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http://www.brickmovie.net/
Release Date: March 24th, 2006 (limited)
Premise: A teenage loner pushes his way into the underworld of a high school crime ring to investigate the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend.
World Premiere: January 21st, 2005 (Sundance Film Festival, in dramatic competition)
Distributor: Focus Features
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Brendan Frye), Lukas Haas (The Pin), Nora Zehetner (Laura Dannon), Matt O'Leary (The Brain), Meagan Good (Kara), Noah Fleiss (Tugger), Emilie De Ravin (Emily), Noah Segan (Dode), Brian J. White (Brad), Richard Roundtree (Assistant VP Gary Trueman)
Director: Rian Johnson (feature debut; he edited the indie horror movie May)
Screenwriter: Rian Johnson (feature debut)
Genre: Drama, Mystery
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i remember hearing a little bit about this at Sundance a year ago and then i kinda forgot about it. but i just saw the trailer for it the other day before The New World and i thought it looked pretty great. i'm not sure why it's taking so looong to come out, it got pretty good reviews as i remember. so i will be there opening day for this one... WATCH THE TRAILER (http://www.brickmovie.net/) or read a few reviews http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/brick/
that joseph gordon levitt is playing all these crazy teenager roles these days. it's like he's trying to re-live all those missing years or something.
Quote from: modage on January 02, 2006, 11:59:17 PM
WATCH THE TRAILER (http://www.brickmovie.net/)
steal it directly (http://www.focusfeatures.com/clips/brick/trailer-640x340.mov)
if that kid at the beginning doesn't solve the rubix cube, this could be pretty cool. a teenage detective story.. works for me.
Yeah, looks good. Though I couldn't help but laugh when I realized the trailer reminded me of the short noir spoof posted here long ago (with the guy getting hit with the basketball all the time).
i'm really excited for this.
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you can talk to the writer/director here: http://www.rcjohnso.com/forum/index.php
A teenage film-noir-ish picture...This one definately has my attention. Those one-sheets (or promotional cards?) look interesting.
Quote from: modage on March 06, 2006, 10:00:33 PM
you can talk to the writer/director here: http://www.rcjohnso.com/forum/index.php
i'm gonna ask him about the rubix cube!
Saw this last night at an advance screening in Santa Monica where the director and two of the actors stayed after and answered questions and I've got to say, it's my favorite film of 2006 so far. If you love Film Noir you'll really embrace this. It seems like this could have been a lost script from the late 1940's early 50's, it's that much like a film noir and I might see it again when it comes to the arclight in hollywood on the 31st. My god, what a fun film.
At the questionairee it was the usual film school questions, so nothing new other than he based it on alot of hammets stuff and that it was shot about two years ago. But god, I was so happy to have encountered this film. Just seriously wonderful vintage film noir dialogue and some hilarious moments.
But ya, :yabbse-thumbup:!!!!!
I saw the trailor when I rented The Constant Gardener, and decided I MUST see it. As I watched closely, though, I realized the lead role was the kid from Third Rock from the Sun. It's always hard for me to adjust to seeing people like that in serious movies...
Quote from: sheshothim on March 18, 2006, 06:20:12 PM
I saw the trailor when I rented The Constant Gardener, and decided I MUST see it. As I watched closely, though, I realized the lead role was the kid from Third Rock from the Sun. It's always hard for me to adjust to seeing people like that in serious movies...
Go rent Mysterious Skin, you'll really have a hard time adjusting
Quote from: edison on March 18, 2006, 10:45:54 PM
Quote from: sheshothim on March 18, 2006, 06:20:12 PM
I saw the trailor when I rented The Constant Gardener, and decided I MUST see it. As I watched closely, though, I realized the lead role was the kid from Third Rock from the Sun. It's always hard for me to adjust to seeing people like that in serious movies...
Go rent Mysterious Skin, you'll really have a hard time adjusting
Manic, too. That was the first movie I saw him in after Third Rock, and I could hardly believe it was the same kid.
Ah ha....intrigue!
Great film. I think it's the most original Ive seen in some time.
cool, i'm REALLY looking forward to it.
i'm going to see this tomorrow
EDIT:
i just saw this, and the writer/director rian johnson spoke after
it's good, but not great. when it started, i was afriad it was starting to get silly with the funny lingo and obvious musical infulance to noir films. but i started to get into it, and in the end enjoyed myself. the music, which i thought was quite good, reminded me of the soundtrack to punch drunk love at times. He spoke about the soundtrack, and said that they used cheese graters and bottles as instruments. some of the sound design was impressive for a film made for just under $500,00 (at least i thought so).
in the end, i'm left with the thought of twin peaks, without the lynch weirdness. Xidentity Crixax may have more to say, he was there too
rian johnson seemed cool, although he did not talk much, and a bunch of old people used the Q&A time to complain that they did not understand the film :yabbse-angry:
i also must have missed this, but i did not realize the super hot emilie de ravin was in this. she's not always super hot in this film, but it's alright
give it 45 minutes to figure out its own identity, and then it's a great neo-noir that'll have you by your balls.
i fucking loved it, and talked to rian johnson one on one for a few minutes after the show. cool guy... honest, relaxed, and grateful.
it's great, except for some forced-sounding music in the beginning, and the plot wabbling its way down the line between camp and intense drama.
heads up, if you aren't sucked into the genre enough to expect it, there are times when the characters are almost sound like they're speaking in pikey.
definitely recommended-- partially because it's a decent film, and mostly because it's a really intriguing first feature for the writer/director. i am almost certain it'll get wider distribution later this year. fuckall if it doesn't. netflix eventually... but see it. ... especially the lynchheads.
I can't wait to see it, I'm just pissed that i live in a shitty small town and i'm not sure it will play within an hour of any direction that i live... :yabbse-thumbdown:
Quote from: Neil on March 22, 2006, 01:39:11 AM
I can't wait to see it, I'm just pissed that i live in a shitty small town and i'm not sure it will play within an hour of any direction that i live... :yabbse-thumbdown:
nah, you're pissed cause Rian Johnson doesn't have you as a facebook friend.
Quote from: Xidentity Crixax on March 22, 2006, 12:38:54 AM
i am almost certain it'll get wider distribution later this year.
it will get wider distribution starting in a week...
Just got a tentative schedule of the roll-out for Brick. This could still change, but right now this is the plan, with specific theaters:
3/31New York City - The Angelika
Los Angeles - The Arclight
4/7Boston - Kendall and Coolidge
Chicago - Century Center Evanston and Downtown
Dallas - Magnolia
Washington DC - E Street
Denver - The Esquire
Minneapolis - Lagoon
Seattle - The Metro
San Francisco - Embarcadero
Portland - The Fox Tower
San Diego - The Hillcrest
Atlanta - Midtown
4/14We will expand into more theaters in the Bay area, New York, LA and DC.
4/21Austin - The Arbor
Baltimore
Detroit - Main Art
St. Louis - Tivoli
Indianapolis - Keystone
Milwaukee - Oriental
Philadelphia - Ritzs
Phoenix - Camelview
Sacramento - Tower
Houston - Angelika
4/28Albany - Spectrum
Charlotte - Ballantyne
Cleveland
Kansas City
Louisville - Baxter
Monterrey
Santa Cruz
Salt Lake City
Quote from: Xidentity Crixax on March 22, 2006, 01:47:47 AM
Quote from: Neil on March 22, 2006, 01:39:11 AM
I can't wait to see it, I'm just pissed that i live in a shitty small town and i'm not sure it will play within an hour of any direction that i live... :yabbse-thumbdown:
nah, you're pissed cause Rian Johnson doesn't have you as a facebook friend.
Me too.....me too.
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Brick is a rarity in really low budget independent film, it’s exciting and dynamic. To break it down it’s a film noir set in a southern California high school. Film noir is the most malleable genre out there. You can do comedy, romance, action and now a high school movie all within this shroud of violence, sexy women and drugs.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan Frye a smart fast talking high school student who isn’t above breaking a jock’s nose in order to find his missing ex-girlfriend. I got a chance to talk with Brick writer/director, Rian Johnson, who rightfully won the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision.
Daniel Robert Epstein: One of the things that’s interesting about Brick is that they don’t make film noirs without humor anymore. The only humor in Brick comes from the fact that they are high school students. Did you want to make something that was so nihilistic?
Rian Johnson: Not particularly. I hope there’s actually some degree of humor in there.
DRE: But the humor doesn’t come out of the noir aspect.
Rian: Exactly. The origin of this whole thing was the novels of Dashiell Hammett. That’s where it all started for me and if you go back and look at his novels it’s got that same humor that you see in a lot of darker stuff like the Coen Brothers, where it’s funny but in the context of the world. The biggest example would be in The Maltese Falcon. The scenes with Sydney Greenstreet, who is the heavy, are hilarious. They’re like comedy scenes really. But at the same time it’s not hilarious in the way that steps you out of the world, because it’s completely at peace with what’s going on in the story.
DRE: But did you have the beats set up such as when the head of the crime family is being served milk and cookies by his mom. You knew that was going to get a laugh.
Rian: Yeah, definitely.
DRE: But you don’t play it for laughs.
Rian: It was very important not to. A big part of what my goal with this was to do a straight up detective movie. I knew that we were playing a very dangerous game by setting it in this high school world because that inherently lends itself to parody and humor like Bugsy Malone. If anything I probably did overcompensate by wanting to play it completely safe. The humor seeps in when you play it totally straight.
DRE: What made you decide to set it in high school?
Rian: The decision to set it in that weird high school world came from wanting to give it a different set of visual cues because everyone is so familiar with film noir. The instant you see images of men in hats in shadowy alleyways, it’s very easy to turn your brain off to a certain extent and just chalk it up to being a homage to older better films. I’m always a little bit nervous when I tell people the central conceit of the film because I’m afraid that they’re going to think that the high school twist is some sort of post-modern deconstruction of the genre, when it’s not that way at all. It’s actually a way of being able to take a much more straightforward approach.
