33. Brick
We watched this a couple of weeks ago, and for the first 10 minutes or so I thought we were gonna have to turn it off. It’s high school film noir, and at first I couldn’t suspend disbelief long enough to be able to hear that type of dialogue coming out of teenagers. For instance:
Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you.
-or-
See the Pin pipes it from the lowest scraper for Brad Bramish to sell, maybe. Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they’ll say they scraped it from that, who scored it from this, who bought it off so, and after four or five connections the list always ends with The Pin. But I bet you, if you got every rat in town together and said “Show your hands” if any of them’ve actually seen The Pin, you’d get a crowd of full pockets.
This is hardboiled, Dashiell Hammett dialogue, and should be coming out of Humphrey Bogart, not that kid who was in Third Rock From The Sun. (aka Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who actually turned out to be good in this movie, thus raising my opinion of him, though I still think his name is too long, and if I were going to refer to him again in this post I’d just type JG-L, but I’m not.)
And then, about 11 minutes in, it clicks. It doesn’t sound strange anymore, and you’re immersed in this atmospheric little mystery, and it works that much better for having taken the two genres and mashed them together. And the scene with Assistant Vice Principal Richard Roundtree is hilarious. Good stuff.