At the dawn of the 21st century it
seemed as though Robert Downey Jr. would be remembered as a cautionary example,
just another instance of immense talent needlessly squandered due to an
inability to cope. As 2006 looms, however, Downey is at the top of his game.
His refined performance in George Clooney’s Good
Night, and Good Luck stands out among a uniformly stellar ensemble, and in
the cunningly fun noir KissKiss, Bang Bang, Downey
plays Harry, a East Coast gunsel who stumbles into a West Coast murder
investigation and risks his neck to save a skirt called Harmony.
None other than Val Kilmer, another
notorious gift-waster, joins Downey for this phoenix-like renaissance… and
almost steals Kiss Kiss right out
from under Downey’s formidable nose. Kilmer finally gets another chance to show
off his flair for comedy as Perry, a fabulously droll private detective who
acts as Harry’s tour guide through the seedy underbelly of Hollywood. How is it
possible that these two warhorses look so great after such hard living?
Redemption obviously does wonders for the complexion.
Harry is our fast-talking narrator,
and he shows us how he wound up in Los Angeles after hiding out from New York’s
finest in, and then hilariously acing, an audition. Harry is supposed to study
Perry’s PI ways for his new acting role, but the bodies start piling up and the
two men uncover a connection between Perry’s case and the assignment that Harry
agreed to take on for lost love Harmony (the impressive Michelle Monaghan),
because “detective” goes further than “thief” when trying to sweet-talk your
childhood crush.
The plot is actually rather arcane
and, to be perfectly honest, irrelevant. Kiss
Kiss is an excuse to watch virtuoso performers deliver whipsmart lines at a
breakneck pace (California, for example, is described as if “someone took
America by the East Coast and shook it and all the normal girls hung on”). And
writer-director Shane Black divides his dark romp into days using the titles of
Raymond Chandler novellas (i.e., “Day 1: Trouble Is My Business”), causing this
pulp freak girl to cackle with glee as I tried to guess what the following
chapters might be called. It’s interactive moviegoing!
Black was once the highest-paid
screenwriter around, and his fresh script for the first Lethal Weapon effectively drafted the blueprint for the modern-day
buddy movie. Black is keenly aware of what he hath wrought, however, and with Kiss Kiss, his directing debut, he seems
to get quite a charge out of taking all the clichรฉs he arguably pioneered and
satirizing them with a wrecking ball. Fortunately, so does the audience.
Unfortunately, though, said audience
may have to Netflix this one. As I write this, I have no idea whether Kiss Kiss will last in Rochester
theaters beyond one week. For some reason, a quality flick like this opened on
just one screen in town, a suburban googolplex where it will most likely flop,
thus making way for the juggernaut that is Harry Potter. And this would normally
be the part where I would complain about the abundance of venues and the dearth
of good movies, but I’m just not in the mood.
The
Polish Film Festival, organized by the Skalny Center for Polish and Central
European Studies at the University of Rochester, celebrates its 10th
anniversary in 2005. The closing night selection is Anya (In and Out of Focus),
a lovely documentary by Polish-born filmmaker Marian Marzynski about his
daughter Anya. Marzynski will be at the Dryden Theatre to present his film,
which was most likely intended as an exhaustive chronicle of one woman’s
evolution but becomes something else along the way.
Having fled the Warsaw ghetto as a
young boy, Marzynski gets a second chance to experience childhood, this time
through the eyes of his American-born daughter. He trained a camera on Anya for
25 years or so, and his footage illustrates a sharp and dramatic young lady
only occasionally at ease with the fact that her every triumph and misstep is
being recorded. Anya’s parents learn about America as she does, especially
Anya’s architect mother Grazyna, whose reticent racism surfaces once Anya’s romantic
life begins.
Marzynski probably envisioned Anya as a tribute to his daughter, but
to watch it you realize that it’s also a moving portrait of one girl’s
unconditional adoration of her father, a man who confuses interest in his
daughter’s life with the need for compelling cinema. How else to explain the
remarkable restraint exhibited by a 14-year-old who merely rolls her eyes and
clams up upon being asked the on-camera question, “Do you menstruate?”
Kiss
Kiss, Bang Bang (R)
is playing at Tinseltown | Anya (In and Out of Focus) is
showing Friday, November 18, at the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre, at 8
p.m.
This article appears in Nov 16-22, 2005.
