SoCal High School Noir?

Ezra Klein justly praises the excellent 2005 film Brick. But he also describes it as “the best hard-boiled noir ever set in a Southern California high school.”

I remember thinking when I saw Brick how strange it was that this film came out at the very same time when Veronica Mars was on television. Suddenly the world was full of Southern California high school noir. And then just like that, the genre vanished. At any rate, I think I liked VM slightly better than Brick, although arguably the TV show doesn’t qualify as “hard-boiled” so we could draw the distinction there.