journal features

movie review - Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one 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

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot