solace in cinema : A vast wasteland of movies

I've been waiting to see the hot new property 'Brick' for a while now, after hearing a lot of good buzz from the states about 'this year's Donnie Darko' (whatever that means… I think they mean breakout indie film) I was gagging to take a look at it.

Brick is a modern day Humphrey Bogart film, a movie that pans out like a school play version of 'The Maltese Falcon'. A detective thriller where teenagers play all the parts, using a Calfornia school and suburbs as it's sets.

The world in which Brick is set is best described as 'doll house', based in a slightly skewed meticulously constructed reality of the films own making. When this is done well you get films like 'Brick' or the works of directors like Wes Anderson, when it's done badly you get self-flagellatory pieces of crap like Guy Richie's movies. As a friend of mine say's "When I'm pulled out of a movie because i catch myself thinking the guy behind the camera is a tosser, I can't help but hate it". With Brick this could have quite easily been the case, but the director's 'world' is backed up by a tight script, great actors and some keen editing.

The initial setup (and i'm not spoiling anything here, if you've seen the posters you'll know the deal) is that Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) a high school student, recieves a worrying phone call from his ex-girlfriend Laura (Nora Zehetner), she's in trouble and wants his help. When Laura turns up dead, Brendan sets out to do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of her death.

Digging through layers of lies and subderfuge; dealing with drug dealers, thugs and 'dames'. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan as a Bogart character, smart(with an equally smart mouth), calculating, knowing all the right questions to ask, and knows when to take a risk and when to turn and run. He gets beaten up, punched a LOT, bloodied and battered, but his intentions always hold strong, and his morals never waiver. Brendans unwillingness to be seduced, cohersed or manipulated is channelled from his love for Laura, a love he can't let go of until he get's to the bottom of what happened to her. 

The cast without exception, handle the roles with intensity and believability, an ensemble cast of young actors that you can tell are being expertly manipulated and coersed from behind the camera. Characters that exist in this slightly odd world include 'the pin' the town's resident drug lord, "an old guy, like 26" operates out of his mum's basement, and makes deals in his weird 'sherlock holmes' styled office. Lukas Haas an actor that regularly crops up playing interesting rolls in indie movies, plays 'the pin' with sincerity, and integrity even when his shady dealings are juxtaposed with his mum serving him orange juice and cookies.

Characters in 'Brick' don't talk like normal teenagers, they talk quickly, intelligently and using more slang than your brain can process at one time. The slang words are one of the films trademarks, employing a clever  'drop a word in and explain it later' strategy that mean's you're constantly re-processing past scenes in your mind while taking in new ones, just so you can keep up. Dialogue like:

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.

A brave tactic from director 'Rian Johnson', but it works well and makes you constantly re-evaluate what's going on. You suddenly hear a new word dropped into the conversation and your brain is operating twice as hard as it would during any other movie to store the word incase it's explained, or to try and figure out for yourself what it could mean.

Brick could have quite easily fallen into one of two 'indie film' crevices; the 'thinks it's way cleverer than it actually is' or the 'stylish camera moves and nice cinematography backed up by nothing'. Brick easily avoids both of these pitfalls and will certainly be remembered as a classic piece of independent cinema, a film that traverses genres with great ease, weaving characters and plot threads together, and then let's us watch as they unwind. A competant, fascinating film that deserves to be watched by everyone… twice.

check out the trailer for brick here

and the some stills in our flickr account here 

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 12:48 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.