BRICK
BRICK
January 15-16 2008, DVD, home living room, from library
Finally I got to see this extraordinary movie, and I am SO glad. It's exactly as wonderful as I'd been told, and as I'd hoped, maybe more. And it's noir as fuck - much more so than they usually make 'em these days. Maybe Scorsese still kind of does this tightening noose, lead characters who take a terrible beating but won't give up, multifaceted and yet still mysterious femmes fatales, mugs, goons, suckers, and hopeless loves, which never do anybody any good.
I mean - fantastic.
Heavily influenced by Dashiell Hammett (NOT Chandler, for a change), BRICK is a mannered, strange murder mystery starring the incomparably talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I've been in love with since he was on Third Rock from the Sun (Dammit, why don't I own that series on DVD!? I've got to fix that ASAP - talk about comfort viewing!) and who still has that fragile loveliness, which just makes it that much worse to see him get the crap kicked out of him over and over again. But he takes it, and he gets back up every time, even if it takes him a little while. Gordon-Levitt's character, Brendan, is a bespectacled high school student who is actually a hard-nosed gumshoe of the old school. His ex-girlfriend, Emily (played briefly and efffectively by Emilie deRavin, who is generally seen wasting her time and everyone else's on Lost), has turned up dead, and Brendan will stop at nothing to figure out the "straight" (i.e. the straight dope). To do this, he has to step into a drug-dealing, violent underworld also made up of high school students, with great shorthand tough-guy names like Dode (the wonderfully thuggish, yet vulnerable Noah Segan) and Tugger (Noah Fleiss, ditto with the thuggish/vulnerable), all of them rotating around the sun figure of the Pin (as in "kingpin") as portrayed by the incredibly creepy/adorable Lukas Haas, who somewhere in the past decade or so, grown to about nine feet tall but still looks like a little kid). The Pin's the biggest drug dealer in town, and also pretty old (maybe 26, they estimate) but he still lives at home with his attentive, oblivious mom and really loves Tolkien. And then there are the dames... poor dead Em, the theater diva Kara (Meagan Good, who is staggeringly hot, especially dressed up like Sally Bowles), and the ultimate fatale, Laura. Now I freely admit that I watched this movie because it co-stars Nora Zehetner, who I had the bad luck to fall in love with during her brief tenure on Heroes. And here, she doesn't disappoint. She's sexy, cute, elegant, and smart, and radiates danger from every pore. You know you shouldn't trust her, but... you can't help it. Assisting Brendan on his self-destructive detective scheme is Brendan's only pal, the loyal and aptly-named Brain (Matt O'Leary), who gets information, tracks everything, and, well, is a buddy, even when Brendan is crazy and abrupt and rude. Every gumshoe's got to have a buddy to take care of the data-crunching, while he's out getting his face bashed in. Detectin' is a dangerous game.
And hey, all the dialogue is written in the style of Hammett, too. This apparently is a barrier to many people's enjoyment of the film, but I thought it was perfect - appropriate for the subject matter, as well as being a commentary of the Grownups that they can't understand the slang that high school kids speak these days. The idea of an entire body of slang jumping a generation is something that I've been personally trying to accomplish all my life (even though I'm attempting a kind of quasi-beat, funkster, hippie, drive-in movie kind of approach). It works, I tell you. It works.
A great story, beautifully filmed and executed. Writer/Director Rian Johnson is one to watch (and keep watching) and BRICK is going into the buy pile.
January 15-16 2008, DVD, home living room, from library
Finally I got to see this extraordinary movie, and I am SO glad. It's exactly as wonderful as I'd been told, and as I'd hoped, maybe more. And it's noir as fuck - much more so than they usually make 'em these days. Maybe Scorsese still kind of does this tightening noose, lead characters who take a terrible beating but won't give up, multifaceted and yet still mysterious femmes fatales, mugs, goons, suckers, and hopeless loves, which never do anybody any good.
I mean - fantastic.
Heavily influenced by Dashiell Hammett (NOT Chandler, for a change), BRICK is a mannered, strange murder mystery starring the incomparably talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who I've been in love with since he was on Third Rock from the Sun (Dammit, why don't I own that series on DVD!? I've got to fix that ASAP - talk about comfort viewing!) and who still has that fragile loveliness, which just makes it that much worse to see him get the crap kicked out of him over and over again. But he takes it, and he gets back up every time, even if it takes him a little while. Gordon-Levitt's character, Brendan, is a bespectacled high school student who is actually a hard-nosed gumshoe of the old school. His ex-girlfriend, Emily (played briefly and efffectively by Emilie deRavin, who is generally seen wasting her time and everyone else's on Lost), has turned up dead, and Brendan will stop at nothing to figure out the "straight" (i.e. the straight dope). To do this, he has to step into a drug-dealing, violent underworld also made up of high school students, with great shorthand tough-guy names like Dode (the wonderfully thuggish, yet vulnerable Noah Segan) and Tugger (Noah Fleiss, ditto with the thuggish/vulnerable), all of them rotating around the sun figure of the Pin (as in "kingpin") as portrayed by the incredibly creepy/adorable Lukas Haas, who somewhere in the past decade or so, grown to about nine feet tall but still looks like a little kid). The Pin's the biggest drug dealer in town, and also pretty old (maybe 26, they estimate) but he still lives at home with his attentive, oblivious mom and really loves Tolkien. And then there are the dames... poor dead Em, the theater diva Kara (Meagan Good, who is staggeringly hot, especially dressed up like Sally Bowles), and the ultimate fatale, Laura. Now I freely admit that I watched this movie because it co-stars Nora Zehetner, who I had the bad luck to fall in love with during her brief tenure on Heroes. And here, she doesn't disappoint. She's sexy, cute, elegant, and smart, and radiates danger from every pore. You know you shouldn't trust her, but... you can't help it. Assisting Brendan on his self-destructive detective scheme is Brendan's only pal, the loyal and aptly-named Brain (Matt O'Leary), who gets information, tracks everything, and, well, is a buddy, even when Brendan is crazy and abrupt and rude. Every gumshoe's got to have a buddy to take care of the data-crunching, while he's out getting his face bashed in. Detectin' is a dangerous game.
And hey, all the dialogue is written in the style of Hammett, too. This apparently is a barrier to many people's enjoyment of the film, but I thought it was perfect - appropriate for the subject matter, as well as being a commentary of the Grownups that they can't understand the slang that high school kids speak these days. The idea of an entire body of slang jumping a generation is something that I've been personally trying to accomplish all my life (even though I'm attempting a kind of quasi-beat, funkster, hippie, drive-in movie kind of approach). It works, I tell you. It works.
A great story, beautifully filmed and executed. Writer/Director Rian Johnson is one to watch (and keep watching) and BRICK is going into the buy pile.