DRE: Brick feels like a student film, in a good and very pure way.
Rian: I take that as a big compliment. It was shot at my hometown high school which is very freaky. That’s years and years of therapy right there. I grew up making movies. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was 12 and throughout high school I was running around with a video camera. That’s what I did to avoid social situations so there was something about the experience of making Brick that very much pulled me back to that world. I was back in my high school making movies with a group of friends.
DRE: Does all the anger in the movie come from high school too?
Rian: Of course. Everyone wants to break the jock’s nose. Those two worlds of detective movie plus high school slid very easily on top of each other in a lot of different ways such as the nihilistic anger you mentioned. That’s something that’s very present and very rooted in the archetypal detective protagonist of detective fiction. That seen it all, disconnected from the world in doing his job type of thing. That connects to the loner archetype that you have in high school and the way a lot of us envisioned ourselves in high school. Everyone likes to think of themselves as outside of that stratified social world.
DRE: What made you decide to start off Brick with a scene from the middle of the movie? I assumed it was a scene from the end.
Rian: I’d be interested in knowing how you reacted to that.
DRE: You didn’t have to do that but since it is a noir, you could do it just as easily. It was good because walking to the theater I didn’t know if this was the kind of movie where people would die.
Rian: It served a couple purposes and it is a Sunset Boulevard type thing.
DRE: I wasn’t sure who the girl was supposed to be.
Rian: You’re supposed to be confused. Also I think the fact he’s sitting there looking at a dead girl on a creek established from the very start that this isn’t a high school movie. As opposed to jumping into something where all of a sudden you’re in high school with locker cages and corridors but now you’re ramped up to see murders and violence. I felt it was better to lay the cards on the table.
DRE: Was it difficult or expensive to get Velvet Underground's Sister Ray to play over the credits?
Rian: Our budget was just under 500 grand and for Sister Ray they wanted $60,000 and we talked them down to $30,000. I got to the point where I got so passionate about having that song at the end, I wrote a letter to John Cale and Lou Reed begging them to let me put it in which I’m sure their assistants read and had pity on me. Since there were hardly any songs in the whole movie, I wanted to punch it home with that at the end.
DRE: I liked the jazzy score.
Rian: Yeah. It’s like a junkyard jazz score.
DRE: You obviously had a very strong vision for this movie. How happy were you with the final cut?
Rian: I was thrilled. I can say that and not feel like an asshole because the reason I was thrilled with it is because of how different it was from how I originally envisioned it. I had a very clear idea going into it and to a large degree it did come out matching that but the things that excite me at the end of the day is the stuff that still surprises me. That’s why after seeing it 500 times I can still sit down and watch it.
DRE: What movie did you see Joseph in that made you want to cast him?
Rian: The only movie I’d seen him in was Manic with Don Cheadle. I’d never seen his TV show and he’d just finished shooting Mysterious Skin but it wasn’t cut yet.
DRE: Have you seen Mysterious Skin yet?
Rian: Yeah it’s amazing. I think Joe is really going to surprise a lot of people in the coming years. His trajectory is going to be a really intelligent one. He’s such a smart guy and he’s so level headed and he knows his taste in projects. One benefit of him working since he was young is that he is only in his mid-20’s but yet he has such a highly developed sense of where he wants to go and how he wants to get there.
DRE: He’s gone beyond working with edgy directors. He works with amazing people.
Rian: The nice thing about him is he isn’t like “Fuck the mainstream, I’m doing edgy stuff.” He’s just interested in picking good projects. I’m not afraid to hear if he’s going to do a 50 million dollar movie because I know it’ll be something interesting.
DRE: I was given a glossary of terms for the movie Brick. Of course you can figure out most of them from the context they are used in the movie. How did you come up with the language?
Rian: The slang in the movie is really dense but it’s just mish mash. There’s a lot of it from Hammett, the 50’s, modern day stuff and a bunch I just made up. The only thing in my mind was, does it sound cool. If I couldn’t think of something that sounded cool enough I would make something up.
DRE: When you came to certain beats while writing Brick would you have to think of what would happen next in a noir or did it come naturally?
Rian: I really tried to avoid thinking what would happen next in a noir because then it would start to feel like a homage. When working with the cast and crew I felt I could make fresh creative choices and not play archetypes. It was important for each of them that they found something about the character that let them bring it to life.
DRE: What made you think of Lukas Haas for the crime boss?
Rian: We found him very close to the end of the shoot. Joe and I drove up to his place up in the hills. We had to go up this twisty dark road and then go into this house much like a kingpin’s house. I hope he does more character roles like this. It’s really fun to see him have something where he can be a bit more bizarre and cunning.
DRE: Who was Gary Trueman [played by Richard Roundtree] in the film noir canon?
Rian: He was the chief of police that the detective’s got to go in and deal with eventually. That scene is basically verbatim straight out of The Big Sleep. That’s a scene that is the closest we get to very directly tipping our hat to our origins.
DRE: After I see a film noir I really want to punch someone in the face. I want to just sneak up on someone and clock them.
Rian: Yeah, clock them in the kisser. There’s something cathartic about that.
DRE: Seeing that world just makes you want to do something bad to somebody else.
Rian: My goal as a filmmaker is to make people do bad things to other people in life. If I can accomplish that one thing, I’m all good.
DRE: A lot of independent filmmakers get offered the most bizarre things after having success. I know Eli Roth got offered Dukes of Hazzard after Cabin Fever. How about you?
Rian: It’s bizarre to see what people toss us based on this movie. It’s nice for me in a way because I actually like the career path I want to take. I want to just keep writing and making my own movies. I’m not looking to be a working director so it’s easier and very nice that I don’t have to read scripts and deal with that world.
DRE: So you have no desire to even read scripts.
Rian: Not at this point. I’ve written my next movie, called The Brothers Bloom, and I know what the next one is after that. The career trajectories that I want to try to emulate are like the Coen Bros.
DRE: The Coen Bros went and tried to do a big picture movie with The Hudsucker Proxy.
Rian: There are some things about Hudsucker that I still enjoy.
DRE: I saw on your website that you’re taking pictures across the country for the movie.
Rian: It’s weird, I have this little personal site of mine and I’ve been just tossing stuff out there for my friends over the years. Now people are starting to find it, which is strange. The Brothers Bloom is a globetrotting con man adventure movie about two brothers who are con men and their last job is on this one woman. I’m really excited about it.
DRE: How old are the characters?
Rian: Like mid-30’s.
DRE: So no part for Joseph Gordon-Levitt?
Rian: No, I wish I could put Joe in the time machine and zap him forward ten years. I would be in heaven. But as proud as I am of Brick and just 100 percent overjoyed with the process of making it, it was something I wrote in my early 20’s. I’m 32 now and it is really invigorating to be working on something I wrote a year ago. It’s really where my heart’s at right now.
DRE: After working on Brick so long was it daunting at all to sit down and write that second movie?
Rian: Not at all. Movies are all I’ve really done my whole life so if I get a chance to keep on making them, I will.
DRE: Why do you think Michael Bay’s website is the funniest site on the net?
Rian: Have you read the recently asked questions? People ask him what kind of car he drives. There’s something hilarious about that.
DRE: It’s easy because he’s such a target [laughs].
Rian: It’s probably a little too easy. I probably should take that down but I won’t.
DRE: Where are you from originally?
Rian: I went to junior high and high school in San Clemente [California] but Colorado for grade school.
DRE: Was your family in the movie business?
Rian: No, not at all. I was the first one in the family to veer into that. But the way we funded the movie was scraping money together from friends and family. They’re all really big movie fans and really supportive.
DRE: What movies made you want to pick up a camera?
Rian: It was the same cloud of movies that everyone about our age likes. It’s Raiders [of the Lost Ark], Star Wars, The Dark Crystal. But some of my best memories are watching La Strada with my grandfather and my dad showing me Raging Bull when I was in high school.
DRE: What film school did you go to?
Rian: I went to USC.
DRE: So many people come out of there, how was it?
Rian: I had a lot of fun there and I met all my best friends there. To a large degree the reason you see so many people coming out of it is just because it’s in Los Angeles and the people who come out of it stick around in LA and work eventually.
DRE: Did you grow up with Lucky McKee?
Rian: No, we met in the dorms at film school.
DRE: Did Lucky give you notes on Brick at all?
Rian: I showed it to him when we were in the cutting stage. It’s a fun thing. I met a group of friends in film school, Lucky was among them and my cinematographer Steve Yedlin is as well. We’ve all stuck together.
DRE: He shot May as well.
Rian: Yeah. May was the first movie that our group of friends all got together and did. Lucky’s a talented dude and he’s cool. So I hope we keep that going for future movies. It’s a cool little crew that we’ve got.
DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?
Rian: I go to the site completely for your interviews.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RIAN JOHNSON (BRICK)
Source: CHUD 03.29.06
Rian Johnson knew who I was when we sat down for a one on one interview about his debut film, Brick. Whenever someone knows who I am I always flash through my mind trying to think what I have written about them, and whether the revelation that they know me is about to be followed with a fist to the face. The one thing I had written about Brick was that its concept – a noir set in a high school – sounded like Veronica Mars to me. Turns out I was wrong, since Brick is infinitely more accomplished than any TV show. it's a stunning debut, and it really marks Johnson as a major talent right out the gate. And I'm not saying that because he reads CHUD.
Brick was a long time in the making; Johnson and his friends (who became his crew) spent six years trying to get it made. They would go out and take location photos long before they had secured a dime of funding. When it finally did get made, Brick got accepted to Sundance where it won a special jury prize for Originality of Vision, and I can't think of a more fitting award. Brick is a film that takes some very familiar concepts and elements and synthesizes them into something that's exhilaratingly fresh. I spent most of the running time of Brick with a grin on my face – not because the film's funny but because Johnson had the audacity to try what he did, and the talent and skill to succeed so completely.
