44. Die Hard (1988), dir. John McTiernan

[strange_complex]

Rewinding a few days here to the pre-Christmas period, I went to see this at Leeds Town Hall with ms_siobhan, planet_andy, nalsa and Mrs. nalsa in honour of planet_andy's birthday. I've never been to a film screening at Leeds Town Hall before, so that was fun in itself, and nor had I seen Die Hard in spite of its classic status. It is an action film after all, which is hardly my genre, but going to see it in its reinvented pomo guise as a 'Christmas film' - now that, I could handle.

It is, of course, masses of fun. Indeed, I might well have gone to see it earlier if I'd cottoned on to the fact that it has Alan Rickman in it being deliciously villainous. His character even got in a Classical reference, too:

"And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." Benefits of a classical education. [Source: IMDb]

Obviously, that actually boils down to your standard use of Classics to denote morally-bankrupt posh people, and is thus exactly the sort of thing which puts people off the subject, but never mind! It's still good to hear Alex getting a name-check, and it's not like it was a mainstay of the plot. Other things I particularly liked included McClane's message on the first terrorist victim's shirt: "Now I have a machine gun - ho ho ho!", Johnson & Johnson the ineffective FBI agents and Argyle happily living it up in his limousine while blithely unaware of the major terrorist incident going on in the building above him. I assumed for ages that he would spend literally the entire film like this, and just drive out the next morning wondering what was going on, but it was also cool that he got to play his part in overcoming the bad guys too.

I do realise that this bit is going to make me sound like Noam Chomsky on his day off, but gosh - you really couldn't present a more fully-developed fantasy of hyper-masculinity as a response to male anxieties about successful career-women than this film, could you? That is literally how McClane wins his wife back after their marriage has been broken apart by her promotion to Director of Corporate Affairs at the Nakatomi Corporation. But anyway! Helicopters and explosions and cool one-liners and stuff! Yay.

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Comments

[rmc28]

Last Christmas Eve we found ourselves watching Die Hard 2 (the one set in an airport) as I wrapped presents. Two things really struck me about it:

1. all the smoking in public places, wtf?

2. the entire plot, all its death and destruction, hypermasculinity and explosions, only occurs because of the futile War On Drugs

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Heh, interesting! So, here's to a future where point 2 seems as weird as point 1 because we aren't doing that any more.

[rmc28]

Here's hoping :-)