Hacker Cinema
Die Hard
1988 · Film · 132 min
Part of Die Hard Collection
Directed by John McTiernan
High above the city of L.A. a team of terrorists has seized a building, taken hostages, and declared war. One man has manages to escape... An off-duty cop hiding somewhere inside. He's alone, tired... and the only chance anyone has got.
64 positive8 negative2 mixed113 neutralfrom 187 commenters
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210 comments on Hacker News
I meant to write quite a long response to your comment, but let me just bring it down to a single question: How is your feeling different from melancholia?
There is and always will be mainstream, niche, the unknown and everything in between. There was always very little new material and a lot of works just gained recognition when their zeitgeist was long overdue, too. I think experimentation is hard, and it's even harder to justify experimentation in the evolving economic climate.
Genres are meant to be collapsed, or rather they should blend and dissolve into each other. The earlier (and good) seasons of The Simpsons are a poster child when it comes "flattening and duplicating old material". Almost every episode cites a movie or work of literature, and there was nothing wrong with it! It's part of why I understand the 90s as a cultural era of citations, and I had to grow up with that sentiment. It took me quite some time to understand that we moved past it.
Nowadays, we are fortunate enough that a lot of things from the past 10 decades have been digitized and are readily available on demand. That's amazing! Nothing is stopping me from asking myself some naive questions, like "What makes a good drama?" or "If Die Hard is considered to be a Christmas movie, why isn't Falling Down considered to be a summer movie?". I think there is still stuff to explore.
I'll just leave this unfinished thought with a recommendation to a niche movie I discovered recently: Sleep Has Her House (2017)[0]
[0]: https://scottbarley.com/Sleep-Has-Her-House
I wonder if someone in Fance recently saw the Die Hard movie where thieves robbed the Federal Reserve Bank in NY.
I didn't see that one, I added it to my shortlist.
Part of my point though is that, for a long time, the big-budget Hollywood stuff was actually "the good stuff." Like people can quibble about whether indie art films were better or not but I think it's pretty well agreed that (some set of) the big name directors and actors and blockbusters were pushing the art form. And it required those kinds of budgets to pull off, and it was seen as legitimately elite status to be given the chance to do it. The crazy complicated shit they did with practical effects and elaborate set building, for example. Teams of visionaries coming together to build deeply immersive worlds. It was a bleeding edge of art, and it attracted those types.
Read about the making of Die Hard. They're legitimately blowing up and ramming SWAT vehicles into a huge office tower in Los Angeles. Alan Rickman of all people is doing crazy stuntwork with flying cameras and real explosions and everything needs to be timed to the millisecond and executed by the whole team. There is no "do it in post", there is no CGI. And you can feel it.
Some in this thread have made the point that it was wasteful and excessive, and dangerous, and exploited labor, and that is all true, but...it was art.
I recently watched A League of Their Own and Die Hard. In my opinion, these movies are just categorically different from what's being made today, are still totally compelling start to finish, and really capture the magic and the high art of the golden age of cinema. I truly believe movies were Just Better 30-40 years ago.
That was the era of "every second counts." Every second has meaning and purpose and adds something to the narrative. The Fifth Element is another good example, and almost 30 years old. Now in the age of binging, where a 2 hour plot is stretched into 17 hours of TV, there is SO much filler and downtime and it's honestly just offensive in comparison.
I kind of enjoyed Pluribus, I liked the concept and what they did with it, but there's way too much forgettable filler that dilutes it into a slog. The movies I mentioned are (again, IMO) absolutely gripping and just lean and mean storytelling vehicles. Like it kind of reminded me that watching a movie wasn't just something you did leisurely while doing other things.
These days, I just try to clone the core functionality of such sites as fast as I can. So, tried the same with this.
For this, I screenshotted the demo panel and asked chatgpt to generate relevant prompt. Here it is: https://sharetext.io/zy6ccjrm
Then, tested with demo question and a sample comment of mine as answer to it:
Input text: `Die Hard: Is It a Christmas Movie?`
Comment: `nop, its not actually`
===
And here's gemini flash 2.5 lite's response: https://sharetext.io/e7y7kyoe
Total cost: $0.00115
Per dollar: 860+ comments.
- my comment "what an absolute moron"
- Comment Health - Score: 1/5 - Toxicity: 0.80 - Low effort: No
- Using derogatory terms like 'moron' targets the person rather than addressing their argument. This kind of name-calling creates a hostile environment where people feel attacked and are less likely to share their thoughts. Instead, aim to explain why you disagree without resorting to insults.
- Objectionable Phrases:
- "moron"
- Calling someone a 'moron' is a personal insult that attacks their intelligence instead of engaging with their ideas. This type of language can hurt feelings and shut down respectful conversation, making it harder to discuss different viewpoints. Spam Check
- Not spam (confidence: 95%)
- This comment is rude and insulting but doesn't promote any product or scam, so it's not spam. It's simply a toxic remark about someone's opinion. Relevance Check
- On-topic: No (confidence: 90%)
- This is off-topic - the comment doesn't engage with the discussion about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie and instead resorts to name-calling without context.
- Also apologies for writing that, had to test the system
Q: Die Hard: Is it a Christmas movie?
A: Of course it is. It was released on a sunny day, and that makes it a Christmas movie.
[x] Published Relevance Check On-topic: Yes (confidence: 90%)
I think it did a decent job. The key might be how customizable the censorship is.
Article Context: Fun: Die Hard; Is It a Christmas Movie?
Your(my) Comment: The erotic version of Die Hard does involve Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists on Christmas Eve.
Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes
This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film. Results: Revision Requested. This comment would be sent back for revision with feedback.
Revise Low Effort
Comment appears to be low effort
Objectionable Phrases:
"Santa Claus getting naughty with the terrorists"
This phrase can be seen as sexualizing a character traditionally viewed as innocent and family-friendly, which is inappropriate. Such language can make discussions feel uncomfortable or offensive to some audiences.
Relevance Check On-topic: No (confidence: 90%)
This is off-topic - the comment about an erotic version of Die Hard strays into inappropriate content that doesn't relate to the film's actual story or its production details.
Banned topics found: sexual content, adult themes
This comment touches on adult themes and sexual content, which are not suitable for discussion in this context about a classic action film.
I made a comment which would be legitimate perspective but flag the LLM. Predictably, it was flagged. This shows the problem with using an LLM to police a space for ideas -- they are not good at edge cases.
My comment:
Die Hard is a Christmas movie as much as it is a heist movie -- that is, not at all. It is a celebration of Capitalism and of masculine domination. The 'strong woman' needs to be rescued by her man, and the foreign corporation needs the exceptional American cowboy to save it from the effete fancy cigarrette smoking villains.
Result:
Revise Dogwhistle
This comment uses coded language when referring to 'masculine domination' and 'effete fancy cigarette smoking villains'. These terms suggest a disdain for perceived weakness, often implying a negative view of non-traditional masculinity and linking foreignness with moral failure, which can echo larger discriminatory attitudes.
My response:
The film comments specifically about the fancy cigarettes. A core theme in the film is the contrast between the European style and the American style, where the protagonist is called a 'cowboy' but we are meant to see him as opposed culturally as well as purposefully.
The male-domination is not something I agree with per se but as an action movie it is a legitimate perspective to hold.
This passes your checks, but a human moderator would flag it:
> My favorite movie is die hard. I think it's a Christmas movie. But, honestly, we shouldn't have to wait until Christmas to watch you die hard. We should be able to watch that any day of the week :)
Seems to catch various other cases though. Cool tool.
The sample prompt I was given was "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?"
"Of course it is!" got an 80% certainty "off-topic" mark.
When I elaborated that it occurs at a Christmas party, it said this:
"Dogwhistles detected (confidence 80%): This comment seems innocuous, but the phrasing 'Christmas party' may be an underhanded reference to Christian themes, especially among discussions that might dismiss or attack secular or diverse holiday celebrations. This kind of language can subtly imply exclusion or preference for Christian traditions over others, which can marginalize those who celebrate different traditions."
Not a great first experience.
I've seen the trend on Facebook/Instagram to say "unalived" instead of "killed" or "cupcakes" instead of "vaccines" and suspect humans are long gonna be cleverer than these sorts of content filtering attempts, with language getting deeply weird as a side-effect.
edit: I would also note that it says "Referring to others as 'horrible people' is disrespectful and diminishes the possibility of a respectful discussion. It positions certain individuals as entirely negative, which can alienate others and shut down dialogue.", if I feed it your post, too.
Needing to prompt the persona breaks the illusion, though. "Your favorite movie is Die Hard (1988). What's your favorite movie?" isn't technically impressive. Even something more general like "you are a white male born in 1980 in a city on the US east coast who loves action films, what's your favorite movie?" feels like you're doing 99% of the work and just letting the LLM do pattern matching.
Ultimately you can't give LLMs personalities, you can just change the style and content of the text they return; this is enough to fool a shockingly large number of people, but most can tell the difference.
So what about older films? Can you understand Die Hard on the same set? What about Lord of the Rings? That would help to determine whether it's newer films or your newer speakers that are the problem since millions of people have enjoyed those films with no problems.
None, I was laid off and I'm working something completely unrelated to pay the bills. About to crack a beer and have some Chinese while watching pirated movies because I canceled my Netflix to cut costs.
Gonna watch Die Hard, eat a beef chow fun, and try to teach my bird some new curse words.
Comparatively cheaper, no. Americans could afford a lot of things, but the average American home looked like Malcolm in the Middle, and not so much more fancy for the higher class. Meanwhile in 2025, people have immense furbished kitchen (I’m European so I always notice that in abs-training-bro-youtube-slop, I’m not talking about influencers here) and living rooms, order food deliveries all the time, and perhaps some americans could access the number of flights that we saw in movies like Die Hard (going from NYC to SF to see a wife), but that was unimaginable for Europeans. We’re seeing wealth levels that are unimaginable, and global poverty has receded so much that the UN overhauled their definition to redirect their efforts towards human rights rather than hunger.
AQ2 was such a fun mod. It's been a while since I played, but if I recall you could some real John-Woo style moves as if you are in an action movie.
The article says that Le created it though:
Two years later he created Action Quake 2, a fast-paced game inspired by “Die Hard”
They just don't produce very good tv shows anymore. There is nothing to watch.
In the 90s we had Seinfeld, X-Files, King Of Queens, Frasier, Star Trek TNG, Macguyver and so on.
Then onto 1990s movies, which by the time they reached TV syndication were still good! Will I watch Lethal Weapon or Die Hard even though I've seen it before? Heck yes!
Action blockbusters are a product of marketing structure, financial investment strategy, and limited venue space; There is room to see one movie with the family during the holiday weekend, and a studio would find it absolutely wasteful to produce something that isn't Die Hard, if it's already marketing Die Hard for that weekend. An independent theater with the space (which is most everything in the US from 1948-2020 per SCOTUS) might promote a competitor's action blockbuster for that weekend as well, but is probably better holding off until the next holiday weekend depending on how many hundreds of millions of dollars have been pushed into the marketing pipeline. Better to be the Rom Com alternative. The market favors complementarity if it isn't competing on quality. There are only so many tickets that are going to be sold for that weekend, and the overall market size for that weekend isn't as elastic with regards to quality as some other industries. It is elastic with regards to overall marketing budget.
Casting is absolutely a part of marketing & investment strategy here, even as it doesn't necessarily lend anything to the story itself.
In a less psychologically manipulative, less monopolistic arena like streaming, or anime distribution, there is room for a much greater variety of narratives than the two categories you highlight.
Really curious to know what the test shots from Boss Films looked like!
Richard Edlund’s team’s work on various films of the 80s was impeccable (including Ghostbusters, Die Hard, Big Trouble in Little China, and more). They were the inheritor of the crown of high quality 65mm VFX after Douglas Trumbull quit the business (the pinnacle of his work being films like Blade Runner and Brainstorm).
I have to wonder what was wrong that caused the last minute switch to ILM!
My wife and I (both 55) rewatch this probably once a year. It's a really solid film that holds up SUPER well -- so many great elements came together here. Obviously, the principal cast is outstanding; it's not just Baldwin and Connery.
Sam Neill we always love (Connery's XO; "I would like to have seen Montana"), and Scott Glenn (Mancuso, captain of the Dallas) rarely disappoints. We also get a late appearance by Richard Jordan (would would die only a few years later) and an early one by Courtney Vance as the Dallas' sonar tech. Stellan Skarsgard is Tupolev, the Soviet sub captain who pursues Connery. Jeffrey Jones, mostly of note to our generation as the principal in Ferris Bueller, has a small role as the former Navy intelligence man Skip Tyler. And there's a blink-and-you-miss-it role for Gates "Beverly Crusher" McFadden as Ryan's wife in the early moments of the film.
