By D.K. Holm
April 11, 2006
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Brick House
BRICK
Here is my audio review of BRICK.
Rian Johnson's Brick is so far one of the best films of the year, but it treads a delicate line between being a potent tale or being ridiculous. If you go with the spirit of its conceit, Brick is great, but if you don't buy it, the film is a mounting collection of ludicrous scenes that only grow more unlikely.
That's because writer and director Rian Johnson takes something that many people find silly already, which is the settings, format, and lingo of private eye stories, and adapts the formula to a high school setting. Doesn't Veronica Mars do that already?, you might ask. Yes, indeed, and quite nicely, but Brick aches for the romanticism of the PI novel, its dashed dreams and valiant loners. Set amid the hall-less terrain of a suburban SoCal high school, it's really more film soleil than film noir.
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Stripped of its high school accoutrements, the plot of Brick will seem familiar. Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, of Third Rock from the Sun and Mysterious Skin) is a high school loner, who eats his lunch all alone in the isolated back of the school, primarily because his heart was broken by his ex-girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin of Lost). One day she unexpectedly summons him for help, but before he can act she is dead. With the help of the school's resident nerd, The Brain (Matt O'Leary), Frye begins an "investigation" into Emily's death (though everyone believes that she is only missing). As in a regular detective novel, Frye's snooping takes him through numerous social strata of the school, and he meets rich girl Laura (Nora Zehetner), as well as Tugger (Noah Fleiss), muscle for dope dealer The Pin (Lukas Haas), and trashed brain Dode (Noah Segan), and others. As in Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Frye insinuates himself into The Pin's organization where he pits members against each other, and once he clears away the human debris the last person standing is the one who did it.
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Some of the borrowed tropes come from Chandler and other, lesser writers, or studio programmers from the 1930s, but Johnson's admitted biggest influence is Hammett. For example, a frequent scene has the detective barge into the DAs office to announce that he is on the case and to leave him alone. There's a scene like this in both Hammett's Maltese Falcon and in The Big Sleep. Johnson translates this to his high school milieu by having Frye confront the school's vice principal (Richard Roundtree). A private dick also always has a nightclub or theatrical venue to go to, and here it's the theater department in his school, which seems always to be busy.
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But it's not just the narrative forms that inspired Johnson. He also develops a whole lingo for his characters, slang terms (some from Hammett, such as "gat" for gun, "bulls" for cops, "burg" for city, others seem made up, such as "reef worm" for junkie, and "'scape" short for scapegoat) and special names, a code in which the kids can talk to each other shrouded from adult understanding (there are only a few actual adults in the whole film). Johnson's invention in this regard is not oceanic. He perhaps uses the advisement "Keep your specs clean" three times too many. Otherwise the lingo also shrouds the fact that, as mysteries go, it's a little conventional, if not predictable.
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And like Ned Beaumont in The Glass Key, Frye is a guy who can take a punch until the other guy is just too tired to fight back. Like the kid in A History of Violence, it's a little unlikely that Frye is able to so easily beat up a football star. It is more likely, as the film progresses, that he would be a prime punching bag for hoods, which, it turns out, is his primary investigative strategy.
It's not just good writing that carries the film, however. The detective story, like the horror film, is one of the few genres that lends itself to visual creativity. Shot by Steve Yedlin, a gaffer turned DP, Brick has numerous tiny striking images, such as the fan that stays stationary as the camera spins with it — an homage to Apocalypse Now? (Johnson told Creative Screenwriting on its recent must-hear podcast that he was as much influenced by Sergio Leone films as detective fiction.)
Another key element is the music, which is credited to Nathan Johnson. It's not a typical noir score, with its lonely weeping sax. I'm not sure what to call it, if anything, but it is modern, moody, and highly counter intuitive to what the film is ostensibly about. Bits of the score can be heard at the film's official site. The music, as so much of the film's other elements, suggest the depths of Brick's unexpected layers.
