Hacker Cinema
Lethal Weapon
1987 · Film · 110 min
Part of Lethal Weapon Collection
Directed by Richard Donner
A veteran cop and an unstable detective become partners who must put their differences aside in order to bring down a heroin-smuggling ring run by ex-Special Forces.
7 positive3 negative13 neutralfrom 23 commenters
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23 comments on Hacker News
Yep. I'd just about kill for a decade where we go back to 80s flicks. Some of the best quantity and quality we've ever had for mass-appeal movies, and they didn't cost anywhere near what the average cost is today.
And I'd have at least 2-3 movies a year I'd really WANT to go see, probably more.
Back to the Future, Lethal Weapon, Arnie's action flicks, Ghostbusters-- I could go on for quite awhile, maybe the last decade where we had that kind of movie output.
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!
Leaving outside the ethical part of it - which is huge, this kills innovation.
The problem I see is that when everything is iterative, and you kill sustainable incentives for new views, innovation disappears.
Is like the movies. We will get all budget towards remakes and reboots, and little new would show up.
Being an 80s guy, I remember many new movies coming out every year, and when they stretched beyond 2 or 3 films, people frowned.
Back to the future, Indy (the good years), Rambo (first 3), lethal weapon. Cool gems came up too (Last action hero?Terminator) even in loaded fields like simple action movies…. Star Wars, 3 films. Matrix. bond was the exception.
Now? mission impossible (8 films at over 2h), fast and mediocre franchise (20 movies), Marvel and DC movies (3 movies shot 30 different times), and everything else is a reboot. Almost impossible for new ideas to get through.
We are killing culture, innovation and human spark for some companies to make a billion more. We are feeding like factory pigs from generic slop, and as the factories grow they kill fertile ground for those who wanted to eat something cleaner.
The fact that is happening does not mean it’s right. It’s just we are accepting mediocrity as our guiding principle at 0.01 USD a pop…
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.
No, the whole reason "Director's Cuts" exists is that those represent the cut the director wanted, not the theatrical cut released by the studio (which is driven by the studio's or producer's wants).
See, for example, Alien 3, Blade Runner, and Justice League for the most notorious/well-known examples. Lesser known examples include Aliens, The Abyss, Kingdom of Heaven, Doctor Sleep, Lethal Weapon, Dark City.
Only a handful of directors at the big studios get the right to control the final cut. You'll notice the director responsible for 3 of the 4 highest-grossing movies of all time has 2 movies in that list; this is because James Cameron didn't earn the right to control final cut until after his 3rd blockbuster success.
A few studios, like Netflix and A24, adhere to the "auteur's theory" of filmmaking, and let the director have full control over the creative process of the film, including the final cut, even without an established record of hits, but this is the exception, not the norm.
Well, I broke it. I have crafted 93 different Lethal Weapon movies - sequels well into the million+ range.
It's missing Lethal Weapon 5 and 6: https://github.com/lynnandtonic/nestflix.fun/issues/176
The irony is that the It's Always Sunny Lethal Weapon and Thundergun 4: Maximum Cool [1] episodes made fun of exactly that.
[1] https://nestflix.fun/thunder-gun-4-maximum-cool/
> The US/Hollywood is far more prudish since my youth.
The prudishness manifested differently. I recall a lot more nudity and at least as many sex scenes in movies I watched as a kid (under 18).
Highlander
Lethal Weapon
Robocop
Life of Brian
Even OG Batman had some nudity and referenced sex in it as a PG-13.
Exposed breasts and sex scenes were pretty common. Full frontal nudity was even relatively common. And sometimes wouldn't even garner an R rating.
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.
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)
I personally can, maybe that says something about my moral code, maybe not. Orson Scott Card's works are some of my favorite books to read, and it puzzles me how he was able to write a book like Speaker for the Dead while holding the xenophobic and racist views he did. Mel Gibson also holds some pretty reprehensible views, however that doesn't stop me from watching the Lethal Weapon films.
Contextualizing works of art is important in some cases, and moreso if the art is political. In cases where author bias either isn't present or doesn't matter, however, I don't think it matters.
A lot of the removed U.S. content, is usually accessible in other countries (and vice-versa in some cases). I find more blockbuster movies when I am in Europe can be accessed via Netflix than in the U.S. (e.g. Black Hawk Down, House, Brooklyn 99, Lethal Weapon, Mad Max, Star Wars VII etc). There are a couple of search engines specific to find the right region.
Netflix from my understanding can pay less upfront for rights to well known movies outside the U.S. (https://flixed.io/newest-best-netflix-movies/).
The problem with Netflix from a non-U.S. region viewer is its lackluster offering of native language movies.
Beverly Hills Cop was pioneering, though. I can't think of any action-comedy buddy cops films that predate it (it came out before Lethal Weapon, the other film often cited as the first in the genre).
> 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.
Came here to say the same and as the back catalog slips further and further into the syndicated Sunday movie category the OC looks better and better because you haven't already seen it. When I first subscribed to Netflix it was a library of DVDs (literally), now its a slightly better TBS. (Hey Lethal Weapon's on... again)
One thing to note about the cost. There's one rather large difference between cable and multiple streaming services (at least where Netflix is concerned) and that is advertising. We may be paying more for this content, but at least we're only getting content and not having to wait through mis-targeted advertising... At least for now.
Like how 'lethal weapon' wasn't referred to as 'lethal weapon one' until the sequels. It has always been regarded as a gem by many people. First use of CGI in a film too, I believe. For the x-ray scene at the Mars port.
family favorite franchises such as Back to The Future & Lethal Weapon.
When did a movie that depicts a PTSD-afflicted Vietnam vet being tortured by electric shock become a "family favorite," and what does that say about us as a culture?
> I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.
I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides.
With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine.
But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too.
I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.)
I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud.
If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."
> 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."
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 viewed Lethal Weapon as one of the early movies to glorify torture to get what you want out of bad guys. On TV the Shield took it to a much higher level.