‘Die Hard With a Vengeance’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Van Lathan
Producers: Jack Sanders and Ronak Nair
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Transcript
Rewatchables is brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where you can find Chris Ryan on The Watch,
sometimes on the big picture,
on about 12 other ringer podcasts, including Higher Learning.
It happened.
You somehow got invited to Higher Learning before meeting
on Juneteenth.
Very special.
Best episode of the year?
For sure.
Did Rachel know who Chris Ryan was?
She wasn't there.
Rachel wasn't there.
She didn't know who he was.
Does Rachel know who Chris Ryan is?
No, she doesn't.
Well, she will know on Monday as we crown the Face of the Ringer.
Monday.
Face of the Ringer is happening.
The Face of the Ringer arguing.
Chris Ryan was a part of it.
You're one of the four finalists.
Yeah, congratulations.
That's great.
Yeah.
For what it's worth, I said you're the face of the ringer.
Oh, thanks, Chris.
Yeah.
You got just 10% more Boston.
Yeah.
Right now.
All right, I'm on Face of the Ringer, am I?
Yeah.
You can also hear Van on
The Ringerverse.
Ringiverse.
On the Midnight Boys.
And sometimes here.
My name is Bill Simmons, and it is still New York month.
Very few New York movies more New York than diehard with the vengeance, and that's what we're covering next.
John McClain, NYPD.
On a good day, he's a great cop.
You don't like me because I'm white.
I don't like you because you're going to get me killed.
On a bad day,
he's the best there is.
On May 19th, McLean is back.
You got a triple-A card?
Bruce Willis, die hard, this time with a vengeance.
Rated R.
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I'm just going to read the Wikipedia description of this movie.
That, like, the Grok thing that they tells you, like, the AI spits it out.
Okay.
Detective John McClain, parentheses, Bruce Willis, is now divorced, alcoholic, and jobless after getting fired for his reckless behavior and bad attitude.
That's the first sentence.
Reckless, divorced, and an alcoholic, and no job injected into my veins.
The quadruple crown.
When has it ever not worked?
In real life,
it's like, yay, having the birthday party.
John McClain's coming over.
Don't let him drive.
In a movie, he can just defuse a terrorist attack and it's fine.
Yeah, in real life, John's getting drunk at the birthday party, whipping out his nine millimeter.
Boom, boom, boom.
But in the movie, it's perfect.
Has John McClain ever come to a birthday party not covered in grease and blood?
Wearing a tank top?
In real life, John McQueen is hanging out with the guy who was killed that led to the Karen Reed trial.
Oh,
he's on the third floor.
Wait a second.
It is literally 110 seconds.
It's like, oh no, John McClain's here.
Oh, he's getting into it with John O'Keefe.
He's texting his buddies being like, make sure you plant the evidence.
How long does it take a body to freeze?
Anyway, John McClain in movies, it's fine.
His life really fell apart.
Here's my first question.
Let's start here before we get in the movie.
So John McClain saves the Nakatomi building, prevents an incredible terrorist attack, and then doubles down and saves everybody in the airport in Chicago.
How is this guy not at least Captain Sully at this point?
I mean, this is...
What else did he have to do?
Do you think that this is one of the greatest testaments to the power of the internet to create celebrities out of nothing?
I mean, to be fair, this guy would have a documentary made about him in 2000 or whatever.
Certainly.
In real life, if you do those two things, what are your next 30 years look like?
I feel like you have a ton.
Like, you're at least, what was that guy, John Walsh, the America's most wanted guy?
You're at least hosting a show like that, just getting massive paychecks.
Do you have a morning talk show?
You probably do.
You know, Fox News is starting to bubble at that time.
He's probably got a show on there.
He's their law enforcement guy.
But you have to remember,
he's smoking on Fox News.
Him and Bill O'Reilly were bringing
to tell us.
But you have to remember, also, this was the era of, remember, Eddie Murphy left, Axel Foley left Detroit and went and basically solved two gigantic capers.
Right.
But he was an outcast.
Right.
So maybe they look at John McClain.
as somebody who went against the grain too much by saving people's lives in Los Angeles.
Yeah.
He he'd been done it.
He was out of his jurisdiction.
You saved us too much money.
You too many lives.
Isn't this actually, we could really map this out.
All of the sequels find our favorite characters in a place in their lives you'd never guess.
Like, how is Pete Mitchell not at least Chuck Yeager
by Top Gun Maverick?
Instead, he's like, I'm fixing old planes.
No, you would be probably like, he would be on the cover of a Wheaties box.
Yeah, like Val Kilmer or what happened to him with Iceman should have at least happened with him.
But see, See, that is, I guess, why our protagonists are our protagonists.
Because they're complicated.
Right.
They're complicated and flawed in a way that keep them in the bubble that we need them to be in to make the movies work.
All right.
Counter, Captain Sully, random pilot, lands the plane in the water.
That's it.
They make a Tom Hanks movie about him.
Like, that's one of the things with these movies.
Nobody makes a movie about John McClane.
Yeah.
That actually would have been a better Die Hard 3 is them making the John McClain movie about Die one, and then there's a terrorist.
I'll take it a step further.
Why can't Holly move back from Los Angeles?
Excuse me.
Has this guy not been through enough?
That's one of my picky nits.
I will say something about Sully, though, is that it actually happened in real life.
So he actually saved like actual, like, 200 people.
Yeah.
So John McClain is a fictional character.
So
noted.
So Sully's celebrity actually comes from actual.
But this is what happens in real life if somebody does something like that.
They should speaking to the world.
John McClain's at least doing $75,000 speaking gigs all over the world about the two types he saved the world.
If this was a contemporary story, what would happen is John McClain would do this.
We would all get like, God damn, this is really what we need for America right now.
And then somebody would discover his weird Facebook posts from 2021.
Where he's like, I'm not wearing a fucking mask.
And we'd be like, no, John McClain's not allowed to even be a security guy.
N-word tapes.
And Zeus is one of my best friends.
Right.
Yeah.
So if this, so after you save Chicago, it turns out there's some frat photo of him in 1978.
Yeah.
That's not good.
And then that kind of dresses Richard Brown.
I just, my biggest pet peeve with all these movies we love is that, especially with the sequels, that they just discount how amazing it would be for somebody to have pulled off the feat they did.
Isn't there also
a chance that John, this is the only time that John is competent.
Because when we first see John, he can't even get his shit together.
He's got, but then as soon as the adventurer is on, he's like really Jason Bourne in this movie.
In this movie, he's one, I mean, obviously, the original diehard as well.
He's one step ahead of them at all times.
He's making evaluations.
He, when Zeus has,
John is like, oh, real quick, boom, boom, mix the thing, blow the thing up.
He is really.
He's got jokes.
Yeah, the whole nothing.
But the best part about Bruce Willis is he still gets scared.
Yeah.
The best part about Bruce Willis is like when he's getting out of that police van in the beginning in Harlem, he's like, don't worry, I'll be dead in four minutes.
Like he's like, I'm still like sweating out beer and I need a cigarette and I need aspirin and I'm, I'm, I know I'm going to die.
Like this kind of character needs to have almost nothing to lose to do the things that they do.
Or one of my favorite small parts of the movie is when they get to the park and the bomb's there and he goes, goes, yeah, there's a bomb there.
Why don't you go ahead and grab it?
He says to Zeus, why don't you go ahead and grab the bomb?
Zeus goes, why would I grab it?
He goes, yo, Simon said you're supposed to be helping out.
He told you to help me.
Go grab the bomb.
It's funny.
He doesn't want to grab it.
It's funny.
Did you see this in the theater?
Yeah.
I saw it in the theater this weekend, actually, but I saw it in the theater when it came out.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember my excitement level was a 10 out of 10.
And I remember being slightly disappointed by the last like half hour.
Sure.
It helps the
first hour, great, fell apart near the end, still had a good time, not as good as diehard.
And then I think over the next 30 years, the first 75, 80 minutes is so rewatchable.
It just kind of took another life.
I think like literally like up through the school evacuation, it's like one of the best Blockbusters ever made.
Yeah.
It's one of the best action movies ever made.
One of the best New York movies ever made.
One of the best summer movies ever made.
It just checks all the boxes.
The first 80 minutes is unassailable.
And like so many other great ones, it can't sustain it.
Yeah.
And we'll go into some of the alternate ending and stuff like that.
But holy, I love that it just starts.
We're just going.
We have an explosion within 90 seconds and we're off.
And they don't spend a lot of time with McClain.
It's just clear.
He's a complete fuck up and his life has fallen apart.
And then we're off.
Let's go.
Yeah.
Premise heavy.
Like, this guy is fucking with McClain.
We don't know why, but that doesn't matter because McClain is in imminent danger in every single scene.
He has to find his way out of it.
And the story kind of orients itself around that.
I went to see it in the theater, but I remember not being as excited because I was kind of getting off the old action star guys.
This is, I think, after the last action hero.
This is the tail end of that era.
Yeah.
And so I remember going to see the movie and being like, oh my God.
like that was much much better than i expected it to be it had the same kinetic energy of the first film but you know, Eraser and other movies like that, maybe Eraser is a year after this, or maybe it's the same.
It is.
No, it's True Lies was right before this.
Well, True Lies was fucking.
Cliffhanger was right before this.
We had like the action guys from the 80s and early 90s had like one last run here through 95.
And then 96, it starts a flip.
We get Daylight with Stallone.
We get Eraser.
Van Dam kind of falls apart.
Who else?
Arnold Seagall.
Pretty much done after 96.
gall
and then Stallone after daylight.
Then he gains the weight for Copland.
So it's just, this is kind of the last movie.
I gotta say,
I was actually where you were probably.
And then the second Die Hard is done by Rennie Harlan, and it's like, it's really, really good.
And if you watch it over and over again, it's far.
We did the rewatchables.
It's discounted.
But the crucial movie for Die Hard with a Vengeance is pulp fiction.
Yeah.
Because when you find out Sam Jackson is going to be in this movie and you find out Bruce Willis is going to be in this movie and then you see the trailer and you you watch it, and you're like, Oh, it's this kind of movie, and it's funny, and it's referential, and it's like fast-paced, but it's like it feels the most real of all the diehards because of the way that people interact.
It's a crucial point.
Sam Jackson is the crucial part of this movie because he's bouncing around for years and years.
Pulp happens, and then within a year, he's in this movie.
And that was the appeal for me in 1995.
With one of one of my worst years,
be like, Bruce, one of your worst years, Not a lot going on.
Bruce.
Say more.
Just like, you know.
Attendant Bar.
Wait a minute.
Just trying to get shit going.
No, trying to get shit going.
This is my last year at that last year at the Herald.
Okay.
Trying to think like maybe this sports rated thing is not going to work out.
We talked about another pod.
Celtics.
Reggie Lewis is dead.
Celts are a mess.
Okay.
Red Sox are a mess.
Trot.
Trot.
Troy.
I was mobilized when Boston became Loserville.
Yeah.
But it was like, Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson, this would be fun on a Friday.
Yeah.
Could have hit you hard right there.
I let it go.
The Boston Loserville thing, I could have hit you.
It was bad.
The 90s were bad.
Yeah.
Then it turned.
Sam Jackson has this run from Pope
where he just is in like five movies a year.
But some of those movies were Die Hard 3, Time to Kill.
Yes, it deserves to die.
I hope to burn it.
Hell.
All right, Bill.
Long kiss, good night.
Juneteenth was yesterday.
Star Wars remake.
All of a sudden, he's like an A-plus listener.
That's not a remake, but yeah.
Whatever.
