Die Hard

And so I went and I had a bit of a holiday. A holiday in which I pretty much did nothing but read Inception fanfiction. I am several months behind on the fandom, y'all. I have a lot to catch up on. Can you deny me an epic news room AU?


Between the truly ridiculous amounts of fanfic I've been reading, though, I did watch some movies. I'm gonna try to catch up with them all, because this it's fun to write about this.


On Christmas Eve, my brother, mother, and I went and visited my dad at work (he's a local EMT and was on call up at the station, we were not distracting him from any duties he may have). While there we watched all watched a movie together.


Dad's coworker: What are you guys watching?
Dad: A Christmas movie.
Dad's coworker: Miracle on 34th Street?
All of us: Die Hard.


Yeah, we're the kind of people who think that Die Hard is a totally appropriate Christmas movie and would probably look at you with confusion written on our faces if you tried to explain to us that it isn't.


This is why we're cool.


Anyway, Die Hard is a 1988 movie directed by John McTiernan and starring  Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, and Bonnie Bedelia.

In Die Hard, an NYPD cop by the name of John McClane (Bruce Willis) is visiting his wife (Bonnie Bedelia) in LA for Christmas. Their relationship has been strained by distance and their different work goals. So he goes to her office holiday party and it becomes evidence that they are not the only ones with problems when a group of terrorists lead by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) come to steal stuff and wreak general havoc. Sadly for them, McClane is competent and ready to kick some ass.


If there's something my family really loves, it's messing around with the genres. We see no reason for something to be cubby-holed into one thing when it can be so many things all at once! We occasionally have far to much fun. So there I am watching this movie with my family and clearly it is not an action film, but a romantic comedy. The villains think they're in a caper film (so naturally they look dashing to play the part). The FBI agents think they're in a buddy cop movie. The whole this is rudely interrupted by an action flick. To my family, this is all rather self-evident.


This is just more evidence of the cool theory, in my opinion.


So, we have this couple who’s marriage is in trouble. I’m not going to go into how it seems to be in trouble because the woman is career oriented and is using her own name (mostly because that’s no fun and I might just get my feminist rage on). John McClane, though, is willing to walk barefoot over broken glass to get to his wife. Okay, so he was also going to go kick some terrorist ass, but it was still all mostly for his wife’s sake. She’s one of the hostages, he’s going to save her. He walked over broken glass. That, right there, is one of my phobias because ow. McClane walks through fire (both real and metaphorical) to get back to his wife and he saves the day. At the end their marriage is in much better shape (despite barely seeing each other, whoops) and she corrects someone to have her last name be McClane, which is almost like marrying him all over again. One presumes that he moves to LA to be in the same city as his wife, since he’s got a really good rapport with the local cops and is going to be like a legend in that city and life will be pretty sweet.


I’m not going to talk about any sort of symbolism that might be involved with the image of Holly’s watch (a very nice one she got from work) having to be unclasped to defeat the villain. That’ll just end in tears.

I’m also going to put this screen cap here, mostly because it took me something like ten minutes to get VLC to cooperate with me just to get the shot and it still doesn't exactly show what I wanted. I just liked the low angle shot of Hans after he shot the CEO of the company, since it nicely and simply showed the power he had in that moment.

Speaking of interesting shots involving Hans, when he’s pretending to be the American office worker, there’s this really nice shot/reverse shot conversation between him and McClane that’s canted, showing how not right things are there. It’s a nice way to set the viewer on edge and show the deception going on screen. The whole scene is also darkly lit and eerie looking and just screams “OH GOD, CAN’T YOU SEE HE’S EVIL?”. I call this good times.


Eventually Hans Gruber falls to his death and all I can think of is Snape killing Dumbledore and the latter's fall from the tower.

I CAN’T HELP IT. I’M A HARRY POTTER GEEK.