“Howdy folks. After a week of crizaziness (Red State on Sun, Dollyrots on Mon, Spelling Bee stuff on Tue, Good Charlotte and Forever the Sickest Kids on Wed, Burn the Floor on Thur) Im finally getting a chance to sit down and watch something. WHew.
Up on the list now we got Die Hard. This is one of several that’s on my list to watch every Christmas. Yes, its an Xmas movie. I’ve actually found I dont hafta argue that point as much as I used to, but comment if you need convincing, and convinced you shall be! Sadly, I wasnt able to manage that this year. I’d loaned out my VHS copy of the trilogy to some friends, and an impulsive run to Best Buy didnt prove fruitful. Still haven’t gotten the VHS’s back but I picked up a second hand copy of the original at Newbury. That’s really the only one of the franchise that’s being considered here.
I’ve found that early 90’s movies tend to fall into two categories for me. There’s the ones I grew up loving, good or bad. And the ones that I didnt see until more recently, and just can’t get into, no matter how good. Die Hard is one of the rare anomalies to that theory. Im not sure when I first saw it, but it was at least once I was at MIT. I \m/ loved it. Well, clearly, since it made the list.
The action scenes are fun, the dialogue is killer (prolly the winning-est point of hte film for me), great cast, just a perfectly awesome film.
A friend of mine whom I visit every so often in LA works very close by to the Fox building that was used as Nakatomi. I can’t help but just refer to it as Nakatomi whenever I see it. I wonder if the building feels like Dustin Diamond always being referred to as Screech (best analogy I could think of). Would it be offended? Sorry, Im a couple drinks to the wind right now. Rough day. Action movies make it all better.
I remember discussing this film with a friend, not long after I’d first seen it. He’d caught it in the theaters upon its release, and said one of the things that was awesome about it at the time was that Bruce Willis wasn’t that well known. So here you had this total nobody getting completely beat up and thrown around by the bad guys, but charming the audiences with his dry humor and sarcasm. By the time I saw it, Bruce Willis was very much the legendary Bruce Willis. That meant that for me it was very much a showcase for a respected actor.”