A Ponta de um Crime

I saw this film at a sneak preview the other night not knowing what to expect. To say the least I was pleasantly surprised. Film Noir being one of my favorite film genre's, "Brick" follows the same story structure, odd-ball characters, right down to the very smart and quick paced dialogue of a 30s/40s hard boiled detective thriller. The twist that lifts it above parody and even a mere homage is the presentation of these elements with high school kids in Southern California. The direction by Rian Johnson is very expert and confident in telling the story, giving the audience smooth and quick editing along with skewed and distorted camera angles. He manages to maintain suspense throughout the film, only in a couple of parts letting it drag (the scenes with the Drama Queen are some of the weakest). The actors are great, the most memorable being the "villains" Pen and Tugger. Rather than just being atypical baddies, their portrayals give them depth, sympathy, and at the same time a degree of likability. Kudos also goes to the actor who played Brain, the partner of Frye, who is nearly flawless in his somewhat small role. John Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, shows up as the Vice Principal, but it is obvious they only had the budget to hire him for one day. I have to say this isn't a classic film by any means; I merely decided to give it such a high rating because it attempts something different and succeeds fairly successfully. I've been tired of the mundane films that get released every year, and for once this is something that is completely different; the use of archetypal characters in the setting and delivery not expected. It's a low budget film, but it is obvious to me that that this filmmaker will be heard from again. Keep an eye out.

The geography of film noir is usually a neighborhood, a city, a region ... BRICK transposes this geography onto a high school with surprisingly successful results. Watching it brought to mind not only the black & white films of the 40s and 50s, but glimmers of Gus van Sant, David Lynch and River's Edge. What gives BRICK its filmic authenticity (much different from realism) is its language -- the language of Chandler and Hammett, but re-imagined from the lips of contemporary teens.

The effect is staggering. BRICK essentially re-creates a world we thought we knew. Suddenly there are forces at work that we recognize because we knew they were there. But to see them in this noir glow is to give them an exciting new life ... "to see them again for the first time." There are plot twists and surprises aplenty here, although familiar once you realize the inspirations for the film. But familiarity is more than compensated by a superb cast and (not generally noted in these comments) excellent music. Contemporizing the soundtrack keeps us on our toes and makes a significant contribution to the tension of BRICK.

A terrific debut!

An instant classic. At once, it demands respect for its efforts. Creating an original film amidst the money-press-like formulaic cookie-cutters is reminiscent an act of rebellion against "the man", and this film has done a beautiful job of sticking it to 'em.

This is just an example of how a movie should be made, and I don't say things like that lightly.

Hell, you know it's going to be interesting when Neilson can only compare and contrast it with things like Memento and Donnie Darko on their little questionnaire. Rock on for intelligent life out there, keep it coming! I for one can't wait till it's released so I can watch for the things I know I missed! -Cognac

"Brick" is completely lacking in any sort of believability or even plausibility, and even if you pretend that it takes place in an alternate universe where everybody speaks 'stylized' as opposed to English, the dialogue sounds silly and ridiculous spoken by typical high school kids. I can buy this sort of stylized dialogue if spoken by gangsters and private detectives, but high school kids? Even in a fantasy universe the characters have to be believable but in this case the characters, their motives, their lives (lifestyles, more like), their way of speaking, and their mannerisms completely lack believability or plausibility and while I SHOULD be invested in the outcome of the film's events I simply cannot be because I'm reminded over and over again that these characters aren't plausible.

"Brick" is original in the sense that there are no other stylized neo-noir films set in high school, but it lacks originality in all other areas. Rian Johnson's (who is clearly, based on this film, a very talented director) direction is almost too inspired by classic noir for the film to work in its own right. It's certainly pretty to look at, and quite well-paced, but it's far too concerned with being an homage to bother with feeling genuine. The same could be said of the plot, characters, and dialogue, which are all so 'inspired' by Raymond Chandler and countless other sources that they seem far more interested in packing in homage after allusion after homage after allusion than telling a story. The story itself is mildly interesting, and some of the plot twists and turns got an 'ooh' out of me, but the whole thing feels completely phony and soulless. The sort of thing that would have been fun as a 10-minute short for film class, but is incredibly frustrating as a feature.

The acting is good from everybody involved, and Rian Johnson's shot composition is excellent, as well as the cinematography by Steve Yedlin and the score by Nathan Johnson. The script is outrageously silly and over-the-top, but at least the film is nice to look at.

A noir story in a high school setting is a reasonable idea, and this film could have been quite good, but instead of working in all the staples of a noir Johnson instead goes all out and makes something so frustratingly derivative and intensely stylized that it doesn't for a second feel plausible. No, I'm not looking for realism here, just some form of plausibility and believability. Do you question the world of "Star Wars"? Do you question the persistently stylized dialogue in classic noir films? No, of course you don't, because they feel genuine. Above everything else, "Brick" is completely phony. Not a second feels real, and by the tenth time Joseph Gordon-Levitt attempted a Marlowe routine I was already shaking my head in disbelief at the waste of talent this film was. It's so phony and so gimmicky that it becomes genuinely hard to sit through.

4/10

A life in film — if you really commit yourself to it — can leave you desperately depressed about the future. The templates are so mature that they are inescapable: without a template somewhere in the field of the thing you simply cannot "read" it, register it.

So you have only a few choices if you are a young filmmaker entering this world. You can buy into the system and play the game as the rivers flow. You can become a stylist in some way.

Or you can play with the templates and forms, usually in a self-referential way. When I see this last as the choice a young filmmaker makes, I rejoice. And it is sheer pleasure when it is done well.

This is. And its existence will make you optimistic, probably just knowing it is there.

Here's what it is: a hardboiled detective story transplanted not into high school (as it appears) but into the abstractions of high school that movies have invented. These two genres each have their own set of abstractions that flatten the world. This fellow has overlapped them. He's suppressed all irony — what is usually called irony but is actually selfawareness.

For this to work, all the characters have to be locked in their own world(s) and never glimpse anything outside the flatland. Its expertly done here, just gloriously. The editing is banal (which is a real problem) but the blocking is every bit as inspired as the placement of the thing in terms of the ordinary world of movies.

One example: our hero has been stereotypically beaten and is in a car trunk on his way to meet the local drug kingpin, who is another teen operating out of his Mom's basement. There's a game of light and darkness in this sequence: being blacked out with fists, darkness in the trunk and surreptitiously peering out. Once we are in the house down the cellar stairs there is a short hallway between the bottom of the stairs and a small basement room, the hub. This room is cheap fake wood panelling and low ceiling. Cheap lamps. But before we get there, we get a flash of light when the door opens and we see the 10 foot hallway is jammed with teen drug soldiers lined against the two walls. Its brilliant.

Kids. They own everything. They control not the future but the way we shape what we have now. When I see stuff like this, I think we might be lucky because if it.

2005 was a bad year for movies. This should be on your short list of best of 2005.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.