Sequel.
What was it?
Keep doing the thing.
Well, it's just that was it.
All of a sudden, he was an A-plus lister.
And it made perfect sense that he was right next to Bruce Willis in what basically is Lethal Weapon.
We got to at least address that this is basically Lethal Weapon, this movie.
This script was acquired to be a lethal weapon.
It was supposed to be Lethal Weapon 4.
it somehow went and turned around.
20th Century Fox bought it.
It became this movie.
But you could easily have seen Gibson and Glover in this, I think.
I could, but I'm glad that it's this and I would put these guys up against those guys.
On Sam Jackson, has anyone taken advantage and rode the kinetic energy into the beginning of a career, not the beginning of a career, into the renaissance of a career like him?
He was able to balance taking parts where he was with more established actors like Bruce Willis.
Yeah.
Really weighty secondary roles with new stars like Matthew McConaughey, properties like Star Wars.
He seemingly had a complete vision of how he wanted to start his golden era.
And it's really what kind of solidified him for the next like 30 or 40, like every single movie was something interesting and had some kind of quality.
Yeah, maybe it's because it didn't happen early for him.
So he he just like knew when the window opened.
I'm jumping through it.
Right.
So I know exactly how to do this now.
He's the toughest one for the rewatchables actor rankings because I think this is like his 10th rewatchables.
Yeah.
But like six of them, he's barely in the movie.
Right, like Goodfellas.
Yeah.
Like he's in not only Goodfellas, he's in Coming to America as Hold Up Man.
He's in Do the Right Thing.
We did that one.
He's in Sea of Love in 1989 as Black Guy.
Yeah.
Like he had some of his that's what he's credited as?
This is his Black guy
um you go through his things magic sticks is that what you credit me as
is that what i is that what i am he's like in magic sticks he plays bum
you go like it's just
but anyway but seriously though by the time pulfiction comes it kind of and this doesn't happen as much as it used to at least not for me by the time pulp fiction comes you go oh okay it's it's it's it's time for him now but by the time that because i had but it was improbable though this is like an NBA Query at age 30 becoming a star.
I'm not saying that it wasn't improbable, but I had seen him.
You leave like Jungle Fever.
He was in almost everything that Spike had done.
Exorcist 3, he plays Dream Blind Man.
But yeah, Jungle Fever.
He's actually quite good in Exorcist 3.
It's a brief part.
Yeah.
Dream Blind Man.
But Jungle Fever is when I think he goes on the radar in 91, where people are like, oh, this guy.
Death by Temptation, one of my favorite horrible movies.
He's just, he's in all of these films.
Juice.
Juice.
92.
One scene in Juice.
Juice.
Maybe he's in Patriots game in 92.
When's Fresh?
A little bit later.
So that's like 95, 94, 95, maybe even 96.
Then in 93, Menace to Society, Jurassic Park, True Romance, Fresh in 94.
94.
And it's the Pulp Fiction movie.
And he's been in like nine or ten Rewatchables movies.
I can't remember whether Fresh came out before or after Pulp Fiction, but I remember
being blown away by him in Fresh.
Yeah.
So it's so, and, you know, everyone knows the story.
He had a a lot of issues, he had a lot of drug stuff, and then cleaned up by the 90s.
And then all of a sudden, he's, I mean, I can't even imagine how much money he's made.
Yeah.
He's been in so many movies.
He's been in 30-plus years of movies constantly.
A lot of big blockbusters.
He's always figuring out a way to get an Iron Man or a Star Wars in there.
Plus, he's been the lead in stuff.
He was in like every Marvel movie for 10 years, basically, right?
If you're curious, the through line to a resource.
It's a little like how Snoop Dogg just kept going and going and seems like he's as relevant in 2025.
I still feel like Sam Jackson's as relevant now.
Well, he's become more than an actor.
He's become a cultural figure.
Totally.
Like Snoop.
Like Snoop.
Same thing.
Whereas you've seen a lot of these actors.
I think it's really hard to keep that going for more than 15 years.
Even you watch somebody like Cruz
who
eventually couldn't keep it going.
And then it's just like, I guess I'm just Mission Impossible Top Gun Guy.
And that's it.
Well, the thing that I've always loved about Jackson is that he seems to operate under the idea of like, I want to make movies that I would want to go see.
And so, so many actors probably are like, I want to make a movie to win an award, or I want to make a movie because it's specifically going to make me a lot of money.
But he just is like, I like shark movies.
Yeah, I'm going to be in deep loose speed.
I like this kind of movie.
I like that kind of movie.
And he makes them a lot.
He's prolific.
He doesn't take a lot of time off.
And, you know, and part of it is not shouldering the load of having all of these movies riding riding on your back.
When that happens, that means a flop or a movie that's not critically well received doesn't ding you as much as it does somebody else.
So you get to do that.
That's a good point.
His losses just kind of come again.
Yeah, you get to do cool stuff.
And if it works, it works.
If it doesn't, it doesn't because they're not these, it's not like, oh my God, I didn't like Days of Thunder.
Is Tom Cruise over?
You know, the big thing with him, I think he had a little more trouble carrying a movie, but if he was part of the movie, almost like a basketball player, like, if I can just be on the right team, I'm awesome.
And he's figured out a way, like, he can be like kind of the
kind of the cool, collected, brain Sam Jackson character, or he could be like the bombastic character, or the character like Zeus, which I probably think is it, what, a top three, top four Sam Jackson character?
Like, for
just for pure, like, Jules is number one, he's number one.
Um, I really enjoyed Deep Blue Sea, Sam Jackson.
We still haven't done that in rewatch most, but I think he's great in that movie.
I'd probably say Ordell from Jackie Brown is up there.
Oh, fuck yeah, fresh,
fresh is up there.
Just, I love Fresh came out around the same time that Searching for Bobby Fisher came out, so I was going through a chess thing, yeah, and to see the two different
was really cool.
