Neo-Noir Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Our hero got a call from his ex-lover two days ago, after a furtive note telling him to be at a certain phone booth at a certain time. She sounded like she was in trouble, so he went looking for her; asked around; kept his eyes open. And now he's found her. Dead. Face-down in a reservoir, her blonde hair trailing in the rainwater runoff. He's shaken, but he knows what he has to do: He's going to find out who's responsible. He's going to find out why they killed her. He's going to see that justice – or something like it – is done. He walks away from the body, sad but ready. He's going to have to plumb the local underworld. He's going to have to ask ugly questions. He's also going to have to come up with an excuse for the Assistant Vice-Principal about why he won't be in class for the next few days. ...

Brick, written and directed by Rian Johnson, is already being called many things: Hammett goes to high school; a teen noir; a distorted trip through two different genres, as if John Hughes directed The Maltese Falcon. All those things are right (or glib enough to be quotable, which is almost as good), but let's also cut to the chase: The first thing you need to know about Brick is that it's hands down the first truly great film of 2006, one worth seeing and seeing again and actually thinking about, with sharp, snappy dialogue giving it a lustrous gloss, and carefully-drawn, achingly human characters putting real weight and power under the sheen. What Johnson's done with Brick is something akin to taking two old pieces of wood – caked with years of dust and shoddily-applied paint, layers of uneven age-dulled wax, cheap veneer and hastily-applied stain – and banging them against each other so hard and so precisely that all the cover-up and concealment fall away revealing the true beauty and grain of each piece so we can see them both as new.

There are many things you can get out of six years on a sitcom. Cash; a comfort-zone; a catchphrase. Having a career afterwards – especially at a young age – doesn't normally come in the same package. Joseph Gordon-Levitt went from Third Rock from the Sun and Treasure Planet voice-overs to sex and death in Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin and taking punches to avenge his dead girlfriend in Rian Johnson's Hammett-meets-high school film Brick. In San Francisco, Gordon-Levitt spoke about reading screenplays, small-scale moviemaking and the benefits of passion.

Cinematical: When you first read the script for Brick, did you have any – I almost want to say warning – about the nature and character of the material, or did you just dive into it?

I had no idea what the script was; I opened it like any other script, going 'I wonder what this is. …' and by the time I was through page three, I was flabbergasted. People don't write movies like this anymore. People try to create movies through digital effects and camera tricks – and not that there aren't really cool camera tricks in Brick, but none of them are digital. Rian Johnston, the writer-director, he created the world of Brick with his words … and no one tries to use words anymore; it's like a dying art, the wordsmith. And the language that he came up with for Brick is so fun to say that when I was done reading it, I turned over the last page and went to the front again and started reading it again, just because I liked saying it.