Brendan Frye (Brick)
Created by Rian Johnson

Much like The Big Lebowski, Rian Johnson's Brick (2005) is a P.I. film that has everything you'd want in a P.I. film -- except a P.I.

And like Lebowski's The Dude, Brick's BRENDAN FRYE is a loose cannon, a social misfit who has to make like a private eye to get out of a jam -- and rises spectaculalry to the occasion in this quirky little indy flick that wowwed 'em at Sundance.

But whereas the Dude played out his gumshoe schtick in a crazed Coen Brothers world of middle-aged performance artists, psychotic Vietnam vets, opera singers, nymphomaniac trophy wives, self-styled Nihilists and obsessed league bowlers, Brendan's mean streets are... a high school in the endless suburban sprawl of Southern California.

Yep, we're tramping the same teenage never-neverland television's Veronica Mars has already staked out as her own, and yet rookie director/writerJohnson manages to add some seriously trippy original touches to this engaging rip on the classic crime and noir films of the forties and fifties.

Like an adolescent Philip Marlowe, Brendan's an oddball loner (and possibly the only teenager in SoCal without a cellphone) who doesn't really fit into (nor pledge allegiance to) any one social clique in school, thereby allowing him to move easily between them all in his dogged search for the truth -- or something like that.

Which comes in handy when he discovers the body of his ex-girlfriend Emily lying facedown in a puddle by a drainage tunnel. The police are next to useless, so Brendan decides to look into her murder himself and is soon finds himself bumping up against every cliche of every high school you've ever seen (the brain, the jock, the nerd, the stoner, the local dealer, the inept school administrator) -- each a sly reinvention of its pulp fiction counterpart (the hired thug, the femme fatale, the stool pigeon, the junkie, the gangster, the corrupt cop, etc.). Marlowe had his seedy little one-man office; Brendan eats his lunch alone by the dumpsters behind the school.

But what's really fun is the way everyone speaks a sort of stylized pumped-up hard-boiled slang ("all the jake sprang from him"), full of rude wit and raucous laughter. Including, of course, Brendan himself, who cracks wise and offers a unflinching running commentary that fans of detective fiction will be more than familiar with.

It all adds up to one fresh and stylish back-handed high-five to the P.I. genre -- and a more than worthwhile way for gumshoe fans to kill a few hours. The Dude would approve.

THE EVIDENCE

• "...and no more of these informal chats, either. You got a discipline issue with me, write me up or suspend me, and I'll see you at the parents' conference."
  (Brendon gets summoned to the principal's office, but refuses to back down)
  
  
• "I'm looking to find this big game The Pin's played. Not to gum it, but just so when its tail jams in my back I know who to bill for the embalming."

FILM

• BRICK .. Buy this DVD
  (2005, Bergman Lustig Productions)
  Written and directed by Rian Johnson
  Produced by Ram Bergman and Mark G. Mathis
  Executive producers: Johnson Communications and Norman Dreyfuss
  Co-producers: Susan Dynner, Dana Lustig and Angela Roessel
  Associate producer: Raymond Izaac
  Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as BRENDAN FRYE
  With Nora Zehetner as Laura
  and Lukas Haas as The Pin
  Also starring Noah Fleiss, Matt O'Leary, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Segan, Richard Roundtree, Meagan Good, Brian J. White, Jonathan Cauff, Reedy Gibbs, Lucas Babin, Tracy Wilcoxen, Ari Welkom, Tangels
  

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.