Everything I Consume: Live Free or Die Hard

From a July post of Faith and Fear in Flushing:

…I laughed a great deal during the latter portions of Lo Duca's epic at-bat when Keith Hernandez compared Paul to Bruce Willis. What, you mean like Die Hard? asked Gary Cohen — who admitted during some desperate blowout chatter that he doesn't go to the movies during the season. Between pitches, the announcers tried to remember the name of the latest Willis action thriller, one whose exploding title (Live Free or Die Hard) chewed up much screen space during ads on Mets telecasts not two weeks ago. Gary's guess was Die Hard and Like It.

I can't say why for sure, but that cracked me up. Die Hard and Like It. Captures Hollywood's sequel ethic perfectly. Describes what this road trip has become, too. Anything one finds funny as a 17-7 decision and a four-game losing streak go final must be worth staying tuned for.

The Wife and I caught LForDH last night and it was pretty good. I'm a sucker for Bruce Willis and the Mac guy from the Mac vs. PC commercials was good, too. No one else has Bruce Willis' gleeful worldweariness. He's one of the few people who will always get me interested in seeing a movie. I have distinct memories of all the Die Hard movies except for the first one which I've only seen in bits and pieces. I think Die Hard was the frst movie I can remenber as being marketed as a movie you had to see on the big screen.

If you were in New York in the summer of 1994 you couldn't avoid the shooting of Die Hard 3. They were closing down whole sections of Manhattan for it. But filming ran late and the city ran out of patience. Less and less of the city was being shut down. One night, I was walking home down LaGuardia Place and I walked right through the shoot as a beleaguered women yelled at people to get out of the shot but nobody seemed to care. I looked in the street and saw Bruce Willis standing patiently in the middle of the road waiting for the camera to roll. When I finally saw the movie the next summer I was living in Santa Monica and missing New York terribly. I don't remember much about the movie because I was pretty drunk when I saw it but I learned it's a bad idea to see a movie about water when you really have to pee.

I saw Die Hard 2 a year later after I moved back to New York. It was shown on CBS and because of that much of the dialogue had to be dubbed. You know, the swear words. Often, actors dub non-swaer versions of their dialogue during shooting for the broadcast version. This was not the case with Die Hard 2. I believe a gentleman form the south dubbed Bruce Willis' lines and they were re-dubbed in mid-sentence. It was awesome. This led to lines like "You're not such a RASCAL after all." "I'm just your kind of RASCAL," and the immortal, "Yippy-kay-yay, MISTER FALCON."

Let's all live free or die hard in the coming year, readers. You're my kind of rascals.