Brick hits this Friday in the lucky cities. If you want to find out when this excellent film is coming to a theater near you, check out the Brick forums at Rian's website.
Q: This has been a long process for you – this played at Sundance last year.
Johnson: A long process. And even longer than that – I wrote the script right out of film school.
Q: The movie you worked on forever, but this part, where the movie's done but people can't see it, has been going on for over a year and change.
Johnson: We made the thing totally independently and Focus bought it at Sundance and then immediately slotted it into their schedule a year later. At first, personally being impatient I was frustrated with it, but eventually I realized it's a good thing, because they have been very good at putting it out there in terms of screenings and showing it at festivals. Particularly for this film I think word of mouth is really the only advertising that means anything. I know people have been responding well to the trailer, which is encouraging, but at the same time the central conceit of the movie is so weird you really need someone to sell it.
Q: I walked in and didn't know what the film was about, and took me a couple of minutes to get my bearings. At first it seems kind of funny – they're talking funny – and then you realize it really works.
Johnson: At the same time it's really tricky because if you just tell people that this is a hard-boiled detective movie set in a high school, that doesn't communicate that it works. And if it doesn't work, it could be the worst concept ever.
Q: That's the thing – I kept expecting it to be a comedy, that the concept of them being hard boiled would be played for laughs, but it never is.
Johnson: Absolutely not. It's real important that we stuck very true to the detective roots of it. The origin of it, where it came from, is my love of Dashiell Hammett's novels, and just wanting to make a straight up American detective movie. The whole twist of setting it in this high school world for me had nothing to do with being post-modern or meta or deconstructive or any of that bullshit, it was really just because the visual cues of film noir are so ingrained in our culture now that it's hard to see them without turning a piece of your brain off and filing it as film noir. That was really the origin of putting it in this high school world, giving it a different set of visual cues, so we could do a much more straightforward take on a genre movie.
Q: How hard was it to get your cast to get that patter, that rapid fire dialogue?
Johnson: We worked a lot on it. With Joseph in particular we had a three month period where we got together constantly and watched movies, talked about movies and worked out exactly how we would make this weird language work. The first thing we tried was to forget about this formalized dialogue and do it completely naturally. That didn't work, it fell flat, and we realized if you're going to have this kind of language you have to take the bull by the horns. We went back and watched a bunch of Billy Wilder movies. We watched Treasure of the Sierra Madre and we had to kind of study that style of performance, which isn't done today.
Q: That style died out when Marlon Brando showed up, but do you think that such stylized dialogue could come back?
Johnson: I don't know. If so it would be a sea change that would happen a century from now. People get used to a certain thing. But then again, you look at the modern day sitcom –
Q: Which has a lot of those elements.
Johnson: Absolutely. Two centuries from now people will look at our sitcoms from today and think it's the weirdest, most alien thing in the world. It's kind of the frog in the pot of water having the heat turned up – there are a bunch of conventions of the genre that we've gotten used to since the 50s.
Q: As a writer is it fun to write like that?
Johnson: It's a blast. It's a blast because you never get to do it. For the actors I think that's one of the things they responded to, what other opportunity are they going to have to try this kind of thing?
Q: When you spend so long working on a film, planning it out for months and years before the first frame is shot, how does that effect the editing?
Johnson: That's interesting. The editing is always a process, I think, of in a way being able to let go of the conceptions you had at the beginning. So the fact that I had so long to conceive of this at the beginning made it inherently more difficult. The fact that I had the luxury to take so long on the editing, mostly because we financed it independently and because I was cutting it on a Mac in my bedroom, I had all the time in the world to play with it. When I was planning the film out I was watching a lot of Sergio Leone westerns, and I shot it in that style – which works for the framings, but I shot it in these long single takes. Then I got to the editing phase of it and I kind of realized that I shot it in this particular way, but the Hammett, the stuff that it's based on, is very percussive. It's very short and it's very abrupt, it's all about saying the most in the least amount of words possible. When I put the first cut together I realized the pace was off and it was way too long, but because we had shot so quickly I didn't have coverage. So what I did was I just went into the shots and cut out the boring parts of the shots. Now there are these jump cuts that happen throughout the movie, that's where those came from.
Q: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Johnson: Absolutely. But it ended up creating this other cool kind of little style thing that works with it.
Q: What's next for you? I assume that the time between Sundance and now has given you the chance to think about it.
Johnson: I have had a con man movie percolating for the last couple of years and I wrote it this summer. We're in the thick of trying to get it made now, and as proud as I am of Brick and the work everyone did and what a great experience it was, I did write this when I was in my early 20s. It feels really good to be working on something I wrote this year and is about stuff that I'm about now in my life.
Q: Is the con man film going to be a genre mash up as well?
Johnson: A bit. I think it's more straight ahead, but at the same time it's very much in its own world. It's a con man movie, a very character based con man movie about two brothers. It's kind of the same thing as Brick in that it's character based and I hope the main relationship is what takes you through it, but it was important to me not to sublimate the con man elements of it, to make it work with the characters.
Q: I would imagine that after your first film wins a special jury prize for originality of vision at Sundance it would be easier to get your second film off the ground.
Johnson: Your lips to God's ears. So far. But again those six years of trying to get funding taught me that you're not making a movie until the film is rolling through the camera.
Q: Do you have people coming to you and saying they want to be in your next film?
Johnson: Yeah, and that's nice. It's nice to have something that does a bit of the talking for you, because I'm bad at selling myself. Now I just show them the movie.
Q: How much of a difference does it make having a couple of names in your film versus having nobody at all?
Johnson: You mean in terms of getting into Sundance?
Q: Actually in and then getting noticed at the festival. Because it seems like every year there are more and more movies filled with names we recognize and with budgets over 10 million dollars that are not necessarily what we think of as Sundance films. You're on the lower end of the budget, but you still have names in your film.
Johnson: In terms of how Sundance works, I couldn't say. But I do have to hold on to the idealistic hope that if you do have somebody or nobody in it, if you make a good and interesting movie, people are dying for that. Especially up at Sundance – everybody's just incredibly thirsty for something interesting to see and get excited about. When it happens, again maybe it's naïve, but I like to believe it isn't about who's in the movie.
Q: It's about the film itself.
So what are you watching these days?
Johnson: I just discovered Bergman, which sounds really weird because I went to film school. In film school I watched The Seventh Seal and I kind of idiotically felt I had Bergman pegged but then I recently watched Fanny and Alexander for the first time and it blew my mind. So now I'm going through and rewatching Scenes from a Marriage – it's all a revelation to me.
Q: You mentioned you were watching Leone films and they affected how you approached Brick; does that often happen to you? Do you find that what you're watching works its way into your stuff?
Johnson: Absolutely. Not that it has necessarily had much to do with how the final product comes out. It's kind of like the music you're listening to when you write a script; it's important that you personally apply that directly to the script because it's what you're excited about and passionate about in the moment, and it's going to feed what you're working on at the moment. Then inevitably a year later when you're cutting the movie together you try putting that music in and it doesn't fit. But no, I think that's what feeds you, whatever you're excited about in the moment.
Q: Bergman's what made Woody Allen stop being funny, so we'll see what happens with you. Is the next film going to be really dour?
Johnson: I'm making Interiors 2, actually.
Q: How does that happen that you get back into Bergman? It doesn't seem like you would go to Blockbuster on the weekend and not find anything else to rent.
Johnson: Netflix. I hate to be an adman here, and I'm not getting a free subscription, but I am such a Netflix addict. I've got something that most people don't even have – I have the eight discs at once option.
Q: Holy shit.
Johnson: But I don't have cable, that's how I justify it! That's all I do. I'm hooked on it. I burn through them, I try to watch as movie as I can.
Q: My problem with Netflix is that I'll set up my queue months in advance and then whatever I felt like watching months ago, when it comes to my mailbox, I am just not in the mood to watch it anymore. But you're able to just power through?
Johnson: You know what the trick is to Netflix? And I tell this to all new Netflix people, the trick is that if it's sitting on your coffee table for a couple of days and it's a chore, send it back. Don't think twice, just send it back.
Q: You can always get it again.
Johnson: Exactly. It doesn't matter if it's something you think you should see, just ship it back.
Q: So what are the guilty pleasures on your queue right now?
Johnson: A friend of mine, Noah Segan who plays Dode in the movie, is a huge fan of 60s cinema, so I got that movie Candy, and I haven't watched it yet.
Q: That movie is a little bit awesome.
Johnson: Is it weird?
Q: It's really weird.
Johnson: And I watched that Peter O'Toole movie, The Ruling Class. Which I guess isn't a guilty pleasure, but it's out of nowhere. That whole freaked out 60s cinema.
They have a weird thing on Netflix – not to make the whole interview about Netflix – where you can have your friends see your list. I got excited about it, and then I signed my mom up for it. And now I realize –
Q: If you want to put something really creepy on the queue, your mom can see it.
Johnson: Yeah. So I'm censoring myself.
Q: Who are the current working directors that you consider the best? The ones you look up to.
Johnson: I'm a huge fan of a couple. Wes Anderson, I love him. Paul Thomas Anderson, I'm really excited about the new one that he's working on.
Q: There was just a script review for that.
Johnson: I read it. The guy was ecstatic but he didn't give much information.
Q: The guy was psyched, but he didn't know it was based on a book already.
Johnson: I know! He suggested they novelize it! [laughs] That's a little curious. Although that reminds me of one of the funniest things I've seen in a bookstore, which was the novelization of the Gwyneth version of Great Expectations. It was a novelization of that movie.
Q: What about a novelization of Brick?
Johnson: You know what's funky is that during the writing process my first step was that I wrote it as a novella. I imitated Hammett's writing style, which is very distinct. When people think of detective fiction they think of Chandler, with those long flowing metaphors about the city at night. But Hammett is much more like Hemingway.
