Big Gold Brick

8/28/2022

It says a lot – or very little – about Big Gold Brick that it is an example of the book being better than the movie, even though the ‘book’ is completely fictional – not its content, mind you, but its very existence. The film, narrated by Samuel Liston (Emory Cohen), is an account of the experiences that inspired him to write a novel called “With Gold Bricks” (a title as arbitrary as that of the movie itself); a tome so hefty as to give the impression of depth, just like the movie’s 132-minute running time gives the illusion of substance. The truth is, however, that director Brian Petsos’s script can’t be said to barely scrape the surface because it’s too shallow to even have a surface to scrape. What we have here is essentially a collection of loose ends and unresolved plot points. We