Saw it yesterday and it did not disappoint. I would have liked to have been watching a DVD because the dialogue was very sharp and I’m sure i missed things. Very clever mix of comedy and the detective thriller which manages to lampoon most of the latter’s conventions without ever losing speed. Downey and Kilmer are great, some great laughs from the gay detective angle and the miracle bonus of Corbin Bernsen accidently being in a movie that doesn’t go straight to DVD or late night TV.
Got to see this earlier today per my note above. Definitely empty calories; the movie isn’t about anything at all beyond its own movieness; but enormously entertaining anyhow.
Ditto. Great, great film. Lots of LA locations for the film, too, and as always it’s a surprise to see things I recognize. But am I the only one who had to suspend disbelief on the concept that Downey and the girl (whatever her name is) are contemporaries?
They actually filmed scenes twice that were right outside the theatre where I was watching the film (Arclight Hollywood on Sunset). That’s always a little freaky. I had the same experience with (I think) The Man from Elysian Fields, as it was largely filmed in Pasadena, albeit they turned “Three Dogs” into a music store and Jake’s Billiards into a high class resturant.
Well that’s nothing compared to the notion that a struggling would-be actress could afford a beach house in Venice or Manhattan Beach. All the struggling actresses I know are holding down two waitressing jobs and living doubled up in studio apartments.
Well, that makes sense. It bothered me throughout the whole movie, partly because Downey just seems so world-weary now. But that would also explain a lot of stuff, like how all of the characters, including Harmony and the pink girl, have better houses than me or anyone I know with a real, full-time paying job. Cause people in the movies always have cool houses.
Stranger: I kept thinking – hey! There’s the Standard! Wait, now they’re in an alley behind the Standard? There’s no alley behind the Standard! And how did they get there so fast – it’s all the way across town! They made some good use of LA locations for the film, though.
I enjoyed it for the most part, and Downey & Kilmer make a great team, but by the end, it felt like it was slowly transforming into the type of movie it claimed to be satirizing. Just because a movie admits its using cliches, or apologizes for its cop-outs, doesn’t somehow exonerate it.
Leagues better than the genuinely horrible Last Action Hero and Hudson Hawk (note to others: Quite a number of people did “get” these films, but humorless cacophonous bullshit remains humorless cacophonous bullshit even if dressed up as alleged “satire”).
True. I just wanted to lash out at something, and I’ve not seen the later films (how many are there now? four? five?) but I was dragged to the first two and was unimpressed.
I don’t know if I’d quite class it in the empty calories category: it isn’t, to quote from Onion A.V. interview, a “real movie about these Guatemalan immigrants, and how they hid under a truck for 300 miles,” but it is a clever deconstruction of action/buddy films and screenwriting in general. There’s a great scene in the end of the movie where Val Kilmer’s character smacks around Harmony’s father (the incestuous father) and you think to yourself, “Wow! That’s tough/revelatory/unexpected/hard-core/whatever”…then Downey shows up with his naration and highlights it: “Did you see him smack that old guy around? That’s heavy, right? Whatever. Anyway…”…and you realize that Black is showing you how screenwriters and directors jerk you around and push your emotional buttons by setting you up for and giving you “the big payoff”. It’s sort of like a magician showing you how a sleight of hand trick is done. It’s not one of Clint Eastwood’s string of Oscar-guaranteed movies, but it’s certainly more clever than anything that has dribbled into theatres in the last twelve months.
Well, they took the I-705 (Jack Bauer Bypass Freeway) of course! Heh. Yeah, I love when they do that, or when they walk from one room to another–cut to new angle–wait a minue! There’s no back room in The Red Buddha! There’s supposed to be a smoker’s patio back there! And how the heck did they go from street level to five floors up without stairs or an elevator? Collateral is particularly egregious in this regard; literally, one momemt Jamie Foxx is driving down in Long Beach and the next he’s on 2nd and Hill. Oh, wait a minute, is he in Venice Beach? Nope, he’s on Santa Monica or Sunset or Beverly over in Hollywood. Oh, look, now he’s at 7th and Metro. Wow! That’s a fast cab! How come it takes me half an hour to get from LAX to Pas but he can flit from downtown to Wilshire before Tom Cruise even has time to reload? He’s almost as fast as McQueen, in Bullitt, who jumps from Knob Hill (or Russian Hill…I can’t tell) to North Bay so quickly you don’t even see him cross the Golden Gate Bridge.
Mann uses some great iconic LA landmarks in Heat, though, and the locations mostly make sense, though I don’t see any beach houses in Santa Monica that are as close to shore as DeNiro’s condo, and the helicopter has to keep flying around and around so it doesn’t run out of skyscrapers to background against. And the Bradbury (featured in Blade Runner as J.F. Sebastian’s apartment building) is a must see for the architecture alone, quite seperate from the film geek thing.
It’s been 16 years since this film has come out, and I saw it for the first time about a month ago.
Let’s reopen the conversation. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an hysterically funny movie which absolutely shatters the fourth wall and the black comedy genre that it’s part of. It helped signify the resurgence of Robert Downey Jr.'s career, and without it we wouldn’t have gotten him as Tony Stark. The MCU would still have happened, but it probably wouldn’t have been as successful, because I think Downey is one of the irreplaceable actors in that series.
It’s eminently quotable, too.
“Look up the word ‘idiot’ in the dictionary; you know what you’ll find?”
“A picture of me?”
“No. The definition of the word ‘idiot,’ which you fucking are!”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“I think you wouldn’t know where to feed yourself if you didn’t flap your mouth so much. Yes, I think you’re stupid.”
“You put a live round in that gun?”
“There was like an 8% chance…”
“Eight percent?! WHO TAUGHT YOU MATH?!”
This movie was relatively obscure and may have gone under your radar in 2006. Do yourself a favor and go back and watch it if you haven’t yet.
It’s been a few years since I’ve seen this movie, but I remember it and agree that it is very entertaining. Now that you have me thinking about it, I’m making a point of seeing it again.