Q: It's punchy and snappy.
Johnson: So I wrote it in prose and imitated his style and that helped shape the story and the dialogue. I took those hundred pages and transcribed them into screenplay form. So I've got a novel version. We might publish it.
Q: That's cool. But why screenwriting and filmmaking? Why not novels?
Johnson: The most exciting stuff about it for me is the stuff that doesn't come from me. It's the stuff that's accidental, or that the actors bring. As meticulously planned out as Brick was, and I planned every single shot in the movie and knew how it was going to cut, but at the same time the reason I can still sit down and watch it after having seen it 500 times, is the stuff the actors bring, that I had nothing to do with.
Q: The common perception of directors is that they have these big egos, but a part of being a good director is letting go of that ego and letting people add to your vision.
Johnson: Absolutely, and taking it as a collaboration. But at the same time on the side I write stuff just for myself, I goof around with recording musical things I never play for anyone. It's important to have both things, but those specific things about filmmaking are what excite me.
Q: Also I imagine hotter girls in filmmaking than in literature.
Johnson: This is what I read.
Q: Literary groupies are not as hot.
Johnson: I have yet to...
Q: But you got a prize at Sundance!
Johnson: You know something, man, I don't know where this myth about getting all these hot chicks comes from. Maybe it's just me, maybe not a "playa." I'm not dating Rachel Weisz yet.
Q: When they write the sequel to Raging Bulls, Easy Riders for this generation, you have to have something good in there.
Johnson: I have to work on it. Either that or make a lot of shit up and have pay people to agree with it.
Q: When you're working on this film for years and years, going out and taking location photos long before you get the funding, what is it that convinces you that all this work will one day culminate in a movie?
Johnson: You just have to go on blind faith. You have to set it in your head like a rock that you're not going to go away until you've made this movie. I used to get very frustrated during that time hearing from filmmakers who had made films and wanting to hear details about how did you do this – how did you go from a script to the movie, how do you get movies made. They would always be infuriatingly vague, they would be like, "I met this person and it came together." But now I realize that the answer is really you have to be vague. The details are different for every single film. The common thread is that somebody stuck to their guns and didn't go away until they made their movie. That sounds very general and vague, but it's true. If you write something you care about and want to make and you don't go away until it's made... it'll get made.
Quote from: modage on April 01, 2006, 10:20:59 AM
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RIAN JOHNSON (BRICK)
Q: Who are the current working directors that you consider the best? The ones you look up to.
Johnson: I'm a huge fan of a couple. Wes Anderson, I love him. Paul Thomas Anderson, I'm really excited about the new one that he's working on.
yeah but the best part comes after:
Quote from: modage on April 01, 2006, 10:20:59 AM
Q: There was just a script review for that.
Johnson: I read it. The guy was ecstatic but he didn't give much information.
Q: The guy was psyched, but he didn't know it was based on a book already.
Johnson: I know! He suggested they novelize it! [laughs] That's a little curious. Although that reminds me of one of the funniest things I've seen in a bookstore, which was the novelization of the Gwyneth version of Great Expectations. It was a novelization of that movie.
he's never played Street Fighter: the Movie: The Game.
Saw it again today at the arclight. Yippeee! It was so awesome.
yeah so if you couldn't tell, i saw this on Friday and...
Quote from: SiliasRuby on March 18, 2006, 04:03:57 PM
I've got to say, it's my favorite film of 2006 so far. If you love Film Noir you'll really embrace this.
Quote from: Sal on March 20, 2006, 05:50:59 PM
Great film. I think it's the most original Ive seen in some time.
Quote from: meatwad on March 20, 2006, 09:00:41 PM
the music, which i thought was quite good, reminded me of the soundtrack to punch drunk love at times. in the end, i'm left with the thought of twin peaks, without the lynch weirdness.
Quote from: Xidentity Crixax on March 22, 2006, 12:38:54 AM
give it 45 minutes to figure out its own identity, and then it's a great neo-noir that'll have you by your balls. i fucking loved it.
it's great, except for some forced-sounding music in the beginning, and the plot wabbling its way down the line between camp and intense drama. heads up, if you aren't sucked into the genre enough to expect it, there are times when the characters are almost sound like they're speaking in pikey.
definitely recommended-- partially because it's a decent film, and mostly because it's a really intriguing first feature for the writer/director. but see it. ... especially the lynchheads.
and i thought lucas haas was AWESOME in this. even moreso than JGL, i was like 'where has he been?' :yabbse-thumbup: :yabbse-thumbup: :yabbse-thumbup: and the Laura character was a dead ringer for the chick on the OC. probably more later...
Quote from: Aint It Cool News interview with writer/director Rian Johnson
Capone: So, you talked about musical reference points and plot reference points. Any directors that you look to for visuals?
RJ: For this movie, most of the visual style, I think, is taken from Sergio Leone actually. Probably more just because I was going through a phase where I was really into him and...
Capone: We all do. We all go through that phase. For some of it, it lasts decades.
RJ: Exactly, yeah, yeah. That's a phase you should never leave. Also, it worked because the town of San Clemente where we shot is very wide open, and that school is very horizontal. It almost feels like an institution the way that high school is set up--in the way that a lot of Southern California high schools are set up. It's outdoors, and it's all very flat. Having those kind of wide-open compositions really lends itself to the location. Again, talk about good people to steal from, you can't go wrong.
Capone: Anyone else, or is that the main influence?
RJ: I'd say him and the other huge reference for the film for me was Kubrick. To a large degree because we kind of wanted it to--in planning out the way the camera would move--we wanted it to be shot the way the main character thinks, which is very clear, very clean cut. I don't think there's a single hand-held shot in the movie. And, we want it to be that kind of almost sterile, clean feel that would be the way Brendan would kind of think of everything. There's very little shades of gray. He thinks in black and white the whole time.
Capone: It's interesting you mention Kubrick, because in the notes I took while watching the film, I scribbled down a reference to the way you use and invent language. The kids have almost got their own dialect in a lot of ways. It reminded me of CLOCKWORK ORANGE. You'd almost need a glossary or multiple viewings just to get through the language and pick up on some of what they're talking about. I'll confess, I caught myself wondering "What are they saying? What is this?"
RJ: [Laughs] You run the risk of people disconnecting from it because of that, but at the same time, I know that that's the type of movie I'm attracted to, something that you can really sink your hands into, and if you want to kind of do a little bit of work and figure it out, it will pay off.
Capone: It pays you to listen, too. You're forced to listen so that you can at least pick up on some of the things that are understandable.
RJ: Exactly.
http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/display.cgi?id=22941
Quote from: modage on March 22, 2006, 07:39:06 AM
it will get wider distribution starting in a week...
Just got a tentative schedule of the roll-out for Brick. This could still change, but right now this is the plan, with specific theaters:
this is the only movie out right now that i want to see but Brick showed Miami the back of its hand. :elitist:
at least i still have Phat Girlz, She's the Man, and The Shaggy Dog to choose from! :yabbse-cheesy:
Yeah, this was really damn good. At first I was worried that it might be a little on the cute side, but it really packed all the right punches in all the right places.
Quote from: Ghostboy on April 08, 2006, 05:24:42 PM
Yeah, this was really damn good. At first I was worried that it might be a little on the cute side, but it really packed all the right punches in all the right places.
Exactly. I wrestled with whether I would like it or not for the first twenty minutes or so, but once I got used to the whole highschool noir thing, I was with it 100%.
I think it's safe for me to say this is the first great movie of the year. Can't stop thinking about it.
yeah, its great and i think i might see it again if i can find some more people to drag with me. it will probably hold #1 for me for a while, which means by this time next year it will be completely overlooked at the Xixax Awards!
fine i'll just go to New York to see it.
I'm seeing it this week.
There were some parts that made me giddy.
Spoilers
The first time he goes to see the Pin. I don't have the whole scene in my head, I need to see it again. How often do you get to say that in modern cinema. The flashes of whatever bleak images while he's on the ground. I was practically gushing.
The little shots here and there. The high-five worthy shots. Tug standing in front of the train speeding past just behind him. Tug walking toward Brendan while Brendan is holding up the cement block. The ceiling fan moving. My friend Gallagher wearing his Bane sweatshirt in the movie. The magic hour talk with the Pin. The lens flare in the phone booth. The chase with the knife guy. Laura and Brendan's faces on the field at the end. A passionate flash back to a hostile moment between Brendan and Em. Every time he visited his actor lady friend. The freshmen joke was somehow great. The principal talk, 'See you at the parent teacher meeting.' The angle on the principal.
So many. The movie was a lot of fun. A lot. It wasn't out of the ball park my favorite of the year this year, I really liked L'Enfant and Lonesome Jim, but it, look, this year is going to be great near as I can tell.
I really liked the way the story was told. It seemed very straight forward, no fucking around, like its lead character. It began with the plot, ended on the plot, and held these fabulous characters in its hand the whole way through. A well written go-getter of a lead too. As far as high school characters go, the most bad ass I can think of.
i'm so addicted to this trailer. i missed it in january. it's almost as addicting/exciting/thought about all the time as the donnie darko trailer was.. i'm slightly sad it makes Jo obsolete, though.
What a bizarre movie. The film really had the burden of proof that it was not bullshitting the audience. For about 45 minutes, I wasn't sold. It was a film noir...in a high school. But so what? There was no benefit. Then, the scene with Tug comes around and the movie finally has a reason to exist.
MINOR SPOILERS
The fight scene with Tug, then the meeting with the Pin comes up. The Pin is the reason why this movie is great, just the constant presence he creates, his mother coming around, the lamp in the car, it's just so fucking smart. The dialogue, I'm still not a big fan of it. It's clever, but for no reason. It presents a barrier between the audience and the film. Talking fast and using a slick lexicon are great, but there's no pleasure in watching it on its own. In, say, A Clockwork Orange, we know what it means and the meaning is dark, covered up with a facade of playful language. It's mostly a mood thing here, and it starts to work when scenes aren't solely comprised of it.
