[UA] Vaguely UA-able movie: Brick

[Peter Kisner]

Generally when a movie strikes me as at least moderately impressive in
some way my brain immediately starts trying to figure out which of my
favorite RPGs it would best fit either as a scenario, or just
ambiance-wise.  In general it goes:

* Changeling:  the Dreaming - If the movie deals heavily with a shared
delusion, themes of creativity overwhelmed by the mundane, magic
empowered by belief (or lack of scrutiny), dream-like states or
nightmarish beings.

* Mage:  the Ascension - If the movie in any way endorses alternate
paradigms, alternate worlds, or humans bending the normal rules or
reality in some way.  Even better if there's a powerful "status quo"
faction that has to be contended with regularly.

*  Call of Cthulhu - If the movie deals in any way with things that
Should Not Be.  Especially things that take human assumption about
what is "normal" and stand those assumptions on their head with
unsettling results.

* Unknown Armies - Anything else that has a vaguely occult theme, or
just some really weird crap in it, generally sets off my UA alarms.
But not just para-normal stuff.  Anything with a certain level of
incongruity will do it as will anything that shows the seedy
underbelly of a sub-culture in an intriguing enough light.

For this last reason I mention the movie "Brick" which I finally got
around to watching yesterday from netflix.

The storyline in Brick surrounds a high school kid investigating the
drug-related death of his ex-girlfriend.  The whole thing is
intentionally stylized to have strong elements from the noir and "hard
boiled detective" genres.  This is generally done with sufficient
subtlety that the story still feels semi-plausible in a modern
context, and doesn't just end up as a another vaguely comedic
retro-ization of a modern story.  Though in a few scenes they do lay
on the lingo a bit heavily.

The seedy underbelly dealt with in Brick alternates between the sort
of back-lot grime you'd almost expect in real life, and the more
cultivated incongruity found in a David Lynch film.

Now it'd be pretty difficult to peg any of the events in Brick as
having occult significance (unless you count one of the (thankfully)
deleted scenes) or even really approaching a typical Lynchian level of
bizarreness.  But the tone of the movie and the way it unfolds, the
grit and the consequences for getting what you want, these all strike
me as ideally fitting the ambiance for a UA scenario.  Hence the
reason I mentioned it here.

I got nothing else.


- Peter K.


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