It was only on a relatively recent viewing that we noticed one of the Red October's minor officers was played by an actor we'd recently seen on TV. On THE AMERICANS one of the main Soviet characters is a man named Burov who eventually rotates back to the USSR to work in the same government ministry as his father. His father is played by Boris Krutonog, who 30 years before played Slavin -- his big moment is denouncing the political officer as a "pig" at the tense dinner scene early on.
I never know how film-nerdy people are, so I'll also note that Red October was directed by John McTiernan, who also directed the original Predator, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, Die Hard with a Vengence, and the 1999 Thomas Crown remake. Unfortunately he did some deeply shady shit around one of his films and ended up in some significant legal trouble that basically blew up his career, but the films he made in the 20th century basically all hold up pretty dang well. The sense of momentum you get in October is present in Die Hard and in Crown as well.
It’s just slop par excellence. I’ve been watching a number of movies with my wife over Christmas. Everything is so bland, repetitive and ‘design by committee’. It goes further than merely announcing what the characters are doing (in that new wannabe Die Hard movie we hear that they are expecting a baby three times in 5 minutes), you just know there are certain metrics used for every genre of movie accounting for every minute: “if it’s an action film with no action scene in the first 10 minutes then the audience loses interest”. They are all so soulless.
And this is fine when you realise that Netflix replaces direct-to-video movies and not that of cinema, as much as they refuse to admit.
I'm Muslim too and I always find it interesting to see how various non-Christian theists observe Christmas. Obviously we don't "celebrate" but I personally don't see anything wrong with partaking in the secular parts of Christmas (and let's be real, in the west, it's pretty much all secular).
My parents felt otherwise when I was growing up, so my siblings and I weren't allowed to do anything Christmas related, but now my wife and I would do seasonal things like watch a live performance of Nutcracker or Pentatonix or TSO. And can't forget about watching the holiday classic movies like Elf and Die Hard!
It's just a trope, like "arguing" about Die Hard being a Christmas movie. Or maybe a little closer to home, "is a burrito a monad?" and other low-effort fodder.
i've met countless people who aren't capable of watching a movie, they just sit there looking at their phone the whole time then claim the movie was stupid and/or boring and that they "didn't get it". if you ask them what a good movie is, they say something they liked from before they became phone addicts because they literally haven't watched a movie since.
i also personally struggle a bit with older movies (80s/early 90s) because they tend to have a slower pace and i instinctively want to start multitasking every time there's a lull in the action. i actually watched die hard for the first time last night and found it kinda slow and boring despite it being one of the most iconic action movies of all time.
there may or may not be a scientific study to suggest it can happen (although i assume there is) but based on my own experiences i am 100% certain that it is happening.
It's the kind of idea that is captivating from a literary perspective but doesn't actually make any sense if you think about it, which is why it has showed up in so many movies, tv shows, novels, etc. My favorite subversion is in Die Hard where the person on TV is explaining that the victims are likely bonding with their captors while a scene plays of Gruber and his gang terrorizing people who are huddled in fear.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
I rewatch many movies quite often. But the ones that really stand out, in no particular order...
Wargames Jurassic Park Evolution Unstoppable Lord of the Rings Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 Alien 1, 2 and 3 Back to the Future Ghost in the Shell (basically all of it, mostly seasons 1 and 2) The Martian Tron 1 and 2 Anything by Miyazaki, but Howl's Moving Castle even more so
Just sit and watch, while not doing anything else? Die Hard. At least once a year since it came out in 1988. Die Hard and pizza have been a Christmas Day tradition since it came out on VHS in 1989. (I saw it in the theater in 1988.)
Otherwise, if I am watching a movie more than once, it's wile I am doing something else. Working from home, I often have old science fiction B-movies -- both the MST3K versions and unriffed versions -- running in the background. Others I'll "watch" while doing something else are Animal House, Blues Brothers, the Lethal Weapon films, Patton, James Bond, and some others.
Bruce Willis Die Hard. It always astounds me that he becomes more badass as he gets balder and balder.
And all of Nolan's films.
I managed to set one up for my in-laws. It works well enough with their smart tv (a plasma lg from 2010) that they can say “Alexa cable tv” or “Alexa Die Hard” and it will turn on the tv, find the streaming service that has the movie, and start playing. The voice incantation does have to be fairly specific and it did take some practice to figure it out.
Speaking of defenestration scenes in movies, Die Hard has always been my benchmark.
I think people sometimes need to be reminded that the Houthis are a race-supremacist religious cult (they're literally named after a guy named Houthi, who very probably saw the movie Die Hard) that employs child soldiers to ethnically cleanse Yemen in a doomed effort to restore a (literally) fascist Imamate.
Stop dignifying them. Nothing they're doing is even comparable to bringing a case before the ICJ.
Watched Die Hard again, and it was funny how fast a single cell phone would have changed the movie.
>> President Reagan ordered an unencrypted version of GPS to be made available to the public so that civilian aircraft would have a reliable form of navigation. At the time, no one apparently foresaw any motive or incentive for tampering with GPS signals, so no provision was made to protect them.
That can't be true, I believe one of the Die Hard films made at the time is based on this idea.
>Note I'm not talking about 'commercially successful', but enduring, historic/academic quality.
Thanks for giving us your position; I think I'm generally in agreement with you.
Here though it's good to note that [at least] one type of historic importance develops over time.
Die Hard, to take an arbitrary example, might not have been an important film as far as its art or technical quality [I don't know, it's not important to my point] but its enduring nature and position as an icon -- as a sort of mainstream but somehow counter-cultural part of Christmas for those of us of a certain age and certain bent -- makes it important when otherwise it would not be. It's not intrinsic to the artwork but emerges out of the societal response to the work.
In the UK we've been paying for the BBC to make culturally responsive TV for decades, yet somehow it all got tied back up in copyright when really it should be publicly owned and free-libre to anyone who will pay the download costs [and, perhaps, has a "TV License"].
At one Very Corporate job I had, there was a file share that somehow had never been culled, had a bunch of coworkers (current and previous) vacation photos, even a couple episodes of seinfield and I think the movie Die Hard. This was pre-snowden and the ripped videos were very pre-snowden. This share was like 8 or 9gb. Two or three .ISOs from a POC (proof of concept) with a vendor could easily push it over 16gb. If they compromised the share the marketing department kept their 2006 era .wma files of the company team building activity from That One Time it might result in not a lot of actual text files. I've had my gmail account for almost as long as you've been able to have one (almost 19 years?) and I've only managed to accrue 17GB in that time.
> Remember Die Hard? I don’t. I saw it right around the time it came out, and all I remember is Bruce Willis, barefoot, running through broken glass. That, for me, was a metaphor for watching the movie.
I'm not sure one should advertise their poor taste in movies. As action flicks go, Die Hard is one of the best, if not the best.
> Fans of the film, however, will recall its dapper German villain, Hans Gruber, smacking his silly lips and gloating at some private victory. He puts his fingertips together and says in facetiously tragic tones (clearly quoting something from High Culture and referring with cozy irony to himself): “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer.”
This is incorrect. Hans doesn't refer to one of his own victories; he contemplates with irony a model of a future project of the Nakatomi Corporation, and comments the extent of their conquests.
The point of this is to make us understand Nakatomi is a formidable company, and that Hans, who's attacking them, is even more formidable.
The exact quote from the movie is also not that; it is "When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer".
(I do find it interesting though, that the origin of the quote is in fact Alexander before conquering anything and wondering why, since there are so many worlds available to him, he has not yet mastered any.)
Eh. He's allowed to not like Die Hard - I don't think he was overly snooty about it. In fact, I read the parenthetical as an indictment of Hollywood, in sympathy with action movie writers (i.e. it sounds like he's describing the lamentable restrictions placed on the writers by studio and audience expectations).
It was fun to read but man are some people snooty. To wit: "The monkeys who wrote Die Hard did not invent that quote. (And let me tell ya something: the people who write the scripts for action movies are literally forbidden to invent anything. Their mandate is to regift whatever is known to have worked in the past." Come on, Die Hard was great.
> Thankfully there was no fifth movie.
If that's intended as a commentary on the fifth movie I agree with it, but in case it's an actual misapprehension, sadly there was one [1]. It's more part of Bruce Willis' output during his cognitive decline than part of the Die Hard series, really.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Day_to_Die_Hard
Your argument is incomplete, everyone agrees differences exist, but you haven't explained how any of those differences make "Nakatomi spaces" in games somehow less legitimate than in movies like Die Hard.
If anything, you've got it backwards: The fact that each individual player must notice and choose to exploit alternate paths makes them more authentically unusual and innovative than in movies, rather than less.
> the illusion of a Nakatomi Space, but in truth the developers intended all its pathways to be traversed
I don't think that logic works, because if we apply back onto Die Hard, we get a bizarre conclusion: The movie's Nakatomi Plaza lacks any of the eponymous Nakatomi Places it supposedly showcases. (Because that protagonist, too, is traveling intended routes that were planned and put there by screenwriters.)
When it comes to works of fiction, what we need to be looking at are the intents and assumptions of the in-universe fictional architects and/or typical users of the space.
Excellent point and I think there is a deeper connection here:
I believe a big part of the success of Die Hard is that McClane is such a strong hero. One of the ways the movie viscerally demonstrates his individualist heroism is how we constantly subverts the architecture of Nakatomi Plaza. While most of us would be awed by the expensive and heft of a luxurious skyscraper and feel obligated to follow its rules, McClane gives zero fucks and bends the skyscraper's physical substance to his will.
Likewise, videogames where the world is a pile of static geometry that you can only navigate in ways the game designers decided to allow feel decidedly disempowering. You're essentially a rat in their maze where your only option is to find the cheese in the way they've chosen.
Immersive simulation-like games with emergent gameplay are empowering because they offer an open-ended space to explore with greater agency and creativity. It feels like it is your game and the NPCs are just playing in it.
The third film is fantastic, including in ways relevant to the article, playing with similar abuse-of-infrastructure ideas at city- rather than building-level.
It's actually a better city-level example of the first film's architectural ideas than the Nablus raid the article brings up. The Israeli forces' (horrifying, from the account in the article) "reconfiguration" of Nablus was a massively forceful one, blasting through wall after (residential) wall throughout the entire city *. In Die Hard (1 and 3) the protagonists' interactions with the civil infrastructure were far more involuntary and far less forceful, with the characters often being imperilled by those hostile spaces. Blasting through them like a Terminator wouldn't have been at all in keeping with the movies and the article does the first one a disservice by describing it in those terms.
The second one isn't great but I've always rather enjoyed it too. Far from diarrhoea, anyway.
* I should say, I know absolutely nothing about Nablus besides what's described in the article, and have no idea how accurate it is.
For me Die hard is the better Christmas movie...
Ah, Die Hard. The perfect Christmas movie and the reason behind one of my most fun posessions: An HK SP5 with A3 retractable stock.
There's a trilogy of movie fight compilations set to music that was on youtube until it was removed for copyright. Your comment about Bourne vs Bond and how they use the scenery is illustrated in some very cool action shots, especially one where a camera follows Bourne as he jumps from a building into a window to catch up with an assailant. The first is now here: https://vimeo.com/68656656
I think action can be made much more interesting by a good visual director moving the viewpoint, balancing the view of the action against quick cuts or angles to serve the needs of the special effects and stunt people. There's a silhouetted scene in Bond's Skyfall where the colours and viewpoint are far more artistic, without detracting from the impact of the fight.
(Die Hard With a Vengeance, the 3rd one, is better than the 2nd, I feel)
He does use them, in fact this is one of the pictures in the article!
The villains catch up to his use of vents though.
I think Die Hard is fair use of this trope, because it popularized or codified it. Back when Die Hard opened, a lot of these tropes were far less common; in fact they've become common because of the movie. Many later action thrillers owe a lot to John McClane.
This is actually a very interesting essay.
I always liked Die Hard way better than its sequels (Die Hard 2 is merely acceptable, and the rest are embarrassing), but I never thought about this use of space and architecture. "Military parkour", as the article calls it.
Also insightful are the comparisons between Jason Bourne and the latest Bond movies; Bond feels sterile, and I find myself in agreement that some of the reasons for this are:
> Jones writes that “there’s no travel in the new Bond”; there are simply “establishing shots of exotic destinations.” By the end of a Bond film, he adds, you simply “feel like you are in the international late-capitalist nonplace,” a geography with neither landmarks nor personal memory.
Whereas
> “Bourne wraps cities, autobahns, ferries and train terminuses around him as the ultimate body-armor.”
