Bruce Willis

So this Red movie.

might watch it in a few minutes... bad?

I had to watch Die Hard last night (my wife had never seen it and felt she needed to "get in touch with the zeitgeist")

and?

(i like to stay out of reach of the zeitgeist myself, esp from 1988)

this belongs to a subgenre of film that I like to call copaganda

on its own terms it succeeds v well and is expertly executed. my problem is I find the terms execrable.

Die Hard of the Will

a minor plot point centers around a cop who, consumed by guilt over his previous murder of an unarmed teen, has been unable to draw/fire his gun ever since that event, but in the closing minutes of the film finally manages to overcome this psychological block in order to shoot a bad guy in the face.

I mean, how am I supposed to care about that

prescient! i mean i had no idea a cop had ever killed an unarmed teen before

to yr objections, junk stans usu say "it's only a movie," dismissing the idea that ppl who see dozens of these are in fact influenced by them.

i don't think shakey needs you to tell him how a strawperson would respond

it's hard for me to say how many action movie cliches originated with this film vs. existing cliches it happily exploits but you can kind of guess them all without watching it - the top brass that do everything wrong, the underdog rogue protagonist, the helpless feminine totem (a barely written part representing female transgression against traditional gender roles and is thus punished/taught a lesson), the vaguely effete/european villain with an accent, the occasionally jarring bits of gore/uber-violence.

all in all I think I prefer Hong Kong's 80s action movies, maybe because I am more at a cultural remove from any baggage but man when it comes to the American stuff all the subtexts are nauseating.

that moment in the resolution is super fucked up jtbc, all the more for its gratuitousness

bits like that aside i still love die hard, but def wouldn't recommend it to anyone sick of american action film cliches

I once had a friend who insisted that Bruce Willis was the American Chow-Yun Fat but idk I can't think of any BW roles where he portrays the kind of sadsack/tragic figure the way Fat does. There's always the smirk or the suckerpunch with Willis.

xp

12 monkeys?

yeah that's kind of the closest I could think of - he's p much confusion/desperation the entire time, probably the least conventionally action-y of his action roles

also both his m night shyamalan movies

I think a few of his indie [sic] roles qualify on this score, eg Breakfast of Champions, Mooonrise Kingdom

could be a few more gloomy gus roles in the umpteen i haven't bothered to see

dude came into this world as a "bill murray" type (that's specifically what they were looking for when casting moonlighting), dude didn't really start showing his sadface in action until after tarantino

but Chow comparison is off then -- except he has done non-action roles as well

xp

haven't seen Breakfast

he's decent in MK altho I don't think there's a ton to that role

(this Chow comparison was made at least 15 years ago fwiw)

thinking about this did make me feel bad about Chow's career, he got the shaft coming to America afaict

couldn't bear to watch him when i checked out the corruptor

I guess he's still turning out star material in HK...? I haven't seen anything he's been in for at least a decade

watching him to try to be cocky while navigating english was so rough

i find this movie pretty unobjectionable except insofar as like, civilization is objectionable

also great

watching him to try to be cocky while navigating english was so rough

― da croupier,

rubbish, he does this very well in die hard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1daIIDQsXI

^ compelled to watch this every few months

die hard is a master class in a lot of ways, mctiernan is (was, i guess) a pretty incredible director.

mctiernan was great, but don't forget the script! it's not exactly shakespeare, but it's beautifully proportioned. i don't think mctiernan ever worked with a script that good again (though i do like hunt for red october).

it's hard to believe mctiernan directed rollerball before you get to the part that's arbitrarily shot in night vision

I'll defend the second Die Hard too, although if you're not down with its ridiculousness I understand.

HFRO is pretty great in how its two heroes spend the entire film trying to avoid getting into any kind of life-or-death conflict. also for its devotion to sharing little moments that give a sense of minor characters (also a die hard trait), and how it doesn't really have any straight-up bad guys (except for the stowaway agent on the sub, and i guess joss ackland's soviet diplomat, and probably tim curry's role.) i liked the scene with the hardass carrier commander who was being all cliched army swagger dickhead and then the admiral told him a story abt jack ryan, and then in the next scene they shared his swagger was gone.

mctiernan was great bc he didn't cut those bits for time.

i'd defend DH3 as well, based on its stature in my eyes as the 90s version of the taking of pelham 123.

the technical chops brought to bear are definitely apparent; there's no wasted scenes/shots, everything in the script and in the direction is economical and coherent, it's just all brought to bear in the service of something I find fundamentally objectionable (so, ban civilization I guess, in response to amateurist).

There was one line that did elicit a genuine laugh from both myself and the wife: "We're gonna need to get some more FBI guys"

xp

^^ I liked it at the time but rewatched it last spring and couldn't get past J-Irons as quasi-fag with peroxide do. Also: Pulp Fiction hadn't affected casting directors so Samuel L. Jackson still cast like he's in Loaded Weapon 1 and Amos 'n' Andrew.

kinda afraid to revisit 3 or 4 (which i'm tempted to defend as an '00s version of the searchers), but i'm sure 2 is the simple pro job i remember it being

5 was just atrociously boring

i guess i feel no need to revisit the sequels, you'd think one near-perfect die hard is enough, right?

whichever one w J Irons and SL Jackson was I saw that in the theater and hated it

i'd rather move on to other parts of the mctiernan canon, like uh the 13th warrior

xpost

2 ridic 4 ridic but both competent
13th warrior is GREAT

DH 2 was at the airport and co-starred John Amos as an evil but benign paramilitary officer helping a terrorist or something

john amos vs john stamos

if you haven't seen The Prince, get on that shit. kind of a student-film Taken

bruce willis is...... Out Of Death

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12528166/

??

