You always think you can end a story and get an ending. All movies. When the end appears, you always hope to catch it. . Especially in the face of a movie like Brick that is exciting from the first shot, a remote tunnel, a gloomy sky, a corpse, and the golden hair is covered by the water. The lost life makes the girl look extra pure and trembling. The restless boy squatted not far away. You start to concentrate, 109 minutes, you are fascinated, you are awake, you wait until the moment when the truth comes to light, but you still can't grasp it, you start from the beginning, describe the context of the story in your mind, and you hear from your heart firmly: Actually you don't know anything. On the other hand, everything in the movie arouses your sense of familiarity, light, lens, and plot, forcing you to keep searching for all the keywords of the movie in your mind, but in the end you still find nothing. Brick, a film that hides and seeks with the audience, let's from the top!
Independent production of the film Brick won the Jury Prize after its screening at the Sundance Film Festival, and apart from this heavy hat, the film actually has a Very Hollywood-style plot: The branden who lives in the sun-drenched St. Clément in California is a lone ranger on campus. He wears a messy mop head and a gray coat. He has a solitary and reclusive style, except for his buddies brian. He had almost no intersection with this campus, until his ex-girlfriend emily disappeared bizarrely, he began to transform into a sam spade-style detective in "The Maltese Eagle", calm and ruthless, with a keen sense of smell and accurate judgment. In the constant whistling, the dark characters hidden in the campus appear one by one, the greedy queen of the theater, the weak campus gangster, the rough and impulsive thug, the dark and psychedelic behind-the-scenes boss of the drug cartel, and a wandering beauty. Elf, when the truth of his girlfriend's death gradually became clear in Branden's mind, he was like an angel of revenge to arrange a perfect end of destruction for all participants.
Even by the lowest standards, the film is just a typical Hollywood cliché, but under the ingenious methods of director rian johnson, the film has a different rhythm from the general suspense film from the beginning. The film started two days before emily's disappearance. Branden suddenly received a note from emily. In a hidden telephone hall next to a highway, he received a call from emily. The flashing words and flustered tone of emily aroused branden. And the audience’s doubts, and then in Branden’s pursuit, the director began to tick the audience’s nerves easily with cryptic assertions and black words. After fiddling with the flashing words and phrases in the first twenty minutes, the background and clues of the story finally surfaced. In addition to the ingenuity of the language, from the setting of the environment to the expressions of the characters in the film, there are faintly leaked depressive anxiety, wide-angle photography and the faint yellow tone of wanton permeation. It makes the tone of the film even darker and paler. After a series of mysteries, the director seems not satisfied, but further extends the suspenseful aftertaste through the conversion of the lens: alternately appearing at the same place through different angles, so that the audience can not see the whole picture of the entire space; hiding The camera behind the character sticks his head out of the unexpected real object, tracking the character's footsteps; while in the scene of Branden’s contact with the world, the camera is constantly switching between Branden and other characters, causing a spatial dislocation. An illusion, showing the barrier between Branden, who has been in a state of self-defense for a long time, from the surrounding world. The beauty of the position and structure of the characters also adds a lot of attractive elements to the film. In the background environment, the director prefers to use long alleys and disappearing ends, implying the hiding of the truth; the rehearsal scenes of the theater troupe appearing in intervals make people unconsciously reflect on the young people indulging in the illusion of life. The cold reality of losing yourself. In the use of music, another important element of suspense films, unlike general suspense films, the sound effects in the film are not deliberately contrasted at critical moments, showing that the director has adopted a different attitude in the choice of music. The light percussion and the long but low horn spread in the film, adding the color of illusion and the uncertainty of the surroundings. The manic rock and roll is rudely mixed in with the roar of the motor, and the slashing sound of the slashing pounding highlights the black temperament of the underground drug cartel. After 109 minutes of indulging, you finally realize that the director is so careful to arrange all the flashy ingenuity, thus forming a crystal-like and alluring narrative technique. It reminds you of the first experience of reading low-speed novels, and it is also full of the fusion of different elements, especially the deliberate manipulation of small details, but in contrast, Quentin Tarantino's kneading of low-speed novels appears more To be rude, and rian johnson carefully pursues the balance of fineness and subtlety in brick.
For an independent film director, Sundance’s victory is a perfect beginning, especially for rian johnson. Brick is his first official film 10 years after graduating from the School of Television and Film at the University of Southern California, during which he mixed up. Behind the scenes of various films, large or small work is being done. And when he worked hard to raise funds for his movie and immersed himself in writing scripts on his Apple computer, he chose the subject matter of high school students. This is not a tricky choice, but stems from his long-held thinking." In all the movies depicting teenagers, the importance of high school life is always belittled unconsciously, but when your eyes are on the microscope, you will find that high school is the most important in your life." Brick also fully reflects the director’s thoughts on the high school world. Behind a suspenseful story, it is full of young people’s doubts about life and unscrupulous collisions. Greedy desires or self-closing dodge are all confused subtexts. Let us Hear these people's uncertainty about themselves and their surroundings.
Unlike the director’s "Newborn Calf", the male protagonist Joseph Gordon-Levitt grew up from a child star. He has appeared in more than 40 TV movies and has not been swallowed by the mainstream of Hollywood. He continues to participate in independent films. During the shooting, especially the strange brilliance in the 2003 film Mysterious Skin, he won unanimous praise from the critics. The director rian jonhson was attracted by his performance in another independent film manic. Both parties After meeting for the first time, Rian Johnson felt that Branden's role was none other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Although Joseph's performances in Brick were expressionless most of the time, his grasp of eyes and body details pushed the film to the peak of success.
As an independent film, brick has the unique mark of all independent films, and the exquisite but not new technique cannot conceal the fragility of the story. But when you start to think about it after watching the movie, you still can't help being attracted by the obscure fragments in the first part of the movie. Those overflowing black smoke teases the audience's curiosity about the unknown darkness, while the fragmentary fragments tease humans like a fable. Shocked at the suspense and even the swelling appetites of greedy greed. Perhaps we should review our endless desire for suspense films before we question the director's fancy methods.
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