Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
Shane Black does it again. This is hilarious, Val Kilmer should have won an Oscar for this gay private dick. Derringer in the balls, “homophobes never search there”. It’s like The Nice Guys, without the kid.
Small time crook flees a robbery and wanders into an audition. His partner just got gunned down by a lady with a gun, so the scene where he has to mourn his partner feels very real. In Coen-esque way, this is actually phoney, it’s just a ploy to lower the salary of Colin Farrell, but we don’t know it yet.
In a parallel story, a girl from a small town is sick of being raped by his father (the old guy from the opening of Saving Private Ryan). She abandons her sister, not before telling her a story of how her father is an actor in some silly noir film series. This will be important later.
The crook has some “consulting classes” with a real private detective, for “realism”. On a real stakeout, they witness two guys dumping a car into a lake, with a girl in the trunk. Gay Perry gets her out, and our protagonist notices she has no underwear, that the carpet matches the drapes. This will be important later.
After more and more hilarious hijinks, both stories wind up together, but in the end, it’s all a joke, just a big joke. There’s an actual plot, about a guy who puts his daughter in a mental institution, then hires a lookalike to pass for her and sign some papers related to some inheritance, but the girl’s sister was not exactly related to that, only incidentally.
She convinced her sister her father was some actor, then she gets to LA and sees that actor doing hanky-panky with a much younger girl. This drives her to suicide, the plot with her fake “father” is not related.
At least Elvis and Lincoln got back to life for a while in a cameo.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.