’t enough to make it worthwhile. With a runtime that’s not even an hour and fifteen minutes the movie moves at a snail’s pace and feels like it’s going on for far too long.

While the story of a popular gamer losing their popularity due to coming out as trans is interesting on paper, Narcissa Wright just isn’t a very interesting figure to watch. A large majority of the movie is Narcissa sad and alone in her home just wallowing in sorrow and after so much it just gets tiresome.

There are some nice visuals throughout where Jane M. Wagner integrates little video game cut scenes that add some flair to the movie. At times it feels like they get focused on a little more than they should, but they are a nice addition to the overall movie.

I wish I had more positive things to say about this documentary but ultimately it just felt like a missed opportunity. While the intentions behind it were good there just wasn’t enough here to find engaging and that makes it one that you should probably skip.

Rating: 4/10

Your Fat Friend: Review. By Joe Muldoon.

Currently travelling its way across the festival circuit, Your Fat Friend is the highly anticipated documentary by filmmaker Jeanie Finlay. Subject of the picture is Aubrey Gordon, podcaster, author, and mind behind the immensely popular blog yourfatfriend.com. The result of 6 years of filming, Your Fat Friend is perhaps the most important documentary on the topic of fatness to date.

“Just say fat. Not curvy, or chubby, or chunky, or fluffy, or more to love, or big guy, or full-figured, or big-boned, or queen-size, or husky, or obese, or overweight. Just say fat.” Gordon’s opening words are as direct and unflinching as you could ever hope for. When much of the public discourse surrounding fatness has been informed by works such as the infamous 2004 documentary Super Size Me, Finlay’s latest film is a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Finlay opts to take a more observational position in her role as documentarian, allowing for Gordon to tell her own story on her own terms. A call for kindness and for basic human decency, our subject begins by asking not for pity or empathy, but for solidarity and anger. The most seemingly mundane tasks such as eating, and sitting in an aeroplane seat, visiting a doctor, all become difficult situations for fat people; eating becomes a recurring guilt trip, air travel becomes something to dread, visiting healthcare professionals -the very people in whose hands we place our trust and lives- becomes a finger-wagging lecture.

We are shown the awful cruelty with which fat people are bombarded on a daily basis, both in person and online, from snide comments to doxxing, and even to death threats. Permeating the piece is Gordon’s fiercely funny sense of humour, providing at least some relief from the harsh reality of the adversity, and very quickly establishing itself as a highlight of the film.

A particularly chucklesome segment has Gordon introduce us to her growing collection of vintage fad diet books, ranging from the obnoxious to the outright bizarre. Attention is drawn to the absurdity of our longstanding obsession with fad diets, with her pointing out that “we’re repackaging the same four or five diets over and over and over again, and they didn’t work in 1943, so why would they start magically working?”

Delving further into Gordon’s personal life, we meet some of her friends and family members, including her father Rusty, a retired airline pilot. A rare instance of us hearing the documentarian’s input, Finlay asks Rusty what he thinks of his daughter’s popular pieces for her website, and he shows his support. We join Gordon for two of the most important moments of her life; first, the news that she will become an established author, and second, the wildly successful launch of her lauded writing debut, What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.

Combining the dream-team of Finlay’s deeply compassionate storytelling and Gordon’s wicked wit, Your Fat Friend is a long-overdue work that refuses to tiptoe around a highly emotive issue, attacking it head-on and without reserve. Not only is it a documentary, but it is also a call to action, a call to change our behaviours and attitudes towards fatness: “My aim is to provoke people to question the things that they always thought were true… I want them to change the way that they treat the fat people in their lives”.

Many of us have had uncomfortable conversations surrounding weight and size with our loved ones; “have I put on weight?”, “do I look big in this?”, “do you think I should start a detox diet before my holiday?”. In most cases, these conversations operate with the unspoken implication that being fat or heavy is an objectively bad thing, any nuance or medical safety tossed by the wayside. Many of us have batted overused fat jokes around as if they were always innocent and innocuous.

Many of us have freaked out and reached for a salad after looking down to see that we have tummy rolls, as if they were unnatural or unhealthy. Your Fat Friend steps aside from these conversations and argues that the true problem is not fatness, but our relationship with it, and our treatment of anybody who fails to meet impossibly lofty (and largely dangerous) body standards.. Fat people do not need to accept themselves – they are in need for society to accept them.

