WNYC-FM
Loveline
CBS-FM
Spinner
 
 

the style council, greatest hits
 
 

Die Hard (the series) 
 
 
 
 

Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder; Willard, by Stephen Gilbert 
 
 
 
 
 

don't get me nothin', just take a look at my lovely list.
 
 
 
 
 

"And we have in our audience today guests from The Optimist's Club."
"Oh -- so they make glasses or something?"
-- scintillating chat from Ty Treadway and Lisa Rinna (in that order) on SoapTalk

The best caption for this photo is:

1. I can die happy after patting down that smooth pate
2. Who thought I'd crush on a big bald head?
3. True, the voice is the real aphrodisiac.
4. Getting ahead of myself here. Har har ... I kill me.

Not to be too glib here, but there's another casualty of 9/11 that I hadn't thought of -- the Die Hard trilogy.

For big dumb action pictures (that I've found surprisingly watchable over and over again), you really can't beat the Die Hards. They're good in descending order, but even III isn't bad. And the one Steven Segal movie I like is Under Seige, which is essentially Die Hard On A Carrier. (If you can buy the buff and Neanderthal-looking Segal as an "everyman," and can stomach the whiny blonde they saddle him with.) I hadn't seen them in full uncut glory in years; I own two of them on videotape, but never sat down to watch much. But if they were on TNT or regular TV, I'd end up getting sucked in, no matter when I turned them on. I'm not even a Bruce Willis fan -- he's just good as everyman and has a lot of fun quips. Even in light of my Law & Order fascination, I'm never left yelling at the screen "that would never happen in real life!" Because, of course, it isn't real life.

Until it is.

I got a good discount price on the trilogy of DVDs -- extra scenes! commentary! -- off of Amazon.com's used section, and have been watching them on and off while having dinner over the past week. Director John McTiernan is no Ridley Scott (who, for my money, is the best commentary on DVD guy I've found), but I enjoyed the stuff he explained as he went along. And there's a whole mini-course in film editing, etc. on the second disk -- you can re-order a scene by choosing different camera angles. Plus, I love Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber ("Who said we were terrorists?") and the ingenuity of Wills's McClane character is endlessly enjoyable. He's MacGuyver! In Die Hard 2 (Die Harder; yawn, roll eyes) the storytelling gets harder and crueller -- Renny Harlin should be shot for forcing us to see inside the doomed plane just before the baddie runs it into the ground, but it is effective; my stomach clenches every time that scene comes up. It's just so ... mean. The rest -- pure dumb good stuff.

But. Watching I and II over again (I haven't gotten to III yet; the title is Die Hard With A Vegenance, which leads me to believe if we'd gone to IV it would have been called Son Of Die Hard) it's hard not to wonder if the Al Quaeda guys who brought down the WTC weren't taking notes by watching these films. Real or not, there are a lot more stomach-clenching scenes now. Let us review:

• In the first one, the Nakatomi building (now home of Fox in LA) is under seige by German terrorists who want to steal untraceable bearer bonds, which makes them not really terrorists, but thieves. They decide to do this while the Christmas party is going on, so the building is empty except for the employees of the Nakatomi Corporation. McClane outwits and outsmarts them all over the place, they blow up the roof, causing a nearby-flying helicopter to collide. Flames. Fire. Top of a building ignited. And when McClane leaves at long last with wife Holly, the Christmas season is nodded to by having corporate documents "snow" all around. This time around, all I could think of was, "They're right. When a building really does get hit by a craft, the paper does go flying everywhere. Like snow." Fortunately, there's no bodies falling; the carnage is largely on the baddie's side. Rickman falls, sure, but that's about it.
• Second one: A drug dealing General from some Latino country is being extradited and will land in Dulles in hours; for unknown reasons (except to support "our way of life") the baddie (Col. Stuart) and his henchman divert power to Dulles during Christmas Eve? Christmas season? in the midst of a snowstorm and shut down the electricity, holding the planes in the air hostage until they can get the General away safely. Watching that stomach-clenching airplane disaster is even more so now. But I'm sitting there going, "What if Osama's a big Bruce fan and just decided to mix these two films? Like ... 'Hmm...planes. Lots of fuel. Tall building. Lots of [insert anti-Western sentiment here] money. On fire. Hm. Let me sleep on this one. Where is my dialysis nurse?' " Inside the airport, there's a scene where some of the henchmen apparently have obtained the key to the luggage area; they just click on through. Again, thinking of security at the airports and everything these days ... it brings it home in a way that isn't pleasant.
• On an unrelated-to-9/11 incident, I also started thinking about this: Throughout the movie, there's a snowstorm. There's apparently even been so much snow in previous days that there's a pack thick enough to drive snowcats over. All I could think was, Ah, yes, back in the days when global warming hadn't taken away our snowy winters. Ah, those were the days. The good thing is, Bush says there's nothing to worry about. And just because conservation societies are basically saying we're past the point of being able to save our ecosystem ... what, me worry?