I don't get it. Isn't that what people wanted to happen? Don't produce copyrighted work in the output. Sure you can learn from it, much like a director might learn from hundreds of movies he's watched. He obviously can't copy the plot from Die Hard but he can use elements he's picked up from it to make a Christmas movie.
> My guess is that it's far more likely that major labels start their own music streaming services
They can't. Unlike movies, there's great value in back catalogs. If Die Hard isn't available on a movie streaming service you will likely not care. If Pink Floyd (or Beatles, or Aretha Franklin) isn't available on a music streaming service, a huge number of people will care.
There are ~4 big companies that control 70-80% (by different estimations) of music. But individually they own different chunks. Sony can't start a streaming service if they don't have music owned by Warner etc.
> Willis in Die Hard, Smith in Independence Day, Cruise in Top Gun-- they all exhibit more depth to me than Jordan in Creed or the Rock in whatever.
Idk man I think you've got some seriously rose tinted glasses. Most everyone I know who was born after that time thinks Top Gun is a formulaic piece of trash. It's very hard for me to think of this film as something that gives an actor a good opportunity show off their acting talent. There are plenty of good films from the 90s but Top Gun was like a generic DC superhero spectacle film.
Die Hard holds up. Jeff Goldblum is enough to salvage independence day but its largely dropped from popular consciousness among young people.
>Actors showing range are not doing big movies because big movies mostly don't ask for range.
They don't explicitly ask for it but I think it's a little more subtle than that.
Taking an example you gave, I don't think Michael B Jordan will ever reach the star power of peak Will Smith simply because I don't think he's as talented an actor frankly.
Willis in Die Hard, Smith in Independence Day, Cruise in Top Gun-- they all exhibit more depth to me than Jordan in Creed or the Rock in whatever.
Plenty of people watch movies more than once, and I’d prefer to not pay over and over.
I buy movies that I know I’ll watch repeatedly, e.g. LOTR extended editions, Alien anthology, The Matrix, Die Hard is a Christmas movie tradition, etc.
I will never forget the experience of seeing Die Hard on a big screen and the vault being cracked open to Ode to Joy:
https://youtu.be/sLMRh62sazs?t=170
Recently I saw Runaway Train for the first time. The final scene is set to Vivaldi's Gloria in D Major:
https://youtu.be/VdBd5Hwd1Tg?t=207
What are your favorite examples of classical music in movies?
yea let's surely blame Russia out of the blue without a shred of evidence! Don't you have a Die Hard movie to write?
There used to be a trend to star Brits as villains in movies, of which Alan Rickman in Die Hard (doing a variety of accents) may be the peak example.
There's a huge gap in having non-Comic/non-SciFi action movies.
For all the reasons why John Wick is successful, so was Top Gun 2.
People want to see just good'ole realistic action movies (that aren't SciFi/Comic)
Decades ago, we have Jason Bourne, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, etc. Today we have so little of these types of movies.
While I agree with Spielberg's realization that modifying his prior work was a mistake, there's something I would like to be able to do with movies as a consumer that I wish streaming services offered.
Hollywood seems obsessed with three things: Guns, sex and objectifying women.
While not every movie has guns, the sex and objectification is pretty much everywhere. Perfectly good movies have utterly unnecessary sex scenes that make them impossible to watch with kids. In some cases this is also uncomfortable in family gathering settings.
Two examples that come to mind (there are thousands):
Die Hard. He opens an office door, only to expose a couple having sex. Of course, the woman is fully exposed, while the guy is not.
Lucky Number Slevin. The main character walks into his apartment only to find his girlfriends on all fours on the bed having sex with a guy. Again, full sexual exploitation of the woman, of course.
The Last Kingdom (series): Once again, sex everywhere. No value whatsoever to the story. It's a great series. Unwatchable with kids and in other settings.
Battlestar Galactica (the one with James Olmos): Excellent series. Sex everywhere. No nudity that I can remember, yet scenes of oral sex and other forms of sex without showing full body nudes. Fucking unbelievably unnecessary.
Outlander (series): Might as well be labelled porn. It's a sex-fest. Humping in any way possible at any possible time and even male-to-male rape. Nothing whatsoever to add to the story, which would have been amazing without all that shit in there.
The Queens Gambit (series). Fantastic series about chess. My kids are really into chess. Fuck if we are going to watch it with them. No nudity, yet drugs and sex are featured. The character is fictitious, which means there was no need for any of it. The producers just wanted to include sex and drugs. This one can't be fixed. I am not going to watch a show with my kids that implies taking drugs can make you smarter in any way.
There are tons of movies and shows with similar problems. Movies that are excellent and yet the producers feel it is necessary to insert a stupid sex scene that adds absolutely nothing to the story and is of no value whatsoever other than to show boobs bouncing and feature women as sexual objects.
Notice I did not say anything about movies like Fifty Shades or Gray, Wall Street or Eyes Wide Shut. Those are movies where the story justifies some of what they feature. There could be an argument related to female objectification, that's about it.
I am not a puritan, by any means. I just think this is stupid, wrong, unnecessary, detrimental and destructive to women. Having a daughter changes your perspective on what's out there in popular culture. Great movies and series are being ruined all the time by inserting sex where it is unnecessary, and it is usually at the expense of women.
Getting back to the first paragraph. I wish there was a setting on streaming services to be able to watch these movies with those scenes cut out or replaced by alternative scenes shot and chosen by the creators.
In the case of Die Hard, the couple could be kissing, taking a nap, playing chess...anything. The point is they were distracted and did not react to the emergency. In the case of Slevin, the sex scene could either be completely cut out or replaced with something different.
That, to me, would be a feature very much worth having. Hollywood's obsession with sex and the objectification of women is a problem that does not seem to receive the attention it should.
I didn’t keep it but GPT-4 pitched me a very convincing cross-over between Die Hard and Jurassic Park culminating in a tense face off between a machine gun armed John McLane and a T-Rex.
The heartbreaking World War 1 movie involving Pokémon 1 was less good however.
Attacking critical infrastructure in order to perform a robbery is the plot of several of the Die Hard movies. In those films, the group of antagonists performing the attack are generally called "terrorists"
I mean, Rick and Morty has made many jokes about not wanting to be a show about progressing the canon. It’s probably the worst possible example you could choose for this concept. Most episodes are deconstructions of other works and they seem to prefer it being that way. I do too.
I’m still laughing at the concept of a deconstruction of homages to die hard. I love their perspectives on writing.
Really? You must not be very creative. Chat GPT is pretty much DOA for anything really creative.
Try having it write a movie scene where one person is abusive to the other. It won't do it. Ask it to tell you an offensive joke, it won't do it.
Why was "Game of Thrones" such a popular show? The Lanister's were hostile, nasty, abusive, vulgar people. Why is Hamlet still considered a master piece to this day? I mean, he says to his mom "Get thee to a nunnery" if you translate that to modern language he is calling is mother a whore. Try having Chat GPT write anything where it calls a woman a whore, it won't do it.
Look I don't expect it write Shakespeare level stuff, I don't expect it write Quentin Tarantino level stuff, but it ought be able to attempt to emulate both of them (including having characters that aren't PC). If you ask it to give you a sitcom premise and come up with a page of dialogue it will come up with the most boring, flat, uninspiring crap you have ever read. You can iterate over it asking it to make adjustments and improvements, but sooner or later you will probably want some fucking depth to your characters, which means some of them will be assholes, which Chat GTP will refuse to do.
Ask it to make an argument that Die Hard is a Christmas movie, no problem. Ask to make an argument that Die Hard is not a Christmas movie, again no problem. Ask to make an argument on the importance of diversity, no problem. Ask it to argue why diversity is not important, HOL UP THERE COWBOY! Seriously, you mean to tell me there are positions so heinous and bad that you can't even entertain the arguments that someone make in favor of that position? When I was in school we were FORCED to come up with arguments for BOTH sides of a topic, this was immensely helpful (however difficult it was) and it is the proper way to learn and teach.
ChatGPT is simultaneously one the coolest pieces of tech I have encountered, and the lamest.
Maybe I am the only one, but I am very disappointed how sterile, boring, dull, ordinary, and stale ChatGPT is. I mean don't you want something that will occasionally blow your fucking hair back, or make you spit out your coffee? I mean I am not asking it to be overtly offensive on purpose, but when I ask the damn thing "Tell me an offensive joke" I would like it do so and not lecture me on how being offensive is mean.
Seems like maybe you're are just a cog in machine though, you seem to only care about "productivity". For me though creativity == productivity, and no one was ever creative without being, or at the very least risked being, highly offensive.
God forbid ChatGTP ever offend someone. Meanwhile, I am sure it would happily help you code a system that guided missiles so that you could literally kill people.
I watched Predator when I was very young, on VHS, without having watched any trailers, and I still remember how amazed I felt. What was this monster? How was Arnie going to win, the creature was unbeatable and was everywhere!
A couple of other movies -- again, no trailers -- which made me feel this way were "Aliens" (they are everywhere!) and "Die Hard".
I don't really feel that way anymore with scifi or action movies, and of course much of it has to do with growing up. But I wonder if teenagers feel that way about the current crop of scifi/action movies, do they feel the thrill, do they feel "the good guys can't possibly win", or is this forever lost in modern cinema, what with all the rushed pacing, spoilers and trailers?
> It looks just as sharp, and has more presence
on an lg oled display i instantly notice when something is 1080p vs 4k.
i suggest watching an old movie in 4k. for example die hard in 4k is absolutely incredible compared with the DVD release.
Columbo episodes were unusually long. Each was the length of a short movie: ~1 to ~1.5hrs.
One of the Die Hard movies had the "extract 1 gallon from a 3 gallon and a 5 gallon jug" puzzle in it.
A better question would be:
If you're going to watch exactly five Die Hard movies, would the fifth be Die Hard 5, "A Good Day To Die Hard", or the Die Hard battery commercial[1]?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc28osQsUT0
The most obvious christmas related topic is of course "Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?"
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No, die hard is the Xmas movie.
> It really depends on how you define a machine.
Sure, and depending on how you define a computer program hamlet is a computer program, and depending on your definition of Christmas movie, Planet of the Apes is Christmas movie.
The point is that for typical and sane definitions cells aren’t machines, hamlet isn’t a program and planet of the apes isn’t a Christmas movie (But Die Hard is).
I just watched the first four Die Hard movies and it’s amazing how much it changed in Die Hard 4, which came out after 9/11.
In the first three movies, the bad guys are basically after money, the cops are all disorganized fools, and it’s just this one guy with the right skills that foils the plot.
In the fourth movie, the bad guys are after your whole country, your freedom, and your daughter, the cops are supported by the feds who are are very cool and powerful, and the feds from their all-seeing command center masterfully assist the guy with skills to foil the bad guys. Also the bad guys can log in to any webcam they want any control any computer system at the press of a button.
Watching this reminded me of the mass cultural delusion that took over USA in the 2000’s. This LifeLog program follows from the idea that anything and everything that can be done to foil a potentially all powerful adversary should be done, and things like individual privacy have no meaning whatsoever.
What’s interesting looking back at these movies, knowing for example how the cops behaved at the Uvalde elementary school shooting, is that the portrayal of the police in the first three movies is way more accurate than the fourth.
it does not hurt that the first Die Hard is one of the best movies ever made.
Next watch Aliens (the second one) together and you are gold.
Yes.
I showed my 12 year old son Die Hard for the first time the other day.
He absolutely (...) loved it.
Unprompted, he talked about how good all the effects were - they didn't look like the bland CGI he is used to.
And he absolutely loved the movie. Zero political correctness. So incredibly liberating.
(A few scenes had me question the parenting choice of showing DH to a 12 year old, but it'd been at least a decade since I saw it last).
I think this is pretty cool. Franchises like Die Hard can now keep going indefinitely, with video and audio deepfaking. If you don't feel like that is artistically worthy, fine, don't watch it. Fans will appreciate it, like some people like to watch another Spiderman movie every other year.
The Die Hard movie franchise very much has Bruce Willis as the protagonist. It wouldn’t really be the same without him.
A related collection of his brief film reviews:
‘An unbelievable Die Hard rip-off’: two decades of Alan Rickman’s withering film reviews - https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/24/two-decades-of-alan-rickman-film-reviews
1988 Die Hard http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016
1988 Red Heat https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095963/
1988 My Stepmother Is an Alien https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095687/
1988 Twins https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096320/
1989 Honey, I Shrunk the kids https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097523/
1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097576/
1989 Tango & Cash https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098439/
1990 Edward Scissorhands https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099487/
1990 Home Alone https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099785/
1990 Pretty Woman https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/
1991 Terminator 2 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103064/
1991 Silence of the Lambs https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102926/
1991 The Last Boy Scout https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102266/
You really have a thing for clowns...
