Brick
First of all: Any Donnie Darko comparisons you may have heard are totally unfounded. Complete Shit. No idea where people are getting that from. It's possible reviewers are actually just grouping this and Darko together because they are two teen films made in the last ten years that aren't just about someone on a zany quest to lose their virginity, or the school quarterback taking on a bet to turn the ugly-chick-with-the-overalls into the prom queen, but other than that the two films don't have a common thread between them.
Secondly: the big gimmick you may have heard Brick has up its sleeve, that the kids all talk like film-noir Humphry Bogarts, is very true, and yes, just as pretentious and cringe worthy as you may expect. It really started to annoy me that every review/article on the film included a cute little glossary so you could keep up with the film. It's one thing for film phrases and quips to make it into the ‘cool' youth lexicon almost by themselves, it's another to assume they will and promote a film as one brimming with this summer's new hip sayings. Hey, I dig that this is film-noir-for-kiddies, and that it takes itself like, totally seriously, but Brick would have been a much better film without the dialogue gimmick.
The really painful thing in Brick however isn't the I-don't-understand-what-they're-saying-so-it-must-be-cool lingo, but the attempts at humour, if indeed that's what they were. A recurring gag is that one of the femme fatales has a man-servant that always seems to be ‘servicing' just her out of shot. Hahahhahahahhaaaahahahaa. I'm sure this was a clever homage to some classic 50s noir film, or something, but it was also incredibly fucking lame and unfunny. One more thing that pissed me was that the film ends with a girl whispering something elusive into a man's ear that we, the audience, are not privy to, and thus presumedly prompts us to leave the cinema pondering what could have been said. Hmmmm…would have been a little bit cooler if Lost in Translation didn't have the exact same idea a few years ago, perhaps.
Visually, I loved the film. There's several moments where director Rian Johnson employs the most effective use of jumps cuts I've seen in recent memory, where it looks like he's just jumping between takes of the same shot (which is either a really cool technique, or the guys a hack and thought no-one would notice!). The violence in Brick is also quite shocking and gut-churning, as you really feel the hits and recoil at gunshots, although it should be pointed out that after Joseph Gordon-Levitt's character gets smacked in the face for the twentieth time I started to become immune and stop flinching and instead started wondering just how it was that he was still on his feet and conscious enough to keep brooding so much.
Still, for all its annoyingness, I was intrigued watching Brick , and while I never bought its gimmick, I did get sucked into the mood of it all - all the while silently willing it to become a better film than it was. What the hype and drool over Brick does suggest to me is that there's an audience crying out for more serious teen films to be made, and that the kids out there aren't looking forward to the antics of Stifler's equally horny second-cousin Dexter in the upcoming American Pie 5: Masturbation Day quite as much as the studios might think they are.