journal features

movie review - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2006.10.02

This is an irritating movie with an irritating lead. It's about an obnoxious young man (played by a forty-year-old actor) who rediscovers an old high-school flame (played by a twenty-eight-year-old) through a series of unlikely events. He gets drawn into a violent criminal sub-culture after lying his way into a movie cast after fleeing the police during a failed break-in. Honestly this story is such a mess that even telling it in a linear fashion would become boring. Not a lot of what follows makes any sense, and the lead actor is at turns engaging and repulsive - he executes someone at one point. The tone doesn't really ever settle down, with things like the rape of one's own daughter or the aforementioned execution being at once serious and played for laughs.

Not recommended.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton