Is the movie Brick worth watching?

I recently saw the movie Public Enemies, about John Dillinger and his gang. It wasn't actually that interesting. I wanted to get hold of the movie Brick as well, which is meant to have dialogue done in a Film Noir kind of way, even if set in modern times. Anyone here who has seen it, and can tell me if it is any good?

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Permalink Reply by Tome Wilson on May 11, 2012 at 10:31am

Brick is one of my top films of all time.

Go in expecting an excellent hard-boiled noir piece and you won't be disappointed.

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Permalink Reply by Deven Science on May 13, 2012 at 12:56am

Brick is not full on old fashioned noir, but it is definitely influenced by, and takes elements from, noir.

It's really good. Marlow as a teenager, sort of.

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Permalink Reply by Eric Langlois on May 16, 2012 at 4:57am

It's an excellent example of Neo Noir. Essentially, Rian Johnson took an old-fashioned noir story and set it in a high school, drawing on the connections between those cliques and the archetypes common in period noir. While this may sound silly, and it has been done badly in other works (e.g. Assassination of a High School President), Johnson's meticulous attention to the conventions of the genre, as well as leaning heavily towards a cynical worldview, make sure that the plot plays out with deadly seriousness.

Johnson is an incredible writer, with a considerable talent for razor-sharp dialogue. I don't think that there's an extraneous line in the entire film; they all set up something or explain someone's motivation. It's also clear that he studied the works of Dashiell Hammett very thoroughly before he began work on the script. There's actually a novella-length treatment of the story that you can download from his website which makes his influence even more clear.

All this is by the way of saying "Yes. Go see. Now."