The fact that it was shot almost entirely in daylight is really ambitious, but if they had one more goddamn shot of a character in front of the sun, I would've shot someone. Anyway, the fact that they are kids was played with just right. I wish there was some more stuff with parents, but I'm going to contradict myself and say that I'm glad there wasn't, because they did leave me wanting more scenes with grown-ups. Like RK said, once I was on board with the idea, it got really good.
It's growing on me by the minute.
Quote from: Gamblour le flambeur on April 10, 2006, 11:44:41 PM
The fact that it was shot almost entirely in daylight is really ambitious, but if they had one more goddamn shot of a character in front of the sun, I would've shot someone.
I counted three. Once with Em on the field, once with Brendan in the phone booth, and the prolonged one on the beach with the Pin.
I saw this again today. Seeing it a second time, not having to wait to get sucked in, you realize the film is running from the word go. No time wasted. No line of dialogue wasted. No shot wasted. I appreciated the Halloween in January party more this time around, really classy shots.
The first scene with the Pin is still my favorite. The revelation of Pin is fantastic. Then, Brendan lists off the details he knows, the camera cuts with each one listed, Tug comes and hits him, the camera falls down. Brendan's face cut between some dark, abstract shots. The camera goes sideways, Tug over Brendan, the Pin in the background. Laura comes into the room, tells them to stop, a flash of light. End.
And there were about five or six lines which are worthy of being quoted over and over again.
I'll list them, but I'm not good at remembering exactly how lines go so fix them if you can:
Em:
'You don't love me, you just want to keep me.'
'I don't want to be saved and hidden.'
Brendan:
'When she saw you she got scared like' Fuck what's he say 'she'd seen some kind of devil.'
'I was done here three months ago. [About not wanting to be his boy]. You got a problem with me, write me up. I'll see you at the parent conference.'
Laura:
At the school, her short monologue. It was great.
The dialogue is great. I wish I could remember it all exactly. Is the script online?
The movie is a lot of fun.
I missed a few minutes in the beginning and I wasn't so good at following these plots anyways, if someone has the time and inclination and feels like being my friend, please PM me your interpretation of the plot. please.
that being said, it was real good and confident. it was always directed with the audience and its familiarity with the genre in mind--started out cute, funny, then gradually sucked you in and got darker and darker. everything was well-shot without being too first-time flashy (ahem Justin Lin) and the sound design was real fun. I "got it" but didn't really understand how exactly all the pieces fit and the relationships between the characters. if you could help that'd be great.
Quote from: pete on April 14, 2006, 12:11:18 AM
(ahem Justin Lin)
I kept thinking about him, too, and how his film, even though it was playing it 'straight,' so to speak, didn't pack nearly as much weight as this one. And of course, any good will he might have had has since been squandered with his followup work. Although I shouldn't speak too soon - Rian Johnson could change his mind about studio films and sign on to direct 'Stealth II.'
:bravo:
I don't think I have any praise to add that hasn't already been said. I don't consider myself a huge Noir fan, yet this had my balls from the get go. The Pin is awesome, who would have thunk it? The language didn't seem that big of barrier either. Maybe I just talk retarded, but the theater had these little promo books with Brick Talk, stuff like "copped" "dose" "hop/junk" "scraped" are all words i've heard in the real world with the same meaning as the movie. It's def. my favorite of the year thus far and the first movie that i'll try to drag friends to go and see.
word on the justin lin thing. and i wonder if rian johnson likes park chan wook (the answer being a resounding yes). the first half's an absolute mess, there are some fantastic moments (most notably the fight that ensues as heard from the cellar... fucking sweet), joseph gordon-levitt's proving to be a great actor. thought the ending as bullshit and the femme fatale element (both the character and the actress) was really weak. throughout the film, i had the sense of watching kids play make-believe where they role play and make up crazy narratives as they go along. overall a pretty banal, slightly entertaining exercise in genre (hooray film school!).
let me just grab a quote from that...
Quote from: Samsong, xixax.com
"a...fantastic...entertaining...great...film."
cool. :yabbse-grin:
you're a douche bag.
:|
kidding. sort of.
the last time you get called for free concert tix. :elitist:
:shock:
Just came back from this and thank Christ I was able to wash the taste of Scary Movie 4 out of my mouth. This was great!
And fucking Joseph Gordon Levitt... holy shit!
I think it's interesting that Rian Johnson says in that one interview that he's shooting for a career like the Coens because the balance of humor and drama in Brick reminded me a lot of Miller's Crossing. In particular in Brendan's fight with Tug in the parking lot, and then again when Brendan is running from the guy with the knife. For some reason, that second scene reminded me of when Albert Finney takes out the guys in his house that break into his house.
I need to see this again very soon. I only pray it holds up to repeat viewings.
Brick US - DVD R1
Universal Home Video has sent over some early artwork for the critically acclaimed Brick which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas and Emilie de Ravin. I'm afraid Universal has yet to officially announce this one, so details are still pretty sketchy. However, we're expecting it to arrive some time in July, with over twenty minutes of deleted and extended scenes.
Can anyone post the DVD picture? I can't seem to put it on here.
thats really fast to announce this. i mean, it hasn't even expanded wide yet? so i guess xixax will have an opportunity to see Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Brick all inside of a few weeks and realize they missed the best movies of the past year or two.
(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xixax.com%2Fimages%2Fdvd%2Fbrick.jpg&hash=c2f5ef8b0427c1bbbc4750c0c88f2cb6009228ad)
focus usually does a pretty good job with the dvd art even when they ditch the theatrical, they still manage to come up with something thats not offensive. i respect that.
I don't get the quick to DVD release, though. This movie has enough appeal to do really well at the box office through word of mouth and the good reviews. Nonetheless, this has cult status written all over it.
Quote from: JG on April 25, 2006, 07:26:26 PM
I don't get the quick to DVD release, though. This movie has enough appeal to do really well at the box office through word of mouth and the good reviews. Nonetheless, this has cult status written all over it.
Focus/Universal do that sometimes. Shaun of the Dead came out in the US in September 2004 and was on DVD the week after Christmas. I think the same can be said of Serenity last year. They were expecting Brick to do Blair Witch numbers in its limited release, which it hasn't. They know this will make SO MUCH more money on DVD than theatrically so it's a pretty smart move.
Looks like they pushed the DVD date release after all.
Title: Brick
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Released: 8th August 2006
SRP: $29.98
Further Details:
Universal Home Video has sent over some early artwork for the critically acclaimed Brick which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas and Emilie de Ravin. The disc will be available to own from the 8th August, and should retail at around $29.98. As well as a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, and English Dolby Digital 5.1 track - the disc will include a director commentary, around twenty minutes of deleted and extended scenes, and a hidden easteregg.
i would buy it for sure if it had the trailer.
behind the scene photos
http://www.rcjohnso.com/Phone/Brick/Brick.html
Going to see it tonight. Looks pretty good
edit
Just came back, overall movie was very entertaining. Certainly felt like a directorial debut/student film at some moments, but with that said the movie was very well done, both storywise/stylistically. Some harsh pushins and sound at times but Joseph Levitt was very very good - he is one tough dude.
Go see Rian Johnson's student film on his website, its the evil golfball or something along those lines.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: RIAN JOHNSON (BRICK DVD)
Source: CHUD
Rian Johnson is a name you need to know. His debut film, Brick, is impossibly assured and great filmmaking, especially when you consider how easy it would have been to fuck up – the movie is essentially a hard boiled noir set in a Southern California high school, where the teens talk like they've got Mickey Spillane in their DNA. It sounds like a gimmick but writer/director Johnson is way too talented to let it be one; instead it becomes a sort of revelation, a new way of looking at both noirs and high school movies.
Brick is going to finally hit the kind of audience it deserves this week when it's released on DVD. No matter how you buy it, buy it you must. The disc doesn't just have the great film, it also has plenty of cool extra features (which Rian talks about in the interview below).
If you've already seen Brick, here's something that's cool beyond words - earlier this year when I interviewed Rian for the film's initial release, he mentioned that he had written the story as a novella and turned it into a screenplay. He was considering packaging that up in a book (a book I surely would have bought). Instead, he's done something very great: he's made it available for free on his website (click here (http://www.rcjohnso.com/BrickScript.html)). And he's added in the script, complete with annotations. Oh, and there are very cool illustrations in the novella as well. Did I mention this is all for free?
And while you're at Rian's site, be sure to check out his message board, which we talk about at the end of the interview. You're not going to find many directors who are as involved with their fans as Rian is.
Rian gave me a call this weekend, and after some chat about which coast is the best (it looks like we might be swapping sides of the continent), we started talking about his next movie, The Brothers Bloom...
Q: You're recently back from the UK, right? And you were doing Brick stuff over there?
Johnson: It was half vacation, but I was also out there meeting people for the next movie, which is called The Brothers Bloom. We're kind of in the middle of casting and money gathering and the process before the process.
Q: There is a website that popped up for The Brothers Bloom in the last few days.
Johnson: You saw that! It's just a little teaser site that I put up because I'm a web junkie and a tinkerer. It doesn't have much on it right now, and I don't know if anyone has found it – other than you, I guess.
Q: You have some sketches up there.
Johnson: Yeah, some storyboards. It's the first time I've ever gotten to work with a professional storyboard artists and I'm so buzzing about. I can't draw worth shit – actually on the UK version of the Brick DVD I did a little storyboard to scene comparison. It's pure comedy – you have these little stick figures lines up against an actual image. So for me to work with an actual artist and see the stuff come together, I got pretty excited about it – probably prematurely so – and I tossed a couple of things up on the internet.
Q: It looks like you're working on a period piece.
Johnson: It's not, actually. It looks that way because of the way the kids are dressed. I think the image on the site are of these two brothers – and the movie is called The Brothers Bloom – and it's about these two guys who grow up in and out of foster homes as kids and they learn to survive by becoming con men. It starts out with this ten minute sequence of them pulling their first con as kids. It has a kind of Paper Moon type feel to it, that opening sequence. But in the rest of the movie it's them as adults. It's not period but it's very much its own world, if that makes any sense. I think the style of it will owe more to the earlier part of the [20th] century than the later.
Q: That makes sense to anyone who has seen Brick, where you create your own world where they're driving modern cars and yet talking in this 1940s patter. I'm assuming that Brothers Bloom won't be that exact same thing, but that same concept.
Johnson: Sort of. I think it's probably less extreme than Brick in that sense. It doesn't have the extremely dense patter that Brick had. Brick was extreme in how much it was its own world, but Brothers Bloom is a little more open than that and a little more accessible. But yeah, the same general thing.
It's weird – in my mind they're such different movies, but I talk to people who have read the script for Brothers Bloom and then saw Brick and said it made a lot more sense to them after they saw Brick.
Q: You mention Paper Moon. What are some of the other influences on you for this film?
Johnson: The con man genre is one of my favorites, and it's a weird genre because it's one that looms large in the minds of cinephiles like ourselves, but when you think about it there are surprisingly few examples of it.
Q: A real handful.
Johnson: Yeah, it's weird. You've got The Sting, obviously, you've got House of Games, you've got Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, which is one that I don't think usually leaps to people's minds, but it's one of the great con man movies out there.
It's a genre where the big pitfall is the mechanics of the plot overtaking the movie and turning it into a big 'fooled you' machine. I think the best examples of the genre and the ones that really endure are the ones that are about the characters. Newman and Redford in The Sting – that's the reason the movie stuck around as long as it did. And what Mamet did with House of Games in terms of exploring the theme and turning the whole thing into a mind game and making it an intellectual exploration of deception and the con game. That's what I want to do with this one, to make it a big, fun, elaborate, globe trotting con piece; to not make it a little character piece but at the same time make it about these two guys and make it about the relationship between them. Hopefully at the end of the day what's going to make it special is the characters.
Q: Have you done a lot of research into cons and grifts in general?
Johnson: It's been a subject that always fascinated me. There's a book that The Sting is drawn from, called The Big Con by David W. Maurer. It's incredible. The guy's a journalist, and it started out as a linguistic study of the patter of criminals and it turned into this big expose of cons around the beginning of the century. It's fascinating. It's amazing. It's also incredible if you love slang and you love words – it's like a banquet. The Sting was drawn from that.
But there's something so alluring about the gentleman thief and the combination of showman and criminal.
Q: And a con man has to be smart. While no one likes to be taken, you have to respect a guy who can pull one over on you like that.
Johnson: Oh, absolutely. You can get fancy and say that's what we go to the movies for, to have that done to us. That's one of the fascinating things about con men – there's a phenomenon that's well known in the world of cons where they would pull a con over on somebody and forget about the person being angry or coming after to them to kill them, more often than you would think the person would come back to them and want to do it again. There's this phenomenon of dipping back into the well and taking the same person with a big con multiple times. There's something that's built into our nature and it has to do with why we love hearing and telling stories so much. The idea that we should have the excitement that we only hear about in stories is a very seductive thing.
Q: You're talking about a big globetrotting con man movie. How big are you talking about?
Johnson: It's big, man. I reached for the ring. I wrote every location I ever wanted to visit into it. It's kind of ridiculous and it becomes a joke [in the movie]. They're all over the place – I think there are 12 countries it ends up hopping around to. Which I love – I love movies with that kind of glamour. At the same time it is a bigger film, and it's probably bigger than I should have written as my second movie! It's going to be an interesting thing getting it together and getting it funded. It's not going to be a studio picture, it's not going to be a big budget thing, but it's probably a little bigger than would be comfortable for a little known second time director to get going.
Q: I'm curious about how you're approaching your second feature. The sophomore slump is a cliché, but it seems especially real in the film world, where so many indie directors break out with their first film and stumble with the second. Richard Kelly is dealing with that right now with Southland Tales. What are you doing to avoid that?
Johnson: I'm not sure how to answer that. To a certain extent I don't think you can look that problem in the eye and do something productive about it. I think you have to pick up the pen again and do something that genuinely interests you make it the best work that it can possibly be. I think if started thinking in those terms I would go a little crazy and probably make a piece of shit.
With Brick, as incredibly proud as I am of it and everyone's work on it and the finished product and to see it find its segment of the audience, but at the same time I wrote that script nine years ago. For me it wasn't like, 'Holy crap, what am I going to do next?' At this point I'm bursting with ideas, and it feels really good to be working on something I wrote just this year that's connected to where I am in my life right now and deals with stuff that I'm dealing with. I've never had a more invigorating experience than working on this next one.
Q: Why go indie again? I'm assuming you could be taking meetings at studios and taking offers, so why go independent?
Johnson: I just really don't have any interest right now in doing studio work or being a director for hire or doing other people's material or selling my material for other people to do. Right now I've got a couple of stories in my head and I want to be able to tell them in my own way. I want to be able to make my own movies. Maybe down the line that can happen with a studio, but right now it seems like it would be more difficult. Staying indie and staying indie for the time being makes sense.
I look at the filmmakers whose career trajectories I really admire – you look at the Coen Brothers or Paul Thomas Anderson or Aronofsky and you see these people who have made their own stuff and be able to stay true to that. They all stay relatively small; that seems to be part of the equation. I'm completely thrilled to do that.
Q: Has Brick opened a lot of doors? When you're trying to get financing for The Brothers Bloom does having the calling card of a successful film make a big difference?
Johnson: Oh my God, the difference between trying to get Brick together to trying to get this together is almost night and day. It's surprising to me how much easier [Brick] has made it. At the same time it's still a process, and Brick was still a small, weird little movie and you still have to fight the good fight to get the next one going. But yeah, it's been kind of a pinch myself experience, seeing the people who are interested in working on the next one, and seeing that there are people coming to us who are interested in it. It's utterly bizarre.
Q: Is there a time frame for Brothers Bloom yet? Do you know when you want to start shooting?
Johnson: We're going to shoot at the beginning of next year, which makes it'll probably be coming out in [2008].
Q: Brick is hitting DVD this week. What's it like putting together your first DVD?
Johnson: I had a lot of fun with it. The process was more rushed than I thought it would be – I didn't realize that basically we had to get all the stuff for the DVD done by the time the movie opened. It's such a quick turnaround from theatrical to DVD, which is great, I think.
I had a blast, though. The fun thing is that the extras that are on the disc I put together the same way I put together Brick – I cut them at home on my Mac, using the hard drive that still had all the footage on it. It was fun; it felt like a continuation of the homespun process that Brick was born out of.
Q: What are some of the features on the DVD?
Johnson: The US disc has a commentary track that I did with our production designer, our costume designer, our producer and a couple of the actors – Nora Zehetner and Noah Segan. That was totally terrifying for me, mostly just because I'm not a big fact of commentary tracks.
Q: Really?
Johnson: Yeah, I know. It seems like the kind of thing I would be into, but more often than not – and you occasionally hit a good one – but more often than not... my theory on it is that the process of it is one that is slightly flawed. If you ask a professional comedian how long it takes to put together enough material to be interesting to an audience for two hours, they'll say months and months. And yet you're taking a filmmaker like myself – who is not a performer at all – and plunking them down in front of a microphone and asking them to talk for two hours about this movie on the screen and be interesting. I think it's a lot harder than it looks, so I was really daunted coming into it. I hope it comes off just shy of embarrassing.
There are a couple of auditions. The centerpiece of the US disc is this segment that I cut together of deleted scenes, but it's a little bit more than that. Each scene is introduced with a mini-commentary as well as some still photos of the shoot. What I tried to do was, because Brick was worked on so much in the editing in terms of cutting it not just for length but for clarity, so I tried to put a series of deleted and extended scenes on there and use each one to make a point about the editing process. Hopefully it's a little segment that takes you through the cutting process on the movie, showing you how that affected the end product.
Q: Is the cut of Brick on the DVD the director's cut, or will we one day see these scenes put back in the movie?
Johnson: No, I don't like the whole notion of director's cuts. The version that went out there was the director's cut, and the scenes that were cut out were definitely cut out for a reason. That's always the fun thing of watching DVDs, is when you see those deleted scenes you can nod your head and say, 'I can see why those went.'
Q: Are you surprised by how deeply Brick hit? There's a real fanbase for this movie.
Johnson: Absolutely. I don't know how to articulate how deep the surprise went. You have to go back to my surprise that we even got into Sundance and that we even got released and that people saw the movie at all. We were really taken by surprise because of the way we made the movie. It was made as a microbudget movie and made totally independently; we kind of went off into the corner and made this little thing without any grownups looking over our shoulder. When we finally brought it out to show it to everyone we had no idea what to expect – it was like emerging out into the sunlight, and it was totally terrifying.
The fact that people who have been into it have been into it so much and have really connecting with it is so satisfying. I started up this message board, this forum, on my own personal site, for the movie, for people to come and talk about the movie whether they liked it or not and to ask questions. I'm on there all the time – I answer questions, I talk to the people, I've gotten to know a lot of the people who are really into it. For me that's been the most incredible part of this process, getting to connect with filmmakers and film watchers out there and hear their perspective on the movie, hear why they connected with it or didn't. Another cool thing is the opposite end of the spectrum – while there are people who passionately love the movie, if it's not their cup of tea there are people who can really passionately hate it. It's even more fun sometimes.