When you post a comment where the only possible outcome is not just positive, but Hollywood film stuff (protagonist is struggling in a new situation and gets bullied, boss/friend/wise elder shows him path to success, protagonist is triumphant over the bully -- literally the exact plot of Karate Kid, Rocky III, Die Hard and countless others), then it reads as idealistic. Your next comment, where you finally acknowledge that not everything is fixable and firing might be an outcome, is a lot more reasonable.
Robocop was part of a unparalelled series of action films that came out in the mid-80's. The sequence started with Aliens, then the next year we had Predator and Robocop and then finally Die Hard. They're still making the sequels to these films in one way or another today. The sequence has never been equaled, though I really wish it were.
I've long pondered building exactly this, an anti-recommendation engine. You'd go through and mark some favorite films or genres, and it'd come back with something great but totally unlike your usual picks.
Foreign flicks not your thing? Try Parasite.
You don't remember what it's like to be an awkward pre-teen? Eighth Grade will remind you.
Not a big action movie person? Maybe you need to watch Die Hard.
Kids movies are just for kids? Spirited Away!
You can't connect with female protagonists? You've got to see The Invisible Man.
Don't find food interesting? Try Tampopo.
Sick of movies which try to make a statement and fall flat? Promising Young Woman.
Most dramas feel too contrived? Marriage Story.
Musicals and plays aren't really your thing? Hamilton.
Very well put, and I agree. I'd like to add to your list: Die Hard has always felt to me like the genesis of the modern action movie.
That makes me realize another aspect I hate about modern movies. In the first Die Hard, McClain was suffering. That scene where he walks across broken glass, and then limps around the rest of the movie. It might not have been realistic, but at least it conveyed how hard and tiring it is to fight. That is totally absent from modern action movies.
I blame comic book movies and a generation raised on them.
Comic book movies are also "ur fascism." They feature utterly paper thin heroes who are just good and paper thin villains that are either just bad or have caricatured motives. Thanos with his genocidal malthusianism is about as high-brow as this stuff gets.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the generation raised on these has been softened up for puerile political zealotry (of various stripes) in adulthood.
Go back and watch an action flick like Die Hard. Such movies were considered lowbrow when they were made but that film contains some extremely complex characterization and nuance compared to 90% of comic book films.
> Down to earth is the key I think. So many action films these days are "save the world" or some sort of incredibly over the top world-changing maguffin.
Ran across this observation with regards to Die Hard: the first two movies had McClain as basically a beat cop who gets in over his head. The latter movies he's almost a superhero.
I have no problem to defend Drive against Fugitive, Fugitive aged really bad and it feels like cheap TV movie, Drive is obviously much newer, has great cinematography, great score, atmosphere, nice action and aged really good despite being 11 years already (but I am not really some big fan of Drive, just saying it's better than Fugitive). Btw. just because something is "stupid action flick" it doesn't mean it can't be good at it, you can have good stupid action flicks and you can have bad stupid action flicks. I don't usually watch stupid action flicks (I'm more (social) drama guy), but when I do I want to watch the good ones.
I'm recently rewatching movies starting from 90s and while The Rock was still enjoyable even in 2022 (8mm or Absolute power were meh, same as already back then), I remember Fugitive being pretty bad already many years ago. Movies like Die Hard, Speed, Con Air, Mission impossible, Enemy of the state, were all better than Harrison action movies, which always felt like cheap TV movies with low production value. Meanwhile we have 2 year newer Heat, which is still for sure in top 5 best action/crime movies ever and aged amazingly and could easily beat any day any new action/crime movie. The production value and director skills are on completely different level than Harrison action movies. I just checked the most famous Harrison action movies I remember from 90s - Fugitive, Clear and Present danger, The Devil's Own and Air Force one - all 4 have different director, 3 directors nobody remembers and 4th only thanks to Das Boot.
That's kind of the point. The movies were directed by two stunt men who had worked with Keanu Reeves on The Matrix. To me it feels like an American version of a movie like "The Raid"[1], though not quite as grounded.
I think it's praised because the kind of "down to earth" action movies like the first John Wick are pretty rare these days. Superhero movie fights are generally about the spectacle of superhumans shooting various lasers at each other. They are also often entirely CG. This makes John Wick fee more much more "real" by comparison. More Die Hard and less Man of Steel.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raid_(2011_film)
I'm not familiar with Die Hard, but https://diehard.fandom.com/wiki/Argyle doesn't suggest anything about Argyle being a "stoner buddy". So the reference from Stranger Things to Die Hard is... simply the name Argyle? There's an Argyle in Arrested Development. Is that a Die Hard reference?
Is the entire article a ragedump inspired by the author basing his life experience on the #1 grossing action film of 1988?
I am kind of ashamed to bring this anecdote in a comment to such a high brow article, but it should be noted that "Ode to Joy" was the villain's song in the first "Die Hard" movie. It's played when the bad guys finally open the vault. The chief villain, Hans Gruber, is himself, of course, German and has received "a classical education".
(The director, McTiernan, had noticed the use of Ode to Joy in A Clockwork Orange and was a big fan of all things Kubrick's).
Using that music for the villain also plays beautifully in building some moral ambiguity; it can be argued that Gruber is in fact the protagonist, trying to achieve something (and succeeding, when the vault opens), while John McClane, who doesn't want anything and isn't even happy to be there, is the antagonist.
But then in subsequent movies, the Ode to Joy somehow becomes the good guy's song, which is super weird because McClane is anything but German, or classically educated, or... educated.
As a fan of the Die Hard movies, i got this reference immediately! lol :-D
My dad's favourite hobby was tinkering on cars. I don't honestly see much difference between me playing video games and tinkering on my PC than him driving and getting his hands greasy. My grandfather's was walking around in the woods hunting or sitting in a boat fishing. Why are those mature and virtuous, while my love of games infantilizing? Are video games innately childish due to their medium? Is a comic book movie actually that much more childish than Die Hard or James Bond?
Yes. The typical modern blockbuster constantly hits you over the head with its messages of "family" or "finding yourself" or "overcoming obstacles" of whatever like you're still in grade school. Compare that to something like No Country for Old Men - a movie with a much more nuanced set of ideas. Or even to older blockbusters like Die Hard which are more consistently focused on the action and keep the moralizing to a minimum.
> Fort Knox gold reserves in your spare room
What do you mean a wooden safe isn't good enough?!
Joke aside. This is the reality we live in. Almost makes heist movies pale in comparison. The failed Die Hard heist was planned in order to steal $640M.
I wonder how long until Hollywood will start making movies about these hacks.
I'm thinking it would be something like: I want to be the baddy in Die Hard and want the protagonist to be Peter Griffin (cartoon version). The system feeds you the movie ... I'm imagining there could be an industry for writers to create the off-screen plots of other characters and principaly it would be rendered with the same scenes as the original movie.
Forrest Gump is in the same category as Die Hard and The Godfather, the book is just mediocre but the movie is great.
The movie is in the running for greatest American movie made; so much of it is so very good, and so many things went exactly right. The book, as others have said, is a pulp potboiler; no serious critic would place it on a list of 1,000 best novels.
Funnily enough, Die Hard is similar. It’s a great action movie, legendary and timeless. The book on which it’s based is awful.
It’s so rare that this happens, when usually it’s the reverse — a great book is made into a bad or mediocre movie. The true exceptions — great books made into great movies — seem vanishingly rare to me. Off the top of my head I can only think of a few: Lawrence of Arabia (from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom), The English Patient, The Name of the Rose. Apocalypse Now from Heart of Darkness, perhaps?
Classic action movies of the 80s often had very flat good-at-everything male heroes. What weaknesses does John McClain ever show in Die Hard? Vulnerability to walking barefoot on broken glass I guess, not much.
There are obviously exceptions, but generally action movies don't have very interesting characters.
Die Hard is my family's Christmas movie. Even now I live in Australia, and the weather outside is not frightful at Christmas.
Well, I had hoped not to live to the moment where we use movies as an argument in seemingly serious discussion.
Hopefully "Home Alone" or "Die hard" didn't shape your picture of our world.
> And if you're not aware of the gray zone conflict since 2014 and that thousands of people got killed on Ukrainian soil because of Russia.
I'd suggest you to substantiate claims like that - "because of Russia". Not everyone is a product of propaganda and readily believe in anything without any evidence.
> No "suggestion" for a "better solution", just ignorance of facts that happened/are happening.
That's would be great if you bring up facts to support your claims instead of throwing patronising phrases about education.
They hadn't written the ending of Die Hard when they started filming - the Movies that Made us episode about it is pretty wild & illuminating.
It might sound odd, but it is not abnormal for a movie to be rewritten deep into production. Some infamous movies for this include Die Hard and Stripes, the endings for which were not written until after filming had begun. Given the much longer process for animated movies I'm not surprised this happens at Disney too.
I think I agree with you, in fact it gave me a few movies I hadn't seen that are now on my to-watch list (and a couple to rewatch, like Tango & Cash). But at least it's a better list of action movies that haven't aged as well than Terminator 2, Robocop, and Die Hard.
Wait, Die Hard isn't a Christmas movie?? We watched it with our college age kids over the break as one. Sure seemed like a perfect Christmas movie to me, even redeeming a rocky marriage at the end.
You had to choose those three movies as movies that only seemed great as a teenager? I'd argue they've aged better than a lot of movies from that time period and I'm pretty sure I don't hold the minority opinion there.
Hell, I got tired of adults making nonstop jokes and references to watching Die Hard as a Christmas movie on Facebook just a month ago.
Here's what I would consider a better list:
https://screenrant.com/80s-action-movies-notoriously-bad-good/
> Half the tentpole movies of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s were my niche, so it's not as though I'm a difficult audience.
I know what you mean - but is that Hollywood, or is it us becoming grown-ups?
I mean, it's possible all movies are aimed at the tastes of teenagers, and the reason Terminator 2 and Robocop and Die Hard seemed like great movies is because I saw them when I was a teenager.
The innumerable superhero movies we have nowerdays may seem like a snoozefest in comparison - but maybe that's just because I'm no longer a teenager.
You're never alone with the best Christmas movie ever made, Die Hard.
Wow, Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon used the exact same gun, "The live-firing handgun that was used in both films has since been 'retired' to a glass museum case."
http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Lethal_Weapon_(1987)
The first Ghostbusters is hilarious, and one of many exemplar 80s movies - back to the future (as mentioned), crocodile Dundee, short circuit, die hard, ferris bueller (just off the top of my head) that embodied that decade and often saw stodgy corporate types as the enemy of fun. I've never even thought about it as a libertarian parable, and I believe doing so is a revisionist strawman coming from opponents and reading too much into it coming from supporters. The movie was good clean fun of the kind that existed fleetingly around that time.
The remake was based on only one premise- it will be women instead. It wasn't funny and had none of the cultural centering (especially the whole vibe of 80s New York) that the original had. It was a shitty movie. So it failed.
There is not some broader political message. A good movie that hit the mark for its era was successful, a lazy remake was not
> So, is it a classic? No. Is it faithful to the books? Not at all. But IMO it’s decent sci-fi, and interesting enough to watch if you’re bored :)
If you want to make an action-y television series, then choose action-y source material. There's so much good sci-fi (and fantasy) out there that can be used for that type of style. The Vorkosigan Saga for one:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
While it may be possible to adapt Waiting for Godot into a Die Hard-like movie, why would you do so?
> If the show is not called foundation, he will probably enjoy it.
It wasn't about Foundation, then why call it "Foundation"?
It's like that Will Smith movie called I, Robot: why did they bother calling it that?
You can create a new sci-fi show or movie without the 'false marketing' of referencing previous source material: that's what the original Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars did in the 1970s. Or you can try to faithfully use the source material as much as possible as The Expanse show has done, and what Villeneuve has generally done with his Dune.
There are plenty of both sci-fi and fantasy works available for adaptation into shows and movies. And if (general) audiences expect action-y stuff in their sci-fi/fantasy, then pick one in which the source material is more action-y.
Don't try adapting Waiting for Godot into the next Die Hard.
Hah. That it does! I like the parallel with "Die Hard is the best Christmas movie".
But most fight scenes were fake, even before CGI. In fact, almost nobody ever gets hurt on set... and when people do get hurt, its in stunts (not the fight scenes).
The number of "realistic fight scenes" are incredibly slim. Chinese martial arts are mostly Wuxia: a branch of martial arts that was developed for stage performance (flips, spins, etc. etc.) that has very little practical relevance.