It seems like, at least as far back as 2013 with "A Good Day to Die Hard" (15% on Rotten Tomatoes), he knew they were crappy movies, and he couldn't muster up a single crumb of pride (despite *acting* being his job) for them.

Moonrise Kingdom was right before that, and a few years later he was fired (and replaced by Steve Carell) after a couple days work on Woody Allen's Cafe Society. So he at least was trying re: better/more prestigious projects.

Looper was 2012...I wouldn't think he was declining then

He was increasingly super checked out/disinterested going back at least a decade mainly in shit like expendables & dh5 but the clips that were going around recently were p clearly a different thing entirely

nobody really brought their A-game to Expendables. besides maybe Terry Crews

Dolph Lundgren!

He was increasingly super checked out/disinterested going back at least a decade mainly in shit like expendables & dh5 but the clips that were going around recently were p clearly a different thing entirely

― wins, Friday, April 1, 2022 7:54 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was watching some dorky youtuber going through all the zero budget terrible films willis has been in recently and the youtuber was mentioning that it seemed like he had dementia and having known people with dementia I had to agree, it really seemed quite shocking. it was obvious that they were probably doing everything in one take and bruce didn't care but it was quite beyond that

(this was a couple of weeks ago, before the announcement)

Tinseltown is usually very good at paying tribute to its bygone stars. But it seems entirely likely that Willis will miss the entire Hollywood lionization machine in the final years or decades of his life: no career achievement awards, no late-life Oscar nomination for a surprising indie, no wave from the balcony at the Kennedy Center. From 1988 to the end of the millennium, no one made bigger hits, flopped bigger flops, and grinned more shit-eating grins. He used to be one of the coolest movie stars around. It feels painfully unfair to watch his work end with this kind of whimper.

Willis is barely in Wire Room, whose actual star is the Entourage meathead Kevin Dillon.
But behind him he leaves a fascinating cinematic record. To look back at Bruce Willis’ career is to see a man who became a megastar in an instant and spent the following decades torn: searching for ways to complicate his persona, retreating to what was familiar. There’s nothing to see in a movie like Wire Room, no hint of the Willis who commanded $20 million per movie and, ever so briefly, deserved every penny. But you don’t need to watch Wire Room when you can watch so many other movies.

No mention of 12 Monkeys, weirdly.

yeah, 12 Monkeys is probably his best film

Well, besides Die Hard.

Bruce Willis made some really good choices to balance out his terrible choices.

Also: The Sixth Sense.

Jesus, I hadn't seen anything from the cognitive decline/aphasia movies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUTjfOkVu7E

Kevin Dillon! I remember liking Heaven Help Us as a youth, now sure how it holds up now

https://collider.com/bruce-willis-sells-rights-to-deepfake-firm-deepcake/

https://variety.com/2023/film/news/bruce-willis-dementia-aphasia-retire-1235525599/

I’ve been re-appreciating Bruce since “Moonlighting” went up on Hulu

also Blank Check podcast is winding up their McTiernan series and I’ve recently rewatched Die Hard & Die Hard With A Vengeance

Moonlighting is really the key to a lot of what made/makes him so great

It was his second acting job, first big role and if you watch the pilot, his character is fully formed, right out of the gate. There’s no “wait a season” or “in season four he really starts to pop”

No. Everything that we associate with the Bruce that hit in the back half of the 80’s is all right here.

Die Hard in a weird way is, character-wise like a slightly wearier David Addison walked off the set of Moonlighting and straight into Nakitomi plaza. It’s all there.

And McTiernan is great at giving Willis some character bears to carry some emotional weight & show the melancholy touches he’s so good at.

Willis is also one of the rare 80’s action heroes who shows you the cumulative weight of all those shootouts and falls by the end of a movie, like you get to see the very human, wearying effect it has on him

I guess I have also been reappraising because of the dementia, personally taking stock of what we had while we had it and how good it truly was, because when he was at his most affable, he made it look so easy

I was wondering to myself where we the cutoff of his filmography is, time-wise, with regard to his dementia?

*character beats … not bears lol

(all that’s not to say he didn’t make some bad movies too - i paid actual human dollars to see Color of Night in a movie theater in 1994)

He's in (and good in) at least a half dozen movies that I love, I like him in some stuff I don't love, but boy was he in a lot of stinkers. Even from the very beginning. But "Moonrise Kingdom" and "Looper" are outliers in his late career cavalcade of garbage, right? So my guess is it maybe started before then? He's later in "Motherless Brooklyn," I (and also nobody) saw that, is he acting in it?

If you’re a teenager in the early 90s with aspirations towards sassiness and an underdeveloped sense of taste, The Last Boy Scout is basically the greatest movie ever made.