Q: One of the most important things about modern filmmaking to me isn't stuff like digital films but the ability for filmmakers to get in touch with their audience, like what you're talking about with the forum. Just ten years ago this would have been pretty much unheard of – people would have to rely on a jerk like me talking to you on the phone and writing everything down to get to know how you feel about stuff. Now they can go right to you. How does that affect you as a filmmaker, being so in touch with the audience?
Johnson: I don't know. Ask me in a few years, I guess. [laughs] It's interesting, I was having a conversation with a musician who had a message board on his site. He had looked at the Brick message board and he was commenting on how amazed he was that I interacted so much. He said that he may have done that at first, but then he found it was healthier as an artist to not talk about the actual stuff with the fans. It tends to have unforeseen effects. But at the moment I don't see any unhealthy effects from it at all. It's something I just really enjoy.
Like you mentioned before it's possible for the filmmakers to connect with the audience. It's rare enough that people are surprised that I'm on there and actually answering stuff, which is weird to me, just considering the nature of the internet. I guess it's something that doesn't happen all that often. It's made for some interesting reactions. There have been moments on the forum where someone posts the type of rant you might see on the IMDB forums or on a TalkBack where people think it's totally anonymous and all of a sudden I reply back. They suddenly become twenty times more thoughtful and start engaging in a conversation – it's beautiful actually. It's kind of cool.
Q: And there's got to be a fiscal aspect – by communicating you're creating a fanbase who will feel very connected with your work. They're going to turn out to see your next movie because they feel personally connected to you.
Johnson: I hope so. Like I said, the exciting thing is creating that kind of community. Growing up as a film fan and directors specifically that was an important part of my youth – following the people you are fans of, people whose work you enjoy and admire. And on the other hand I'm becoming a fan of the people on the forum – people send me links to their shorts and stuff, so it's been fun for me as well.
God, I wish I had seen this movie in the theater when I had the chance. To see a movie by a director who actually demonstrates a point of view, and a style, and that manages to both pay respect to past films and feel like something entirely new and unique... I'm having a hard time remembering the last time I saw a movie that blew me away like "Brick" did. A year, at least. Maybe two. There wasn't a frame of this film that felt wrong.
I too really enjoyed this. It took a little bit of time to get into, with the way the dialogue is and all. Not that it is bad, but the words just flow from each character so quickly I almost wanted to put subtitles on, but I eventually got it. JGL is really on his way up, hope he continues his streak of amazing dramatic acting (See Mysterious Skin). Haas, holy crap, as previously mentioned where the heck has he been. Really good stuff from him. His basement was very Lynchian to me. Highly intentional I suppose. I'm kicking myself for failing to make time to see it in the theater.
SPOILER
I didn't see it mentioned by anyone else but did anyone get the impression that Brain was just Brendan's subconcious. He was never around with anyone else and at the end he just appeared out of nowhere (walked out of Brendan's head!) and then went back in. Totally made me do a complete rewind on then entire movie at that final scene, which was really great, loved that convo with the Rachel Bilson look-a-like.
This never came to my side of the world but I did see it and I thought it was quite an awesome experience. Sort of like watching The Dreamers for me. Although I generally don't like such obvious send-ups of past genres, this one was so cleverly made that you can't really help but be intrigued by it if not like it. I have Mysterious Skin just waiting to be seen simply because I liked Gordon-Levitt's Brendan so much; other performances I thought were great were Lucas Haas's surprisingly ominous kingpin and Nora Zehetner's surprisngly affecting femme fatale. As for the photography - amazing; and the fights (and, really, the editing as a whole) were a lot of fun for a home-edited movie. Rian Johnson could be a director to watch.
Quote from: edison on August 08, 2006, 09:39:04 PM
SPOILER
I didn't see it mentioned by anyone else but did anyone get the impression that Brain was just Brendan's subconcious. He was never around with anyone else and at the end he just appeared out of nowhere (walked out of Brendan's head!) and then went back in. Totally made me do a complete rewind on then entire movie at that final scene, which was really great, loved that convo with the Rachel Bilson look-a-like.
i didnt catch this, but i can't wait to watch it again and pay closer attention to that. a little more info to support that theory (as well as the writer/director's response) here: http://www.rcjohnso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=182
Mod-
Such a huge fan of this film, like I am, I thought you would have bought it already. I'm surpised you haven't.
Quote from: Chest Rockwell on August 08, 2006, 10:34:31 PM
and the fights (and, really, the editing as a whole) were a lot of fun for a home-edited movie. Rian Johnson could be a director to watch.
I felt like the fist fights were very much in the style of noir fights, most of the noir fist fights are a bit theatrical and silly, and sometimes, like the case of Chinatown, it was just completely slapstick.
i saw it in theatres and it was good but i didn't post a review for some reason. i half-saw it at work again today.
semi-spoils
- visually, musically, and almost always pacing-wise, it's perfection.
- this is truly a movie's movie. hundreds of other movies/movie parts were squeezed/pulped to make this one. i wonder what a movie's movie's movie will be like. maybe this is already a movie's movie's movie and i need to brush up.
- i loved the transformation back to his old wardrobe/self.
- this guy knows how to use the sun.
- unfortunately, some gaping things stop the movie from being amazing. like it's hard to understand what people are saying.
- i'm not a good story-follower. so i was lost for the last quarter or so. and i only half-understood the ending. but i was still enjoying it for its pacing/ideas.
- sometimes i didn't like the dialogue. i can't remember an example though.
- i think Levitt was better in the trailer but he was still good here. i didn't like most of the performances, now that i think of it, but they weren't annoying. except for sometimes Stoner, Brain, Dode. i guess Haas was the best overall.
fun fact: i sent Rian Johnson the trailer for Jo (which uses the EWS theme) through his forum and he said he used the theme extensively in the rough cut.
are you drunk again?
Quote from: flagpolespecial on August 10, 2006, 07:28:37 AM
are you all on crack? this movie was not good at all. it's this years 'crash'.
are you on crack? how is this anything like 'crash'?
It'd say Brick is this year's 'Miller's Crossing'. This year's 'Memento'.
Quote from: flagpolespecial on August 10, 2006, 07:28:37 AM
all of you, go reconsider.
done... I've reconsidered and I'm still sure you can't explain why you didn't like it and therefore have no valid argument as to why it's not a really good film.
Quote from: flagpolespecial on August 10, 2006, 07:28:37 AM
it's this years 'crash'. this years 'donnie darko'. this years 'napolean dynamite'.
most people i know have never even heard of it.
i hate you flagpolespecial.
What an elitist thing to say, especially for a movie no one's fucking heard of.
What an elitist thing to say... :love:
*with a werner herzog impersonation:
i , too, would like to step on this film's defence. why can't all teen movies be this smart and cool? i'm sure everyone i'll recommend it to will like it.
On Main Menu, click on Bonus Features. With Deleted Scenes highlighted, press arrow left twice. The A Midnight should turn blue. Click on it to watch the easter egg.
EDIT:
Quote from: MacGuffin on August 10, 2006, 04:11:26 PM
It'd say Brick is this year's 'Miller's Crossing'.
MC is mentioned within the first minute of the commentary.
Quote from: cronopio on August 11, 2006, 08:09:20 AM
*with a werner herzog impersonation:
i , too, would like to step on this film's defence. why can't all teen movies be this smart and cool? i'm sure everyone i'll recommend it to will like it.
oh shut up. you liked Miami Vice.
I now hate you too. you fucking douche.
you're a sweetheart.
I'm slow.
I love that this wasn't just noir for the sake of being noir, but used the heightened drama and near impossible to follow connections to parallel the drama and gossip of high school. As far removed as the story and dialogue are from high school, the characters still feel like they belong right where they are.
Yeah, I wished I'd seen this on the big screen too but still really enjoyed it nonetheless.
Quality debut.
I really liked the tone of it... very little hints of humour and it didn't disappear up its arse into a self-conscious noirish parody.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt is pitch perfect as well.
Quote from: JG on November 20, 2006, 06:28:29 PM
Quote from: socketlevel on November 20, 2006, 11:55:57 AM
i say, stop being smart with cinema, just be smart with subtext.
i say, elaborate (feel free to answer in the brick thread)
well the thing is with this movie, it always feels like it's too aware of itself. not that this is a bad thing always in cinema, but with this kinda story you can't help rolling your eyes every now and then. this type of teenage acting, and more important the directing/writing of teens, started in the 90s. it hasn't let up yet. characters almost seem smarter then the situation their in, overly witty, and the audience never gets to be one step a head of them. it all started with "scream", characters were talking about the plot rather than reacting to the actions around them. it's just annoying in my opinion. it's harder to write a script and keep the audience ahead of the characters, yet still have it interesting and throw twists throughout. when characters comment on the plot with sly remarks or overtly "cool" dialog, it's only done in an attempt to make them desirable. now if maybe they only did this with one character, the femme fetal character, it would have been a more interesting piece. making her allure have more body to it. when every character is cool, it shows the writers need to be cool and accepted. it's not three dimensional enough for me.
i see the noir examples and references/devices in the piece (femme fetal, detective like protagonist etc...) however the film never treats the characters as people actually going though these experiences. almost like you get the impression it's happened before in their lives, nothing is shocking to them. i understand this is the creative decision on the director, and it was deliberate, however i think the story was strong enough that this style wasn't needed. when you look back to noir of the 40s-50s this was the melo drama that existed in all films of that time. when you infuse that in a contemporary film, where acting has taken on a whole new form and school of thought, it only appears like a noir nerds dream. it's not organic enough in my opinion, and bottom line it's a disingenuous piece of work, it doesn't treat the material with enough respect to let the story play out. so that explains my bit on not being smart with cinema. with subtext i meant that it should have taken the time to give insight on something cultural, show (even if layered) some type of problem. film noir did that, it came from German expressionism, and was doing that as a reaction to society through entertaining means. beyond the neat plot twists, this film offers nothing other than how to be cool as the filmmaker sees it.