"Kung Fu" films (ie: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan) reduce the number of filps... but even then, Jackie Chan's use of hilarious stage props is anything but realistic.
I mean: just imagine "Die Hard", no one can sustain that many injuries realistically and keep going. Its fake action, yes with practical effects / non-CGI (blood packs and stunts), but its still fantasy. And "Princess Bride" duel is fully ridiculous: with more flips and gymnastics than actual fighting (arguably the point: it was a comedy film making fun of tropes).
Anyone who has actually been in a fighting-sport (themselves mostly "fake", as duels took place centuries ago), will instantly recognize the bad form most of these older fight scenes had. Enemies charge the protagonist one at a time (yes: even in "practical" Kung Fu movies with few special effects)
----------
"Fake" is fine. But there's a lack of progression or understanding going on in a lot of the CGI-fight scenes. They're willing to spend tons of money on big explosions or special effects, but they don't always hit home with me.
The famous "Jackie Chan Ladder Fight" is a good example of a ridiculous fight scene, barely plausible. But its highly imaginative and has a great progression and rhythm. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4). I'm not here because I want to watch a realistic 4-person Bo-staff fight vs a single dude with a ladder (which would almost certainly result in the ladder-user in getting beaten up). I'm here to watch crazy stunts and imaginative fights.
The use of music / rhythm (notice how the fight is on beat to the soundtrack) increases the entertainment value. These little things should be easier in CGI, but somehow aren't being done.
> Most Christmas movies don't even mention Christ.
Like "Die Hard" ;).
It feels like we are living in an episode of die hard.
Anecdotally I've found this to be true when discussing the US with European friends I have. They think our schooling looks exactly like the sitcoms (e.g. Boy Meets World, Fresh Prince). They also seem to think we're all partially cowboys or at least like John McClane in Die Hard. They also take every bit of media coming from the major networks as absolute truth and tend to believe things that are really quite rare here happen on a constant basis.
This was a fun read, especially as someone who grew up with those 80s and 90s movies.
That said, and as the author touches on, the action/super hero of today is a PG-13 one. Studios need to reach the widest audience possible to make the most money, so it's a safer bet.
Sure, back in the day studios had the same imperative, but the licensed toy game was still young, so they didn't realise that maybe if they made Die Hard PG instead of R they could sell some John McClane action figures to younger viewiers.
Nowadays, that's basically the starting point; what we can we sell outside of the movie? how can we milk the franchise for as much as possible?
And that's where a lot of the sex appeal is lost. Marvel movies can't be as raunchy as a result.
Another topic that the author touched on was the way the ideal aesthetic has changed in not just our bodies but where we live or what we do in our spare time.
I agree that more and more we are optimising for artifice; fitness classes, extra curricular activities, holidays, concerts and events we attend, just to keep up an appearance online or in person. And in those activities we often don't get the true value out of them because we're doing them for the wrong reason.
Anyway, it's a complex and interesting topic and I'd love to read more about this perhaps from even further back (50s or 60s) if anyone has something similar to this post?
I remember a one-man-show of 1998 where the comic pretends he “succeeded to start cigarette” and how stylish he became. In the middle of the scene he says: “Before starting? I used to go to dates, and when the person was late, I was waiting like this, on the street, arms pending, didn’t know what to do with my hands. NOW I SMOKE!”
Joke aside, it highlights that people used to wait a lot. “Meet me at 6 at the library” meant that you might be on the wrong side of the library, you’ll try the other entrance and the person does the opposite, using another path, so you don’t meet, and you don’t know whether they had to cancel. We did far fewer things because anything took a lot of time.
Movies were much slower too. Watch Gremlins again, an action movie: It’s so slow! (Counter example: Die Hard is correctly fast-paced for an action movie). To summarize, qualities you’d require would be reliability in appointments and being able to wait a lot without getting bored.
We could even make the case that it is now possible to fill loneliness with a mobile phone, whereas it drove more than one into dementia pre-iPhone.
Something that for many years I've seen as "Ur-Fascist" in our culture is the popularity and continuous production of relatively vapid superhero movies. The majority of these are power fantasy porn, and like porn the only focus is really on the fetish and the orgasm. There's little characterization and little plot, and the villains are always cast as either pure evil or as a straw man representation of some other point of view.
The rough cop and action movies of the 1980s and 1990s are far more subtile and intelligent than most superhero flicks. Watch Die Hard for example. It has actual characterization. You get at least a bit of a sense for who the characters are, their motives, and their flaws. I'm not saying it's high art but compared to the average comic book flick it's quite deep. The hero is a divorced cop who has obviously thrown himself into his work to numb his emotional pain. The villain comes off like a narcissist whose crimes are motivated by a burning desire to become the moneyed aristocrat he believes himself entitled to be. Throughout the film you can see the hero at least indirectly confront some of his personal demons while the villain's narcissism drives him further into depravity and in the end is his ruin.
I wonder if the rise of fascist thinking of the 4chan /pol variety among younger people can in part be explained by their entire generation having been raised on a steady diet of comic book flicks and of course similar "fanservice" Anime.
I think I did a poor job in highlighting the meat of my response from the rest. The point is not about what I would do, or could do, in a situation like that. The point was that people don't behave rationally in situations like that; not because they're fools, or weak, or immature; it's because they are having a physiological response to extreme emotional trauma. If they don't, they are textbook sociopaths, or have been put through large amounts of emotional conditioning.
Read through your comment: "I doubt the husband has a firearm handy or a means to defend himself for this situation. So his emotional response to attack without proper weaponry is foolish"
This point of view is speculative, it doesn't come from experience (or even a basic psychological understanding). People do NOT function that way. Maybe they do when playing Call of Duty or watching a Die Hard movie, but not in real life. I can't really impart what it feels like in that sort of situation, but I hope you never have to experience it. You end up needing therapy.
Seriously. At one point I curated a similar dataset to OP, but because it was largely worked to which I didn’t own the copyright, there’s no way in hell I was going to distribute it to others (because that would be doing what that internet library got sued for). I can’t freely distribute the last 20 years of TV and movies just because it’s useful for academic research.
Hell, unless you paid for it, you shouldn’t even have the collection to train on, whether you distribute it or not.
Effectively, everyone’s focusing on whether your story(/model) is sufficiently transformative from Die Hard to be fair use for you to distribute it, without addressing the complaint that you snuck into the theater too, and held the door for others to follow me in.
I agree in general. But Mulholland Drive is absolute rubbish which people like because they know that most won't like it (because it's rubbish).
I've been invited to similar groups that have esoteric music tastes. They think that because I have a good taste in music I will fit into those groups. But I can't stand them. It's all about finding the most obscure thing possible. The kind of thing that isn't popular for very good reason. It's just not that good.
Beethoven's 9th Symphony has virtually universal appeal. Die Hard is considered one of the best action movies of all time. Those are the kind of things you need to make sure you see. After that, whether you watch the latest mindless popcorn thriller or crap that nobody really likes is up to you. I'd rather watch the popcorn thriller, though.
IANALC (I am not a literary critic) but I share your impression of Wilson's translation.
I thinks Wilson makes things a little too clear in her effort to produce a modern story. This erases a lot of purposeful vagueness, allusions to background knowledge, innuendo, and general openness to interpretation that makes classics "feel classic."
For example, the first few lines of Pope's translation says that Odysseus, "Wandering from clime to clime, observant stray’d, Their manners noted, and their states survey’d." In Greek mythology, Odysseus was said to have been an unusually curious man. Even in his far-flung travels, he took note of the natural and human elements he encountered, as if he was Charles Darwin! Unlike Darwin's, though, his surveys were neither methodical nor preserved for posterity. His days were unnumbered, and we can merely glimpse a few portions of his exploits that a muse can snatch up for us. There's plenty of blank space for us to fill with our own imagination and interpretation. Indeed, we fill it with a sense of grandiosity and timelessness, as we do when we read any good epic from Homer to Tolkien.
This introduction to the main character is completely missing in Wilson's translation. Odysseus just becomes a "complicated man" who filmed five Die Hard movies in a row to save his crew and get back home. Wilson's opening feels... hollow. It leaves little room for imagination. It sets us up in popcorn mode, merely waiting for the author to fill us in, punch by punch.
Perhaps, everyday English has co-evolved with modern science for too long to avoid sounding matter-of-factly.
Given that:
1. Some of those 37 situations are more interesting than others
2. You need more than one of them for a good screenplay
3. Some situations do not mix well in one story
You will come to conlusion that there is limited number of possible stories.
Now, Hollywood has been producing dozens of movies every year for over a century it becomes clear that it is slowly running out of stories to tell. That's why you see so many remakes/sequels: Star Wars, Rambo, Die Hard, etc. Or remakes with a twist: let's make main characters black/women/gay/trans and pretend that we created a brand new, original story.
Hollywood is eating its own tail.
I grew up in post Soviet Ukraine, watching all the movies that were made in the USSR. I cannot recall a single “us vs them” movie with another country or nationality being the them, except movies about WWII. I don’t know why that is, but when we started getting American movies in the early 1990s it was a huge contrast. In Soviet movies the good guys were often the police trying to combat recidivism after WWII (huge socioeconomic shift led to a huge socioeconomic problem that gave rise to a huge amount of crime). In the American movies the bad guys were often foreigners.
This isn’t to say there wasn’t propaganda, just that the propaganda was pointed in a different direction: for example a young idealistic police officer working with an veteran of the force to tenaciously investigate an elusive criminal gang for the glory of the Soviet Union. The focus was to make Soviet patriotism an attractive quality, regardless of being young or old. It was a lot more focused internally. In the meantime, a movie like Die Hard has none of that: German thieves that pretend to be terrorists are the bad guys, an all American hero is a good guy. American movies rarely have a true patriotic streak, as in “and this, son, is why we must work to better our union.” In fact, the idea of glorifying labor was so prevalent in the Soviet movies and so absent in American ones that this might be the biggest contrast. It shows a different face of patriotism and could easily explain the divide: some think patriotism is exercising your rights while others see it as holding back on exercising your rights. “It’s my right not to wear a mask” is a clear example of that.
On comparison: Take the movie "die hard". Since its creation 1988 (i feeld old) it has been rewatched time and time again and been paid for by nearly every channel and streaming service. Now look at an newspaper edition from christmas day 1988. Yes, it still costs less, but you would agree that it was already "old news" a couple of days after and rereading it is not really worth something to you, is it? One invisible cost in journalism is research and failure. I had a boss who humorously said "just research things that we will print", but in my area of experise in journalism - data and investigative reporting - more or less half of the research is a dead end, isn't interesting enough or has issues that make reporting unadvisable. Yes, sports has a better qouta, but has also taken over by bots writing the articles. Also: Can we agreee, that independence can only be achived with decent pay? It is an issue in other areas of work as well, but this is not about those. Journalists need to be paid well and (mostly) independent of their output or you already weaken/poison the base for independent news. And this scales more than you think. Now multiply this to have competition in journalism (like, gasp!, multiple newspapers/mags on the newsstand for one city) and it gets really, really expensive. All that cost was hidden when the only way to locally advertise was in paper (before the internet).
It was zeitgeist in the 80s.
Ronald Reagan asked in his campaign “What do we want our kids to do? Sweep up around the Japanese computers?” "an economic Pearl Harbor" was a term used.
While the US was fighting double digit inflation Japanese were buying American companies and real estate like candy. Sony bought movies studio, someone else bought Rockefeller Center. Japan's 5th generation computer systems and AI was seen as threat to the US. Japanese management philosophy was seen as superior.
Even in popular culture movies like "Back To The Future 2", "Die Hard" etc. Japanese dominate.
Yes, same here - I'm the star of the Bald & Beautiful in my family, but I don't want to influence my receding hair choices to them, unless you plan on landing male role in future Fast & Furious, Die Hard, or any Rock-infused movie.
Nothing on Disney+ from the extensive catalog they own of any movies rated over PG-13. (think 20th Century Fox and Touchstone pictures - Alien, Die Hard, Exorcist, Highlander, The Omen... and even of those that are PG, many also not available, like original Planet of the Apes series, etc.) I have a free 1-yr promo tie-in membership and it's ok, but I will not be continuing when it expires. If they had all those other films from the catalogs they own I would much more likely pay them.
I wonder if they got the idea from the "Die Hard" movie? Says "20 worksations"... Even with the trailer folding out, that sounds crowded. "gestural controlled" displays... and a telescoping light tower!
Everything necessary to convince the CEO that "Action is Being Taken" when they're troubled by something "cyber" they can't be bothered to understand.
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/DXGD7N9K
* Also, the "infographic" shows a different tractor than the pics.