I'm trying to think who else, so Ordell is definitely up there.
Ordell,
for me,
Jules is the number one, but Odell is very close to Jules.
I love that character.
I actually love that movie.
I'm trying to think of what else.
Nick,
there's an amazing sliding doors that we covered when Tarantino was on, what was that, the King of New York?
It's on King of New York, yeah.
With Sam Jackson and Lawrence Fishburne.
This is actually like for all the sliding doors.
Unbelievable.
It's the best one.
This is the sliding doors.
And we didn't, I didn't know it when he told the story.
Lawrence Fishburne, he's trying to get him for pulp fiction, wrote the role for him.
Please do it.
Please do it.
Please do it.
And Fishburne's agents go.
He wants the leads.
It's a smaller part.
It's a smaller part.
You have to be a lead.
So he turns it.
Which, by the way, those people are fucking morons.
There's no lead in fucking pulfion.
You could argue that Travolt is the lead, but there's no lead in the movie.
The movie.
It's an ensemble.
It's an ensemble movie that has a weird circular narrative.
They had a plan for him.
All right.
They just were like, You can't be in ensembles anymore, you have to be a lead in the movie.
So, I think he did deep cover with Ellen Barker instead, which is also awesome movie.
So, Sam gets jewels
now.
Fishburne is negotiating for
Die Hard 3, and they want him.
They basically agreed that he's going to do it.
And he wants a lot of money, and they're arguing, they're going back and forth, they can't agree on the money.
Well, the producer,
Andrew Vajna, yeah,
unfortunate name.
Oh, Vajna.
Andrew Vajna.
He goes to Cannes because Bruce Willis is about to make Die Hard 3 with him.
And he goes to Cannes to support
Sees Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
He's like, what am I doing with Lawrence?
And he's like, fuck Lawrence Fishburne.
Locks down Sam.
Now Fishburne's out.
Yeah.
So he loses Pulp Fiction and Die Hard 3.
Sam flips spots with him and becomes Sam Jackson.
And this is the biggest movie of 95, right?
Yeah, if you throw in the global stuff.
And then Fishburne sues, and they actually had to pay Fishburne 750K because they had a verbal agreement.
Verbal agreement.
I saw that when I was doing some research, which that is actually pretty awesome.
And then they also had to option a script that he wrote.
But he ends up in the Matrix, so it all
belatedly works out.
But holy, like, this is important.
But that whole point, like, yeah, he's in the Matrix and it's cool, but he's in a, he's basically like, this white man is Jesus for the entire Pulp Fiction.
Right.
By the way,
that's 99.
Yeah, that's right.
And there was a
between 95 and 99.
I mean, Lawrence was working, but there's like fled, and there's other movies like that.
You could argue that this, that he was a tad cold.
Not, he wasn't cold.
He's Lawrence fucking Fishburne, but you could argue that he was a tad cold until Morpheus kind of gets him back on the right track or whatever.
You could argue.
The only other example in history of this Sam Jackson
Lawrence Fishburne alternate universe flip-flop is Dominique Wilkins and James Worthy in the 1982 first pick of the draft, where the Lakers take Worthy over Dominique Wilkins.
And if they take Dominique Wilkins and he's with Magic Johnson on the Showtime Lakers, doing all the stuff Dominique Wilkins would do anyway, and all the above the rim stuff, he becomes the biggest star in the league.
And instead he goes to Atlanta, has a great career as a Hall of Famer,
some good battles.
So like the Hawks are
over.
but he could have been on the Magic,
on the Lakers with Magic, winning titles, posters, shoes, most famous person in the league, and it didn't happen.
Um, Hoodlum was in 97, by the way.
I like Hoodlum.
I like Hoodlum.
I lost fan with my Dominique Wilkins thing, it just wasn't interesting.
Uh, that was interesting.
It was like second Bruce Willis,
second Bruce Willis.
This is, yeah,
you just weren't a neat guy.
He was, I like him, I like Neek.
No, we just found out.
Bruce Willis, two diehard movies, makes a couple stinkers.
Hey, what's going on with him?
Ah, let's do Die Hard 3.
Rips off Pulp Fiction, Die Hard 3, 12 Monkeys, Armageddon and Fifth Element, The Siege, Sixth Sense, and Whole Nine Yards over the next seven years.
It's a great job by him.
And he's married to Demi Moore.
Great job by him.
I just want to throw one idea out here at you guys.
So one thing that's worth noting for everybody,
for the listeners, is that when they make this movie, diehard has become a genre unto itself.
Right, diehard has created the die hard so draft and a die hard and a die hard.
I'll talk more about this later, but I just also want to one of the things that really hit me when I was looking at like when this movie came out in 90s action movie context is that these guys not only had to top diehard 2 and die hard, but they had to top under siege and speed and everything else that was like around it, right?
Like yeah, what were the other ones?
Under siege, under siege, speed.
I mean, Speed was the most recent one.
That was 94.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's like the diehard.
Die Hard in a Blank became one of the most influential.
And Speed is the diehard cinematographer goes off and makes his own kind of movie.
And it's crazy how good it is.
But like that, they were able to cobble together a script that had been written for other purposes.
you know, rejigger it so that it's in the diehard world and then figure out that the one thing that these movies hadn't had before is a sidekick or a partner for McLean that was on his level.
Like Reginald Vell Johnson's good.
People are good in these movies, but like he's never had like a running mate through the entire movie.
But they also moved him around too in this movie, which they hadn't done in the first, in the first two, he's just trapped in a spot.
Yeah.
Well, that changes the dynamic.
Like Reginald Vell Johnson was a guy
because he was stuck inside of Nakatomi Towers.
This one, New York, is a character in the film.
Like there's so much about this.
Like when I was watching it, I had never been in New York before, but they're talking to me as if I had been.
Oh my God.
New York traffic is a part of it.
The parks are a part of it.
