Brick

Being the nerd that I am, few things make me as happy as a genre movie mashed into another genre in an unusual place and time. Be it Event Horizon (horror in space) or Windstruck (bittersweet romance buddy cop movie) I much rather have a little bit of everything instead of a heaping serving of one thing. This brings me to Brick by Rian Johnson, the director of the much acclaimed horror misfit “May.” Brick tells the story of a student trying to solve a murder mystery at his high school and its Noir roots wouldn’t be any clearer if it was filmed in black and white.

Brendan’s (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) girlfriend is missing and apparently none of the cliques know where she is, not even fly on the wall wiz kid Brain (Matt O’Leary) has any info about the sudden disappearance. Like the detective archetype he represents, Brendan works his angles and calls in favors to piece together whatever information he can from the Jocks, the Stoners and the Drama club. After getting some reactions from seductive drama queen Kara (Meagan Good) and a tussle with the alpha male of the jocks he gets a glimpse of the frame of a bigger picture, involving heroin trade and murder. Enter Laura (Nora Zehetner), playing the part of the beautiful siren who seems all too kind for somebody involved with the worse elements at her school.

By the time the final act comes around Brendan is working for the main drug dealer known as The Pin (Lukas Haas) and his hired muscle Tugger (Noah Fleiss). They do a great job of playing sympathetic villains, a couple of suburb gangsters with big aspirations and plenty of quirks putting them on the level of your classic Maltese Falcon bad guy. The ending offers a couple of twists which may or may not seem predictable depending on the viewer but more interesting is the twist on the noir genre throughout the entire movie; working in hit men, cynical police detectives, and femme fatale show girls under the guise of gang members, principals, and drama club members. The mashup is seamless and coupled with the sometimes edgy and sometimes classic style of shooting and editing this film gets an A for effort despite its B-movie pedigree.