'Brick' and 'Stick It'

Jeremy and I missed the opening credits for ‘Brick’. I knew we’d be late getting into the theatre but I thought we’d only miss the previews. When we walked into the theatre though, the movie had begun and I was mildly upset. I hate missing the opening credits and I doubly hate missing the coming attractions. It’s comforting to see which movies I’ll be excited about before seeing the movie I’m excited to see. (Trailers used to come after the movie as a way of getting the audience excited about the movies they could see after they saw the movie they saw. They traaaaiiiiled the movie. That’s why they’re called trailers. Clever, huh?)

‘Brick’ follows the story of Brendan Frye (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt; light years away from his confused commander in ‘3rd Rock From The Sun’), a high school loner well versed in his school’s social strata but possessing a sense of honesty and sincerity, which keeps him from becoming a part of it. This is too bad because the ex-girlfriend he still loves has been murdered and he must sift through these layers to find whodunit. These layers include a dumb jock, an actress with an unusual lackey, a vice-principal, an unstable and smarter-than-you-think Aryan fellow with a penchant toward violence, an underground drug ring, a sweet-talking dame, a seedy drug lord, and, most sinister of all, the warlord’s sweet, oblivious, milk serving mother. (We’ll get to her in a second) He is kicked, punched, played, teased, deceived, kissed, tied up, probed, questioned, fooled, watched and lied to. He doesn’t sleep much either which would not be a problem but for the number of times a can of whoop-ass is opened on him. At one point his breathing became so labored, I thought he was hemorrhaging and missed twenty minutes of the movie desperately hoping someone would take him to the hospital. Frye was cooked, you know what I mean?

The film employs the structure and style of classic noir novels (think Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet) while its characters employ the language. The language is lean, muscular and, in the mouths of the students, comes across as uber-sophisticated slang. The BAM box office even provided a glossary so its audience would not get too lost. I found this a clever yet annoying scheme: I would have needed at least a day to memorize the thing and found watching the movie with it akin to keeping up a conversation in a language I didn’t speak armed only with a Lonely Planet ® phrase book.

‘Stick It’ is an entirely different kind of movie altogether. (“It’s an entirely different kind of movie”.) My friend Leigh and I decided on the movie after a game of ‘Blockbuster Shuffle’, which is the dance you do when you go to a video store and spend hours deciding which movie to rent. Our back and forth stemmed from distrust: did we really want to pay $10.50 a ticket for a film aimed at the twelve-year old girl demographic? But armed with an absurd back-up plan (we thought ‘Mission: Impossible III’ an acceptable alternative), we our bought tickets, found our seats, and prepared to be disappointed.

We never came close. ‘Stick It’ is surprisingly good. The heroine’s name is Haley Graham and when we first see her she’s showing off mad biking skillz and being chased by the police. They catch her and she’s forced by a judge to attend a gymnastics academy as restitution. It turns out Haley (played with considerable moxie and six-pack abs by Missy Peregrym) is also a prodigiously talented gymnast who pulled out of the World Championship tournament some years earlier as her team was on the verge of winning the Gold. Why she did this no one knows; but given this film’s demographic, you can be sure you’re going to find out.

Like the high school in ‘Brick’, the academy is fraught with social and emotional peril; and the abuse the hero takes is so friggin’ extreme and painful to watch that Leigh leaned over to me several times during the movie, grabbed my arm and said “She’s going to be paralyzed!” Instruments of torture include: the balance beam, the parallel bars, the vault, a trampoline, a floor exercise, her prodigious talent, her confused, stupid and clueless parent and a lying narcissistic coach who periodically resembles Beau Bridges (played by Jeff Bridges). The film also tries to set Haley up with a rival: a dumb but competitive gymnast (played by Nikki SooHoo and no, I’m not making that name up.) but seeing as it’s never clear how talented this rival really is or what kind of threat she poses, I cannot list her among the heroine’s obstacles. The rival is funny though - a bastion of ignorance and malapropisms - and the film handles her transformation to friend with such wit and sincerity, it would be a shame not to mention her.

The movie is energetically filmed and loaded with Busby Berkeley type numbers which take full advantage of both the gymnast’s talents and the sport’s speed, structure and candy coated costumes. The dialogue was strained at times and the plot forced; but what sets ‘Stick It’ apart from other teen films, and where it shares a strange similarity with ‘Brick’, comes from the kids’ relationship to the worlds in which they live and in their relationships to adults. The former is unforgiving; the latter barely exist.

I am not sure what role adults play in the lives of teenagers. The books (and Oprah) say adults act as guides and mentors but the reality is their role, while important, is far less active than anyone would care to admit. The teenage journey toward self-realization is fraught with peril and the most adults can do is support when it’s needed and know when to stand back. This is difficult because in some ways parents are just as helpless as their children when it comes to learning life’s great lessons and that, more than anything, is what sucks most about being a teenager: the realization that there is a life out there beyond what they know and that their parents -- their until-recent primary caregivers -- can do nothing to save them from it.

These two films do nothing to dispel that notion. The universe as seen in ‘Brick’ is devoid of any structure; there are no rules because the world itself is broken and the kids are smart and jaded enough to know that nothing much will fix it. I counted two adults in ‘Brick’ – the vice-principal who wants to make Frye a snitch and a patsy; and the aforementioned milk-serving mother who waits on her warlord son and his business “associates” while conveniently ignoring all unsavory elements. Adults are bystanders, offering corruption and a glass of milk to these weary teenage travelers.

Adults exist in ‘Stick It’ but they are mostly portrayed as gullible, manipulative idiots. Yes: the lying, narcissistic coach lies to them; but when he owns up to it, they capitulate without argument. They seem to have no control or interest in their daughters’ futures. But to its credit, and to my surprise, ‘Stick It’ comes up with an interesting solution: Haley, she of strong personality and prodigious talents, allows her self to care about her problems and confront them; and more importantly, she slowly allows that self to be cared for by other people. She keeps her personality but she seems to learn that where adults offer disappointment, her friends offer comfort and validation. That the film took the time to establish this reality satisfied me in such a way that Leigh and I left the theatre giggling and weirdly optimistic.

Near the climax of ‘Stick It’, Haley that what she really wants is for an adult, for SOMEONE, to say how proud of her they are; that what she is doing is good and right and just and worth the effort. And on cue, her coach stops her and does that very thing. I found this trite and predictable and unnecessary. But I also stifled a tear and drank it in like the sentimental monkey I know myself to be. I wonder if the kids in ‘Brick’ ever arrived at such a moment. I wonder if they ever screamed for help. I picture Frye having a moment of clarity and just as he was about to ask for some sort of help, being called into the vice-principal’s office and being forced to rat out his classmates. Demoralizing. Both films show teenagers introduced or grappling with issues of what we really know and how much control we have over our lives. The answer is both stark and startling. And I know two or three or six hundred adults who could relate.