1. Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is a hilarious and fresh look at the pulpy, Chinatown investigation plot. The two lead characters, Harry Lockhart played by Robert Downey Jr., and Gay Perry, played by Val Kilmer, reminds one of a modern day back-and-forth similar to Vincent and Jules from Pulp Fiction. Except that Gay Perry is, well, gay. He's still a raging, self-confident bad-ass, who I would compare more fondly with Jules than Vincent. The character of Harry, on the other hand, is not so easily pinned down: he's a fake investigator, party boy from New York, lost in the criminal and exotic world of Los Angeles. The movie is fairly short, but it never lets go of your attention, like a Tarantino movie. It slickly moves back to the past and into the present, seeming together two stories of childhood between Harry and Harmony, an old friend he finds at a bar in Los Angeles. She is a charm and leads Harry into being a fraudulent detective after her sister is found dead; the news says the sister committed suicide, but Harmony doesn't believe it, she thinks it was murder: the rest of the movie consists of outrageous getaways and classic comic dialogue between Harry and Perry. It somewhat romanticizes the quest to stardom in Los Angeles, while even balancing a little drama in the fact that no-one really made it. Each situation ends with a random, spontaneous occurrence that leads the disjointed Harry onto his next clue, all the while looking behind him in awe at Harmony's beauty. A blast of a film, It is modern-day Tarantino at it's finest.