Brick - Movie Review

Oh man. The dialogue made this movie! If it had been just another high concept "[genre]... in a high school!" film it would have been ok; but instead they downplayed the setting, kept it straight and true to form - the couple of comic scenes were all the funnier for their scarcity - and came up with what seemed like a long-last Chandler classic.

this and the proposition are my two favorite movies of 2006.

Every shot and theme is thought out in this film, and the result of all this care is perhaps the best-crafted film I have seen this year. C is quite a lot score.

Deserved an A, Breaking it down *Dialogue gave it a really cool momentum for me. One of the things that dates most High School movies is often slang etc. By rooting the dialogue somewhere else, Rian went around this in a really smart way. *The pacing was damn good in my opinion. It's easy to blast clues away with too fast a pace. (I know cause I've made mystery films that hinged on one clue that failed to land in the rush to move fast.) Things like the arrow on the cigarette were handled brilliantly, with the accelerating jump cut. The information remains central but the momentum remains. *The character development is handled visually to a large extent as well, a lot is buried in subtleties of gesture etc. It's noir which means, once again, that detail matters. The pacing isn't meant to be "Gilmore Girls" where we're told everything; sometimes you give a cut two seconds to open up. *Finally, I would consider the whole equal to the sum of it's parts. There are plenty of virtuoso moves in the film that serve the story in very neat ways. Dramatically, the ending was very satisfying, even in it's ambiguity.

At last a review of Brick that I agree with. I've lost track of the number of reviews that say "it's like film noir.. but set in a high school", big fucking surprise. That's all it is and nothing more. I was somewhere between bored and irritated and could have happily left the cinema if my girlfriend hadn't insisted we sit it out. and was it just me or could anyone else see the ending coming a mile off?

don't blame the guy for taking it slow. if that's a meritable complaint, take your ADD back to the tv console and leave us in the theatres.

I found the film's pacing and overall architecture annoying at first, but when it reached a point 1/4th to 1/3rd through the course of the movie, I found it really engaging. And given how intricate the twist at the end was - the motives, the timing of events, etc - I don't see how the average person could see it "coming from a mile off". Maybe you could anticipate who would doublecross who, but not necessarily why.