If you call like now, like if it'll be a different hospital that the ambulance goes to, so we need to wait till we get below 14th Street or, you know, like all that.
How did you feel living in New York City with the New York City stuff in this movie?
Because you spent a few years in New York until five years later.
No, but you saw the city.
You used all the parts of it.
So when you watch this movie, it's incredible.
I mean, the grid system that they adopt, you know, I mean, there's like funny, like, how the fuck did you guys get up here or down there that fast?
But like the fact that essentially the movie goes south the entire chase down the island is so ingenious because you can kind of track them like Harlem, 72nd Street.
Now they're at Wall Street.
Now they got to go back up to Tompkins Square Park.
Like it's actually very, very, like, you can visualize it really easily.
What does Wall Street not have?
Schools.
Yeah.
What do they have a ton of?
Banks.
That was the first time I ever had that information.
I didn't know what they had.
I didn't know.
They might have been a Wall Street.
I guess I didn't know Wall Street didn't have school.
Yeah, it could have been a Wall Street Elementary for all I know.
I have no clue what's going on, but like all of that stuff is part of the script.
Pretty sure you can't get to Yankee Stadium that fast.
I mean, there's a lot of nitpicks for this.
I don't know if you can get Bronx.
We can get into that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, I'm just going to head down to Yankee Stadium.
I'll see you guys in a second.
Not sure that's how it goes.
John McTiernan.
What a run for him, man.
Christ.
From 87 to 99, he does Predator, Die Hard, Hunt for Red October.
I've heard that's good.
Is that a good one?
Yeah.
Who's in that?
Sean Connery.
Alec Baldwin.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Don't really remember that one.
That's what John Connery, Sean Connery, where they're down in like South America.
With Madeline Stowe.
He's got like the cure to cancer
or something like that.
That was actually like a good, that was a good movie.
Only saw it once.
Okay, cool.
Last Action Hero, Die Hard with a Vengeance, and then an Amanda Dobbins favorite, The Thomas Crown Affair in 1999.
Oh, I like that movie too.
And then the wheels come off.
He does rollerball remake.
That's
sucks.
And it sucks so bad.
And that's it for John McTarran.
Well, he also gets caught up in the Anthony Palicano stuff, right?
I don't remember that.
Yeah,
he was basically in the wilderness.
He went to jail, I think.
Yeah.
For all the wiretapping stuff.
I know about the story, but I didn't know that it hit him somewhere.
Yeah.
Written by Jonathan Hensley, who we're going to talk about later in a different category.
$90 million budget, budget made $366 million, seventh biggest movie of 1995.
A great movie year.
So
if you look at the top 10 films from that year,
the fact that Die Hard with a Vengeance is the number one global moneymaker of that year is amazing.
With some of the sequel stuff, some of the
movies that it made more money than when I looked them up
was
incredibly impressive that that film was able to outgross some of these movies?
Like Batman Forever?
Like Batman Forever.
Which one was that, Val Kilmer?
That's Val Kimmer.
Yeah, that's the first Joe Schumacher one.
A Toy Story.
It's a Bond movie.
Chris and Tide.
This might be the most Chris Ryan year ever.
The fact that
Seven could make $327 million worldwide.
If they make seven today, that's going on Netflix.
What are we doing?
Why can't we have years like this anymore?
$327 million.
We've got after the top 15, and we're looking at Outbreak, Bad Boys, Species, Clueless, The Net, The American President.
Fucking A.
Disclosure.
Higher learning.
Honestly, I give Under Siege 2 Dark Territory a spin every once in a while.
I like it.
Morse Chestnut.
Yeah.
On a Train.
It's a classic.
I am just saying.
Under Siege, Die Hard on a Train.
A movie that I feel like if it comes out in other years, maybe does better, but there's so many good movies.
You don't love it?
I like Money Train.
Well, I like it for Tommy.
Heat.
A little movie called Heat.
Come on.
Getting the Band Back Together from White Man Can't Jump.
And then that is J-Lo.
That's the.
Yeah.
That's her arrival.
that's the that's the J-Lo 35 point game like oh my god this guy off the bench could score that's the 48 point LeBron Detroit game you like that I tried to throw it back to the do some NBA stuff J-Lo scored 25 points in a row against the pistons
uh Roger Ebert our guy three stars fair
I think three stars is fair if we're giving stars to Rog's reviews I give this a two-star review I just feel like he took a couple miles per hour off the fastball.
Maybe it was a hot.
Didn't really check a lot of the Raj boxes.
Yeah, he did say Die Hard with a Vengeance is basically a wind-up action toy, cleverly remade, delivered with high energy.
It delivers what it just advertises with the Vengeance.
But if the plot's just going to go sideways in the last 40% of a movie, Raj is not going to sign off.
Yeah, that's not going to give him three stars.
Do you guys still feel that way?
Like, when you watch the movie now, do you still feel like
I don't know why we go to Yankee Stadium and then from every moment on feels like they were just trying to figure out how to end the movie yeah I was going to talk about this I still enjoy your point I mean we we have a lot of nitpicks we'll we'll save them okay there's some nitpicks we'll take a quick break and we'll do the categories this episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime ever finish a movie and the next thing you know you're totally obsessed that's happened to me like I'm talking about ordering a book about 70s film lighting have you done that CR I have yeah or buying the soundtrack on vinyl kind of obsessed whatever it is prime helps you get more out of whatever passions you're into.
We're getting into.
Head to amazon.com/slash prime and follow your obsession wherever it goes.
Most re-watchable scene.
This is one of the fun movies where I think every scene is
in my list.
You just wrote down all this.
Up until the boat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have starting opening scene right in Assimon says, which also gets the Kid Cutty Pursuit Happiness Award, best needle drop for somewhere in the city.
Hot time, somewhere in the city.
just so fine and wood
looking for a kid.
