”When in Doubt, Have a Man Come Through the Door with a Gun
Other than Night Watch, which is a film I’ll be watching on my own eventually, the only notable DVD in the shop was Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, and while I didn’t make a point of seeing it while it was in the theatres (for all of, what? a week?), turned out to be definitely worth watching. While everyone seemed to take particular note of Val Kilmer’s character being gay, or anyway, a gay private eye, it’s just a device for some snappy banter with Robert Downey Jr., who’s as good in this as in anything else I’ve ever seen him in. What the movie really is, however, is a very genre-referential (or “meta” in internet terms) movie, and everything works to that end, except maybe the solution to the whole mystery, which was very Agatha Christie, if you take the point made in Murder by Death that she had a habit of introducing characters and events only at the solution of the crime rather than early enough in the narrative to allow her readers to keep up with the detective. This is a Raymond Chandler story, or all of them, as noted in the subheadings introducing the days as they progress; very obvious, but still amusing. How anyone can do a contemporary Los Angeles P.I. story without Chandler can only be a rhetorical question, so Shane Black just has fun with it all the way through.