Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
What a movie! Meta, meta, meta! (Whatever that means.) For all the violence - and the corpses do pile up toward the end - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a funny movie, with lots of LOL moments. It works by spoofing the clichés of detective movies, not at the level of the action so much as in its presentation. Val Kilmer, for example, plays the part of a gay detective straight; gay mannerisms are on a short to nonexistent leash. The spoof is in having cast Val Kilmer in the part to begin with. Having come up with a linebacker-sized gay detective, filmmaker Shane Black keeps the joke fresh by making sure that you never know where he's going to go with it.
Robert Downey, Jr has played more interesting parts - such as Joe Werbsha in Good Night, and Good Luck, which is also in theatres. But Harry Lockhart, like Blake Allen in Two Girls and a Guy, is a role that Mr Downey was born to play. A scamp on the spot, his Harry has eyes that careen more or less constantly in search of emergency exits. He has a good heart, though, and we're root for him all the way. We feel his pain, however, only to an extent, because his predicaments are too funny. And their arrangement, their sequence play with your expectations. Consider the history of one of his fingertips. Not now, but after you've seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
Michelle Monaghan has been in a few movies that I've seen, such as The Bourne Supremacy, but I can't say that I've noticed her before. The simplest description would be: the new Sandra Bullock. I could not make up my mind whether her part would have benefited from deeper inflection, greater archness. As it is, she sends up the corn fed all-American girl who goes to Hollywood to be a slut. Well, not really, but close. The spoof is that it hasn't spoiled her.
There are several bold forays into serious drama. They're momentary, but they break the prevailing mood. The miracle is that Mr Black can snap it back on the minute he wants to. There are also quite a few loose ends, but these don't occur to you until after the show is over. I will be interested to see how this movie plays after three or four viewings. But it's great fun the first time around.
Nothing interesting was showing at the Storage Unit Theatre (nothing that I hadn't seen, that is), and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was showing across the street. To even things up, I came home for lunch - a bowl of minestrone, and read "The Truman Show," Daniel Mendelsohn's glowing review of Capote, the The New York Review of Books. I hope that you've had a chance to see that by now.
Can't wait to own it. It's an amusement park ride of the first order. Almost impossible to describe. Very, very meta, but never confusing. Robert Downey Jr was his usual self (his role in Good Night, and Good Luck is a more interesting part, but there's no down side to watching an actor doing what comes naturally.) I never made up my mind about his costars, Val Kilmer as a gay detective, and Michelle Monaghan as the girl from the past. But it really doesn't matter. The ride's too much fun. Despite all the shooting and some moments of real suspense, this is a good-time picture.
