Movie Chat: Brick

Brick

I understand why people responded to this movie so positively: it looks great and it seems to achieve exactly what it is going for. Which impresses me to an extent (especially considering its relatively low budget), but, really, what it achieved just didn't interest me for more than 15 minutes. It felt like another "one note wonder", and, essentially, it's a one-joke movie: high school kids caught up in a Dashiell Hammett short story, tossing around lines of hardboiled dialogue right out of a 1930s proto-noir.

The style is neat and, like I said, for about 15 minutes that was enough. But the stylized dialogue doesn't have a purpose, or, at least, it doesn't have a purpose that I bought into.
I've seen some comments by the film's fans along the lines of "the style is meant to comment on how kids today are growing up too fast" (or "how kids today are forced to deal with adult concerns"). I guess I not only disagree with this thesis in general - if anything, kids today aren't growing up at all (although no one seems to be particularly grown up in America these days) - but the movie doesn't dramatize this idea, really, so it seems like a notion that the film's fans have tacked onto the movie as a kind of rationalization.

Of course, I'm not even really sure that's what the filmmakers are up to, but if they aren't, what's the heightened, hardboiled dialogue there for?

My guess is that it's the other way around: they wanted to do something in a Hammett-like style, but doing a standard noir would be, well, standard (and another Red Rock West would be soooo 1990s), but with high school kids it stands out - it's a hook, a gimmick. It isn't a bad gimmick, but, again, after 15 minutes I saw that they pulled it off and they didn't have any other tricks. A tightrope act that lasts ten minutes is great: one that lasts an hour-and-a-half might be an impressive display of endurance, but the thrill just isn't there at the end.

Really, though, I've been spoiled by Veronica Mars, which is about a teenager who is forced to grow up too fast. But because that show deals with specific cases (i.e., there's lots of characters on it who are in a perpetual state of adolescence) the show's point never seems half-baked.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is good, though, and I'm looking forward to seeing him in the adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Killshot.

Movie Chat: The Black Dahlia

The Black Dahlia

The movie looks so good in terms of design and it hits just the right mood and tone for this kind of neo-noir that I wish I could have enjoyed it more a la Michael Blowhard and the guys at The House Next Door.

I'm a big supporter and admirer of Brian De Palma, but I don't think the script or the original James Ellroy novel are really to blame here. In the past De Palma has done more with less, but he doesn't put anything on the screen here that hooked me and reeled me in, so I was left admiring the movie's production values without ever being engaged by it.

Unlike Snake Eyes or Raising Cain (which are definitely "minor" De Palma), it doesn't have charismatic and engaging lead performances or any filmmaking-muscle-flexing set pieces that make movies buff like me drool.

Unlike Femme Fatale, it isn't a "through-composed", arty, neo-noir-ish exercise.

And unlike The Fury, The Untouchables, or Mission to Mars, De Palma isn't able to get into the pulpy material and give it conceptual coherence and emotional heft.

My diagnosis: De Palma falls short of making another one of those pulp opera experiences because he misdirects his actors. Josh Harnett, Aaron Eckhart, and Scarlett Johansson look like they fit in their roles, but their performances are all pretty fuzzy. Hilary Swank is pretty entertaining as the femme fatale, but the other leads just don't seem very game.

I think Mia Kirshner, who appears in only three scenes, gives the performance of the movie: her aspiring actress character is, herself, trying to show off the ability to move from artifice to "genuine" emotion and back again and Kirshner turns this into a perfect little po-mo portrait of the artist as a would-be starlet. It's on a smaller scale, but it reminded me of what Naomi Watts does in Mulholand Drive. Kirshner pops out of the movie: she creates a fully-realized character in the middle of a cast of fuzzy copies of characters from past noirs.

Kirshner is definitely helped by how her role was conceived: she's the only actor in the movie given the lines and the space to create a realistic, detailed character - everyone else is forced into trying to do a type.

I've liked Josh Harnett in other movies, but when he's supposed to be larger-than-life or kind of mythic (as he is here and in Sin City), I just don't buy him. He's too nice and too dull and he doesn't have the kind of showy, technical, actory skills that can juice up roles like these. He can be better than fine when he's playing average nice guys (in Hollywood Homicide, where he's funny and gives his character a natural, believable quirkiness), but he seems out of place when he's not playing a standard juvenile lead.

Harnett is another one of these "pretty boys" who have replaced actual leading men in Hollywood movies, so it may not be surprising that De Palma can't get him to work in this part which requires an actual leading man.

I wonder if part of the problem is that De Palma was aiming for something partway between the European-style genre doodling of Femme Fatale and the highly-charged genre opera of his big-budget Hollywood entertainments (The Untouchables and Mission to Mars, say). The movie isn't playful enough to work as the former and isn't emotionally engaging enough to work as the latter.