01/23/10 - Brick

Brick (2005, 110 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0393109/

As I've mentioned countless times, after watching L.A. Confidential last year, I decided I should watch more film noir. Brick is a really recent release from only 2005 that I didn't hear much about for some reason. It seems like it really slid under the radar not even making four million dollars worldwide.

The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan a high school kid who attempts to help his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin). Helping him is the loner The Brain (Matt O'Leary) who seems to know anything and everything that's going on among all the students. Playing leaders in the drug world are Noah Fleiss as Tugger and Lukas Haas as The Pin. Nora Zehetner plays Laura, a "friend" of all these people while Noah Segan plays Dode who seems to not really be friends with anyone.

The acting here is okay but not great. Gordon-Levitt is obviously the best and does a great job making his character believable. I would say that Fleiss as Tugger is the second best. His character is conflicted and torn and Fleiss does a good job at portraying this. The rest of the cast seem to just go along for the ride, not really showcasing any great acting talent in my opinion. I guess I could say that Segan does an above average job but that's probably it of the remaining cast.

As I mentioned above, most of the acting here isn't phenomenal. However, the characters themselves are well-crafted and work well within the story. This is one of the better parts of the movie in my opinion. On the flip side, the absolute worst part about this movie is the dialogue. It tanks to the abysmal at various times during the movie. It actually comes off to me like every once in a while a favorite poet's lines or something of the writer is forced into the dialogue. The bad thing about this is that it sometimes makes multiple characters seem the same when they have these overly witty lines. While I said above the characters work well together, on the whole they do. It's just that a few times in the film there's these absolutely atrocious lines that hurt the movie really bad.

The story itself is a cool one. Putting film noir in the high school setting is something I hadn't seen done before and for the most part it works out well. Though it does kind of seem like some aspects of high school (classes, teachers, homework, parents) are completely ignored. While this works for the plot of the film it does seem like an odd omission. I do like how The Brain was used as a high school kid that just knew everything that was going on so that this aspect of a film noir could be used in the high school setting. The character was really a product of the police part of the noir but was translated well to the new setting. Next, I'll add that the cinematography is one of the best I've seen in recent films. The high school setting is used amazingly well here with some really cool shots of the buildings and field of the high school. Further, there's really good use of contrasting black and white with shadows and that. The film plays up to these staples of the film noir genre pretty well.

Overall, I gave this film a 5/10. The characters are good, the cinematography is great, the plot is decent, and the setting is good. So why did I give this a 5/10? It really is the entire dialogue problem I mentioned. It reaches such corny and terrible levels that I'm pretty sure at one point I even threw up my hands in disgust. All in all, I feel like this director (and writer) in Rian Johnson shows some promise by making a lot of stuff work right.