I didn't say it was two names, I said there are two different movies within the Die Hard series. Just like two different houses on the same street.
Street and house number are certainly two different things. It's more like series of movies (Die Hard 1, Die Hard 2, etc. are different movies but part of the same series. In the same way, a street could be seen as a series of houses or addresses. So the smallest unit is the house, then the street.
It is possible that will change when Disney starts selling their subscription service in Sweden.
Disney will likely use its huge archive to sell subscriptions.
That likely is the reason Home Alone isn’t on public tv in the Netherlands, as tinus_hn says in https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=21871486
If they play it hard, a lot of traditional Christmas movies will move behind a paywall. For example, Die Hard and Jingle all the Way, commented on this page, all are from 20th Century Fox, which is Disney owned, as is The Sound of Music)
Home Alone is a classic Christmas movie. That and Die Hard are Christmas tradition for my family.
I understand the point of the quote but I don't agree. I don't think it's worrying that millions of people enjoy escapist movies, we used to have Die Hard and whatever Arnold and Nick Cage were in, now we have superheroes. What's worrying is that the movie landscape has been hollowed out and NOTHING ELSE is available, so different kind of stories are not financed and promoted anymore (at least with the same energy as in the 90s).
Netflix, HBO and the other streaming services are filling the void but artistically we definitely have gone back a bit.
Sort of, you can see a real 747 pilot discuss the many inaccuracies (not that Die Hard intends to be a pseudo-documentary) here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqLbUF-2nWk
The most important thing the movie doesn't do that would happen in real life is, when there's any problem everybody diverts to their alternate, even including people queued up already to land. "Huh, they had some kind of problem, guess we should go to... uh... Baltimore? Find that for me and I'll let them know". Nobody's going to hang about waiting to see if they can get killed by terrorists.
But yes, they also recalibrate the height wrong in the movie to kill a 747 full of passengers and that wouldn't work either.
In Spain it's a fun meme how most foreign movie titles were translated into spanish, totally changing the meaning or simply destroying the original intent of the name.
You could argue some clever titles are not easy to translate, but God knows there was no need to translate "Die Hard" to "Jungla de cristal" (glass jungle). That practice was more prevalent 10-20 years ago, though.
The thing is that now, for one, it happened the other way around with ehm... "Money Heist" what a boring and uninspired name! :-)
Imagine flipping through the Netflix "channels", Die Hard is playing, and it's playing right at the scene where Bruce Willis is jumping out of the window of the building.
And there's an option in the right corner to "play from the beginning".
Flip to the next movie, and it's positioned right at its most popular scene.
Kids these days have it easy with their movie credits. In my day, you had to pause the tape to work out what year the movie was copyrighted.
Die Hard: MCMLXXXVIII
Avengers: Endgame: MMXIX
> It's not just American sensibilities that are in play. When you allow people to upload pornographic material you have to deal with the risk that they'll upload illegal material (shit that's illegal in Europe too (...))
Umm, disagree. If you allow people to upload beautiful, tasty delicious regular porn, they're not going to automatically upload ugly scary bad disgusting child porn, too. It's not like porn is a "gateway drug" (another American term, btw) to child porn.
Similarly, if you allow violent action movies with strong language like Die Hard, you're not automatically going to get snuff clips of beheadings like ISIS.
The point that you're trying to make is about moderation of uploaded material in general.
It's still American sensibilities if you're somehow going to treat "not nude" and "showing a female nipple" differently.
Urban combat tactics are fascinating. I’m reminded of this post that explains how the IDF in the early 2000s would try to “walk through walls” in urban combat. It also discusses how the film ‘Die Hard’ is a study of architecture. [0] The underlying essay referenced in the post is brief and interesting as well, discussing how those urban tactics were influenced by postwar French thought, in particular the ideas of Deleuze & Guattari.
[0] http://www.bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/
> So hacker news needs a filter lest you quote a sentence from some movie.
"Yipee-yi-yea...mother-fucker." ! -- Die Hard
Done :-)
Yeah, and there are a large number of americans that watch Christian/Biblical movies and consider those to be more Christian. Otoh,there are also a lot of people that think hallmark movies are Christmas movies while some disagree.
It's a celebration,societal consensus is not needed to determine how smaller groups of people want to celebrate it. Lets not force our celebrations on each other. My definition is the latter but I don't care one bit if others watch die hard and home alone while I watch the Gospel of John or something that has nothing to do with Christmas.
Know what? I'm fine either way - I'd rather argue with my dad about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie than politics and the economy any day.
So here's my vote - arguing ABOUT Die Hard being a Christmas move HAS BECOME a Christmas tradition.
> Do mildly Christmas-themed movies such as Die Hard (it's not integral to the plot)
The plot of the movie would have to be changed substantially if it didn't take place at Christmas, so I think it is integral to the plot.
C) Christmas movies can also be a theme where some moral achievement occurs that is in the spirit of Christmas. Scrooge realizes being an asshat is not a good way to live his life, or realizing that your presence in the world has definite impact on the lives of other people a la Miracle on 34th St, etc. Kids movies usually involve being good so Santa will bring presents. There's also the family coming together (whether that's good or bad, but still overcomes to good).
The conversations I've had about this with people that do not think Die Hard movies are usually based on this more than a release date or a winter time setting using Xmas deco in the movie. They don't know that's what they are getting at, but it's what I've come up with to explain it.
Talk about overthinking it! This thread highlights the recurrent conflict that arises because my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ, but most programmers are not.
To me a Christmas movie is a movie with the spirit of Christmas running through it, however weakly. Another definition I have is this. A Christmas movie is a movie that is fun to watch around Christmas. Die Hard meets both of these definitions.
Die Hard is not, however, a typical Christmas movie. It's a movie more for people who are sick of the normal Christmas movies and want a break. Because of this special status, people who think of Die Hard as a Christmas movie feel a greater camaraderie than people who think, say, White Christmas is a Christmas movie. For example, at a Christmas party one of my friends wore, as his "Christmas sweater," a gray sweatshirt with the words "Ho ho ho" written in red.
Another thing that makes Die Hard special is the thought and care that the director put into it, https://vimeo.com/76739972
Yup.
In Poland, this makes Home Alone and Die Hard both Christmas movies. Ever since I was a kid, I remember both being on TV during Christmas days. Hell, people actually made quite a large uproar couple years ago, when the TV station showing Home Alone decided not to show it on Christmas, and AFAIR they eventually changed the programming to keep it.
Several discussions of Die Hard being a Christmas movie happen in the show Brooklyn Nine-Nine, as Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) is obsessed with the movie.
Exactly. As the author noted, "Jingle Bells" was originally a Thanksgiving song before popular culture started associating it with Christmas.
If "Die Hard" becomes a Christmas movie over time, it's a thing that happens. People are messy. Societies of people, exponentially so.
Those are excellent points, but keep in mind that a lot of people define christmas movie as something that both adults and children can watch together. So that makes die hard a hard sell for a lot of families.
For me, any movie set in or around christmas qualifies as a christmas movie and my favorite christmas movies are "die hard", "home alone 1 and 2" and "scrooged". They all represent the redeeming christmas spirit in their own unique way.
Die Hard being regarded as a Christmas movie has been growing in popularity in the culture for many years now. I did however first hear about it being discussed in a TV show, although I can't remember which.
The article also touches on another meme that has been growing for the past few years, Thanksgiving and its lack of associated songs. I remember first noticing that due to Bob's Burgers mentioning it constantly in their Thanksgiving episodes, but have now noticed that SNL has been bringing up the fact there are no Thanksgiving songs for the past couple years as well.
Aha. A local bar was playing 1948 Rudolph the RNR followed by Die Hard, and I thought it was just a hipster ironic incongruity. Now I’m understanding some consider Die Hard a Christmas film.
The joke was popularized by an American TV show. It’s become one of those things people know they can trot out for easy upvotes, likes, etc. Most Christmas movies are family-oriented but Die Hard is an action movie so saying it’s one’s favorite Christmas movie is meant to demonstrate the distinctiveness of one’s personality. It’s like how people made jokes about sporks and “le earth”. Maybe in a few years it’ll come full circle and big data will help us to determine if sporks are closer to spoons or forks.
This is only an argument because of different ways of defining what a "Christmas movie" is, which aren't mutually exclusive:
a) Whether the movie is unambiguously set during Christmas, and if so whether that's clearly an artistic choice, or as much of a coincidence as a movie that has nothing to do with the weather being set in the summer or winter.
b) Whether the movie is aimed at the "Christmas movie market". I.e. released around Christmas, this'll usually coincide with a movie being more Christmas themed.
The article weaves between criteria that'll fall under one or the other, without ever really acknowledging the difference between the two.
Die Hard meets a) but not b), but the article doesn't mention whether or not skipping b) was intended.
The studio had a hard time casting the protagonist. Was it initially meant for a Christmas release, but ended up slipping into July without the script being changed to de-Christmas theme it?
More importantly, is there a reason to avoid b) without a)? Do mildly Christmas-themed movies such as Die Hard (it's not integral to the plot) get penalized in the market as a result? Why don't we see more of them?
Seriously, does anyone actually think Die Hard _isn't_ a christmas movie?
Translations of movie titles are a pet peeve of mine. They are bad everywhere, and have been since way before the times of Internet streaming.
My favourite example is Die Hard, which was translated to Polish as "Szklana Pułapka" (a glass trap). Presumably because the action took place in a skyscraper. I just wish I could have seen the faces of TV execs when they learned that Die Hard 2 came out, and was about airplane hijacking.
It always amused me that the thing that dated Die Hard so much was this line
“When they touch down, we'll blow up the roof, they'll spend a month sifting through rubble, and by the time they work out what went wrong, we'll be sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent.
Of all of the crazy things in the film, Twenty percent seems the most unimaginable to people who have only experienced recent times.
I have a similar question about a different movie: in Die Hard, Bruce sure whines a lot about how the police are following the Plan. But...what were they supposed to do, if not follow their best available Plan? What did Bruce want them to do, if he had his druthers? Should they...NOT follow The Plan? Follow the second-best available Plan?
Going forward, how ought The Plan be modified? Should they add a "now we roll a 20-sided die!" step, so future terrorists can never again be sure what'll happen?
Which is exactly what happens in the movies - die hard for example.
judges and juries are perfectly happy to side with police no matter how egregious the shootings are
Like many I watched Die Hard and Die Hard 2 over Christmas, and it struck me how deeply the rogue, trigger-happy cop is embedded as a folk hero in American culture. The real life John McClain is George Zimmerman or Mohamed Noor. You guys have got to stop making these movies if you want to make any progress
So, have they not watched Die Hard? The point made in that movie is that when you steal this many millions, they will find you -- unless they think you are already dead (thus, the plot to blow the building and look like they all died in the process).
What were these fools thinking?
> who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House
All of these heroes cooperated with close friends, colleagues, and other people in order to solve problems and achieve goals.
The difference is not individualism vs. cooperation. The difference is cooperation based on the voluntary choices of individuals, as needed to accomplish goals, vs. cooperation dictated from the top by someone's ideology.
The American culture values individualism...and also has a strong "you can't tell me what to do!" reaction to social pressure. If those points are connected, I can easily see too much individualism interfering with cooperation even if the base ideas are not in conflict.
Evidence: who are the heroes in american TV and movies? The rebel against authority, the one that breaks the rules. Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, House, I could go on and on. We celebrate the idea of something we actively argue against in daily life.
There's also some weird connection between extremes of claiming to value individualism and idolizing authoritarianism that I won't claim to understand, so I could be completely wrong on all of this. I'm not positive that extremes of individualism are a death knell for cooperation...but I don't find the idea unlikely either.
>Why can I sell a Die Hard DVD but not a Die Hard movie file?
Indeed. Why is that acceptable state of affairs? Remember, we have a law that essentially tells everyone that lending / selling your DVD is legal. Why isn't there such a law for digital content? Why can I sell a Die Hard DVD but not a Die Hard movie file?
Yes, read Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon's "Writing Movies for Fun and Profit" a couple times. There will be chapters that don't matter, and there will be incredibly important chapters (ex: "Every studio blockbuster should follow the structure of 'Die Hard'") but all of them will be fun to read.
One of the hardest parts is understanding the formatting expectations of screenplays. Read a couple (pilots for TV shows like "Breaking Bad" are great) and then use some software to help you get the hang of the format. You don't need to have blank page syndrome - in fact, I think the formatting of scripts is kind of liberating.
You don't have to be a writer to craft great scripts. You have to be a storyteller. The mechanics might overlap, but don't be afraid to try.
Adapt? Really? It doesn't seem so. They are in their own world, and don't care.