And just an awesome swerve
where you're like, oh, this would be nice.
Just shots in New York and the song.
And then all of a sudden, Bon Witt Tower is exploding.
Yeah.
And you're like, what the fuck?
We've started?
Yeah.
And then Simon, we only hear the Jeremy Irons voice.
Should have mentioned Jeremy Irons in the first segment.
Should have, yeah.
Kind of that, like, I'm not saying he's was DDL, but was
for that era, was Oscar.
He had the respect.
Yeah.
It was like, it was meaningful that he was in this movie.
He was one of the best actors in the world.
Yeah.
And this, I mean, we were talking about Lawrence Olivier last time, a marathon man, and the British actor phoning coming in to play the villain in an American blockbuster that would like started with Marathon Man.
This is a great example of that, yeah.
And if you're gonna do Hans Gruber's brother
as a character, it's Alan Rickman, the best villain ever in an action movie, probably.
You're gonna have to bring in a real actor.
Yeah, I do feel like that these guys,
when I see Jeremy Irons, I feel like he just went, you know what?
I just want to be in a fucking movie movie in a tank top.
I can fucking be
able to do it.
Yeah, I can be the fucking heavy.
I can be physical.
I can be cool.
I can be sexy.
And when you see him in this movie, he's playing with different accents.
He's taking this seriously.
I can have violent sex with a chick with a violent song with a throat scarf.
She's got a sickle.
You know, I could throw her on the desk.
It's interesting.
So
he wins the Oscar in 1990.
Right.
For reverse of fortune.
Klaus von Bulow.
Not a great hang, Klaus.
Killed his wife.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Well, he got away with it.
Probably.
But you look at his IMDb and it's just all over the place.
Like, Dead Ringers was a really interesting movie, but for the most part, was not a commercial actor.
Like,
he was in Damage.
and Butterfly.
He played The Lion King.
He played Scar's Voice.
But for the most part, was kind of over here and then just kind of flies into.
But this is what they did so well in the 90s, where they would just just be like malkovich now you're now you're a supervillain in con air you're the best you know what i mean like ed harris come come play in the rock you know with that said i don't think ddl at any point in his career does this movie maybe to his maybe maybe to his detriment yeah how about but that's the thing it would have been amazing if ddl was in a version of diehard three hey dale day lewis you think you're too good for this
now did you guys hear it's funny that you bring this up first of all ddl learns fluent german to play this part oh he goes so fucking deep, he might scar his own face.
Yeah, no, he he's yeah, he learns how to drive the dump trucks himself.
Yeah, he's going all in.
Now, did you guys hear me how to make gold?
Flood gets flooded in an aqueduct just to know what he's doing.
Marvel wants DDL for what?
Maybe to play Doom after
everyone has a price, yeah.
Well, he's working with his son, so he is out of retirement.
He's going to be in his son's movie, Robert Day-Lewis,
Johnny Day-Lewis.
What's his son's name?
I think it's Sam, actually.
Sam Lewis.
I can't remember, though.
But he is back-ish.
I just don't know if he's going to do like a PTA movie.
And I really, really hope he doesn't do Doctor Doom.
There's no fucking chance that Marvel can get a PhD.
Are you a Phantom Thread guy?
Yeah, Phantom Thread.
Yeah.
Love Phantom Thread.
Yeah.
I thought you said, are you a Phantom of Thron?
Sean and I are going to do that on Rewatchables at some point.
We should.
I saw it twice in the theater.
I thought it was just like.
Mesmerizing.
Mesmerizing how good he was in that movie.
The only thing I'd say about him is on the DDL Before We Leave is
his reputation as being the best actor in the world is so cemented and ironclad.
Yeah.
He might
care enough not to fuck with it to ever give us.
a Simon Gruber or something where we just like watch him go wacky.
Really, the history of all these guys is at some point they come back as they get older and like, ah, fuck it.
Like, Olivier was like that.
All of a sudden, we talked about that in the marathon.
Man, he's just grabbing gigs.
I mean, Hopkins.
TV Hopkins is fucking Odin.
Right.
You know, he's old.
Yeah, but Hopkins would like show up for a FedEx commercial.
Yeah, he would.
Yeah.
Next rewatchable scene.
I have a lot on the Simon Says gimmick, but it's for a later topic.
John McQueen puts the sign on,
and we meet Sam Jackson.
What did the sign say?
I don't know.
You tell us, Van.
By the way, this was really controversial in 1995.
Yeah, so honestly,
so I saw this kind of shocking Sunday, and there were a bunch of people who hadn't seen it before, and it was a lot of younger people, and there was a little bit of like, oh,
yeah.
Yeah, like when we saw the verdict and Newman
slash rampling, yeah, ramping, and you could, the crowd like gasped like they couldn't believe it.
So it was like that?
Kind of.
So it's one of those interesting scenes to me because this is just Van's wheelhouse.
It is just because it's actually not he's been waiting.
It's not the most racist thing that happens in the scene.
And I love it when that happens.
Should we guess what the most racist thing is?
What's the most racist thing in the scene?
I feel like somehow we both lose if we don't guess the right thing.
I might do the DDL and just abstain.
Oh, yeah, you're going to retire from podcasting on people.
Just retiring.
So the most racist thing in the scene is,
so he's standing there with that, and you know, that, by the way, it was.
Is it the depiction of the guys on the stoop?
Yes.
So the guys on the stoop.
Just 10 guys hanging out on a stoop.
But no, they're throwing
shirtless and throwing a basketball around.
Go look at it.
It's 10 guys on a stoop crowded together.
No hoop.
They're just tossing the basketball around.
They got guns.
They got liquor.
Knives.
They got knives.
They got no shirts.
And they have a basketball.
And it's like 8.30 in the morning.
So I have this as a picking nit.
They have a basketball.
The kids are going to school.
So school in New York City starts, I would say, either 8 or 9.
I would say 8.
