Before I go..

[green_amber]

Brick is, indeed, really really wonderful. Go. The sheer effrontery of writing a classic-styled film noir gumshoe detective movie, only set in LA-outer-suburbia - where the sun always shines and the sky is always blue - and where Sam Spade is a teenager in high school, as are the familiar figures of the blonde ice-maiden, the femme fatale, the doublecrossing whore, the local muscle and the local drug kingpin (oh hang on, he's in his late 20s!) And it works. It really works - I'd say it was a cross between Bugsy Malone and Pulp Fiction but that would just so much give you the wrong idea. It's more like a classic episode of Buffy mixed up with all those Bogart movies where the black head of police tells the 'tec that he can't protect him from the Feds much longer and he'd better get off the case(fan-taaastic scene with the black headmaster of the school..). And yet it's NOT just a pastiche - it's got a rawness and a realness of the emotions that I haven't found in an "adult" movie in an awfully long time. Maybe, as in Baz Luhmann's Romeo + Juliet, we've got to get ourselves back to the teenage stage to really feel love and regret and loss. To get over the cynicism, the knowingness, of our grownupness. I wish I could have the exposition of the last fifteen minutes over again abouit five times, though, maybe with a transcript to go.

This boy (the writer/director, not the star, though he's pretty cool too) will, methinks, go far.