Brick: The First Pop Whore Movie Debate

Once upon a time, also known as "Saturday," your beloved editors saw Brick, which you may remember was already hyped in Snap Judgment a few weeks prior. It turned out to be a movie neither to collectively gush over nor collectively slam. Rather, we were a bit divided on the issue. So we figured the best way to present our respective thoughts would be in a debate/interview format, conducted over e-mail and offered for your enjoyment below.

(Key: Eti = regular type; Nick = bold type)

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So Nick, you recently schlepped a bunch of us out to the Sherman Oaks Galleria to spend $10.50 on "Brick." If I didn't actually live in Sherman Oaks, I'd be sort of offended. What do you have to say for yourself?

Oh, I'm sorry, would you really rather have stood in line the extra 40 minutes at Universal Studios to get the so-called "free tickets" promised to you and me by the good people of Cingular? Anyway, putting aside the fact that I technically schlepped farther than anyone else, I'll simply say that all I did was instigate a group viewing of a really great movie.

Since I actually got nothing out of Brick other than a few chuckles, but not even the good kind, but rather, the I'm-shaking-my-head-beacuse-this-is-sort-of-kind-of-really-stupid chuckles... which I could've gotten standing in line at Universal Studios making fun of the tourists who are there in a totally non-sarcastic "I just shelled out $70 bucks for this" manner. So, to answer your question, yes, perhaps I would've rather stood in line at Universal Studios.

Shall we begin to explore our dueling positions on this movie or do you want to talk about my favorite color?

Is your bra size a matter of national security? Okay, that's probably enough of the oblique A Few Good Men references that only you and I will ever get. So I'll get to the point. Rare phenomenon though it may be, Brick is exactly what it was pitched as. It's a genuine film noir throwback, populated with exactly the kinds of personalities you'd see in anything from The Maltese Falcon to L.A. Confidential, except with high school kids playing the roles. Do they talk anything like actual high school kids talk? No. Does anyone in any film noir ever talk the way normal people talk? Of course not. Is that why noir is probably the best genre ever? Yes. Am I done answering my own questions? Almost. Does Brick absolutely rock? I thought so.

[Over IM, Eti calls Nick out for failing to end the last e-mail with a question]

Eti (3:05:44 PM): thanks for setting me up with a question, biatch
Nick (3:06:07 PM): oh right
Nick (3:06:16 PM): ok make the last line
Nick (3:07:03 PM): And I know you enjoy a lot of pseudo-realistic noir films yourself, so what gives?
Eti (3:07:06 PM): nah, i'm responding as is
Eti (3:07:18 PM): or i can slip in this IM
Eti (3:07:20 PM): which i will
Nick (3:07:25 PM): ok
Eti (3:07:29 PM): meta!

[Debate continues.]

To answer your faux-question, yes, my boobs are a matter of national security. These babies can kill. Haven't you ever seen the 1991 movie about them starring Richard Grieco called "If Boobs Could Kill?" Thought so.

Anyway, I like noir type movies. I really do. But I had a really hard time liking Brick.

I had a hard time believing anything about it; even the aspects that were tongue-in-cheek seemed completely staged like a bad high school play. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's babbling seemed like he was doing an (incorrectly) un-ironic imitation of a hard-ass detective who's been walking the mean streets for 20 years. It just didn't work for me. Like do I actually see Joseph Gordon-Levitt beating up a kid who is three times his body weight because he's "smarter?" No.

In addition to all the inane lingo (which drove me completely up the wall), all the characters were totally unlikeable and pathetic. It was like a portrayal of stupid kids with drugs and guns, who have a totally skewed elitist view of themselves and their self-worth. I have a hard enough time watching that when it happens in real life.

But that's really besides the point, because I just didn't like the "mystery." It just seemed like a big mish-mosh of 10 other movie plots and so when the case was solved in the end, I really didnt' care.

Why did you find it to be that spectacular?

Well, I'll never understand why "If Looks Could Kill" didn't usher in an entire era of Cinema de Grieco; I mean, when I was 13 I thought it was pretty much the awesome-est movie ever and watched the tape at least three times before returning it to the video store. No joke: it's easily the best project Darren Star was ever associated with.

Now, what were we talking about? Oh, right.

I'd understand someone being more dismissive of Brick if it had really just been a film-school exercise in transposing a 1940's detective plot and dialogue into a 2005 high school (though I probably still would have enjoyed it). But I really felt it was more than that. At its core it was a pretty accurate representation of teenage life: the feelings of isolation and extreme cynicism, not quite having the resources to get things done yourself but also not wanting anyone else's help. And it conveyed these feelings under the guise of a hard-boiled mystery plot, which to me is a lot more interesting than conveying them by having people sit around talking. I'll concede that none of the characters is very likable, even the hero, but that's pretty much par for the course in noir. Match Point didn't exactly give you anyone to root for, either; you just stuck with it to find out how messed up things could get by the end... which is pretty much exactly what I was invested in with this movie.

So what disappointed you so much? Were you expecting a big-screen Veronica Mars?

