In the latter part of 2005, film geeks in several forums I frequent started to to rave about this movie. Words like “Awesome!,” and “Highly Original!” were used liberally when describing this movie.
The thing about film geeks is that you have to take what they say with a grain of salt. Because film geeks are notorious for being overzealous at times. They rally behind a small independent film that’s the least bit different and say that it’s the “BEST.MOVIE.EVER.LOL.”
But then again, them film geeks aren’t all that stupid. Annoying yes. But not entirely stupid. So I wasn’t too quick to dismiss all their frothing because truth be told, the concept behind the movie was enough to give me a massive boner even without any endorsements from any kind of geek:
“It’s Noir, but set in High School!”
Holy Crap right? I mean you don’t need to be a big Noir geek to know that noir rocks. I myself haven’t seen that many films from the genre, but I have spent countless hours in front of the computer playing Max Payne and its sequel; and in my book, if you can finish Max Payne & Max Payne 2 without cheats (for the most part), then you become an authority on Film Noir, not to mention the practical uses of Bullet Time.
But I digress. And here’s another digression for ya!:
I’m pretty sure that most people reading this would have a working knowledge about Film Noir. Quentin Tarantino made sure of that with Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Heck, even the young ‘uns who don’t know who Tarantino is, but watch Veronica Mars know a thing or two about noir.
The point is, noir is not only limited to those old black and white films about hardboiled detectives who smoke a lot, but do an awesome job of narrating what we can already see onscreen. So I will reiterate what the last two paragraphs were meant to say “Noir Rocks!” And the idea of an homage to the great noir films in the past that happens to be set in high school was just something that tickled my fancy.
So I gots me to searching and started on some hot and heavy torrent action which gots me my very own copy of the movie.
Now that I’ve seen it, what did I think about all the hype surrounding the movie? Well, to put it simply, the fanbois and film geeks do get something right sometimes, and all the jerking off that this movie inspired was well warranted as far as I’m concerned.
The story is told from the eyes of Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he tries to make sense out of a very cryptic phone call from his ex-girlfriend Emily (Emilie de Ravin) and the days leading to her death.
Like any film of its genre, the movie is characterized by the witty repertoire among the characters who’ve seen one too many bad things in this world. This helps disguise a relatively simplistic plot that’s written with enough plot twists and convulsions so as to appear complex. And that’s part of why this movie works for me. It knows that it doesn’t have the most interesting story in the world, and it’s totally OK with that.
So that basically leaves the movie with nothing more than snappy dialogue and larger than life characters. For some people that doesn’t sound like much, but in the hands of the right director/writer like Rian Johnson, it’s more than enough.
And I’d just like to take some time to mention how awesome the whole cast is: THE WHOLE CAST IS AWESOME!
Moving on, like I said above, the story is fairly simplistic so any more discussion about it would just ruin the story for anybody who haven’t seen it yet. Suffice it to say that despite this year’s dissapointments (Superman Returns, X3, The Da Vinci Code, etc.), something like this comes along and manages to restore your faith in movies.
In fact, I’d be hard pressed to find a better movie that I’ve seen this year.
So there. Go see it. But check out the trailer first:
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