Sundance, Day 4

With mere hours to go before my flight out of Salt Lake City, there's time for just one more early morning wake-n-watch. Mark scored tickets early on for Brick, so there will be no standing around and waiting, which makes it all the more appealing. Plus, it's the reunion of the four original Dawgs who haven't had many chances to hang out.

I have a better name for this movie: Crap.

This is a misguided, soulless, pointless attempt to graft a Raymond Chandler detective story onto a high school setting. It's a fun idea, right? Kind of like "Alias" but the high schoolers are serious gangsters when they're not sitting in homeroom? They juggle classes while at the same time navigating the L.A. drug underworld? A tough guy anti-hero gets sucked into a seedy crime web and has to fight his way out?

Well, this ain't that movie. This is a mess of conflicting styles, bad hard-boiled dialog, and characters with no character. The director has claimed in interviews that the high school of his movie isn't "real" on purpose because high school itself isn't real. Well, duh, but your characters still have to follow basic rules that the audience can grasp.

For example, lead character Brendan picks a fight with a low-level drug dealer named Brad. He explains later that he did it to get the higher-ups' attention. Brendan also blurts out to the biggest drug dealer around that he knows the dealer's top-secret headquarters. Instead of getting whacked, he gets a job. And if you believe that's how the world works, then you might be willing to believe everything about this movie.

The Aint-It-Cool guys are trumpeting this movie bigtime (link, link and link) but you heard it here first: there's no there there. Brick is a mess -- it wants to be stylish teen noir, but is in fact the writer/director's daydream in which his teen dopplganger out-punches, out-smarts and out-toughs everyone around him for no apparent reason. Remember: anti-heroes still have to be heroes, not blanks of nothing to be filled with lame dialog. The only redeeming character is the operative called The Brain, and he's only on screen for a total of a few minutes.

Day 4 Celebrity Sightings: 0 in the wild, 0 in captivity.