It seems that Brick is one of those films that you either love or hate-I would fall into the "love" but not passionately, more along the lines of "like" it like a brother:
In lesser hands, this could have happened to Brick, Rian Johnson’s risky attempt to bring the hard-boiled language and plotting of post-war detective fiction to a contemporary high-school setting. The obvious pitfall would be the embarrassing spectacle of junior Humphrey Bogarts and Veronica Lakes acting like grown-ups; noir relies on a measure of world-weary cynicism, and even a generation as naturally sarcastic as the younger set might have trouble suggesting that seen-it-all wisdom—or smoking a cigarette properly, for that matter. The other, related pitfall is taking the gimmick too far and letting the movie-movie artifice overwhelm any authentic emotions or original ideas; go too heavy with the homage, and you’ve got a smart-alecky curiosity, not a movie.
Johnson threads the needle a hundred different ways, but before getting into all the little things he gets right, here’s how the concept pays off: The common denominator between crime fiction and high school is a mood of heightened emotion obscured by a thin veneer of cool. There’s never a time in a person’s life where they feel things more intensely than in high school, nor is there a time when they labor as hard to keep those feelings under wraps. By evoking the stylized, rat-a-tat dialogue of vintage Dashiell Hammett detective novels—with words like “yeggs” (guys), “heel” (walk away), “jake” (drugs), “shamus” (detective), et al.—Johnson finds a new way to suggest teenagers’ capacity for couching their real problems in language. He also raises the stakes: Crime fiction deals with matters of life and death, and if that isn’t literally true of adolescence, it certainly feels that way to those on the inside. So by introducing a dead body into the equation, Johnson provides an incident that justifies that level of intensity.
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