Film Noir Is Dead...

...Long Live Film Noir.

The other day, I caught a film on TV called 'Brick', starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and the charmingly impish Emilie de Ravin. I may have mentioned in the past that I don't 'do' teen movies, but this is yet another exception to my oft-bended rule.

Had it been a radio play, it would come across as a pulp noir in the best Sam Spade/Mike Hammer tradition... but the film is set, largely, in an American high school. It centres on the investigations of a jilted boyfriend into his former girlfriend Emily's (de Ravin) death, and the circumstances leading up to it. Along the way, we meet a couple of femmes fatale (cleverly presenting them as the stereotypical 'nightclub canary' and 'gangster's moll' while remaining within the high school motif) and a teenage drug baron (Lukas Haas) who somehow manages to conduct his 'business meetings' while his mother potters about, offering his 'friends' cereal and juice.

Gordon-Levitt puts in a perfectly pitched, taciturn performance as Brendan Frye, the hard-boiled detective, obsessed by a case that hits too close to home, ignoring all the warnings that he might not like the story he's unravelling, picking fights with kids far bigger than him... And the whole film is so cleverly done that the fact that he's informing to his teachers, rather than 'the cops', isn't at all jarring to the story.

It sets up several Noirish twists, but doesn't trip on any of them, and the dialogue is peppered with the kind of frequently impenetrable slang one would expect to find in a Bogart movie.

Naturally, for this kind of film, it doesn't have a happy ending, even though (or should that be 'because'?) the protagonist succeeds in his task. In the end, you're kind of left wondering whose self-destructive behaviour was worse, Emily's or Brendan's..?

In other news, I'm getting a bit annoyed with myself over a few of my artistic endeavours. One is basically nearly done and exceedingly frustrating because I know it's not going to be as good as something else, so I'm just not inclined to finish it (and I've tried!). Another is only in its preliminary stages and I already believe it's going to be even worse than the other one. The last is really only at the concept stage, and I'm terrified to even start because, while the concept is utterly awesome, I just don't feel I'll be able to do it justice.

How fucking stupid.