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Since last October I've been meaning to do my annual DVD Tray of Horror (I have a great lead for it, too), but been bogged down in about 5, 000 other things, 4, 999 of which are DVDs to watch and review. I may end up in the ridiculous position of reviewing two year's worth of horror DVDs seven months from now (that is, if we all last that long). Be that as it will come, I'm still endeavoring to keep up with the DVDs that I've requested to review, and in that spirit I've elevated The Dark (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005, 93 minutes, color, R, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English with French and English subtitles, static musical menu with 12-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $24.96, released on Tuesday, April 11, 2006) from the horror stack to the "do this now" pile.
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I don't know why, 'cause it isn't a very good movie. It's not scary, it's repetitious, it's not very clear about what is going on, and it has a downbeat ending. It does have a smidgen of cultural interest because the narrative (credited to Stephen Massicotte, who took it from a novel by Simon Maginn) is an example of mother guilt that we've been seeing a lot of lately, especially in episodic television. The essence of this theme is that though a mother is "right" in some dispute she is having, she is nevertheless punished or humiliated because she dares to vocalize or act upon her rage against her children or mate. Another current example is the fourth episode of the new run of The Sopranos. AJ is being a fussy little prick, but when Carmella yells at him, justifiably so to we the viewers, she instead is shown guilt racked and, later, compliant and contrite.
Here the guilty mother is Adele (Maria Bello), who had the temerity to strike her teenaged daughter Sarah (Sophie Stuckey). Has some kind of vague penance she takes Sarah to Wales (the Isle of Man in disguise) to visit her father James (Sean Bean), who does something vague there in a remote coastal cottage. After practically the second day there, Sarah disappears into the waves. While James and the village are searching for the corpse, Adele has it in her mind that something mysterious has happened to the child, that she has been seized by the residents of a purgatory called Annwyn where dwell the victims of a fanatic pastor who had his flock pull a Jim Jones off the cliff 50 years ago. There is also some vague information about a sheep abattoir where someone practiced trepanning on various victims. Soon, Sarah is replaced by a new wet girl who has emerged from the waves, whom Adele takes to be the daughter of that crazy pastor. In the end (yes, I am going to "spoil" it), James gets Sarah back, but Adele appears to have taken her place, and in a set of shots that look like they could have come from Hostel Adele sits bound in a chair awaiting the sadistic pastor who, it is suggested, is going to trepan her head for all her sins against her daughter.
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Have I emphasized how vague all this is? When the filmmakers (which include director John Fawcett who did the Goth werewolf film Ginger Snaps) realize once again that they have a dearth of plot and information, they resort yet again to another scene in which Adele spends about five minutes wandering through some dark hovel called out "Sarah! Sarah!" 500 times.
The film enjoys a glorious transfer, and the extra consists of an alternate ending (which you finally get to after 11 minutes of familiar footage), in which Sarah / Pastor's daughter throws a mysterious box (we never do learn its contents) off the cliff. There are also trailers for Ring Around the Rosie, Chasing Ghosts, When a Stranger Calls, Underworld Evolution, the two Amityville Horrors, The Fog, and Capote.
The documentary Deep Blue (Miramax, 2003, 83 minutes, color, G, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English with English and Spanish subtitles, static musical menu with 18-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $29.95, released on Tuesday, April 11, 2006) is not about a mainframe computer, nor is it a peek into the porno industry. Rather, it is an amorphous documentary about the ocean. Though made in 2003 it was kept in mothballs until 2005 and, presumably, the release of March of the Penguins, the poster for which Deep Blue's cover art now resembles.
Miramax presumably scooped up this film at the 2003 Cannes film festival, but like so many other films it purchased under the Weinsteins, declined to release it. I'm wondering if this backlog of titles will now enjoy massive release from Disney, flooding the rental stores and turning them all into Hollywood Videos.
