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List Price: $9.99 | | Label: Universal Studios
Salesrank: 1463
Released: August 8, 2006 |
| Our Price: $3.26 |
| Used Price: $2.25 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Brendan Frye is a loner, someone who knows all the angles but has chosen to stay on the outside. When the girl he loves turns up dead, he is determined to find the "who" and "why" and plunges into the dark and dangerous social strata of rich girl Laura, intimidating Tug, drug-addled Dode, seductive Kara, and the ominous Pin. But who can he really trust? These are the ingredients of Brick, a gritty and provocative thriller that critics describe as "a clever, twist-filled whodunit!" (Claudia Puig, USA Today)
Description of Brick:
High school collides with hard-boiled film noir in the twisty, cunning Brick. When he gets a mysterious message from his ex-girlfriend, a high school loner named Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mysterious Skin) starts to dig into a crisscrossed web of drugs and duplicity, eventually getting entwined in the criminal doings of a teenage crime lord known as the Pin (Lukas Haas), his thuggish henchman Tugger (Noah Fleiss, Joe the King), and a mysterious girl named Laura (Nora Zehetner, Fifty Pills). Brick has not only the seductive, labyrinthine plot of a crime thriller by Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) or Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely) but also a dense high-school version of hard-boiled lingo that's both comic and poetic. The movie unfolds with headlong momentum as Brendan manipulates, fights, and staggers his way through layers of high-school society. Gordon-Levitt is excellent; between this and the equally compelling Mysterious Skin, he's left his 3rd Rock from the Sun days behind. Also featuring Meagan Good (Waist Deep) and Richard Roundtree (Shaft). --Bret Fetzer
Brick Reviews:
I know what you did last summer 
2009-12-01 - I really haven't words for how awful, just really, really bad, the script of this movie is. And the acting isn't great, but it's hard to tell what the actors faults are over the stink of the script.
That being said, the camera work, cinematic style and production are absolutely velvety. I got the impression often that whoever was filming and producing was paying as little attention to the script as I found myself doing--the two were so asynchronous they were almost totally unrelated at times.
I don't know much about the whole film business, but I swear it's as if there was a contest held for middle school students to submit a script to, and whoever won got to have it acted by the local high school theater troupe and then shot and produced by some major talent. That may not be the case, but that's exactly what it looks like.
PURE GARBAGE 
2009-11-19 - This movie was a waste of money and time, bad actors and plot. What a waste of time, over rated on other reviews what were they thinking onless they were making a profit on this movie... I waste my money dont waste yours.
Hard-Boiled High School 
2009-11-15 - This film isn't for everyone, and those with no knowledge of (or taste for) film noir and especially the Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction sub-genre will likely be confused or even bored by it. If you like either, though, you're in for a real treat.
A high-school student gets a cryptic call from an ex, and when she turns up dead a few days later, he launches his own investigation into the matter. Matters spiral from there.
I call this "hard-boiled high school" because it ingeniously takes a standard pulp setting and updates it to a modern high school: instead of the D.A. breathing down the detective's neck, it's the vice-principal, etc. Clever stuff.
The plot's complexity is almost Chandleresque and requires paying attention to dialogue and background details. The dialogue is straight out of a '30s copy of that pulp classic, Black Mask magazine. Hammett would be proud, especially since some of the slang is encased in some truly witty dialogue.
You have to like this sort of thing, of course, but if you do, it's surprisingly well-done, especially given the limited budget and that this was the director's first effort.
Highly recommended for fans of this sort of thing.
only my fav movie
2009-09-04 - what can i say its my fav movie i can watch it 100 times. it has the feel of an inde film with the art style and more
moose
PRETENTIOUS GARBAGE
2009-08-06 - Watch the movie "Havoc" with Anne Hathaway to see how a teen drug/murder drama SHOULD be done. the teen actors in brick had little to work with...flimsy cluttered plot, mindless aimless violence, silly manipulation and macho posturing. the dialogue sounds like a 7th grade computer geek's impersonation of bogart or cagney. nobody of ANY generation speaks the way these kids do. half the time you are scratching your head at what these quasi-hipsters are even trying to say.