-sl-
i don't think this film is anything like Scream or any of the post-Scream era of films. none of the characters in this film are aware that they're in a film noir. they aren't talking about Bogie or mentioning other noir films or simply going through the motions. if they only had 1 character speaking this way it wouldnt make any sense. it would break the reality of the piece and you'd need to have other characters remarking on "what the hell is her problem?". by dropping you into this world where all the characters simply are this way, you're forced to accept it, or reject it as the case seems to be with you and the other people who don't enjoy the film. i think the film is completely genuine. it's as genuine as any modern film that has noir roots. the only difference between a film like Millers Crossing and a film like Brick, is Brick has taken the familiar period setting away and replaced it with modern day high school. some people have a hard time getting over that juxtaposition but i think its a really interesting one, and one that really works. i think there is an awful version of this film that COULD'VE been made, with noir narration and characters spouting film referencing dialogue, but instead i think a really nice balance was struck here.
First off, and possibly most importantly, it's Femme FATALE, not a baby girl.
Secondly, I don't think this movie is "aware of itself." It is stylized, and this may lead you to beileve that it is pretentious from the beginning. It's a fair assumption most high school students don't talk this way and it's also fair to assume they're definitely not as articulate. Really what's going on here is a classic genre like noir mixed with modern settings, so it almost feels out of place. If it did have voice over thoughts, then I'd agree it would be campy. But the pacing of the dialogue is what made the movie stand out so much. It wasn't to make the teens look smarter, but to apply an old technique to a new context.
SPOILER AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST
the teens in this film act like their 40, too much wisdom behind what they say, that's what i meant by the dialog. scream was the same way in tone, having too much wisdom. they are totally different films because of this mannor of speech, yet same sense of false depth. characters say things, and low and behold, their wisdom precedes them. if you go talk to a teenager, they don't know the same kind of life experiences as depicted through conversations of the characters in brick. regardless of the origins of the dialog, it's the mannor it is delivered in, not the words themselves. it could be in old English and i still wouldn't buy it (or modern vernacular or any other form for that matter). too much confidence in their actions/words. i can't help but laugh when i see films like this, like the baz remake of romeo and Juliet, or cruel intensions (dangerous liaisons) it's the same deal. they don't need to talk about bogie, they talk about sex and violence instead. or sip martinis cuz that's the cool thing to do. or the parties are lounges like they're bohemians living the dream. the movie doesn't try and show this juxtaposition, it just throws the characters in an unrealistic depiction, and doesn't do anything to make it real or feel like it has it's own environment. max fisher was a character that was like this, and Wes Anderson understood how stupid it is. we all love him, but laughing at him at the same time. the characters in brick are the ones that Wes Anderson is making fun of. i'm not saying brick should have done what rushmore did, it should have however avoided the natural target it made itself for this level of hilarity
i do agree with you the setting is a big factor as well. along with everything i just said, being a period melo drama with the decor of MTV doesn't fit. yes i understand this is what they set out to accomplish, it's just a neat idea that can't be applied correctly.
I'm not saying the femme fetale should talk in a different vernacular then the rest of the characters, but if she has the confidence that goes beyond the rest of the characters, then she is unique. I'm not attaching the style of conversation (being unrealistic compared to contemporary speech) to the maturity or confidence all the characters inhibit, which unless I'm wrong, you assume i am mixing those two things up. all the characters could have talked in this manor, yet had different characteristics (like confidence levels or "cool" levels) which they really don't. they're all one cool collective, too smart for their own good.
in miller's crossing, there were weasels, pathetic characters, and etc... all these characters are too cool for Christmas. even the nerdy adviser is good looking enough and cool enough to have a hot girlfriend. i knock the film for this, and the lack of subtext as i stated before, not the unique quirks.
it's just a movie for people who like movies, not that this is a bad thing, it's just not a great version of it. i suspect people like it cuz there is very little to compare it to. i appreciate the originality, but that need to be original is forced in this example.
-sl-
EDIT - and if you look at the classical Femme Fetale, this is that character. she starts out strong and seductive, then is depicted very weak and needs help, and in the end she is the mastermind. brick followed that structure, good or bad (i'm just responding to the post before this one, not making a comment on how good or bad brick's application was)
Quote from: Walrus on November 24, 2006, 12:02:05 PM
First off, and possibly most importantly, it's Femme FATALE, not a baby girl.
Secondly, I don't think this movie is "aware of itself." It is stylized, and this may lead you to beileve that it is pretentious from the beginning. It's a fair assumption most high school students don't talk this way and it's also fair to assume they're definitely not as articulate. Really what's going on here is a classic genre like noir mixed with modern settings, so it almost feels out of place. If it did have voice over thoughts, then I'd agree it would be campy. But the pacing of the dialogue is what made the movie stand out so much. It wasn't to make the teens look smarter, but to apply an old technique to a new context.
that's cool, i disagree but i can understand where you're coming from.
btw - i noticed your signature - you can download the missing tracks from "niadre lades - usually just a t-shirt" online (fruscente's site i think) you finally get to hear the beautiful ending to mascara (on the album you only get to hear a snipit of it)
Quote from: socketlevel on November 24, 2006, 01:08:18 PM
btw - i noticed your signature - you can download the missing tracks from "niadre lades - usually just a t-shirt" online (fruscente's site i think) you finally get to hear the beautiful ending to mascara (on the album you only get to hear a snipit of it)
don't encourage it! :doh:
Apparently, I should have watched ten more minutes of this movie to "get it". I stopped at the 35 min mark. Life's too short to give a 96 minutes movie half of it's lenght to become interesting. Yes, teenagers mixed with 40's noir films. Clever. What else is there? Not much that I saw.
This movie is completely self aware without earning one bit of it. We're supposed to be totally into it from the beggining, and actually believe these idiot kids talk that way or, even more annoying, don't seem a bit surprised about anything that happens around them and choose instead of making ironic comments filled with detective jive. If only the main character was like that it might be interesting, but these kind of mexing genres exercises are nothing new and they never work. New York New York didn't work either, to give an example. Movies that feed only on other movies end up feeling cartoonish and uninvolvent (i dont know if this word exists but im sure it explains itself). The music was horrible and kept taking me out of the film.
the mysterious skins comparisons, im sure, are only related to gordon levitt, but that was a far, far, faaaaaaar superior film that succesfully had thriller ingredients mixed in the bag.
Quote from: Alexandro on January 26, 2007, 04:02:01 PM
Apparently, I should have watched ten more minutes of this movie to "get it". I stopped at the 35 min mark. What else is there?
about an hour. i really don't understand why there is so much vitriol towards this movie. i could see some people being more into it than others or saying you really don't get where all the love is coming from. but jesus christ, you had to turn it off? were you aware of what the film was about when you rented it? why wouldn't you then be totally into it from the beginning? mixing genres is nothing new, there is nothing new, but they can and do work. you cant review a movie that you shut off, and you can't "get" a movie that you've decided to hate within the first 10 minutes.
look man. i didn't decide to hate this movie in the first ten minutes. i heard and read is great. i knew it was a thriller, and i knew it mixed film noir with high school settings. i didn't knew characters would talk like if they were in a film noir, but when i noticed it at the beginning, I thought it was a cool idea. this was the movie that i rented last week that i really wanted to see. is the one i chose first.
i dont think it works at all. I gave it 35 minutes to get interesting, and as i noted, it is almost half of it's lenght. i have almost no time in my life to squeeze 4 movies a week there but i try, and it really pisses me off when something by a filmmaker i dont even know, with a bunch of actors who havent really proven to be al pacino takes that long for a person to say:; "ohhhhh i see now". the problem with this movie is that it asks for you to be completely into it from the very first frame, as if putting 16 year old kids talking like humprey bogart and interrupted by stylish noir musical score is a common thing. as i said, if it had worked, i would have seen more, but by the 35 minute mark i was already expasperated at looking at gordon levitt and his non reactions to the sordidness onscreen. from the very first moment when the girl calls him in a state of hysteria and his answer is the coldest, worst performed "hold on" in recent years, i was hoping nothing was wrong and it was just me. liek i said, life's too short and there are tons and tons of good movies that i want to see, and i also want to sleep, eat, clean my cat's shit and make love to my girlfriend, so sorry.
Quote from: Alexandro on January 28, 2007, 08:41:34 PM
and i also want to sleep, eat, clean my cat's shit and make love to my girlfriend,.
in that order!
well she wouldn't fuck me unless i cleaned the cat shit...
I'm very late, but I guess had better things to do than watch this movie. I've only caught whiffs of the praise and bashing so I have no clue if I'm going to be repititive, but I'll try to keep it short:
The film is amateur hour. I'm sick of movies that try to carry on an art film shell without any clue how to execute it. From the get go this film overloads on vacant shots, narration overlaps, odd angles and bad editing. The last complaint comes in scenes that could be obvious in one shot, but are shown in shots that break down the scene so it plays out a story like there is something important to reveal. I'm sure I'm missing some filmmaking tricks that were used, but the complaint is that all of this was used at the very fucking beginning.
The criticism isn't that great films don't use these tricks. They do. The complaint is that better films tell an emotional story and allow scenes to build up to where utilization of these tricks become effective and thus mesh with the story. This isn't to say a film has to be bare of all style before the climax. They do not at all. They just have to know what tricks to use that are good at the beginning and don't call attention to the filmmaker's artistic hand because the viewer will be taken out of the story. Brick is a film that wavers between scenes that look like any high school movie (the fight scenes) and Antonioni-esque isolation shots (Hewitt walking alone) and it is all at the beginning!
The film has no tone because it is slammed with an over abudance of film geek tricks that anyone fresh out of film school could master in. Bringing all the elements together to make an organic, cohesive film is something harder to attain. Brick doesn't do it. For the time being, all hope Rian Johnson gravitates beyond this with his next film, but fuck Brick.