Brick 4K 2005 Ultra HD 2160p

A lonely teenager tries to rub his way into the confidence of a local criminal mastermind in order to learn the truth about the untraceable disappearance of his ex-girlfriend ...

User Review
A guy is standing on a provincial American highway by a phone booth. He has been away for two months after breaking up with the girl he loves. Now he calls her, and she hysterically asks for help and a meeting. A car rushes by, and the guy seems to see his girlfriend in it. But he knows where to go to continue his search. To the local bully, with whom the conversation is short: "You want to fight, you stoned chump? But I'm at my best, and I got a good night's sleep tonight. So you can count me as six and you as one".

The guy quickly finds the girl, but she no longer asks for help, but says goodbye for good. Running away. According to a strange note, he very soon finds her corpse with a gunshot wound at the bottom of a creek at the entrance to a marginal tunnel. That will get him, especially since the killer managed to disappear down the tunnel in just seconds. By the smallest and smallest clues and old acquaintances, the guy, avenging for his beloved, will start digging up a story about some Shtyr and some brick. Everything will be as it should be since the “black movies” of the late 30s: an aristocratic party with a mysterious beauty, the backstage of a nightclub with a Negro singer, beautiful gentlemen's fights, mysterious assassination attempts, a terrible confusion when everything turns out not to be what it seemed, but it will not end until it is not clarified and the guy does not go away, carelessly putting his hands in his pockets, although at heart he - longing.

“The originality of Ryan Johnson's look is that he has transferred the plot, the characters, the dialog, the details and clues, the manner of filming in the late 30's to a modern American high school. The main character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is just a high school student taking on Sam Spade's mission. Behind this is a good idea that in modern times only high school students among themselves are still capable of gentlemanliness, keep their word, do not back down to the end and in general - show individuality. Besides, Gordon-Levitt Mysterious Skin (2004) does not pussyfoot under Humphrey Bogart in the role of Sam Spade, but as if has him in mind, remaining himself - a skinny bespectacled man who knows how to fight. Unfortunately, we can't feel the main moment of “originality” in translation. The words: "You're not stupid, you should realize that I came to the party then, not to show off. And now I'm leaving, not to glue you together"- they can be witty for us, but nothing more. In the original “Brick” the whole thing is told in a language that American schoolchildren have long since NOT spoken, they do NOT know it. It is literary speech, and they speak in a slang where even “crosavchegi” and “rossavchegi” would be literature.

Nevertheless, the gradual frustration comes not because of the difficulty of translation. The fact is that the very “finding” of Ryan Johnson about the “school black movie” is based only on the diploma two-part, 15-20 minutes. A full-length feature presupposes original content, and there is none in the film. All it has is a cocaine brick (well, four bricks) instead of a Maltese falcon, a drug dealer instead of a gangster, and a questionable school vice principal instead of a questionable cop. That is, in essence, Johnson did not “black movie” imposed on modernity, but modernity to him adjusted on all counts, and the further, the more you can see the artificiality, even exhaustion of the finale. Sam Spade in the 1930s could have been for real. How things really are now with school drug addiction, does not interest the author, and the most elegant stylization, beautifully filmed and played, hangs in the air. “Well, so what?”.

In addition, the usual debut-author error is visible: almost every frame is one and a half times longer than it needs to be. Without original content, the meaningfulness of simple passages, passages and hit-and-runs (on the proudly standing hero), dropped pistols and penetrating glances turns out to be false, it is even ridiculous. The dehumanized “empty city” at length becomes not part of the style, but evidence of budget poverty.

Even in the last scene, when everything is already clear, Laura takes too long to walk toward Brendan through the stadium.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (85.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
#English: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Commentary by Professor and Film Scholar Jason A. Ney)

Info Subtitles

English SDH, Dutch, French (Canadian), Italian, Spanish (Latin American).