{ I'm still stuck to my guns, drinking alone, sick to the bone. }

[delga]

My disappointment with this season's True Blood is well known but if any of you have fic recs which feature a lot of Pam, throw 'em at me. Pam is my faaaaavourite. I love her and miss her and any scene is immediately better when she is in it. Okay. So. Go at it.

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Now for some reading \o/

An interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt at AV Club (28-Mar-07)

AVC: Was Brick just difficult because the dialogue was tough to articulate?

JGL: It was difficult for that, and it took a lot of technical rehearsal and practice just to get the dialogue the way it was, but also, the character was just… The character in Mysterious Skin is mostly very easygoing. He mostly feels great about himself. He feels attractive, and people are attracted to him. But the character in Brick is constantly thinking really hard, constantly getting hit in the face, constantly in pain over a dead lover. He sees the one love of his life dead at the beginning, so he's in a lot of pain the whole time. So that was a lot harder. Then The Lookout was by far the hardest thing I've ever done. Partially because both Brick and Mysterious Skin were four- to five-week shoots, and The Lookout was nine or 10. So there's the marathon aspect, as well as the fact that Chris Pratt is having a harder go of it than either of the other two characters ever did.

Another interview with JGL; discussing Brick (30-Mar-06)

"People don't write movies like this anymore. People try to create movies through digital effects and camera tricks – and not that there aren't really cool camera tricks in Brick, but none of them are digital. Rian Johnston, the writer-director, he created the world of Brick with his words … and no one tries to use words anymore; it's like a dying art, the wordsmith. And the language that he came up with for Brick is so fun to say that when I was done reading it, I turned over the last page and went to the front again and started reading it again, just because I liked saying it. Things like 'Who's she eating lunch with?'"

the writing studio: Brick

RJ: [...] At its essence, we set out to make an American detective movie. When I'm saying it very quickly, it's "Oh, it's a strange little detective movie." The reason it's set in high school is, we did that to get away from the imagery of men in hats and what we typically think of for detectives. That's all been done so well so many times over the years that the instant you see the imagery, it becomes pastiche when you're doing a detective movie. I love film noir, but the thought of imitating it was not appealing. Brick is not set in high school for any postmodern twist or to make a comment on the genre; it was meant to free us up to take a more straightforward approach to the genre. We wrestled with the question of "How do you 'do' the genre today?" This was the weird approach that we decided on. [Laughs]

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the writing studio: Flashbacks of a Fool - Life, Death, Decay and Re-Birth

When Joe comes home to his mother twenty-five years later, he finds her in a new, grander version of his childhood home. Yet the same love is still there and the picture is largely unchanged. When he knocks at the door, Peggy is watering her new larger garden and planting seeds Grace, ever the nurturing mother, immediately offers up tea and cakes. In this house, which Grace affectionately refers to as her 'Graceland', Joe finds the contents of his childhood bedroom neatly arranged in a room that is, startlingly, like a shrine to his teenage years. For Grace, memories are sacred. Memories are life. Throwing away her son's memories would be murderous. "I knew you'd be back one day and it's not for me to throw away your memories. That's for you to do," remarks Grace. Yet the reality is that not even Joe can throw away his memories. Memories cannot be sent away to die. The ocean keeps Joe's memories alive and the ocean gives him his memories back. It is Joe's memories that pump life back into his soul, re-igniting his will to live. The powerful memory of a childhood lived in a nurturing family environment has stayed with him.

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Two very different films, of which Brick is definitely the better, but Flashbacks is - in ways that, unfortunately, are not expanded on in the film - the more compelling. I still wish there was more written on Flashbacks but that's a pipe dream. And I always want more Brick. I can never ever get enough.

Comments

[wliberation.livejournal.com]

I seriously need to see this movie already. (Also, I saw JGL on the cover of some magazine in a store this summer. A STRIKING PICTURE, instantly caught my eye from across the bloody room. I almost bought the magazine just for that pic, but didn't, and I'm sort of regretting it because now I can't remember which mag it was. /random)