If you look at the biggest neo-noirs of the aughts and squint, you can almost see a series of controlled experiments, each taking the noir concept in a new-ish direction. Memento filtered the grit of the genre through non-linear storytelling; Sin City was Grand Guignol, a comic book come to life; Mulholland Drive was a baffling art film; Brick was half farce, half tragedy and set in high school; and The Man Who Wasn’t There was, well, a Coen brothers movie.
Tag: Val Kilmer
The timelessness of any film is difficult to gauge. I’ve found that the films I hold dear, and declare timeless, have in fact aged along with the rest of us mortals. The hairstyles and costumes show their age, just as much as my old middle school yearbooks do. But what does not age is nostalgia. In fact, nostalgia grows stronger as timeliness fades. But logically we know that there must be certain films that hold their own, despite our emotional attachment to them. Beyond the quality of a film, there are certain factors that prolong its shelf life when compared to its contemporaries.
US, 2005. Rated R. 102 min. Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bensen; Music: Scott Hardkiss, John Ottman, Lior Rosner; Cinematography: Michael Barrett; Written by Brett Halliday and Shane Black; Directed by Shane Black.
Shane Black, the writer and director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, was the original Hollywood screenwriting fairy tale. At the age of 24, in 1985, he sold his first screenplay for a quarter of a million dollars and in the process invented a certain kind of action film that defined Hollywood in the late 80s and early 90s.