Brick (2005)

A teenage loner pushes his way into the underworld of a high school crime ring to investigate the disappearance of his ex-girlfriend.

Director:

Rian Johnson

Writer:

Rian Johnson

Stars:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Emilie de Ravin

11 wins & 23 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt	...	Brendan
Nora Zehetner	...	Laura
Lukas Haas	...	The Pin
Noah Fleiss	...	Tugger
Matt O'Leary	...	The Brain
Emilie de Ravin	...	Emily (as Emilie De Ravin)
Noah Segan	...	Dode
Richard Roundtree	...	Assistant V.P. Trueman
Meagan Good	...	Kara
Brian White	...	Brad Bramish
Jonathan Cauff	...	Biff
Reedy Gibbs	...	Pin's Mom
Lucas Babin	...	Big Stoner
Tracy Bitterolf	...	Straggler (as Tracy Wilcoxen)
Ari Welkom	...	Tangles (as Ari Velkom)

Storyline

The lonely teenager Brendan finds his former girlfriend Emily dead in the entrance of a tunnel of sewage and recalls her phone call two days ago, when she said to him that she was in trouble. Brendan, who still loved Emily, met bad elements of his high-school trying to contact her, and when he succeeded, she told him that she was OK. He hides her body in the tunnel and decides to investigate the meaning and connection of four words, including "brick" and "pin", that Emily told him to find who killed her. Using the support of his nerd friend Brain, he successively meets the small time drug dealers Kara, Dode, Brad Bramish, Laura and Tugger, to reach the teenager powerful drug dealer The Pin. Slowly, Brendan unravels the motives why Emily was killed and plots a revenge.

---

Plot Keywords:

neo noir | alley | cinderblock | high school | tunnel | 

---

Taglines:

A detective movie by Rian Johnson

---

Genres:

Action | Crime | Drama | Mystery | Thriller

---

Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for violent and drug content

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

14 April 2006 (USA)

Also Known As:

A Ponta de um Crime

Filming Locations:

San Clemente, California, USA

Box Office

Budget:

$475,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$83,574, 2 April 2006

Gross USA:

$2,060,589, 9 July 2006

Company Credits

Production Co:

Bergman Lustig Productions

Technical Specs

Runtime:

110 min

Sound Mix:

DTS Dolby Digital

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The opening scene, with Brendan looking at Emily's body, is very deceptively shot. What appear to be POV shots of Emily's body are in fact something else. Director Rian Johnson says, "Brendan's eye-line never changes. We see him ostensibly looking at different details each time, but that's never cued by eye movement. Those inserts aren't from the angle at which he's viewing them. From where he is, her feet should be at the top of the frame; instead, they're at the bottom, shot from her other side. The other two shots are likewise reversed. You could call that an error, I suppose, but coupled with the fixed eye-line, what it suggests is that Brendan can't process what he's seeing. It's so unthinkable to him that he can only take in tiny portions at a time. He's abstracted the sight of her into objects. The images are technically 'wrong,' but that contributes to the scene's overwhelming sense of wrongness.I know that when I see something traumatic, I don't really process it in the moment, but I store it with an intense amount of detail and then watch the memory of it very carefully. Those disconnected, weirdly beautiful pieces of Emily are not what Brendan would see from his vantage point, but they feel like what he'd remember from the scene."

---

Goofs

When Brendan meets Dode on the football field, he falls down and his jacket gets quite muddy along the right arm and right side. The next scene is Brendan going to the tunnel at 4:00 p.m. for the meeting, and the jacket is perfectly clean.

---

Quotes

[first lines]
[Brendan answers the pay phone]
Emily: Brendan.
Brendan Frye: Emily.
Emily: Yeah-h... How's things?
Brendan Frye: Status quo.

---

Connections

Featured in 2006 Independent Spirit Awards (2006)

---

Soundtracks

The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze
from "The Mikado"
Music by Arthur Sullivan
Lyrics by W.S. Gilbert (as W.S. Gilbert)
Arranged by Renato Neto
Performed by Nora Zehetner

User Reviews

Over-rated!

Having absorbed all the hype about this film I went along to see it with great expectations. How disappointed I was. There are many defects and errors in this film. Here is my list:

I found the dialogue inaudible and when I did hear what the characters were saying I found it completely incomprehensible.

The lead who played Brendan has to be the most uncharismatic actor I have ever seen on screen. Top marks to this guy for being able to deliver the gibberish dialogue, but aside from that this anti-hero character that he plays is truly repellent. Even the poorest most unpopular student in high school wouldn't have bad hair, bad shoes, and completely ill fitting denim pants. Do all squares have to be so unstylish? How can someone so skinny and badly dressed walk around like he's a jock and not to be messed with? The Laura character is prematurely middle-aged and totally pretentious and irritating and that's only when you can hear what she's actually saying. If this film is a satire on American youth - where everyone is sixteen going on 42 then it works on this premise. However I don't believe for a moment that there is even a high school in Hollywood where all the kids talk in hyper-slang with perfectly polished sophisticated responses. This film could never be called realistic.

The only redeeming feature in this project is the lovely Emilie De Ravin who unfortunately plays the soon-to-be dead girlfriend Emily. If she played Laura she would have had more screen time and perhaps would have delivered the strange dialogue with more clarity than the actress who played her.

De Ravin is like a composite of Jodie Foster and Michell Pfeiffer when they were younger. And and yet far from reminding us of them, she also seems to possess an ethereal quality that transcend that initial impression - innocence corrupted springs to mind when I saw here in this flick. I hope this is the start of a glittering career for her.

Watch out pointy chinned Witherspoon!