Val Kilmer wears an unidentified watch

It is night in Los Angeles, and Perry van Shrike has a pistol up in a two-handed grip, sighting down the barrel past a palm tree at something in the dark. Val Kilmer plays Perry, the sharp, fastidious private detective everyone in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang calls Gay Perry. The film is Shane Black's debut as a director, written by the same man who wrote Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, and it pairs Perry with Robert Downey Jr.'s small-time thief Harry Lockhart in a Christmas-set neo-noir that keeps tripping over real corpses.

On the wrist of his outstretched gun arm is a watch you can almost read and not quite. The case is rectangular, a soft-cornered tonneau shape, with a pale silver dial and a dark leather strap. It is a dress watch, the kind of thing that suits Perry's careful tailoring rather than the gunplay he keeps getting dragged into. The brand never comes clear on screen, and no reliable account of the film names it, so the watch stays where the footage leaves it, a smart rectangular dress watch of unknown make.