Noir

[digg=http://www.digg.com/movies/Scoring_Brick]When it came for writer/director Rian Johnson to score his début film Brick he turned to musician cousin Nathan Johnson of The Cinematic Underground. Nathan’s background was not in scoring soundtracks, his primary experience was playing instruments in bands and writing lyrics. However, the relationship between Rian and Nathan allowed them to work together to build an incredibly striking score for what I believe to be one of the best neo-noir films ever made. Brick’s score is haunting and by using specific instruments for each character Nathan allowed for interaction between elements of the score, just as the characters are interacting on screen. It’s quite a brilliant effect.

Below is a video that I found on the Brick forum quite a long time ago now but I’m only just getting round to posting it. I believe this video gives a wonderful insight into the workings of not just the score but also the amazing process behind its creation. Sadly Wordpress will not allow me to embed Blip.TV videos and YouTube will not allow me to upload anything more than 10mins so I’m afraid all you’ve got is a link… so get clickin’! Oh, and don’t forget to check out Nathan’s band, The Cinematic Underground because their stuff is brilliant!

[digg=http://www.digg.com/movies/More_High_School_Noir]If nothing else, it has to be said, that this noir comedy flick has an eye catching and provocative title. I haven’t seen anything of this yet, I would love to see a trailer but all YouTube and Google seem to be throwing up are clips of Mischa Barton talking more about her recent DUI arrest than her role in this film which premiered at Sundance. Cinematical reviewed the flick during Sundance and gives a pretty good idea of what to expect. Set in a Catholic High School popular girl, Barton (no suprise there then), teams up with school newspaper reporter (Reece Thompson) to try and uncover who stole missing SAT exam papers. However, as expected from this kind of High School comedy, not everything goes to plan and they end up uncovering a far larger conspiracy.

My reason for initially taking an interest in this film was mainly because of some quite obvious comparisons between Rian Johnson’s début masterpiece Brick and the noir style dialogue that writers Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski gave to the characters from Assassination of a High School President. Is this just a direct lift of Johnsons genre mix, High School Noir? Is this the beginning of quite an interesting cycle? Or as Cinematical implies is this simply a film that does whan’t quite get the balance right? Johnson himself, on his web forum, expresses an interest in the flick so I guess he’s as interested as all of us to find out some of answers to those questions. I really hope this film gets a national release here and in the USA for no other reason that to see if Johnson’s formula has been carried across successfully.

That’s it from me,

Kieran