Movie: Brick

This weekend The Bad Kitty and I watched a movie called Brick. We'd heard that it was good, but it wasn't. It was really, really good.

Imagine Philip Marlowe as a teenager today. Not the various movie versions of Philip Marlowe, but Raymond Chandler's character as written: the hard, imperfect, honorable man who did the right thing, even when it meant taking a beating himself.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

— Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder

And clearly, the movie and it's lead character, Brendan, are a loving homage to Chandler's work. Rian Johnson (the writer/director of Brick) did a great job of updating and reproducing Marlowe's quick, smart-aleck, private dick argot. Some examples:

Brad (the BMOC): Oh yeah?
Brendan (our hero): Yeah.
Brad: Oh yeah?
Brendan: Yeah.
Brad: Yeah?
Brendan: There's a thesaurus in the library. Yeah is under "Y". Go ahead, I'll wait.

The Brain: 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 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.

Then there's "The Pin" (played quite creepily by Lukas Haas), who refer's to Brendan as "Soldier", like Eddie Mars referring to Marlowe in The Big Sleep:

"Convenient," [Eddie] said. "The door being open. When you didn't have a key."

"Yes. How come you had a key?"

"Is that any of your business, soldier?"

"I could make it my business."

He smiled tightly and pushed his hat back on his gray hair. "And I could make your business my business."

"You wouldn't like it. The pay’s too small."

See? Good stuff. Go see Brick on DVD, and then go read some Chandler.