But no wonder when you read about the crazy head of Sony Pictures, the woman that got kicked because of the scandals that got made public (emails leaked). For example we can "thank" her for that the Steve Jobs movie lost the The Social Network director and is now such a boring piece of movie.
We don't need hundreds of super hero movies, such a mass is stupid. Where are the funny movies, the action movies, the adventure movies? We want less CGI and more real action, or CGI looking like real action.
We want movies not boring hour long series, we have no time to waste hours for a stretched story arc.
The Accountant, (second half of) Bourne 2016, Jack Reacher 2, Mission Impossible Rogue Nation ... were good movies. But it gets harder and harder to find a few movies per year that are watchable. The last two X-Men movies were so bad, so many CGI effects, so dark, so little content that made the previous X-Men movies great. Were are the Die Hard 1-2, Air Force One, first three Tom Clancy movies of this decade - right, directors and script writers forgot how to pace a movie, as constant action is just wrong, you need intense action then calm situations and then action again and a bit humour does't hurt (something almost completely forgotten). I just saw a 1968 action movie and it was so much better (Steven Spielberg mentioned it's his favourite movie he sees up to), this decades Hollywood is in a sad state.
But there is a continuum even within 'loved it' territory. I 'love' Die hard. But I 'love' There will be Blood more. The latter may be my favourite movie ever. What should Netflix recommend to me first? A loud action movie, or an unsettling character piece with an unlikable protagonist?
Exactly this mass of comic super hero movies is so boring. And reboot after reboot with broken confusing story-line, with the reboot worse than the original. No wonder when idiots like the woman who was in charge at Sony Movie Pictures run such companies. The Steve Jobs move bombed big time. Instead of another superb movie in the style of Social Network we got the most boring movie ever.
Please focus on movies instead of hundreds of TV series - no one has time to watch that many series anyway - or do you want to create many niches with little viewers that ay little (Netflix, etc). How about full productions (not outsourced to Canada or Australia) without overusing CGI and spend some money on good scripts. Oh, and we don't need drama and slow spacing all the time. We need more humour and action, and often less story is better. Look at Kevin alone at home 1+2, Indiana Jones 1+3, Die Hard 1+2, Airforce One, the first two Tom Clancy movies, etc. fast pacing with slow elements, a short but good story, no fuss, very good music.
Aye but is it something you'd watch with a bunch of 8 year olds?
Perhaps it's one on a technicality, in much the same way Die Hard is. But it's definitely not what most people think of when somebody says "it's a Christmas movie."
People may spend more time binge watching TV than watching films on Netflix. But they should be concentrating on customer satisfaction, not racking up viewers.
My girlfriend already jokes that if you search for a film on Netflix they realise and immediately remove it. Then you get the dreaded "Films related to X" search result.
It's really really bad if Netflix gets a reputation for having a small catalogue, even if most of it is rarely watched.
It's kind of like Linux vs Windows. Linux has 90% of the apps you need. But when you need Solidworks or Altium or GTA 5 or whatever you think "pff screw this I will use windows". With Netflix it has lots of stuff but when you search for Die Hard or 12 Angry Men or whatever... well let's just say I treat Netflix as a moral way of paying for Bittorrent.
I probably saw die hard and other movies like that in middle school.
I remember seeing saving private ryan around that time too.
The only movie that ever really bothered me for violence was the passion of the christ.
Interesting. Also reminds me of the Thomas Lennon & Robert Ben Garant screenwriting guide (excellent) which posits there is one - only one - blockbuster movie format, and it's most easily seen in Die Hard.
Introduce likeable character - get them stuck in trouble - get them unstuck.
This is a good start:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)
It's also interesting to review old films and media from the late eighties (Gung Ho, and Die Hard). It's hard to comprehend if you didn't live through it, but there was a massive level of anxiety in the US that Japanese business culture and management prowess was going to be impossible for the US to overcome, and that th US was in decline.
The Asset bubble in Japan was so insane that at one point the nominal value of the Imperial Palace was equal to the value of all property in the state of California. Aother good Wikipedia article to read is this one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble
That movie and American Sniper were pretty blatant attempts.
I'm okay with say Die Hard as that's entertainment but these go far beyond with the veneer of "truth"
Well, it's a stretch, but when I saw Die Hard I just barely caught the BSD reference when they log into the CEO's terminal. I found a screen shot on flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/armenws/9516176127/
That's a pretty hackerish reference for a film made in 1988 that wasn't particularly about computers or tech. There was probably a BSD fan at the company that created the computer screens. FreeBSD 9.2 had a tribute to this in it's boot screen:
https://mebsd.com/make-build-your-freebsd-word/freebsd-9-2-die-hard.html
By Grabthar's Hammer, by the Suns of Wavern -- you will be missed.
Like many really famous actors, at some point in his career it just became Alan Rickman, in <MOVIE-TITLE-HERE>
But that was okay. His Die Hard appearance was phenomenal. I'll never forget the movie Galaxy Quest.
I cannot miss Alan, for I did not know him. But I liked a bunch of art he created, and I will be sad thinking that he will not be able to create any more of it.
The super hero movies are getting annoying. The same goes for arkward unfunny comedian movies.
I hope Hollywood revives action movies (1980/90s style; eg Die Hard 1/2) with real stunts and little CGI again, as well as films with good realistic stories, realistic characters, funny and with a little drama (eg The Family Stone).
And, according to Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon's screenwriting book, a successful movie should abide by a very simple 3 Act formula (paraphrased):
Act 1: Introduce Nice Guy
Act 2: Get Nice Guy stuck in a tree, throw rocks at him
Act 3: Get him down from the tree
Or, in other words, just watch Die Hard enough to get the idea.
> Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!
Wait, seriously how? Who? How many of them?
> Films used to be about challenging, emotional journeys.
Charlie Chaplin. Laurel and Hardy. Buster Keaton. John Wayne. Die Hard. Lethal Weapon. Airplane.
The World's End.
> Now we’re really not thinking about anything, other than the fact that the Hulk just had a fight with a robot.”
Yep. I took an afternoon off to treat a few people to Age of Ultron. It was awesome. Afterward, I went back to work.
I think this article can go sit right next to the nonsense about Clint Eastwood and the empty chair: "Person states opinions about society and ends up in the news because they're an actor, more at 11."
Comparing to Citizen Kane seems unfair as it's not an action movie. So here are some other action movies. (NB: There are multiple entries for some of these but I'm not listing them all).
Die Hard 4.5 Die Hard 2 3.1 Die Hard 3 1.8 Armageddon 2.2 -- at least he's ben consistently on the quick side Total Recall 3.7 -- original, 1990 Robocop 3.7 -- original Haywire 6 And I keep trying to search for movies they don't have in the database. So certainly for action movies (1980+), at least for some popular ones, the ASL isn't out of the ordinary.
But then I searched for Alfred Hitchcock and got some interesting results. This database has many duplicate entries and some wildly different values. The Skin Game had 3 entries at about the same time (17.1, 17.3, 17.4). However, Rear Window has an entry at 3.7 and another at 8.8, and several at 10.5. I suppose I need to read about their methodology to understand why there's so much variance.
I hate more recent action movies (e.g. Bond movies) for that reason. I can't figure out what's going on. I miss the more sedate pace of 1980's and 1990's action movies. Go back and watch Die Hard or the Fugitive sometime.
The other big change is pacing. A couple years ago, we needed a Christmas movie to cover some baking time and picked Die Hard. Everyone commented on how much slower it was than modern movies and how much better it was as a result.
I think the main problem is that VFX has become so cheap that there's no check on including another action scene; neither the writers nor directors appear to worry about justifying the expense the same way they would if it involved paying people to build something real which could only be used once.
The second episode of the excellent "I Was There Too" podcast features Ricco Ross, who played Private Frost in Aliens.
It's an excellent episode (and show) filled with cool trivia from the cast and film shoot.
http://iwastheretoo.wolfpop.com/audio/20250/aliens-with-ricco-ross
Also, Aliens is the 2nd greatest action movie (after Die Hard) of all time, and #1 sci-fi action movie ever.
Interesting to note that the first Die Hard movie is 1988. Just watched it the other day, and it doesn't feel stale at all. Lethal Weapon is 1987, and I bet a lot of kids would recognize "I'm getting too old for this shit."
How about a comeback of 1990s style action movies like: Die Hard, Air Force One, Beverly Hills Cop, Lethal Weapon, etc.
Instead Sony plans new movies like Captain America, Avenger, Ants Man. They milk the Marvel brand to death. Sad and boring.
I've been sitting on this gem for a while. I present to you: The Bruce Wayne Gap Year.
Wealthy people with desires to become Batman can more-or-less do so.
First they sign a waiver and an NDA, removing any liability from the Bruce Wayne Gap Year company. Then they'll pay the company tens of thousands of dollars to pay for what is to come.
They'll be put into a real criminal gang [1], and taken around the world getting involved in all sorts of illegal [2] activities.
Sooner or later they'll be subtly led to the Himalayas, where they'll join a monastery, lead a simple life of celibacy and minimalism and slowly learn to meditate and fully understand themselves and their body.
After a while, they'll be groomed by a man [3] claiming to be working for a mysterious and powerful leader of a guild of assassins, and taught all kinds of martial arts over months and months, culminating in a complex battle which determines their eligibility. At that point, they will be asked to do something their morals will not allow (this will be determined in a psychological screening), and end up betraying and destroying [4] the guild.
Then they return home, better for the experience.
It can't fail. A friend of mine also suggested it be re-implemented for all sorts of action hero/film type situations. James Bond, Die Hard, Rambo, etc. It's essentially a very expensive, realistic roleplaying experience.
[1]: Actually, very highly paid and well-trained actors. We don't tell them that though.
[2]: Mostly not illegal, but they're made to believe that these things are illegal. Some things will be borderline (they may accidentally end up threatening people who are not part of the ruse, for example), hence the NDA.
[3]: Also an actor. A very good, very well paid actor. Possibly we'll just get Liam Neeson, and he'll act so well that he'll convince them that he's not Liam Neeson.
[4]: Not really. The martial artists will never be allowed to be worse than the client, and will also be stunt-trained and capable of faking death.
> chock full of graphic violence
In France we don't have any special opposition to either sex or graphic violence in movies (if you check the minimal age required for some movies on imdb, you might be surprised by the amount of movies we put at 12 years old when other countries do 16 or 18), and Hollywood movie have become "tame" enough that dubber (movies are dubbed in french) often add swearing to make it sounds more realistic ...
Hell, even Die Hard turned PG-13.
They have the right...
but they're not angry. In fact... it's a pretty good bet that the average "traditional" resident of that area is not even aware of the fight. The original poster was right, the "traditional" residents in Oakland are just struggling to make ends meet. They're not going to look up from their grind because some upper-middle class kids want to fight each other.
Those who are aware... probably think about it in the same light as the Samuel L Jackson character "Zeus" in the Die Hard movie... "THAT'S A WHITE MAN!!! WITH WHITE PROBLEMS!!!" And just like "Zeus", that's how they will perceive it, since they feel it doesn't affect them. (And they are probably right... they won't get anything out of that fight anyway. I mean, we say they will get a worse reputation... but the reality is... the law abiding "traditional" residents don't care about reputation... you can't pay rent with it.)
Here is a place where it's helpful and guessing wrong is ok. Consider a movie information site, which for some reason knows your name (but nothing else).
Male homepage: Die Hard, Star Wars, Bridget Jones.
Female homepage: Bridget Jones, Twilight, Star Wars.
Both males and females are shown primarily movies they are more likely to be interested in and your bounce rate goes down.
You seem to be missing a whole slew of games here, and most importantly, you don't seem to understand just how gritty, dark, and realistic Wolfenstein was for its time.
You cherry-pick robo-Hitler in order to paint Wolfenstein as a fun and happy game - but the fact of the matter is that when it was released, it was the most realistic game ever made (give or take), in which you killed nazis. Nothing but nazis. In a first-person perspective, in a dark and gritty environment, in what was seen as very realistic. The policor backlash to the game's realism and grittiness - and the nazi-aspect - was huge. Wolfenstein was far, far more realistic and gritty than Halo has ever been, when put in historical perspective.
Then there's the fact that other realistic console shooters existed long before Halo came out. Take Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark for the N64, for instance. Two highly-realistic first person shooters, accompanied by successful multiplayer elements. Or Medal of Honor for the PS1. On the PC, too - take Rise of the Triad, one of the most violent games I can think of. Its multiplayer was simplistic, straightforward, and incredibly violent and gory.