In any case, Deep Blue is not the kiddies movie it may appear to be from the cover. After a brief introduction about the mysteries of the deep, the film transitions to a scene of a feeding frenzy in which birds, sharks, and about five other sea creatures all vie for the gizzards of an acrobatic school of fish. Next up is a profile of some cute little baby seals who are soon mince meat for a killer whale that braves the shallow water at high tide to chomp them up. This scene of seal thrashing goes on and on and on. Then on and on and on, with images of the whale out at sea tossing seals into the air like juggler's balls, reversing the old role of the balancing circus seal.
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Fortunately, that's about the last of it, and having made its point about the Darwinian unease of the sea, the film settles back to show us the wonders and abundance of the world's oceans, both low and high. Three years in the making, with photography by numerous teams of DPs, with a lush score by George Fenton and beautiful narration by Pearce Brosnan, in this, the somewhat shortened US version of the film (Michael Gambon did the British version). A scion of David Attenborough's Blue Planet series, the film was shot in the Maldives, Azores, Cayman Islands and Bermuda by the likes of Doug Allan, Peter Scoones, Rick Rosenthal and others, their imagery marred only by the occasional use of fake sound effects to illustrate the moment. Like Penguins it tries to turn the activities of nature into a "story," and the narration is sparse. We are shown some rather spectacular sea creatures, both in the coral reefs and in the Mariana Trench. One looks like an out of control marquees on the Vegas strip, while another has eyeballs as large as snow globes, but we don't learn anything about these creatures. We are meant, instead, to be swept along by the images and Fenton's music until we feel, thinking being anathema.
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Still, it's a beautiful piece of work. The transfer is gorgeous, and the disc also comes with one, lengthy extra a 40-plus minute documentary making-of that among other things gives ample time to showing Fenton conducting the score before the Berlin Philharmonic.
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Spymate (International Keystone/Buena Vista, 2006, 90 minutes, color, PG, 1.85:1 enhanced, DD 5.1 in English with French language track, and English, static musical menu with 18-chapter scene selection, keep case, one disc, $26.95, released on Tuesday, April 11, 2006) is a Canadian kids' trifle that barely registers as you watch it, the cast being such an array of blandly similar adult actors, despite the innocuous presence of a chimp, who is shot and edited to look as if he has volition. The story is something about a spy's daughter (Emma Roberts), a scientific genius, being kidnapped so that a mad scientist can put her invention to evil use and take over the world. The film stars Chris Potter and TV's Richard Kind, and is written by Anna McRoberts and Robert Vince, with Vince directing. Vince specializes in family films with animal characters, but also traffics in the most retrograde national and racial stereotypes. The disc has but one extra, a conventional making-of.
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I'm about to dive into a whole stack of Blue Underground films for a future review, but I wanted to do a bit of housecleaning now about three recent releases, or rather re-releases. On February 28th, Blue Underground made available films from its Alan Clarke Collection for individual purchase. I reviewed the boxed set (practically before anyone else, I'm happy to brag) when it first came out, and Clarke is a significant, influential director as well as a fascinating, troubled figure who managed to cast his films with future British icons. BL has released Made in Britain, Scum (presented in its two versions), and The Firm, which disc also includes Elephant, the film whence Gus Van Sant got both the title and elements of the style for his film about teen violence. The discs are $19.95 individually.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
Not only that, I've got a new book out on an aspect of film noir I call film soleil, titled simply FILM SOLEIL. It is sure to alter film criticism as we know it to its very core. Order it now!
And if you are interested in what I sound like, I can be heard on KBOO radio (90.7 FM) the second and the fourth Wednesday of the month, at 9 AM in the morning (Pacific Standard Time) on Ed Goldberg's show MOVIE TALK along with Dawn Taylor. It's available via streaming audio (in 20 Kbps Stereo). The next broadcast is Wednesday, April 26, at 9 AM, with the critics' ten best lists.
COMING SOON: Oscar winners on DVD, a package of Hitchcock movies and TV shows, REMINGTON STEEL and other TV mystery shows, many STAR TREKS, the third annual DVD Tray of Horror, and more!
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