By Joe Muldoon

Songs About F-Ing: The BRWC Review: The BRWC Review. By Connor Walsh.

Songs About F-Ing: The BRWC Review is a snapshot of musician Marc Rebillet’s career and life, from going viral on YouTube and Twitch during the 2020 Covid Pandemic to achieving mainstream success. The documentary follows him on tour while providing snapshots of his adolescent years and his family. The unconventional nature of Marc’s manic musical style is reflected in the structure of this documentary as the film bounces from one concert to another with few quiet moments in between.

Everything about Marc’s music is improvised on the fly creating kinetic experiences you can’t quite capture anywhere else. Marc often questions the sustainability of his career, reflecting on his family and his father’s impact on the man he has become.

The film’s tour performances were engaging, showcasing Marc’s charisma and his relationship with his fans. His shows and performances have an overly sexual nature, with him performing in a robe with only boxers on a stage decorated with naked manikins. His sex appeal and charisma have brought him a uniquely intimate fan base as he often brings them on stage and even incorporates them into his performance. When on tour, the party for Marc never ends, giving little time for his upbringing by instead sprinkling these moments throughout the film. The past has a way of catching up to you; after all, it shaped you.

The documentary showcases Marc’s wild life and sudden success after years in the making. However, Marc’s life and background could have been fleshed out more to help establish how his upbringing and father influenced his work and himself. After all, Marc’s Parisian father working his way into the fashion industry is not dissimilar to how Marc found a place within the music industry. How his family shaped him and his music should have been a focus rather than a subplot.

Also, it would have been beneficial for this film to provide context on Marc’s career and audience for those unaware of Marc’s career and online history. His past is only briefly spliced in this segment, which could have also given viewers more context for his success and what has driven him to become a performer.

Overall this documentary was enlightening and showed an unconventional musical act. Still, how the visuals and his life stories were handled could have been better structured and brought the audience more into the concerts, family life and production styles.

Shooting Stars: Review.

Shooting Stars tells the story of a young LeBron James as he and his childhood best friends become one of the best high school basketball teams of all time and change the dynamic of high school basketball for years to come. While not necessarily adding anything new to the genre, Director Chris Robinson is able to put together a competent sports movie that not only showcases the rise of one of the greatest athletes of all time but also shows the struggle and hard work put in by these young men to become a team that will go down in history as one of the best.

This movie is based on the book of the same name written by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger. Despite James being one of the writers of the book the movie does a good job at not just solely focusing on him and allowing time to be spent with the other boys in his group. The first half of movie focuses more on Dru (Caleb McLaughlin) and his family but still spends time with LeBron and their other two friends Sian and Willie. It’s nice to see the movie give some depth to all of its main characters and not only focus on the one who everyone already knows. I do wish the story made a little more time for both Sian and Willie, but they still get developed enough to where it works out in the end.

As far as basketball movies go, this is a good addition to the lineup. While it doesn’t do anything new and keeps to the typical formula that doesn’t take away from the storytelling behind it. Robinson is able to get you invested in these kids and wants you to see their rise to greatness. It helps too that the way the movie is written allows these kids to feel like real kids. A lot of movies sometimes write kids a certain way where they don’t really feel like real kids. Here, the dialogue and the way the boys all interact with one another feels authentic and doesn’t ever feel like the filmmakers are trying too hard to make them sound unique or cool just for the sake of it.

The cast here is great, and everyone puts in a good performance. All four of the main boys are great in their roles but it’s Caleb McLaughlin who is the standout. While he’s always been good on Stranger Things, this movie is able to really show off his acting chops like never before and it’s clear he is going to have a bright acting future. Dermot Mulroney as the coach has a good dynamic with the boys and comes off feeling natural, like he could be a basketball coach in real life. Wood Harris gets most of the heavy lifting out of the adult cast. Harris has always been a great character actor and he brings it once again to his role here.

Overall, Shooting Stars is a great addition to the sports genre. While it doesn’t do anything new or original, it’s able to set itself apart from other basketball movies and make you care for the characters it puts on screen. Add in a stellar cast and some great basketball action and this is one to definitely check out, especially if you’re a fan of basketball.

Rating: 7.5/10