BEFORE: I forgot to mention that I finally watched the final episode of "Arrested Development", which I'd been chipping away at all pandemic long - and the last episode, featuring the conclusion of Buster's trial, neatly coincided with the day I watched "The Lincoln Lawyer", so that's something. But something feels wrong now, because I finished that 85-episode show that was supposed to occupy my time during lockdown, and now that's over, but the pandemic is in full swing in other parts of the country. I realize that it's a mistake to mentally connect the two things - just because I was watching one to bide my time until the other, that doesn't mean that finishing one will bring about the other. Oh, if only it were so. But, now what? I can't MAKE the stubborn people in Florida and Texas wear their masks like responsible humans, only their local officials can do that (and their neighbors can mask-shame them, after making sure they're not armed...) so I have to find another TV show to binge, I guess. There's that Netflix series with Paul Rudd, I suppose - he's always good - or do I have to finally buckle down and watch "Lost"? Let me find some Netflix and Amazon comedy specials to watch over the next few nights while I think about this. There's no lack of TV shows I haven't watched, for that matter there's no shortage of movies available to me either, so I'm good for the foreseeable future. Maybe I should try to generate some irony, watch the first few episodes of "Lost" or "Game of Thrones", thus almost guaranteeing that news of a viable vaccine will break the next day...
Matt O'Leary carries over from "Time Lapse" (changed from "Frailty"). Yes, I was forced to make a change in the order, after publishing the review of "Brick". You could say I traveled back in time and changed the present - see the preceding review of "Time Lapse" for details on how I did it. Reality wasn't working for me, so I changed it, and we're all better off now, just trust me on this.
THE PLOT: A teenage loner pushes his way into the underworld of a high-school crime ring to investigate the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend.
AFTER: This is another one of those Guy Ritchie moments - one where I've seen nearly every film that a certain director has made, with one notable exception, and it behooves me to add that one to the list just so I can cross that director off my mental list, I've now seen EVERYTHING that filmmaker has released, and I can await his (or her) next masterpiece. With Guy Ritchie I'm still missing one film after watching "The Gentlemen", and that film is "RockNRolla" - I'm taping it today and putting it on a DVD with "The Gentlemen", though I don't know yet when or how it will fit into my schedule. And for Rian Johnson, the director of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi", that film is "Brick". Look, I enjoyed "Looper", and "Knives Out" was fine, though I got dinged by my co-worker for not scoring it high enough. Look, I just found the stuff with the medicine vials very far-fetched, that's all.
But "Knives Out" represents a genre pastiche - it's a throwback to those great mystery films (and novels) of the Agatha Christie days, like "Murder on the Orient Express" or "Ten Little Indians", where there's a murder in a closed setting, and the fancy detective arrives on the scene to piece together what when down. And it took a short while to figure out the genre being name-checked here in "Brick", it's the classic detective films of the 1930's, the ones with Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, back when women were dames and private dicks were hard-boiled and everything in the world was black and white, both literally and figuratively, because morals were easy to determine and color film hadn't been invented yet. I saw one film earlier this year that took a modern story and set it back in 1930's New York City, that was "Motherless Brooklyn", because the director/star wanted to do an homage to that noir genre. "Brick" sort of does the opposite, taking a story and dialogue that would have fit in very well in those old detective films and shifted it to a modern high-school setting.
That move, in and of itself, is a bit of genius. High schools have a cross-section of humanity, there are shady characters like drug dealers hanging around, tough kids who want to fight are a bit like mob muscle, and the nerdy kid is like one of those street informants, or someone who works for the detective assigned to get the lowdown on people's backgrounds and whereabouts. Instead of saying who people are sleeping with, people here are more concerned with who's eating lunch with who, or maybe that's just another metaphor for who they're sleeping with. But there's a network of ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends and cliques that needs to be navigated, and after all, high school itself is just a metaphor for the complex interactions and relationships of the adult world, right? So I don't have a problem with the transposition of the genre here, moving a typical gangster story to a high-school. Hell, the first "Star Wars" film is little more than a Western moved into outer space, right? OK, with a little bit of Japanese samurai films thrown in for good measure, and a World War II dogfight at the end. But you know what I mean - the cantina shoot-out has all the earmarks of a Western duel, and thus I felt that with "Solo: A Star Wars Story", things had come full circle because that film had a number of elements of a wester film - robbing the train, gambling in saloons, and, umm, well, more blaster duels. But let's get back to "Brick".
