Hit the Brick!

Last night we watched Brick, darling of Sundance and brainchild of freshman director Rian Johnson. (Johnson edited one of my favorite horror films, May, the title character of which makes a cameo appearance in Brick.) Brick is not horror—it's high school film noir, which turns out to be a pretty brilliant conceit. The terse intensity and impenetrable lingo of The Maltese Falcon aptly suit the self-conscious, self-involved dramas of highschoolers; it's not an accurate picture of highschool as it appears, but the genre distortion reveals how highschool feels. The isolating, empty hallways of the school aren't realistic, but they're both effective and genre-conventional. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (of Third Rock from the Sun) channels Bogie without mimicking him, and Lucas Haas's limping crime boss offers us a deft mix of menace, pathos, and parody. The storyline is played perfectly straight, and packs a brutal emotional punch even as the incongruities are making us chuckle. Definitely worth checking out.