(Posted from All Consuming)

Brick is by far the most engaging movie I’ve seen this year. I’ve seen a lot of fun stuff, and a lot of fluff lately. Serious movies have lately either depressed or disappointed me.

We had seen trailers for this in other DVD’s we rented, and wanted desperately to see it. I think we’ve checked every week for a month to see if Blockbuster had it in.

This is a bit of a concept movie. It’s a gritty noir whodunnit set in a present-day high school. The setting of a high school is a bit arbitrary, in the same way that mysteries are sometimes set in the 40’s, or 18th Century France, or Space. By having this mystery play out at a high school, it gave a set up for the needed social strata, complex relationships, and arbitrary limits.

At the same time, this was not a teen drama. The diologue was fast paced, hard to follow, and straight out of the 30’s. These teens didn’t really go to class, or have parents, or really even exist in the “real world.” It was a vehicle for a cool mystery and a WHOLE LOT of style. The style was completely engrossing for the whole duration of the movie.