Why are so many people complaining that it's not 'realistic'?

I couldn't have said it better. If the music wasn't a give away.....

The fact is, people just like to complain...

I don't love her.. She kicked me in the face!!

I think the problem is that transposing classic noir onto a high school setting doesn't work. It was a wonderfully creative idea, but probably should have been shelved, because the thematic clash is so fundamental that it takes the viewer out of the movie. We're constantly reminded that we're watching a film; it's impossible to get lost in it. It's just trying too hard.

Hence the complaints.

I'm sorry, I just started hearing really loud circus music in my head.

You make a good point, but I disagree agree with your analysis that "the thing that makes the movie enjoyable is exactly because what you're actually seeing clashes with what you think you should be seeing." For me, this is the least pleasurable aspect of the film, the fact that the aesthetic fails to make itself commensurate with the story. The problem is that the film lacks a framing device, something to give structure to its use of caricature, therefore it has no safety net to fall back on when it fails to adequately render reality, which happens frequently.

What I mean by 'framing device' is something along the line of what Hitchcock gives us in Vertigo, or any other of his masterpieces. Vertigo has a motif embedded in it that allows the entire film to be viewed as a metaphor for the creative process, which in Hitchcock's case is filmmaking. Therefore the overly staged worlds he conveys and the caricatures he's used for characterization since the beginning of his career thrive within the film's themes derived from the wavering line between fantasy and reality. When it's fake, which is often, the film's themes support the excess of artifice.

It's interesting because you can see Rian Johnson running to the same problems that Hitchcock ran into earlier in his career. Both filmmakers are more concerned with developing their plotlines than the depth of their characters. This leads to significant problems when the characters undergo extreme circumstances that must be expressed in such a way as to derail the kind of "ripping detective yarns" both directors love to direct. For Johnson, this mishandling of character development becomes blatantly obvious when Brendan (the hard-boiled detective) returns to his brooding, angst-ridden detective caricature hot on the tails of the criminals just one scene after finding the dead body of his lover. It was such a blatant mishandling of the character development that I kept expecting the dead lover to pop up again at any moment, her entire death simply explained as an elaborate hoax of some kind. Hitchcock had similar problems in Notorious. After Ingrid Bergman's character finds out her father has passed away, she frowns for a scene or two, and then shoots off across the ocean, beaming smiles all the way, pursuing a spy adventure and romance with Cary Grant because after all those mournful depressions people fall prey to can be such a drag when one just wants to catch the bad guys and fall in love. It just won't work.

I feel much of the film's problems are due to a miniscule budget. Johnson simply didn't have the means to recreate the kind of world where caricatures can live and breath with ease. It can't all be blamed on him, so I padded my rating a bit. The film has other problems, but I don't want to go on and on with my castigations. This was, after all, a rare glimpse of raw talent leaping after the sun: Great dialogue, superb storytelling, fun parody, an insightful perspective on teenagers attempting to act out adulthood. I enjoyed it a lot!

My rating: 8

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Before I finish reading your post and it's replies, let me just put this out there: I will not say that it isn't realistic, because I get that it's noir, I will say instead that for me it is not believable.

The film had its interesting points, but that last act with Brendan and Laura on the field just fell flat for me. The performance from him was okay, hers was barely passable, and the reveals in the dialog / story pulled up short as well.

And the dialog through the entire film was a bit of a chore to keep up with.

Note: this not coming from an IMDb troll. I loved The Brother Bloom and watched this because I read that it was cut from the same cloth. But I didn't find it to be quite that.

I will watch it again, but for now, I chalk it off to being a good first effort (Johnson's first feature) that lead to better things (The Brothers Bloom, Looper, and two future Star Wars films).

Be sure to proof your posts to see if you any words out

"Cultured and broadly talented", eh?  Is that how you see yourself then? LOL. Megalomania much? Coming from someone who repeatedly makes the "I'm better than everyone else" claim and has seen a lot of "offbeat movies", it's kind of ironic that you rile on hipsters. Because you sure do sound like one.

"Writer, musician, impressionist"... you sound like Miranda Sings. Haha.

It's a straight-up genre film, a noir. The language isn't realistic when Sam Spade uses it. I mean, I hope people don't watch movies from the 30s and 40s and assume that's how people talked back then.

The thing about genre films is that you have to suspend your disbelief up front. There's a difference between watching a film that is otherwise realistic and having difficulty suspending your disbelief when an extraordinarily unlikely event occurs and suspending your disbelief because that's the only way to take the film on its own terms. You don't see people complaining about vampire movies, or Star Wars, or high fantasy in terms of overall suspension of disbelief because, by choosing to watch those sorts of movies, you're implicitly agreeing to allow the movie to operate on its own genre-based terms. "Brick" is no different -- it's noir that happens to be set in a high school, just like "Blade Runner" is a semi-noir that happens to be set in a decaying future dystopia. If you just don't like the movie, fair enough. But criticizing it for actually being the type of movie it was intended to be all along is a bit silly.

Most people are stupid.


Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar, and / or doesn't.