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BRICK
From an alt.gothic post: December 6, 2006
November 18, 2011
The movie "Brick" (2005):
On the advice of the "Sun Fish", SUN_FISH
I watched a relatively recent movie
for once on DVD: "Brick"
Pretty good, though saying
*why* it's a good would be
rough, outside of the obvious
things like "good acting".
It's essentially a pastiche
of old Dashiel Hammett
stories, transported to a http://www.filmmonthly.com/Video/Articles/Brick/Brick.html
different setting, and that
setting is also essentially A quote from the director:
a pastiche: a late-century
American High School. "[...] the initial decision to put it
in a high school [...] Was not to give
it a twist, or freshen up the genre
I think it's hard because I don't think the genre needs
to do a high school to be freshened up at all. But more to
story without doing give it a different set of visual cues
a period piece -- so we could free ourselves up, and just
teenagers are far take our own approach to the material.
too trendy. And I think that freed up the actors as
well, to provide an emotionally honest
Their fundamental story and location that would free up
condition may not very their performances. "
much from decade to
decade, but every few So in his opinion the choice
years they're on to of setting and the "good
different affected acting" weren't independant--
slang, different music it was key to keep the actors
crazes, different drug from doing Bogart parodies.
fads, and so on.
But here in the
land of "Brick", "Donnie Darko" intentionally
everyone speaks plunged us back into the It isn't easy
some strange mid-80s, the years the for an adult
amalgam of 1920s author was in school. author to do
and 1990s slang, the present day.
where some of
the jargon was Safire once
apprarently They don't condescend: quoted a letter:
invented for the they rapidly spit out very "reading your
movie. linguistically complex lines, piece on college
and the audience has to work slang was like
Jennie Kermode to keep up. A nice change, listening to
brought up for once. a deaf person
cell phones sing".
as a major
change, and
that's certainly It's not yet clear if the
true. Thriller/Adventure Story
can survive modern
One of the things communications technology.
that pegs the
setting as pre-90s That's something Iain M. Banks did
is the messing fairly well in "Dead Air": there's
around with pay some cell phone business that's
phones. okay, such as stealing a number
from someone's phone while they're
I liked the way in the bathroom.
the gang leader
was handled... There's also an interesting motive
he brings up for a break-in: to erase someone's
Tolkien and answering machine messages before
suddenly the they get home.
period seems
early (Tolkien DEAD_HARE
was big in the
70s).
And it suddenly explains a lot about
his character: he's a fantasy geek,
role-playing at Gangster Boss instead
of Dungeon Master...
IMAGINARY_BRICK
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