Brick
BRICK:
My senior year of college I took a great class at BU called Detective Fiction and Film Noir. I read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and watched the adventures of Sam Spade. I read Daschel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and was exposed to great films like The Killing, Touch of Evil, Out of the Past, Double Indemnity, Laura, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, and The Long Goodbye. Though I had already had a small appreciation for the shadowy world of noir, the class really opened my eyes to what was out there beyond modern takes on the genre like Memento and The Usual Suspects. So I was excited for Brick - a movie that promised to take the sharp dialects and shady characters of Hammet and transpose them into a modern high school setting. Veronica Mars has shown us that high school can be just as shadowy and dangerous as any urban cityscape or remote border town, so it was definitely a juxtopasition that can be made to work. And as for Brick? Well, it really is an entertaining and interesting movie. While at first it was pretty jarring to hear modern high school kids talking in some weird, Maltese Falcon-meets-Sin City-esque dialogue, the strange rythms and patterns to the dialogue soon really grew on me and became a lot of fun to try to interpret and figure out. Like the classic noirs, the plot kind of becomes secondary to the characters -- and Brick has some good ones. The crime kingpins and femme fatales of classic film noir are reimagined as high school drama queens and juvenile delinquints. Brandon, Tug, The Pin, et all were all really fun characters, and I loved going along for this ride and getting sucked into the crazy world. I also loved that there was a lot of humor, and some of the more absurd moments were kind of done tongue in cheek, knowing that you can only take some of the more outlandish moments so seriously before you have to laugh - and Brick embraces that. Take The Pin - the "old, like 26" leader of the local drug trade, who runs a shady gang of teens by night, lives in his congenial mom's house by day. Pretty funny stuff. Sure, this movie is mostly based on a gimmick -- high school kids acting out a film noir -- but it's a really, really fun gimmick. Definitely check this one out as well.
My grade: A -
My senior year of college I took a great class at BU called Detective Fiction and Film Noir. I read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and watched the adventures of Sam Spade. I read Daschel Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and was exposed to great films like The Killing, Touch of Evil, Out of the Past, Double Indemnity, Laura, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, and The Long Goodbye. Though I had already had a small appreciation for the shadowy world of noir, the class really opened my eyes to what was out there beyond modern takes on the genre like Memento and The Usual Suspects. So I was excited for Brick - a movie that promised to take the sharp dialects and shady characters of Hammet and transpose them into a modern high school setting. Veronica Mars has shown us that high school can be just as shadowy and dangerous as any urban cityscape or remote border town, so it was definitely a juxtopasition that can be made to work. And as for Brick? Well, it really is an entertaining and interesting movie. While at first it was pretty jarring to hear modern high school kids talking in some weird, Maltese Falcon-meets-Sin City-esque dialogue, the strange rythms and patterns to the dialogue soon really grew on me and became a lot of fun to try to interpret and figure out. Like the classic noirs, the plot kind of becomes secondary to the characters -- and Brick has some good ones. The crime kingpins and femme fatales of classic film noir are reimagined as high school drama queens and juvenile delinquints. Brandon, Tug, The Pin, et all were all really fun characters, and I loved going along for this ride and getting sucked into the crazy world. I also loved that there was a lot of humor, and some of the more absurd moments were kind of done tongue in cheek, knowing that you can only take some of the more outlandish moments so seriously before you have to laugh - and Brick embraces that. Take The Pin - the "old, like 26" leader of the local drug trade, who runs a shady gang of teens by night, lives in his congenial mom's house by day. Pretty funny stuff. Sure, this movie is mostly based on a gimmick -- high school kids acting out a film noir -- but it's a really, really fun gimmick. Definitely check this one out as well.
My grade: A -
posted by Danny B at 11:46 PM
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