He plays a screenwriter struggling with ideas for his new film, who ends up embroiled with some very scary people when an actor friend of his kidnaps a small dog belonging to a local gangster and holds it for ransom. The always brilliant Christopher Walken plays the kidnap gang's remarkably urbane, sensitive boss, one of several characters in this story who turn out to be not quite what you thought they were.
I found it absolutely hysterically funny in places, as it muses on the lot of a Hollywood screenwriter and the kind of thing he has to come up with to satisfy a modern mainstream audience, including grotesque violence and female characters who are little more than cardboard cutout stereotypes. You don't quite know what is actually happening and what is part of the ridiculous screenplay he's writing, it's great fun trying to figure it out. Along the way there are jokes about the writing process itself that, as an amateur writer, I found laugh-out-loud hilarious, although at the screening I went to I think I was the only person who got them, as I was the only one laughing at those bits.
Well worth a watch on DVD when it comes out, although be warned that the violence is completely unflinching, if cartoony. Great performances all round, especially from Walken.