Brendan hasn't seen his ex-girlfriend in days, and since she's been running with a tough crowd, he decides to infiltrate the darker side of his high-school scene, to find out what happened to her. (Actually, we the audience already know, because the film starts with one of those crucial-information splash scenes, and then reverts back two days in time to show us how he got there.) But he gets a note in his locker with the location of a phone booth, then receives a phone call there from Emily, his ex, who says she needs his help. But she only mentions a few cryptic words, like "brick", "tug" and "the pin" before she hangs up. So Brendan enlists the help of The Brain to try and track down her contacts, figure out who she'd been "eating lunch" with lately, and learn who the big players are in the local drug scene. "The Pin" is a local dealer, rumored to be about 25 years old, and he's spoken of only indirectly, but all roads are eventually going to lead to this crimeboss, if he does exist.
Brendan has to beat up an arrogant football player (because you know they all take drugs...) and disrupt some of The Pin's business to get his attention, and then once he does he has to play The Pin and the Vice-Principal off each other - he promises to do undercover research for the VP to get him the dirt on The Pin, and then (after getting punched out by Tugger, one of The Pin's goons), he scores a meeting with The Pin and offers to work for him, giving false information to the VP to keep him off off the trail. But he still has difficulty figuring out what happened to Emily, because The Pin's not going to spill information to someone he just hired.
Meanwhile, he works another angle, hitting up his ex-girlfriend Kara for information about an exclusive "Halloween in January" party (wait, is that even a thing?). The party's hosted by Laura, who points Brendan to Dode, a skeevy looking guy who claims to know where Emily is, but he won't say exactly where. Laura also later reveals that the "brick" Emily referred to was a brick of heroin, stolen from The Pin, which certainly could explain her disappearance.
I'm going to stop with the plot synopsis here because I want to preserve the reveals, but the classic elements of the old Dashiell Hammett-style novels are here - the dame who dresses elegantly and knows more than she's letting on, but gets too close to the detective, anyway. The crime boss who's disfigured in some way (did his handicap make him evil, or is it the other way around?) and the hopped-up street junkies who'll sell each other out if it means they get money for their next fix. There are secrets within secrets, but the hero can figure it all out, if he can just stop passing out every time he takes a knuckle sandwich to his bean.
If there's a downside here, it's the fact that this looks a lot like a student film in some places - there's a scene where Brendan's being chased by a goon with a knife, and there are five shots in a row exactly the same - Brendan runs through a section of the school grounds, then the goon runs through the same section in the same manner. It's tedious, the kind of sequence a college kid would put together (I remember cutting one almost exactly like it in one of my films back at NYU) and you've probably seen a sequence just like it in any episode of "Starchy & Hutch". Though I will admit this sequence ends quite uniquely, that doesn't quite excuse it. And the director crossed the axis of action many times, I've seen this mistake made by professional directors too, but it's most common in student films. The special effects were mostly practical ones and done on the cheap, as well, but that was done out of necessity - so the budget here wasn't much more than that of a student film, and it shows.
And the genre mash-up is a bit of a double-edged sword - once you're aware of it, things become clearer, but when it's overplayed and you become super-aware of it, it starts to wear a little thin. Really, what are the odds against teens in the 2000's letting slang terms like "duck soup", "cash on the nail" and "take a powder" come back into vogue? Then again, you just never know with teen slang. But I'm left thinking that this film managed to become greater than the sum of its parts, there's a meaning and a point to it all, which I can't say about "River's Edge", a film I watched last month that started in (more or less) the same place and then ultimately went nowhere.
Also starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (last heard in "Knives Out"), Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions"), Noah Fleiss, Emilie de Ravin (last seen in "Public Enemies"), Noah Segan (last seen in "Knives Out"), Richard Roundtree (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Meagan Good (last seen in "Shazam!"), Brian White, Jonathan Cauff, Reedy Gibbs
RATING: 7 out of 10 phone booths (really? in 2005? what high-school kid in 2005 didn't have a cell phone?)
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