So multiple picking nits here.
Why are all these guys just outside at 7.45 in the morning?
Why is Sam Jackson opening his pawn shop for the early 8 o'clock rush?
I think it's more of an electronics store.
Yeah.
You really say what it is?
Yeah, I think they're asking if he would take that boom box, but I don't think he's a pawn shop.
I think he's an Oh, I couldn't tell what the store was.
Yeah, he's an electrician.
He's fixing.
So it's like an
electrician shop.
Yeah, he's like going to fix.
He'll fix your TV.
He'll fix your TV.
He's opening it at 7.50 in the morning
for no reason.
Hurley Bird gets the worm.
And just that, like, it's a little too alive for 7.45 in the morning, I would say.
Yeah.
I guess I agree.
Yeah.
I think that scene is, I'll be honest with you, though.
I think that scene is hysterical.
Like,
even when Sam Jackson looks and goes, Call the police, tell them somebody's about to get killed.
He walks out there and they're talking.
I remember being in the theater, and all of a sudden, you hear, What the fuck?
Right,
no, when he has to walk by the old lady, and he's just like, Yeah,
that scene is funny to me, man.
I'm like, Who do we not want to help us?
He says to the two kids, and they're like, White people.
Um, I also think they get in the cab
and
it keeps on making.
John keeps calling him, him, hey, Zeus.
He's like, stop calling me, hey, Zeus.
Do I look Puerto Rican to you?
All of it's great.
The mean mugs on the guys.
I'm just going to assume he never makes it in the cab in real life.
They doesn't get there?
Yeah, because they hit him over the head with a bottle.
There's 10 of them.
I don't know.
Yeah, it would be tough.
I think it'd be tough.
I will say that
when
Zeus's character gives the rationale
for why
he had to save him.
Yeah.
Number one, he knows he's a police officer.
He identifies himself as a police officer.
He says, Hey, I'm a cop.
Some guy made me do this.
And the moment that he says, I'm a cop, Zeus changes.
He probably would have protected him anyway, but he's like, I definitely can't let the police get killed up here because if they get killed, then
it's a free-for-all.
Right.
Next one.
Simon negotiates with John, and John gets his badge back.
My
chair with me in it?
Why are you trying to
That's really great.
I know.
That's also a great introduction to all the other cops.
Well, that's my favorite part is when Walter, the guy with the mustache, like his boss, he's like, he tells Simon, he's negotiating, believe me, the jerk isn't worth it.
He stepped on so many toes in this department.
By the time next month, he's going to be a security guard.
His own wife wants nothing to do with him, and he's two steps shy of becoming a full-blown alcoholic.
Kind of crossed the line.
I I felt like you should do that too.
Maybe a little too much information.
You should be like, believe me, Chris Ryan's all used up.
I was going to do this later in the pod, but he doesn't take my real estate advice.
Hey, you don't want to work with Van.
He's nothing but a porn addict.
No, with Chris, like, I was thinking, like, if Chris, like, Chris gets divorced and becomes an alcoholic, remember still doing pods with him?
Jesus.
And it's like, I don't know if CR,
I don't know if we can count on him.
Tell him 11 o'clock call time.
And Chris is Chris just shows an indictment of you.
Can I get an aspirin?
It's an indictment of you that if I was in that condition, you'd be like, fuck him.
We're still wheeling him out there.
Yeah, 100%.
Chris, like on a John McClure.
That's some good movies we have done.
Thunder out here in the tank top, hair fucked up, popping aspirin.
Would it be amazing if CR just had an
alcoholic binge just for like a year?
Just the wheels came off.
CR showed up.
He's wearing like a Ben Simmons torn sixes jersey stupid pods ah i didn't watch that yet but i'm here anyway saw it once could be a good gimmick for next year phantom thread did i read that wrong
uh
i really like that when he gets the badge back uh next one what last one's a minute
have we gotten away from the trope of you losing your badge but you're superior keeps it keeps it in his desk drawer yeah with the other badge it's so good every hey hey you're back.
And then the badge hits his hand like fucking Thor's hammer.
He's like, fuck.
I'm the man again.
I'm a cop.
You tell me I could be a cop again?
Well, being a cop was like the most important thing.
Absolutely.
The gun and the badge trope is just one of the great things.
Give me your gun and badge.
Yeah.
The hungover cop thing, too.
So where was he drinking?
I think like what he up to the night before.
Like the gentleman on the stoop in Harlem, he might have just been out all night.
You know what I mean?
New York City, you can really push the limits.
He really tested Holly over the years.
Is Walter in love with Holly?
How many times is Walter going to bring up this man's ex-wife?
It would be so easy.
He's just getting in with Holly.
Maybe, or he's in love with Holly.
How many times, if I came in here and every time I did something wrong, you went, Van Kalika deserves better, I'd be like, yo, what the fuck you doing?
Yeah, why do you keep bringing her up?
Yeah.
It's between you and I.
Can I just
two more things from the office when that happens?
I love Charlie coming in and setting off a minor bomb and just calling Campbell, like, Charlie, you're going to be wearing that champion mask.
And yeah, just Graham Green.
And it's really funny that like, this was a run in movies where I still feel like we were making fun of the act of getting therapy.
So the therapist guy, everybody's just like, yeah, fuck you, man.
Well, who are you?
Yeah, you're a fucking shrink piece of shit.
I do miss that era.
I also, we've talked about this before, but the 70s, 80s, just the police stations.
Yeah.
just moved in a way more fun way and they just seem to capture it way better it's all printed out papers, hard paper, and lambs.
People busting each other's balls.
Nobody likes each other.
Everybody's like, You going to get coffee?
The fucking pricks from IA are here again.
You know, the whole fucking thing.
Right.
The fucking pricks.
I mean, the whole thing is like in every cop movie, it's the same shit.
48 hours, I still think, is the best with that.
All of those guys are getting paid like 32 grand a year.
