Kiss Me, Kill Me (2015)

I didn't realize saying "I'm the landlord" or "I'm the lawyer" allows people to walk into an active crime scene. A suggestion to any aspiring screenwriters: If you want to write about something you don't have personal experience with, there is no shame in doing research. It might make the story more believable.

Right from the stylish opening credits (which reminded me of 1963's Charade), this is a stylish, compelling and ultimately very satisfying thriller. It certainly kept me entertained and guessing until the end, mainly because it works on so many levels. Largely, this is due to the quality of the script, which twists and turns brilliantly, without ever losing sight of characters to care about. But mention should also be made of the direction, which is so assured (the movie looks absolutely stunning) and the performances of the cast. Some murder mysteries take an age to get going, but what is particularly impressive about Kiss Me, Kill Me is that it hits the ground running from the outset, and doesn't slacken. Not once was I bored, or looking at my watch. For me, this was one of the unsung gems of the year. Highly recommended.

I don't rehash plots in reviews: you can easily find it by either reading other reviews of the summation at the top of the page. Let's just get to the film itself.The main character is a bit of a mess, but part of that may be because it's difficult to assess exactly how much time has transpired in this film. At some points it feels like it takes place over just a few days, while in others a few weeks. If the former, it makes this seem more like a Hitchcock film, where everyone, from the jilted ex (or is he?) to the baby-desperate lawyer (or is she?) to the hypno-therapist (or is he?) is trying to set this guy up. Think "North by Northwest", done on a smaller, more indie budget. No wonder he's such a basket case by the end, thoroughly convinced that he has indeed murdered... well, someone. But here's the thing: after a while, you just don't care — and not for the reason you might think. You don't care because you're just having such a grand time trying to keep up with all the plot twists and turns. Maybe the jilted ex did it — whoops, no, because now he's dead. The guy who shot the TV producer? Well, now he's dead too — and we're only two thirds of the way through. The central character is hauled in for questioning on numerous occasions and finally leaves one session thoroughly disgusted... only to have the camera cut to the lawyer's sudden, enigmatic smile. Then there's the therapist, with an unstated agenda of his own, the drug-dealing best friend who looks like another possibility, and finally the tag team lesbians who manage to muddy the waters even more. So many people to keep track of!But it's great fun: very well written (Actually North by Northwest written by Feydeau). and, for the most part, well acted and directed. The camera work was not the best, moving into the trite on too many occasions, and the eternally young, WeHo nature of the cast was a tad too relentless (My personal favourite laugh line came when the jilted ex hooks up with the therapist — yes, it's the kind of film where everyone is getting it on with almost everyone else — and dismisses him by saying he should look for someone "your own age"... which may have been about 25.Still, see it. It's totally mindless fun.

Last night's opening film for the San Diego FilmOut LGBT Film Festival was a film gris — my somewhat snotty term for a movie that attempts to be film noir but falls short — called "Kiss Me, Kill Me," a great title that deserves a much better movie than this. It was directed by Casper Andreas, an attractive, youngish man who's so far had seven films shown at the festival in San Diego (more than any other director) and will have an eighth, Flatbush Luck, as the festival's closer on Sunday. "Kiss Me, Kill Me" is not only a great film title but a potentially great film idea: Gay "reality TV" producer Stephen (Gale Harold) is hosting a party at which a lot of people, virtually all of them Queer in one way or another (one annoying thing about this movie is that, like a lot of the 1930's "race films" which seemed to take place in a hermetically sealed world in which all the people were African-American, this is one of those movies in which everyone seems to be Gay or Lesbian), are drinking too much, drugging too much and cruising each other without regard for their nominal marital or relational statuses. Stephen announces that his ex-lover Craigery (Matthew Ludwinski), an aspiring actor (but then this is a movie set in modern-day Los Angeles and West Hollywood, so just about everyone in the dramatis personae is an aspiring actor) is going to be the host of his next show. This pisses off Stephen's current partner, Dusty (Van Hansis, top-billed — apparently he's on the current cast of the soap opera "As the World Turns" and he has enough of a following his name was applauded when it came up on the opening credits, but I'd never heard of him or anyone else in Andreas's cast), not only because Dusty was hoping for the job himself but also because he immediately suspects that it means Stephen and Craigery aren't as "ex" as advertised. Stephen offers Dusty an engagement ring and Dusty takes it, but then their argument flares up again and Stephen ends up leaving his own party and heading to the Pink Dot, which is a sort of part-convenience store and part-all-night deli that offers 24-hour deliveries (this sounds like the sort of business that might flourish in West Hollywood). Dusty follows him there and confronts him, and just then a man in a clown mask whom we've previously seen lurking outside the place bursts in holding a gun and demanding that the clerk (the actor is an appealing Latino who oddly isn't listed on IMDb.com's cast list for the film, though a lot of people with more peripheral parts aren't listed) hand over all the store's money. Gunshots are heard but it's unclear what happens after that — a deliberate ambiguity on the part of Andreas and his screenwriter, David Michael Barrett — because Dusty blacks out and whatever went on is locked in his subconscious. When he comes to he's in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital recovering from a minor gunshot wound in his right arm; but he's shocked to learn that Stephen was killed (as was the clerk, who in this whole universe of spoiled rich brats and wanna-bes is one of the few characters in this movie I could actually imagine liking if I met their real-life equivalent, so it's a real pity that he exits so soon) and he's suspected of using the robbery as a cover to shoot his man because he was doing him wrong (you remember).It's a shame that "Kiss Me, Kill Me" isn't stronger as a piece of storytelling because the technical aspects of the film are superb. Cinematographer Rainer Lipski goes a bit too far towards the overall brown tonalities that seem to be the default setting for just about all movie photography today, but he gets some striking compositions and hits the right balance between making his film look atmospheric and falling into too many gimmick shots. This is especially praiseworthy because virtually all the film was shot on real locations — the budget was about $260,000, half of it was raised through Kickstarter and it's not the sort of film where they could afford studio time or built sets — and Lipski insisted on shooting virtually all the night scenes at night instead of going for day-for-night effects which would have been easier and cheaper but less effective visually. And composer Jonathan Dinerstein wisely avoided trying to come up with the full orchestral sound of a classic 1940's-era noir score; instead he went for a jazz sound that effectively used the Miles Davis-ish trumpet of Ben Burget as a lead instrument. (Given that this is a Gay movie c. 2015 I should probably be even more grateful to Dinerstein for not drowning the score in boring and overloud "electronic dance music"!) The technical aspects of "Kiss Me, Kill Me" were done so well it's all the more infuriating that the script, direction and at least some of the actors let the side down. One of my favorite lines for a film that falls as far short of its potential is "a bad movie with a good movie in it struggling to get out," and had Andreas and Barrett cooled it on the reversals, gone more for plot continuity and dramatic sense, given their leads more depth and avoided the occasional camp asides that took the edge of what was clearly supposed to be a serious thriller, they could have had a much better film and a chance of breaking out of the Gay film-festival ghetto and achieving a mainstream release.