Brick

I expected great things of Brick. I enjoyed the trailers, and it received pretty good reviews. So I bought the DVD without having seen it.

It's a story of drugs, murder, and a murder investigation. There's a drug lord, his hired muscle, a detective, his loyal sidekick, and a femme fatale. It's a film noir. And it's set in a modern-day American high school. Yes, they've taken those two staples of US cinema and mixed them together into one great concept.

So, does it work?

Well, on a certain level it does. It's surprising just how well, in fact. But there are some incongruities. The scene in the assistant vice-principal's office didn't play out for me. It just seemed too forced.

And the age of the actors also hindered my viewing pleasure. Fans of gritty cop show The Shield will recognize Brian White, who played Tavon in season 3. White was born in 1973. What the fuck is he doing playing a high-school student in 2005, age 32?! The lead role of Brendan is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, age 24; and Laura is played by Heroes star Laura Zehetner, also 24 years old. Come on, let's get real and cast some people who look like they could actually be schoolkids!

What could have been a great and original film turned into an interesting but flawed experiment in mixing genres. And the tale got so convoluted that it was even necessary to have Brendan tell the viewers exactly what the fuck happened! A shame...

Scored
Acting: 13
Story: 13
Direction: 14
Enjoyment: 14
Involvement: 15
Total: 69

Lost Highway

As a longtime David Lynch fan, I have decided to rewatch both Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. in advance of seeing Inland Empire next month. I've previously seen the former twice (once at the cinema and once on DVD); this was my third viewing.

I find Lynch movies to be terrifying. Most of the most Lynchian ones among them -- i.e., not The Straight Story, The Elephant Man, and Dune -- are, to me, more horrific than most horror movies. Indeed, I think of Lynch as the creator and one true exponent of what I term the "urban horror movie", a genre that takes the most grotesque elements of our everyday lives and tosses them all into the pot, making us hope we never have to venture out into the world again.

Third time around, I found LH to be less scary than the previous times, but this is almost certainly because I was already aware of the gist of the movie, and also because I was watching with a view to seeing things I hadn't noticed before.

On the surface, LH is a murder mystery. There are touches of noir and Hitchcock in there, too: the doppelganger; the platinum blonde; the wrong man. But beyond that, don't ask me to say what's going on. And there's a lot of humour, as always in Lynchland: who among us can forget the "I hate tailgaters" scene with Mr Eddie (expertly played by the great Robert Loggia)? Less funny, of course, is the glass-table scene.

The acting -- going back to a comment-box conversation I recently had with Red and Candy -- was something I paid particular attention to this time. And I found it more convincing than I have before. It's so awful and so stilted, and the dialogue so ... banal ..., that it is absolutely the way people are in real life.

I loved Lost Highway. But then I never understood why the critics hated it anyway. And now I'm itching to see Mulholland Dr. again too.

Scores
Acting: 15
Story: 16
Direction: 18
Enjoyment: 17
Involvement: 18
Total: 84

Inside Man

I had been looking forward to seeing Inside Man for quite some time. I like Spike Lee generally, and I have liked him from way before he became "accessible" to mainstream white America.

What I find now, though, is that his fiction movies are becoming less politicized. Not that that's a bad thing. And I wonder whether this stems from his greater involvement in documentary film-making in recent years. Perhaps now that he has an outlet for his political thoughts, he doesn't feel the need to bog down his fiction with it? It will be fascinating to see how he gets on with TV drama if his show about New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina comes to fruition.

Anyways, that's a whole other ball game. For now, let's talk about the movie at hand, which stars Brits Clive Owen and Chiwetel Ejiofor alongside heavywight Hollywood Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster. As much as I like Ejiofor, I was never a fan of Owen until Sin City and Closer. In both films he was a revelation, and I've come to quite like him now. He was good again in Inside Man.

This film combines several of my favourite things:
a heist plotline; a macguffin; a 1940s-type noir-inspired soundtrack, with shades of Herrmann and even Badalamenti.

Almost the whole of the plot is the heist, and I'd go on to say that this is a first-class heist picture. I wish Lee had left it at that. Because although I like macguffins, this one could have been dropped altogether, doing away with Jodie Foster entirely, and it would have been a far stronger picture. As it was, the last 15 minutes felt tacked on and a letdown after what was a blistering, exciting film up to that point.

That said, this is one of the best films I've seen in a long time, and it certainly deserves a place on my DVD shelf.

The scores
Acting: 16
Story: 16
Direction: 17
Enjoyment: 16
Involvement: 18
Total: 83