I can't remember watching many films where I've actually struggled to understand what's going on for a good half an hour. Not in the sense that I couldn't get the plot - there are plenty of films like that early on. But in the sense that I couldn't get a handle on the characters, the way they spoke and acted and thought. For those who haven't seen Brick, it's basically a film noir detective story meets high school teen drama, where the style, language and archetypes are from the former, and the characters and location are from the latter. Not having any knowledge of film noir or those sort of Philip Marlowe detective stories meant it took me a while to figure out what was going on. For example, when Brendon says of Emma "she's gone" to the Brain, the auto-pilot of my brain told me that he's hiding her death and the circumstances around it and any emotions he might be feeling, and it's only when I adjusted to the (what I know know is called) hardboiled style that I realised that's enough for one person to tell another someone's dead, murdered, and that's as much emotion as will be shown on the topic.

None of this is bad, mind. The end result is one of the most original feeling films I can remember seeing, all the more remarkable given how old the underlying story type is. I'm definitely OK with being mentally challenged by a film - it's not the filmmakers job to pander to the intelligence of the watcher, or his own limited frame of reference. I suspect a second watch would lead me to enjoy in a number of other ways lost by having to concentrate. On a first watch, however, it struck me as a satisfying balance of edgy gritiness and cool quirkiness. I really liked that this unusual world just existed, with its own internal logic, and that the film was not about the reason for that. The humour was wonderful - the scene where Brendon sits opposite The Pin in his mothers kitchen whilst his mother fixes him an apple juice with excruciating detail was very funny - and their lots of off-kilter moments like that. I also remember being aware of the music and liking it.

Movies watched in 2010: 3