Brick

From writer-director Rian Johnson, this low-budget offering comes from a few years back, in 2005. It embodies several things that I tend to appreciate in film: strong, witty, fast dialogue, refusal to rely on effect over acting, and an unwillingness to cater to or patronize the audience. This film demands that you sit up and listen if you want to stay with it - and trust me, you want to stay with it.


At his IMDb page, Johnson is quoted as having said the following:

"Teen movies often have an unspoken underlying premise in which high school is seen as less serious than the adult world. But when your head is encased in that microcosm it's the most serious time of your life."

It's this attitude, carried throughout the film, that appeals so much to me. Too often, movies about (or for) teenagers tend to glamorize that period of life in one of two ways: either you have the Mean Girls effect, where teens generally fall into easily recognizable stereotypes (but don't get me wrong, I love that movie, and I do mean LOVE; it's just doing something else), or you have the coming-of-age effect, where an individual becomes a stronger/better/happier human being (cf. The Karate Kid, An Education). Brick starts at the premise that its characters are already complex individuals, and then, rather than making the film about adolescence, it is a detective story - it just so happens that the PI takes advanced English and the femme fatale is dating the quarterback.

This goes hand-in-hand with the writer's refusal to condescend to the audience. Events aren't recapped, there is hardly any exposition,  and no punches are pulled. All of the action is contained in about three days, within which the main character, Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) takes a physical and emotional beating.

Gordon-Levitt said that he took on the role because

Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. Brick (2005) was a good script just to read. It was like, "Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth". A lot of movies try to set up a world with cool sets, costumes, camera work. In Brick (2005), the world is born from the words.

For example:

             BRENDAN 

No, bulls would gum it. They'd flash

their dusty standards at the wide-eyes

and probably find some yegg to pin,

probably even the right one. But they'd

trample the real tracks and scare the

real players back into their holes, and

if we're doing this I want the whole

story. No cops, not for a bit.

I just can't help but love it. And for sure it's grim, but it's also really emotionally honest and beautiful.

All right, so I guess I have to address the fact that two (2) of the two (2) films I've written about on this blog so far happen to star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. So here it is: sometimes, I get hooked. (For example, this past weekend I read Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, and I liked it so much that I bought and read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close the very next day.) I saw Inception a while back, and while I was already a fan of Gordon-Levitt from way back (3rd Rock, anyone?), I just loved that he took a character with limited screen time - given just how much is going on in that movie - and made him feel so three-dimensional and interesting. I suppose what I wanted was more Arthur, but that's not available, so I went out and got more Gordon-Levitt, which is better, really.

(500) Days of Summer

So there are a lot of mixed opinions out there about this one. For those of you who haven't seen it, or who saw it so long ago that you'd like a refresher, it's like this: boy (Tom, aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets girl (Summer, aka Zooey Deschanel), falls for girl, but the relationship doesn't last. Some people have problems with Zooey Deschanel (which I just don't get because I've thought she was lovely since Almost Famous and how could you not like the sweet tones of She & Him? but that's slightly off topic, although not too off topic because I do have some things to say about the soundtrack), or with her character Summer, which is a little two-dimensional.

But let me say this about that: every aspect of a film has to serve a purpose. Even if you read it as negative, it's there for a reason - or the movie is absolute crap that no one should have to pay money for. With that in mind, to me, Summer is two-dimensional because we see her as Tom sees her, and the movie makes it clear that things don't work out between them because he never fully understood her, or who she was to him (or who he was to her? now I'm confusing myself). The movie is about the subjectivity of romance: for myriad reasons, one person can read interactions very differently than the other, and this will inevitably lead to misunderstandings and miscommunications. This unfolds throughout the film as Tom revisits moments that were important to him - how he reads her behavior changes each time, depending on his mood or his understanding of them as a couple.

I have a soft spot for aesthetically pleasing films, and this one is no exception: the costuming, set and lighting created a timeless quality to the film, allowing the relationship to breathe in a world just slightly different from our own - a world where everyone seems to share a cohesive design aesthetic and color palette. Summer's outfits are all whimsical, vintage-y ensembles; I know a whole lot less about menswear, but Tom seems dressed to match.

And I can not get over the headphones. These headphones, to be exact:

By WeAretheSuperlativeConspiracy. A hipster staple, but I tend to gravitate towards that look myself. Is it so wrong to fall in love with a man for his headphones? Which brings me to another aspect of the film that I love: music. There are some days when I truly believe that a film is only as good as its OST. 500 Days does not disappoint, featuring tracks from Regina Spektor, Feist, the Temper Trap, Wolfmother, and I could go on. The best part, however, is how the music is intertwined with the story itself: not only does Gordon-Levitt sport the magic headphones on and off throughout the film, in the scene pictured above, they connect for the first time over the track from the Smiths that he's listening to ("There Is A Light That Never Goes Out"). And if I'm being honest, I am almost as big a music nerd as I am a movie nerd, so sparks always fly when the two are combined.

I guess in the end the reason why I like this movie is because for all its magical realism, it's far more realistic in terms of relation and perception than your average run-of-the-mill Hollywood rom-com. Sometimes things don't work out, and that's still beautiful and authentic and life-affirming.

And finally, just because I've been listening to it on repeat while writing this, from the soundtrack of (500) Days of Summer I give you Carla Bruni and her guitar: