Brick

Brick (2006) is set in a high school and talks like film noir. Brendan gets a call from his ex girlfriend; she is frightened and saying things he does not understand. Days later he finds her dead and starts pulling apart the drug network inside the school. The whole idea is transposition. Dashiell Hammett's rhythms and slang are placed directly in school corridors, nobody finds it strange, and the film never turns it into a joke. It is Rian Johnson's first film. He spent seven years pitching it without raising money. His family, who worked in construction, put in the first funds, and that persuaded others. The total budget came to about 450,000 dollars. It was shot in his home town of San Clemente, mostly at San Clemente High School, which he attended. Filming took twenty days, though he rehearsed with the cast for three months beforehand. Joseph Gordon-Levitt leads. It won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at Sundance in 2005. It took 2.07 million dollars in America and 3.9 million worldwide, and became a cult film. It runs 110 minutes. Good for: film noir, formal experiment, and low budget independent cinema. Less good for: the slang is dense and it is hard to track who is who in the first twenty minutes. The emotional distance is cold. The combination of a school setting with noir violence feels forced to some viewers.