Listen up, ya yegs. Ask any dope rat or reef worm in your 'burg, and they'll tell ya to drop your gat and heel it to a movie theater. Make sure the bulls don't gum up your plans, or it'll be duck soup for everyone.

Confused? What you may be interpreting as modern-day street slang is actually the essence of a no-nonsense literary genre minted nearly 100 years ago. And thanks to the innovative new film "Brick," those old-school gangster words are flowing out of new-school gangsta mouths.

"It started with Dashiell Hammett's novels," first-time filmmaker Rian Johnson said of the Depression-era writer. "He's the guy who wrote 'The Maltese Falcon' and 'Red Harvest' and started the whole hard-boiled detective genre back in the '20s and '30s."

Hammett's shockingly violent stories told tales of jaded, hard-drinking antiheroes battling cocky crime bosses and the muscle-bound gunmen who surrounded them. Typically, there was a lot of blood and even more rapidly delivered dialogue — and there was always a dame.

"My character is very wicked and manipulative," said Meagan Good ("You Got Served"), citing the tradition that fuels her character. "She's a drama vamp who lives in the theater department and kind of preys on freshmen. So I was like, 'Oh, that should be fun.' "

After decades of detective stories and film noir, the genre most recently gave birth to "Sin City" and "Miller's Crossing," which feature morally ambiguous main characters.

"I get the crap kicked out of me the entire movie," said Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the detective-like high-schooler who goes looking for answers when his girlfriend (Emilie de Ravin of "Lost") is murdered. "It's almost more like watching Bugs Bunny than watching 'Mission: Impossible.' "

"The main character is just getting the crap kicked out of him every other scene, and that's something that goes back to the old detective movies," added Johnson, who took all of those old formulas and injected their qualities into the modern-day story he shot at the Orange County high school he attended.

"It's funny how the high school world and the detective-movie world mesh together really, really easily. Think of the old detective stuff, like 'The Maltese Falcon' or 'The Big Sleep.' It's all about these shady little underworlds and high-society worlds. ... That's what high school is. It's all about the caste system and who you hang with and who you eat lunch with."

Anyone who's ever been in a high school classroom will recognize the cocky jocks, contraband-filled lockers and parking-lot fist fights from "Brick." To truly immerse yourself in this world, however, you've got to know the lingo.

" 'Burg is the neighborhood," explained Gordon-Levitt. " 'You have to blow the 'burg' means 'You have to get out of town.' "

"Reef worm is a stoner, like someone who smokes a lot of weed. I don't need to use that in a sentence, do I?" de Ravin said. "I like that word, though. Isn't that a great word?"

"Yeg ... that's a guy," Gordon-Levitt said. "There's a slightly derogatory feel to it, like, 'That yeg over there is a dumb-ass.' "

Then there's "heel" (get out as quickly as you can); "take a powder" (to leave); and the phrase that describes a bunch of victims waiting to be slaughtered: "duck soup." "Duck soup is like, if you're f---ed, you're duck soup," Gordon-Levitt said. "If I'm gonna screw you over, you're duck soup."

Such highly stylized wordplay demanded exact line readings from the stars, so Gordon-Levitt looked to an unusual source to wrap his mind around the script.

"For me, the biggest influence was music more than movies. The dialogue is more like lyrics than natural speech," he revealed. "Wu-Tang Clan bear a lot of similarities to this movie because they take elements you would never think go together — like hip-hop and kung-fu movies — and put them together to create this language, this whole world. 'Brick' is that way. It takes the detective movie and high school and puts it together, and it's seamless, even though it seems weird just like hip-hop and kung fu."

It's a long way from typical Hollywood depictions of high school kids and their prom-time problems. And, according to Johnson, Hollywood would much rather avoid "Brick" altogether and continue dumbing things down for the teenage demographic.

"When we were showing the script around to try to get it made, one comment that we got a lot was, 'This is too smart for high school kids,' " he said. "That just always made my blood boil. ... When you're in high school, that is your entire world. ... When you're actually in it, it feels much more serious than the adult world ever does, just because it's your entire universe."

So whether you're a simple yeg or a lousy reef worm, the basic questions of "Brick" and any high school are the same: Are you smart enough to make it out alive?

"There's something larger than life about high school," Gordon-Levitt said. "The stakes are so high and the cliques are so defined that everything's like life or death. That's how a detective movie is too: It's life or death."

"Someone asked us last night, 'Is that how kids really talk now?' " he said. "And I was like, 'No — but they will soon.' "

Check out everything we've got on "Brick."

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