Don't misunderstand me, I like weird cinema. I've watched and enjoyed Gaspar Noe, Lars Von Trier and even David Lynch as a more accessible weirdo. But something about the world of Brian and Charles just didn't resonate.
Firstly, the film is written in a very, very heavy handed way. The antagonists are probably the thinnest written, working class tropes you're ever likely to encounter. And actually the humour in this, ahem, comedy punches down in ways that the writers are clearly unaware of. I can laugh, like the rest of us, at mental illness, Tourettes, fart jokes, irreverent humour but for me there has to be an acknowledgement, an awareness by the comic of what you're doing - as a matter of respect to the recipients of your down-punching. I never got the sense that both writers were respectful of this.
Anyway, I actually thought this was going to be an interesting love story between a social outcast and a hulking male robot and, I wouldn't mind seeing that story. In the same week that a bloke was sacked from Google for saying in the press that he was working on an AI that he believed had become sentient, there is a rich arena of ideas to be explored. This is what probably is most disappointing about Brian and Charles: it doesn't know what film it wants to be. The label says COMEDY but it's just not funny enough and it's not intelligent enough to explore the likelihood of love/pathos emerging between humans and robots.
Firstly, the film is written in a very, very heavy handed way. The antagonists are probably the thinnest written, working class tropes you're ever likely to encounter. And actually the humour in this, ahem, comedy punches down in ways that the writers are clearly unaware of. I can laugh, like the rest of us, at mental illness, Tourettes, fart jokes, irreverent humour but for me there has to be an acknowledgement, an awareness by the comic of what you're doing - as a matter of respect to the recipients of your down-punching. I never got the sense that both writers were respectful of this.
Anyway, I actually thought this was going to be an interesting love story between a social outcast and a hulking male robot and, I wouldn't mind seeing that story. In the same week that a bloke was sacked from Google for saying in the press that he was working on an AI that he believed had become sentient, there is a rich arena of ideas to be explored. This is what probably is most disappointing about Brian and Charles: it doesn't know what film it wants to be. The label says COMEDY but it's just not funny enough and it's not intelligent enough to explore the likelihood of love/pathos emerging between humans and robots.