Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)

December 18, 2018 10:03 AM

A murder mystery brings together a private eye, a struggling actress, and a thief masquerading as an actor.
posted by the man of twists and turns (16 comments total)

For my money, one of the funniest movies out there. RDJ is perfect!
posted by orrnyereg at 10:37 AM on December 18, 2018 [7 favorites]

Yes, a talking monkey. Came here from the future; only says "Ficus."
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:31 PM on December 18, 2018 [8 favorites]

There are only a handful of movies that I never get tired of, and this is one of them. It's still hilarious every single time. Everything Perry says is gold. And it's a Christmas movie!

"Why in pluperfect hell would you pee on a corpse?!"
posted by Sibrax at 6:06 PM on December 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

P: Look up idiot in the dictionary, you know what you'll find?

H: A picture of me?

P: No, the definition of the word idiot, which you fucking are!
posted by axiom at 2:02 AM on December 19, 2018 [5 favorites]

Your case, and my case...

Are the same fucking case.
posted by doctornecessiter at 6:41 AM on December 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

I love this movie! I feel like not enough people have seen it. I'm going to remedy that this weekend by making my husband watch it.
posted by Aquifer at 10:21 AM on December 19, 2018

I feel like Shane Black really gets what makes RDJ compelling and fun, this movie and Iron Man 3 show that you can't just rely on flippant sarcasm for him, his character has to be that way to cope with the panic of being in over his head.

I forgot about the shitty joke the script has Harry make about sexual abuse victims though, that's a bad look.
posted by jason_steakums at 11:35 AM on December 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

I'm pretty sure that this is the movie where, in the director's commentary, the director and RDJ say of one of the child actors: "She's so cute I wanna squeeze her til she's dead," and it cracked me right the F up then and does every time I think about it.
posted by cooker girl at 1:22 PM on December 19, 2018

My favorite thing about this movie is the way the story actually follows the same arc Harry describes for the Jonny Gossamer books. Starts out gritty and low key with two cases that turn out to be connected, and by the end of the movie, people are dangling off bridges by one hand while shooting at oncoming cars.
posted by Naberius at 12:31 PM on December 20, 2018 [2 favorites]

This movie whips ass and I haven't seen it in a long time.
posted by rhizome at 6:15 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

The little girl in the magic act at the beginning, who says "I'm going to be an actor!" is Ariel Winter, who did grow up to be one, on Modern Family
posted by librosegretti at 8:11 PM on December 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

In 2007 my Navy destroyer made a port visit to Kota Kinabulu on the island of Borneo. In a shopping mall there I bought a dozen obviously pirated DVDs and a small DVD player. Of all the movies I bought, only Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and John Cusack's noir thriller Ice Harvest turned out to work in my player. So I watched those two movies over and over again inside my rack (bed compartment) during the tediously boring three months of a counter-terrorism deployment off the shores of Jolo and Basilan islands in the Phillipines. I remember both of them as being pretty good movies, so if I had to be stuck with only two, those were the right ones. Now I want to watch KKBB again. (Ice Harvest, not so much -- very dark.)
posted by seasparrow at 9:29 PM on December 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

I have never seen this movie, which is strange since I am a huge RDJ fan and have always heard good things about it. I should remedy this situation tonight.
posted by Julnyes at 11:21 AM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

The commentary track is equally as funny as the film.

I freaking LOVE this movie. (Except that horrible "joke" about sex-abuse survivors. Which is unfortunate, because the punchline of "I mean, it's literally like someone took America by the East Coast and *shook* it, and all the normal girls managed to hang on" is a great line, in a vacuum.

I saw this movie alone in the theater on a whim and have never laughed myself into pain before or since at the movies. If it hadn't been released when it was released* (and if WB hadn't completely fucked up the marketing for it), this would have been RDJ's comeback. Instead we had to wait three years for Iron Man (which is fine! I'm just bummed that KKBB isn't as universally known as it should be).

*(KKBB was released, with approximately zero marketing, the same week that the following pictures were new or new-ish in theaters: The Constant Gardener; Brokeback Mountain; Walk the Line; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Batman Begins.)
posted by tzikeh at 2:04 PM on December 25, 2018 [5 favorites]

"Who taught you grammar?"

"Who taught you math?"

"Don't worry, I saw Lord of the Rings. I'm not going to end this 17 times."
posted by tzikeh at 2:11 PM on December 25, 2018

I saw this at a movie theater in Sweden when my kid was still young enough that someone had to leave when grandma called and it was my ex. I refused to budge. I rarely laugh out loud the way I did at this film. It was baffling to me that so few people had seen it but tzikeh provides the context I was missing. I just thought nearly all of it was perfect and just hysterically funny.
posted by Bella Donna at 10:12 AM on February 2, 2019 [1 favorite]