Brick Tanks

I try to spare my loyal readers my personal reviews of the films I watch. My criticisms aren't very insightful or trenchant. And there are plenty of others on the web who can articulate critiques better than me. So I just watch my movies (now nearly all from Netflix), enjoy them or not, and keep my comments to myself (even though I think all of you out there would enjoy The Painted Veil, Best in Show, Letters from Iwo Jima, and Little Children.)

But when a third of my audience requests my opinion on a specific movie, then I would be remiss not to respond.

I watched Brick last night. It attempts to be "noir" with atmosphere, death, clever nicknames, love lost, and drugs as a high school student unravels the murder of his ex-girlfriend. It had been in my Netflix queue for many months before rising to the top, in my queue so long I can't remember why I put it there.

Brick is the most ludicrous movie I've seen since the Carter administration.

I kept wanting to turn it off, thinking it couldn't get any more stupid, but then I'd laugh and have to keep going. Throughout the movie, I had this sense that somehow a lame high school drama class woke up inside a latter-day Raymond Chandler story. A story in some bizarro parallel universe where all the kids talk using this fast-paced street argot, twenty-something drug kingpins live with their mothers who dutifully serves juice and cookies to the hired muscle, and beauty queen teenagers know how to cut chemicals from laundry detergent into a brick of heroin. I've no doubt that writer-director Rian Johnson came up with the movie's premise while reading Sam Spade in study hall.

Some pointers for Mr. Johnson:
1. If you're going to use 24 year-old actors to portray high school students, at least try to have them not look like 24 year-old actors.
2. Work on your timeline. The scene at the end... where Brendan meets Laura on the football field, a scene that takes place maybe 3 hours after a 4 AM massacre of six young people, don't have the boy ask "What did the papers say about it?" and then have the girl quote what the "papers" are saying.
3. There are actually people in a high school. Lots of them. Lots and lots of them. Everywhere. Adults, too. Lots of adults who keep an eye on things. And in all the other places outside of school, there are lots of people there as well. And cops. There are cops in the real world.

Brick stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt. One of his earlier films - Angels in the Outfield - is more grounded in reality than this thing.

I don't see many movies I hate. I'm usually pretty good about screening movies before investing two hours. And I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them. But Brick joins the ranks of The Green Berets, Pretty Baby, and Date Movie in the pantheon of Kem White's most hated movies.

I hereby sentence Rian Johnson to read everything ever written by James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett before he is allowed back behind a movie camera and he is never, ever to make another movie about high schoolers again.

Your mileage may vary.
K-