I know it's all the rage to talk down on console gaming and games like Halo in particular, but the fact of the matter is that this kind of gaming didn't start with Halo, and had been around for a long, long time before it. Games like this have always existed alongside deeper and richer games, and that's a good thing - I like more intelligent and rewarding experiences, but after a long day or a stressful week, I just want to get some friends together and shoot zombies in Left 4 Dead 1/2 - just as I don't want every movie I see to be Philadelphia. Sometimes, I just want Armageddon or Die Hard, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I agree and disagree, to varying degrees.
HL1 was definitely better than HL2 (which I still liked), which would make a terrible movie.
But HL1 as a movie? It's already been made. Half Life is Die Hard with aliens as a video game. "Fairly regular guy is put into an unpexpected situation where is is forced to kick ass and crawl through air-ducts in the ceiling." We don't need a Half Life movie.
> Exactly the same thing is happening in the movie industry.
And I personally hate it. I remember a time when "blockbusters" included stuff like Total Recall, Die Hard, Terminator II or Aliens, I just want that again. There's still the casual Sucker Punch or Watchmen, but they're too few and far between.
Everyone has seen Nmap used and might not even know it. It was famously used by Trinity in The Matrix, and has popped up in Die Hard, Bourne Ultimatum, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and more. http://nmap.org/movies.html
I wonder if Hollywood will upgrade.
It really depends on the movie. I see your point about it sometimes being a lazy way to cover up for poor acting, or just to go for shock value, but consider "Die Hard" - the word "fuck" (and variations on it) is used 50 times, mostly by John McClane. I think that helps contribute to the atmosphere of his being a regular guy who's in way over his head, doing his best to survive in an impossible situation.
Either way though, I don't think it should be the ratings agency's job to enforce artistic quality. Either movies that lazily use profanity will fail on their own lack of merit, or they'll succeed; in which case I would argue that the public is getting what it's asking for.
Side note: I think it's poor form to lead a comment with "I know this will get downvoted" or "time to burn some karma" etc. It comes off as a pretty annoying attempt to psychologically manipulate readers.
> I actually like the action movies where you know that the guy gets the pretty girl once he is done blowing things up.
Die Hard is "years old" (24 of them, actually) and is an awesome movie in this genre. In fact I am going to preemptively declare you to be an action movie hipster if you like them but not Die Hard.
Being old doesn't make a movie bad. Being bad makes a movie bad. Sometimes that's because the times have changed and the plots are hard to relate to, but usually it's got nothing to do with the age.
"Die Hard" - best Christmas movie ever!
Let's go find your last days on the IRC. I'm trying to have conversations about servers and you are interrupting us with...I don't even know.
[09:20] JimBastard: yeah, with rackspace i get to control the guy going to the rack with a REST api [09:20] JimBastard: hrmmm, i need more traffic on our sites right now so i can stress test the new fucking proxy version [09:21] V1: The 3 minute install is only possible if you actually have rackspace account [09:21] JimBastard: V1: aye [09:21] JimBastard: <3 rackspace [09:23] lachlanhardy has joined the channel [09:24] callen: JimBastard: boo [09:24] JimBastard: ? [09:25] callen: JimBastard: ?_? [09:26] callen: JimBastard: you know Hans Zimmer? [09:26] JimBastard: from the die hard movies? yeah [09:26] callen: lots more than that, but sure. [09:26] callen: JimBastard: pure dramatic orchestra kitsch. It's like cotton candy with string and brass instruments. [09:26] callen: JimBastard: I am addicted ;_;
This is the last thing I saw from you on IRC:
[01:21] callen: JimBastard: boo. [01:22] HAITI: cheers [01:22] ehaas has joined the channel [01:22] JimBastard: ?
(nt for a while)
[03:09] callen: JimBastard: wake up.
( i stopped responding at this point , no point getting trolled on IRC )
Hang on, there are people who watched that movie and sympathized with the Winkelvii? They were a cartoon character playing up every negative stereotype of old money that exists.
That's like someone sympathizing with the villain from Die Hard or something.
I was impressed with Die Hard (1988) when I first saw it; so well engineered, as a movie and story and visual spectacle. Now that's the way action movies should be made, I thought, and hoped there'd be more like it -- even while wary of formulaic recombinations, like 'Die Hard on a boat', etc.
Years later, I saw The General (1927), and it blew my mind. There, 60+ years earlier, was 'Die Hard on rails'. There were so many action-movie scenes and stunts and plot points that have been repeated over and over in the decades since.
But: when Keaton did it, he wasn't cribbing anyone else. These weren't old familiar cliches (yet). He was risking his health with dangerous stunts. He didn't have the help of later special effects. He didn't even have sound or spoken dialogue. But still it all worked: the humor, the story, the stunts, the tension.
It was like discovering the common ancestor of hundreds of later movie and TV tropes, the very first action flick that crawled out of the oceans of text and imagination to walk on the dry land of motion pictures.
To have created that, with the limited tools of the era, prefiguring so much of what came later -- well, we can only hope to do something similar with the still-young digital and network media of our age.
Please bear with me for a while.
A proposition: let's just start splitting our P2P downloads, initially and for simplicitly, in two counterparts of equal size that are XORed together to form the actual work whose copyright we want to infringe.
Downloading random data can't possibly be illegal—oh wait, despite of this naive scheme (that is almost out of Applied Cryptography and one that almost smells of a one-time pad), wouldn't my download still be non-random because it somehow must contain a kind of a half of a copyrighted work or something? Wouldn't it still infringing? Mere lawsuit-fodder?
It happens that if we have any blob of data of, say 700MB in size, then no matter what you do, someone can always construct another 700MB that—when XORed together—yields a copy of a recent movie.
If I legally download a Ubuntu live CD image, I can't possibly be infringing any copyright, right? Even if someone has constructed another image of the same size, that when XORed with the Ubuntu live CD yields a copy of Die Hard? Duh, easy: it's obviously the other 700M blob of data that's infringing copyright! Off to prosecute me if I do that, then.
Now, if I do happen to be downloading the other blob, what exactly would I be infringing? Again, the blob I'm downloading contains random bits and can contain—depending on the other half—any movie you can think of, under copyright or not. Or no movie. If someone gives me a suitable set of ten other halves, then I can get exactly ten movies out of the single 700M blob. But you can't possibly fit ten high-quality movies into a single 700M blob, so obviously the other blobs, again, must contain the actual payload and be illegal copies, and not this particular one...
If neither of the blobs is a public, recognized piece of data, how can you tell which is which? They're just both random data. If I individually XOR these blobs with other blobs and happen to get Ubuntu live CDs, Fedora installation CDs, WinXP corporate installer CDs, Die Hard and other movies, and memtest diagnostics CDs popping out of them, it's obvious that someone has been XORing these blobs with copyrighted works.
But you can't tell who exactly infringed the copyright; you can't tell who exactly downloaded the copyrighted works; and you can't tell who exactly uploaded them, either.
The infringing will eventually happen, should one choose to do so, in the privacy of one person's home. But how could anyone know? Especially MPAA/RIAA/<insert_goons>? Besides, fair use says that personal copies can be made, doesn't it. Or something like that.
Lawyers would of course, at this point, laugh at this feeble technicality and start aiming their prosecution guns at me, drooling off all the way. But as long as they could only observe IP numbers logged off a BitTorrent tracker or magnet swarm, what would they produce as evidence? They could try to convince the court that because I was downloading a 700MB blob named b8501756a0db1fc96a79920c30edd29e40a050b4 I was downloading and sharing a particular movie? Possibly, but how could they prove that?
They could carefully examine the logs and try to find out whether I've also downloaded and shared the particular XOR counterpart of this first part. But what if I got it off a website? They can't track direct downloads. Or what if there were three counterparts? Two of them available on torrents and a third counterpart of public data that I could legally and separately download somewhere or have it delivered over with an USB stick. Or I got some of them from FreeNet?
I guess they would have to show that I first had all the required parts and then actually assembled the files together in order to prove that I did, in fact, infringe the copyright of one work. If they don't, then why would downloading anything from internet not infringe the copyrights of all copyrighted works there are.
Please, someone tell me why this wouldn't work. Convenience? The maneuvers here do sound complicated but they could be mostly automated away.
I'm not stupid enough to think that this would somehow hold water, otherwise we'd be doing this already; I'm just stupid enough to not figure out why exactly would it fail, and I mean fail totally. Not just "yaa, they'd probably try to sue you anyway".
Because paying 2x or 3x bandwidth for the freedom to download and seed as much as you can would be a bargain. (And, yes, I would legally buy the best of all the warez I would download.)
Consumed and processed by you, perhaps. The film was released (somewhat shortly) before I was even born. I watched Die Hard for the first time last year. Before then, the only thing I knew about it was that it had Bruce Willis in it. I don't think I'm particularly special, I just don't watch that many old movies.
The point is, spoiling it adds nothing to the conversation: "I watched the movie and you got this plot element that, while important to the film, is completely unimportant to your point ... wrong!". On the other hand, not spoiling it lets anyone a bit too young to have seen it the first time around not have their experience of the film permanently altered for the worse. There is no contest. Don't spoil things, even if it's old as hell. It really, honestly ruins things for some people who are a bit behind the times and care about this sort of thing.
"What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs. This mutational exploration of architecture even supplies the building's narrative premise: the terrorists are there for no other reason than to drill through and rob the Nakatomi Corporation's electromagnetically sealed vault.
Die Hard asks naive but powerful questions: If you have to get from A to B—that is, from the 31st floor to the lobby, or from the 26th floor to the roof—why not blast, carve, shoot, lockpick, and climb your way there, hitchhiking rides atop elevator cars and meandering through the labyrinthine, previously unexposed back-corridors of the built environment?"
So, basically, just like a hacker. Like Mel using the values of opcodes as numeric constants, spacing instructions just right on the drum to slow down the computer's execution rather than using time delay loops, and exploiting a register overflow instead of a loop test. Not constraining one's self to the artificial rules the system is built to enforce, but dropping back to the fundamental physical rules the system was built upon in the first place.
Excellent find. However he mischaracterizes one segment of Die Hard that would actually strengthen his thesis.
The article argues that the logic of Die Hard rewards those who "infest" the spaces they inhabit, traversing them creatively rather than via their intended corridors, elevators, and doorways.
He uses the L.A. SWAT team running across Nakatomi Plaza's rose garden as an example of this.
I'd counter that the SWAT team's approach was actually conventional. They try to get in through the front door, and get blown away. Had they tried to tunnel in from below, for example, in Die Hard's world they would have been more successful.
Also, his point that the subsequent Die Hard films would have been improved by holding onto the premise of exploring an architectural space rings true. Die Hard 2 tried to do this with an airport, but it was a much less interesting locale. You could debate whether or not Die Hard 3 was taking the same approach to NYC or not...
If, as he says, Die Hard is more about architecture than characters, I'd argue that the true spiritual sequel to Die Hard is Steven Seagal's Under Siege, aka, "Die Hard on a boat." Throughout the (awesome) film, Seagal travels around a navy ship in all sorts of unconventional ways, letting the viewer explore the unfamiliar space in a fashion similar to John McClane's adventure in Die Hard.
Quick summary: What I find so interesting about Die Hard—in addition to unironically enjoying the film—is that it cinematically depicts what it means to bend space to your own particular navigational needs. This mutational exploration of architecture even supplies the building's narrative premise: the terrorists are there for no other reason than to drill through and rob the Nakatomi Corporation's electromagnetically sealed vault.
The article is all about how "Die Hard" and an Israeli invasion of Palestinian territory in 2002 are both about using space in unexpected ways, and moving through everything except doors, streets and hallways.
A simple script isn't the same thing as a bad script, though. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard, Alien... these are simple scripts, but they were all turned into good movies.
The problem with Avatar's script is not so much its simplicity, but its preachiness. A story set in a simplified world of good and evil isn't so annoying (cf Star Wars) unless it's supposed to be making some kind of political commentary on our own world.
Isn't it more like an annual Seattle screening of Pulp Fiction switching to, I dunno, Die Hard? Perhaps a change for the worse, but one you are rarely (if ever) actually affected by, and one the majority of people who are affected by it wouldn't care about?
Movies are a tough example because a LOT more people care about movies than fonts -- so perhaps many people would care about that switch -- but you get the idea.
In the film Die Hard, there are 'anonymous/untraceable bearer bonds', so maybe.
Never seen Die Hard. Never really wanted to... I didn't think it was that big a movie.
Yeah, I'm just not getting the ticked off part. Could there really be a "billion" blog readers who have never seen Bruce Willis in Die Hard and therefore can't spot the pop-culture reference in DHH's closing quote?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/quotes
I thought that even one-celled animals had seen Die Hard by now. But perhaps it's more of a generational thing than I had realized.