Brick

I was fortunate enough to attend a preview screening recently of Brick, a film I had been looking forwards to for a while now. The film is a strange hybrid of old school film noir and high school drama and the story focuses on Brendan, played brilliantly by 3 rd Rock from the Sun’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a fairly typical teenager living on fringes of school who one day receives a call for help from his ex-girlfriend. This one event sparks the mystery of finding out what happened to her and it is here that the labyrinth plot begins to unravel. Now this is not qa film for everyone. It is dense and complex and very unique. Shot on a low budget, but working all the better for it the film cleverly parallels the stereotypical noir characterisations with their high-school counterparts, allowing the teenagers to take centre stage. In fact true ‘adults’ are few and far between in the film, it is clear from the start that we are entering Brendan’s world, and if you can’t keep up you’ll fall behind. One of the things that make the film so original and yet complex is the language used, using the typical hard-boiled intonations and slang made famous in film noir and the pulp novels of Raymond Chandler et al. Rian Johnson has crafted a film that sounds unique and draws you in to it’s almost poetic use of dialogue. The performances all round are excellent and the film is brilliantly crafted. The detailed plot is understandable and yet not over explained, the mystery is constantly intriguing and cleverly executed and the characters seem real, something that helps you engage with Brendan and his quest. He is the typical noir hero, tough, isolated and worn down but who has to reach the truth, to see the story through and hopefully make it out in one piece. There are times where the tough-guy dialogue seems slightly out of place and tries to be too clever for its own good, but on the whole this is a wonderful film, highly original and interesting; it’s a welcome break from the multitude of remakes and sequels that are flooding our cinema screens at the moment. A strikingly original and unique detective story, hard to penetrate but constantly entertaining. If you can get your head around the complex plot and dialogue this is one of the most enjoyable and impressive film debut's of recent years.