Review of Brick

Watched again after at least five years, mainly because we just watched 'Knives Out', also written and directed by Rian Johnson. At the first watching Brick made a really good impression - mashing up High School drama and Detective Noire seems like such a brilliant idea. On second watching it was still good, but not nearly as good as Knives Out. The dialogue was so quiet and mumbly it was hard to make sense of some of it, and I'm still not sure I got all of the plot. I had to read the Wikipedia article just to get some of the characters' names.

The behind the scenes loyalty of Brendan's friend 'Brain' is kind of implausible...they don't seem to have any other relationship at all. And I know we ought to suspend disbelief, but the fact that all these hard-nosed hard-bitten gangsters are still in school and living at home with their parents seemed hard to take - though of course lots of the gang members in the UK are doing exactly that.

Is this the last film in which young people seem to do all of their communications via payphones? It's 2005, didn't everyone have a mobile by then? Brain does, though it seems to be a dumb flip-phone, and everyone writes each other little paper notes rather than sends texts.

Liked the moody noire music, and the cinematography was still enjoyable.

Watched via laptop, VGA cable and informal distribution.