Three Films Make A Post: Got a pencil? Take this down. Tomorrow you die.

Hit Man (2023): To my eyes, Richard Linklater’s perfectly decent comedy has been more than a little overhyped. It’s very Linklater in many ways, starting with the typical “I would like to be Eric Rohmer, alas I’m American” style of its dialogue scenes (do I need to mention that I loathe Rohmer’s dialogue style?), the same view on American culture he has had for the last decades, the slick but a bit empty style, and the grand gesture Linklater traditionally likes to present decent but not exactly terribly exciting ideas with.

This doesn’t mean this is a bad movie – like most everything Linklater ever did, this is an eminently watchable and entertaining piece of work, just not one that connects with me on any level beyond my appreciation for its rather unexciting craftsmanship.

Zu: (The) Warriors from the Magic Mountain aka 新蜀山劍俠 (1983): When it came out, Tsui Hark’s wuxia extravaganza was a core movie in the introduction of at the time state of the art special effects techniques to Hong Kong cinema that gifted us the joys of the wire fu style of wuxia (among other things). Not all of the film’s effects have aged gracefully, but the film throws so many at the audience that you’ll only have to blink and get to the next one; plus, many of the effects are of such insane and lovely conception, their actual quality isn’t too important to me.

Of course, the film’s absolutely unrelenting pace can be a bit of a difficulty if a viewer is in the wrong mood or prone to headaches, something that isn’t helped by its love for throwing barely comprehensible philosophical concepts at the viewer in the same tempo it does everything else.

It’s all a bit like having one’s head bashed in with a bag of the best candy one has ever eaten. In the right mood, that’s not a criticism coming from me.

P.I. Private Investigations (1987): For much of its running time, Nigel Dick’s film is the epitome of the competent-but-not-more thriller in the Hitchcockian style. Dick’s direction is slick, Los Angeles is Los Angeles, and Clayton Rohner’s whiny rich boy protagonist the kind of guy I’m pretty happy to see suffer a bit – it’s that kind of film, and he’s no Cary Grant.

From time to time, however, there’s a hiccup in the conventional slickness, and the film goes off in strange directions for half a scene or so – a chase is interrupted by our protagonist randomly stumbling into a heist, a dream sequence intrudes for no good reason – that keep it away from boring competence syndrome.