"Ask any dope rat where their junk sprang and they'll say they scraped it from that who scored it from this who bought it off so and after four or five connections the list always ends with the Pin. But I bet you got every rat in town together and said 'show your hands' if any of them've actually seen the Pin, you'd get a crowd of full pockets."
I actually stumbled into a screening pass for BRICK over a year ago, but it was on a night that Pam was in class and I didn't know enough about it to put myself out over it so I let it drift. A few months later I Netflixed it and it's become one of my favorite new movies. In my mind it's a new classic of well done film noir. I own a copy of THE MALTESE FALCON on DVD that I just put on when I want to watch a movie but cant really decide what I want to watch. I know that if I pop in Sam Spade, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Casper Guttman and company I wont be disappointed. I think that Brick will be another choice in the "old reliable" category. Which is funny because they are both very similar movies and not because they both involve hard boiled detectives and if you've seen Brick, while Brendan isn't actually a detective per se, he's unexpectedly resilient for so slight of a kid and extremely canny. If there's another character that comes to mind that reminds me of it's a younger version of Tom Regan, Gabriel Byrne's character from MILLER'S CROSSING.
Having seen The Maltese Falcon plenty of times I see where Brick is taking it's cues from (Brick: Honk your horn 4 times, long, short, long short. Maltese Falcon: Ring the bell 4 times: long, short, long, short) but it's also the fact that the main characters are kids and their suburban environment, namely the high school acts as an analogue for the city where this type of story would normally take place. Despite those two points the script and the characters come off well, if you're a pedant who can't get past the fact that these teens are talking like they just walked off of the pages of a Dashiell Hammet book then dont bother showing up, but once you get past that there are so many nuggets of goodness in this movie you'll be hard pressed to resist a second and third viewing.
