I don’t know, how do you not love a movie that includes lines like this one, about women in Los Angeles:
I swear to God, it’s like somebody took America by the East Coast, and shook it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on.
And that’s what Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is like: Relentlessly clever dialogue, witty screenplay, extremely self-aware without crossing the line into being eye-glazing about it.
Essentially an update of a second-tier LA-based noir film, the film moves so quickly and is so funny that many audiences may not catch that they’re watching a film that could have once starred Alan Ladd or Humphrey Bogart. There’s the beaten-to-a-pulp detective in over his head, the rich movers and shakers who can crush him at will, the dream girl who’s alternately sexually available and loathes him, dead bodies that get moved around, seemingly on their own and lots more standard bits.
Toss in Robert Downey, Jr. doing his best work in years, Val Kilmer, funny again for the first time in decades and the new-to-me-but-ought-to-be-a-star Michelle Monaghan, and you’ve got a solid, solid cast capable of making the clever script pop. Heck, there’s even some footage from a truly awful 1980s Corbin Bernsen action movie, which isn’t something you see every day.
It’s hard to figure how this got overlooked in theaters, but no fans of buddy movies (the film is written and directed by the creator of the first — and vastly superior to the sequels — Lethal Weapon movie), Downey or Kilmer should miss this.
Sensationally great fun.
The problem when adapting a tremendously great novel like Nick Hornsby’s High Fidelity is that, well, your movie gets compared to a tremendously great novel like Nick Hornsby’s.
In this case, it’s an especially tough comparison, because the novel is relentlessly introspective, list-obsessed and obsessive compulsive about music in that braggadocio admire-my-eclectic-tastes sort of way.
Now, while a movie can do reasonably well with the music — although this adaptation, strangely, has very little focus on its own soundtrack — it simply can’t compete with a novel for introspection or the endless lists.
Of course, the book doesn’t have great performances by a wonderful array of actors or the genial charm of John Cusack — Rob, in the novel, desperately needs a slap on the back of the head, and not a particularly gentle one, either — but the film ends up feeling like the creators are trying to turn Hornsby’s very mannish novel into a film that fans of Meg Ryan would like, which really sucks a lot of the life out of it.
The film is nice, inoffensively so, and it’s definitely worth watching for Cusack and Cusack and Zeta-Jones and Black. But in the time it took to watch the movie, one could have read most of the (short) novel.
Do yourself a favor and read the novel afterwards if you liked the movie.
So, I’m loving my new Treo 650 and, via the magic of the Ringo Pro shareware program, enjoying using ringtones for my different groups of contacts. (I know, I know, it’s very passé. I’m late.)
Although my regular ringtone is the instrumental portion of LL Cool J’s“Going Back to Cali” before he begins rapping, my news contacts cause my phone to ring with the Eagles’ “Dirty Laundry” when they call. (I never said it was particularly clever.)
But lest anyone think I’m unusually dorky (because of this, at least), when I was at a police “event” today (you’ll see what it was in tomorrow’s Daily Press and Tuesday’s Hesperia Star), I heard two separate police officials’ cell phones ring, and each had police/detective show theme songs as their ringtones. (I think they were the Rockford Files and Hill Street Blues, respectively, but they were the plinky MIDI versions and not totally identifiable.)
So it’s not just me.
You know, just when I thought that blogs and blogging and all that were dying down (or at least finally morphing into noisy text lite MySpace pages and the like), I do a piece on Scott McCloud for CBR and 10,000 bloggers come out of the woodwork to talk about it.
Who the hell knew that the Live Journal crowd was so ga-ga for McCloud?
Not particularly timely, since as far as I know, there’s no hint of the final Harry Potter book on the horizon, but despite that …
I’m a Gryffindor!
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