In Contention

Tag: Robert Downey Jr.

  • Best in show 2005: the year in superlatives

    It’s time to really round out the year and offer up my picks for awards in 2005.

    In addition to the typical categories – which finally see their winners announced today – you’ll find some other fun arenas for awards citation. Call it a mish-mash of MTV-Awards-type kudos and other frequently heralded categories we find time to time in various critics’ awards and precursor ceremonies.

    No one is better at this sort of thing than Nat Rogers over at The Film Experience, so I recommend you all take a look at his Film Bitch awards when he dishes them out in the coming weeks.

    These will likely be my last extensive thoughts on the awards season this year, barring any brief comments I may or may not make here and/or there. There will, of course, be one final predictions update before the end of the year.

    It feels good to wrap everything up before Christmas vacation, I have to tell you. But the Oscar season is by no means over, so I’ll be diving right back in once 2006 finally rolls around.

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  • SHORT TAKE: “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (***1/2)

    Kiss Kiss Bang BangShane Black’s “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is surprisingly fun, excitingly catty and ultimately one of the greatest guilty pleasure film experiences of the year.

    Based in part on Brett Halliday’s novel “Dead Bodies Are Where You Find Them” – about which I must confess I am entirely ignorant and therefore have no basis for commentary – Black’s film serves as a worthy addition to the canon of the American buddy/cop film genre he helped to create with 1987’s “Lethal Weapon.”

    The conglomerate of Walter Hill, Roger Spottiswoode, Larry Gross and the ever genre-immersed Steven E. de Souza really initiated the concept with 1982’s “48 Hours.” Following suit, the trend continued through to the John McTiernans and the Jan De Bonts of the world toward fully crafting the modern American cop actioner. Of course, films like this can find roots in, say, William Friedkin’s “The French Connection” on some level, but in as much as they exist almost as comedies first and foremost, Shane Black has certainly hand a major hand in paving the way, for better or worse.

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