aoneproduction’s "Brian Fantastic"

I’ve never been a fan of magicians, magic tricks, magic shows, or any other bullshit performance material including the word “magic”. And honestly, with the amount of useless magic trick videos on the internet, I really don’t have much respect for the people who submit them either. How I ended up stumbling across this one I can’t even remember, and why I bothered watching it all the way through is beyond me. All I know is, it hasn’t helped much to improve my opinions on magic.

The premise is, this second-rate magician Brian Fantastic is having a falling out with his lisp-afflicted girlfriend, as she doesn’t seem to appreciate his constant magic trickery. This sets up the video to include many gimmick shots of magic tricks in action, and the inclusion of one-line magician cliches. As you can imagine, this gets relatively old relatively quick, which in the filmmaker’s defense, is sort of the point of it: The entire point of the video is to demonstrate how annoying these tricks are in a personal sort of setting, and how tedious it can be to watch someone doing them in rapid succession. That still doesn’t alter the fact that we, as the viewer, have to sit through each trick as the girlfriend has to.

As far as the camerawork goes, it does a well enough job of providing us multiple shots, and the quality of the footage and the lighting conditions really aren’t all that terrible. There are a few errors in the continuity, which are mostly excusable, but some of which are a bit too distracting. Some of the shots could have been centered better, namely the shots which feature only one subject on-screen. These shots would work so much better if the subjects were right there centered in the frame, yet the cameraman felt some need to keep them towards the sides of the screen instead. Still, as far as the cinematography is overall concerned, it demonstrates at least some level of competence of the man behind the camera.

So, you might be asking yourself, what’s so bad about this video that inspired me to do a full review of it? Let us discuss the most apparent flaw of the video: How piss-poor a performance the character of the girlfriend puts on. Sure, Brian Fantastic isn’t winning any awards for his acting, but his entire character centers around being cheesy and cliche. The girlfriend, on the other hand, puts on an absolutely miserable show, in her delivery and her timing. As mentioned before, the actress’s lisp really comes out with the delivery of each of her forced lines, and is almost difficult to listen to. Tack onto this just how poorly written her lines are, and her part is completely unsalvageable.

This video perfectly demonstrates the importance of good casting, and how one actor [or actress] can compromise what might otherwise be an otherwise simply unspectacular video, or even one with some amount of potential behind it. Unfortunately, Brian Fantastic does not fall into the latter, and the inclusion of this incompetent louse only serves to make a generic, tiresome, bland video worse than it already is, and almost unwatchable.