The Continental Op Cuts Class

Sorry to be a week late getting this link posted to you, but the person who normally posts my "Hidden Gems" DVD segments to the CBC website is on vacation, so they're a little behind on updating their online content.

Luckily, last Thursday's choice is a pretty timeless movie: it's Brick, the "Dashiell Hammett goes to high school" debut feature from writer/director Rian Johnson, whose somewhat less successful followup film The Brothers Bloom is currently in theatres. If Bloom feels like a film that overindulged on production design, Brick is a great case of a filmmaker getting maximum visual impact out of a tiny budget. It'll be interesting to see what he does next — Bloom has earned him a lot of (unfavourable) comparisons to Wes Anderson, but he's like a Wes Anderson who went straight from Bottle Rocket to The Life Aquatic with nothing in between.

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, my review of Brick. Click here to listen to it.