Even prior to my seeing the trailer, you sold it to me as exactly that. And you know from first-hand experience that I wasn't too turned on by the trailer to begin with. I thought it looked kind of weird; like they were selling it to us as one of those weird mind fuck movies where you feel like you're in a dream you don't understand. But I figured I'd give it the benefit of the doubt.

Basically, I was hoping for a better plot than just drugs, guns and manipulative kids. For some reason, it just seemed really out of place to me. Maybe I would've believed it a little more if the dialogue wasn't so "check us out, we're speaking in our cool-kid code" or at the very least, if the kids were in their twenties, but definitely not in high school. And if you're hell bent on setting the movie in high school, then for god's sake, be a little less pretentious. I couldn't take any of these kids seriously.

And I beg to differ, but in Match Point, you did have some people to root for. At the very least, you had Chloe and her family, to more or less of an extent, which did a good job of making Chris and Nola unlikeable for a reason.

Even still, you were given enough of an interesting psychological aspect to think about such as social climbers and haves vs. have nots. Match Point gave the audience a tiny little shred of sympathy for both the Chris and Nola characters, as hateful as they were. By the end, you were like, Nola's fucked up, but Chris is even more fucked up, so who do I hate more and why do I hate one less than the other?

Brick made me feel absolutely nothing for anyone and I really didn't care enough about any of them to want to see anything happen with them; good or bad. I just wanted the stupid story to end.

The worst part is that the "hard-boiled mystery plot" that you speak of wasn't even that intricate or fucked up. I thought it was very basic and they just kept throwing in new characters and artsy fartsy bullshit and dialogue to make it seem complex. I felt that throwing in Emily's pregnancy was about the stupidest thing they could've done because it was a total cop-out.

Brick was nowhere near as psychologically interesting as Match Point. In fact, it wasn't psychologically interesting period, because it never gave you any background or motivation.

No, there's not any kind of exact parallel between the two movies; I was mainly pointing out that you don't really have to like a character to be interested in seeing what happens to him or her. Still, Brick did get under my skin similar to the way Match Point did, and not many movies can do that for me. You can call it pretentious, but just about every good movie risks being pretentious when it believes completely in its own internal logic without copping out by giving a wink to the audience. It only seems pretentious when you don't end up going along with it.

I'm surprised that the dialogue was such an issue for you. The kids on Buffy, Veronica Mars, and The OC don't exactly talk like real American high schoolers either, but (in general) they behave like them, and that's the important part. The culture, subculture, and sub-sub-subculture were all painted pretty accurately except, like I said, they were represented in a sort of heightened reality. The language was crucial in drawing you into that reality, just like it is in Tarantino's films or on The Sopranos or any number of other things.

Yeah, at essence the plot was pretty basic. Except in a few cases (like The Big Sleep), a good film noir isn't about a lot of twists and turns; it's about sending a character down a dark path that they more or less know the end of but can't turn back from. In Brendan's case, he knew from the beginning that nothing good was going to come of anything he did, but he had to see it through because he had to know. That made him not only interesting, but also believable on a certain level because you can imagine a high school kid having that kind of stubborn determination. The background and motivation were there; they weren't spelled out, but I could understand well enough what kinds of people the characters were and what made them vulnerable. And as far as I can remember, all the important characters were introduced within the first 20 minutes if not sooner.

That's exactly the thing I didn't like. I felt like the kids didn't talk or act like high schoolers. The plot was completely unbelievable because it kept teetering between the "real" reality and the one made up for the movie. Seriously, in what alternate universe does a vice principal in a wealthy upper-class southern California community know about a missing girl from the very high school that he works at and something bad about to go down involving drugs AND gives a kid room to operate without calling the cops or getting authorities involved?

Tarantino's films tend to have a completely made-up world within the real world, but they never teeter back and forth and are therefore very easy to buy into and accept at face value. Whereas, I felt Brick completely went back and forth between the two worlds whenever and wherever it was convenient for them.

I felt the movie stuck to its own reality exclusively. Within a few minutes, and as each of the main characters was introduced, I got absorbed enough in Brick's world to accept whatever else happened within it. It's kind of learning a foreign language -- and I'm not talking specifically about the nature of the dialogue (though, of course, that's part of it) but how at a certain point, your brain can process the information organically without having to translate it into something it understands. It's also like Dance Dance Revolution: you eventually get used to looking at the arrows, and your brain can just tell your feet what to do.

Yes, I concur. However, I get a lot more pleasure from embarrassing myself at the arcade trying to "dance" on a metal pad than I ever did sitting on my ass being bored to death.

To think that I blew 21 games of DDR on Brick is sad.

Hey, you still had plenty of time to play DDR afterwards. We owned that part of the Sherman Oaks Castle Park arcade for a solid half hour. And seeing Brick gave us a new vocabulary word.

Brick (n): Something that Nick and Eti completely disagree on.

"Eti thinks Beaches is the greatest movie ever, but I wanted to chew my hand off to distract me from Bette Midler. It's a total Brick."

"The Rock was such a complete Brick." Hey that's a clever play on words, Eti. Thanks, yo. Word.

Well, I can see you don't even need me to ask questions anymore. This interview is over!