This movie was UNBELIEVABLE! SOOOO good. Seriously need to watch it again, as they all talk so fast in words I don’t always catch.

If you love Film Noir you will most likely love this movie. Even without seeing noir, like my husband, you will most likely love this movie.

ARG! It’s impossible to talk about without giving anything away!

If you like old Bogie movies, Raymond Chandler plots, and good teen movies, you’ll probably enjoy this. Imagine Humphrey Bogart and Edgar G. Robinson translated into high school students … it sounds absurd, but it works.

And then there’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He is a wonderful human being. I got to meet him when the movie Manic, which he starred in, screened at UCLA the night before it premiered. I had taken my son as I was on a panel to discuss the movie (I was the Anger Management EXPERT). Joseph hung out with the Cub and invited him to the cast party. He was a real, honest-to-goodness human being, not stuck up or snotty.

If you don’t know who he is, he played the long haired kid on 3rd Rock from the Sun. As an actor, his range and believability are excellent. In Manic, he made me think he had severe anger problems … and yet he was normal.

Anyhow, watch both movies, watch 3rd Rock.

Reviewers seem oddly split on this, but I, for one, loved it. A small movie, shot close and intimate, well suited for watching on a laptop screen, in a quiet room, and listening hard to the language.

In present-day California, high schooler Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) gets a call from his ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin). She lets him know that she’s in trouble, asks for his help, then disappears. This sends Brendan on a quest to find her with the help of his friend the Brain (Matt O’Leary). Along the way, he runs into trouble with other students: rich-girl Laura (Nora Zehetner), drama queen Kara (Meagan Good), and druggie Dode (Noah Segan). The quest to find Emily begins to consume him, and soon he’s involved with the Pin, a local drug lord (Lukas Haas), and his enforcer, Tug (Noah Fleiss).

Rian Johnson won the 2005 special jury prize at Sundance for originality of vision, and his name shows up three times in Brick’s credits: writer, director, and editor. He does an impeccable job in all three roles. In one of the DVD extras, he cites Dashiell Hammett as a big influence. For those unfamiliar with Hammett, he was a crime novelist. He’s probably most famous for creating the character Sam Spade, who was played by Humphrey Bogart in one of the best noir films, The Maltese Falcon.

This influence is reflected most in the film’s dialogue – it’s very stylized. There’s a lot of rhythm, slang, and everything is spoken very quickly. Take note: to catch Johnson’s razor-sharp wit, you need to be paying full attention. This is a movie that requires a smart audience.

Ask any dope rat where the junk’s spraying and they’ll say they scraped it off that, who scored it off this, who bought it off someone; after four or five connections, the list always ends with the Pin. But I betcha you got every rat in town together and said show your hands if any of ‘em actually seen the Pin, we’d get a crowd of full pockets.
-“The Brain”

Setting the story in a Southern California high school instead of 1940’s New York City was a big risk. There are a couple of scenes where this premise could have run into problems. For example, when Brendan gets called into the principal’s office, the movie really could have started to fall apart. (Can you imagine Sam Spade getting called into the principal’s office?) But Johnson pulls it off, lightening the mood by having Brendan and the principal exchange some clever banter.

He also did an amazing job with the editing. The pacing of the film is flawless. It doesn’t drag at any point, and all the pieces come together at just the right moment. You get the best sense of what kind of an editor Johnson is by watching what didn’t make it into the film. If you watch the DVD extras, there are several deleted/extended scenes, each introduced with a short rationale about why they were left on the cutting room floor. None of the scenes were bad – well, maybe one dream sequence – but everything he cut tightened up the whole movie.

Really, really, an excellent film. As other reviewers have pointed out, it is set in a high school, presumably in California. The tone and the filmography are absolutely right on, if a little updated. No more hiding in shadows on dirty city streets, these sleuths and crooks live in the suburbs.

It really was a little hard to follow, mostly because it really does seem like a script written for a classic film noir, old slang delivered in quiet, pubescent voices. Totally unexpected.

All in all, I stand by my five star rating. Really couldn’t have asked for anything else… Well, maybe a better soundtrack. It was a little distracting.

(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.

Subhy and I watched Brick this evening. It’s a funny kind of a film. I found it very difficult to follow the dialog – I’m not sure if this was the accent that was particular to this film, or if I just didn’t know all of the slang. The acting was superb, and the whole thing was surreal with these serious, serious drug goings-on in a high school – people being alternately concerned about some bad crack and the vice-principal looking for them in class. Four stars, I think.

This is a modern noir film set in a high school. It’s interesting and unique, but somewhat difficult to follow. The dialog is often difficult and hard to understand. Despite that, it’s a worthwhile flick.