They're just skimming Coke out of the evidence room.
All right, so
I'm going to go most rewatchable for this next part, which I think
it's multiple scenes, but I feel like it all ties together.
The phone game with the seven wives
into the cab ride, driving through Central Park,
cutting through New York City, and then him jumping on the train and the train bomb going up.
Whatever.
I just feel like that's one scene.
Wall Street is South.
Man, stop yelling at me.
I got a bad headache.
And the best way south is not not 9-5, and it was through the park.
Oh, dear.
I told you the park drive is always jammed.
I didn't say park drive.
I say through the park.
I think it's like 15 minutes.
It's 15 of the most electrifying minutes in action movie history.
And one of my favorite parts about it is that the moment when McClain goes into the park is the moment that Zeus realizes he's in an action movie.
Yeah.
Where he's just like, oh shit.
And this is like that kind of 90s meta, like a character is almost aware of the absurdity of their thing.
Like most action movies now are like, no, it's the accountant.
And it's normal that Ben Affleck will kill 35 guys.
Yeah.
And nobody ever comments on it.
You know what I mean?
But in this movie, Zeus is us and is like, what the fuck are you doing?
We're driving through.
Are you aiming at these people?
You know?
And he said he did say he was aiming at the mime.
And that was a crazy line.
He's in it.
He's in it with a crazy white boy.
He's with a crazy white boy, taking him on a crazy white mission, crazy white problems.
He keeps coming back to that.
He never loses his worldview.
I honestly think that there's a couple of really unintended funny scenes, or maybe intended funny scenes, but the scene where Simon's fucking with them at the phone booth and they dive.
I don't know why that is so hysterical to me.
No, no, the answer is he has a bomb.
And they jump on the, it's, it's hysterical.
To your point, also, this has got
Grace Papaya in the background of the 72nd Street payphone.
Then they go and they do like traffic talk.
Oh, you want to take 9th Avenue to get south?
No, the fastest way south is through the park.
Yeah.
And then it's like through the park.
Then there's the ambulance blocking scheme, which is based entirely on him knowing what hospital responds to which call at a certain point in the city.
And it's just like the whole thing.
And then it's the whole getting into the subway part.
It's so New York that you are like so grounded in like this experience.
You're so like, I'm right here in this city.
Then it really feels like they're filming in New York, which they are.
Yeah.
Like, I really genuinely feel like people were in.
I was like, we were talking about it when we saw it on Sunday.
I was like, this movie would cost a billion and a half dollars because you have to shut down so many parts of New York.
Then there's another New York thing that they're doing.
And I see my New York friends do all the time, is they're arguing over who's more New York.
Like they're arguing over who has the right way to get to this place, who knows this, who knows that.
Nah, it's not what you do.
You go there.
Nah, you don't know.
This is what you do.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And like, that's my introduction to all of that type of shit.
It was a great spot for a name drop there, but you avoided it.
I'm trying to.
But you're New York friends, and then you could have just listed like three people to impress us, but you didn't do it because you're not that kind of guy.
Not anymore.
The Central Park piece,
there's a couple how the fuck did they do that moments in this movie even the bon with teller blowing up i i was rewinding and watching i'm like did they actually blow up on with teller like how'd they do this because i don't feel like cgi was good enough in 95.
i don't know how they did it also like so many funny visual sight gags like when uh when walsh the cop is following them and he loses them as they come out of the park and he just sees like fucking cafe tables exploding
and he's just like ah i lost him
We always talk about the concept of the rewatchables as if it's on and you're like, oh my God, I'm getting sucked in.
And sometimes there are movies you can come in halfway through and be like, yes, I'm going to fucking ride right now.
Or like boogie nights, you like when Dirk shows up at Jack Corner.
So I was like, oh, this is going to be an amazing 40 minutes.
Yeah.
Or the world over, whatever you want.
This is the,
you want to catch the opening.
It's like diehard 3 starting right now.
Yeah.
Can we push that reservation to 730?
Just give me like an hour here.
But if they are in that cab, like if they are in that cab, I'm multi-viewing it, whatever sports I'm watching.
I'm just, you just want to see it.
I'm finishing the fucking movie, bro.
Oh, this also has Sam with the phone ringing.
One of my favorite gimmicks, The Nervous Cop.
The phone ringing, and he's like, If you want to shoot me right now,
he's like, I was here first, bro.
Yeah, yeah.
Yuppies take a beating in this movie.
There's multiple bad ones.
Uh, that whole scene's great.
I do feel like nitpick, I do feel like the bomb would have caused a lot more damage, but I feel like some people are dying.
It's worth mentioning that they, this is when we were a nation and we would blow up a subway train for a movie, yeah, and it would travel at 45 miles per hour within there, and like the entire film.
The submen were actually like running for their lives, and the film crew was like, I'm really glad no one died when we
made it.
Speed was like that, too.
It was another one where it was like, poof, thank God, no casualties for that scene.
They would never do it.
They would just CGI.
Yeah.
Simon breaks into Fort Knox.
A very hot entrance from Chris's girlfriend in this movie.
I don't know.
Do you want to
save it?
Okay.
Yeah.
Thanks.
This really seems like it's Fort Knox.
They do a good job of like, I don't know what Fort Knox is actually like, but it's actually not Fort Knox.
Well, but you know what I mean?
Like the where all the gold would be.
It's just like,
is this what it would be like?
Or just all these gold with different countries?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's one scene where they bring out that gigantic drill.
You know, that big drill that they're drilling through the thing.
When I watch the movie, I'm like, they really had that drill drilling into this.
There's a lot of stuff like that.
A lot of care.
The elevator scene.
I have a breakout here.
What was the lottery number last night?
You mean like I had to turn the TikTok camera on thing?
No, it's no, it's not.
When I see the elevator scene, you know what I thought?
Fucking Captain America Winter Soldier.
Yeah, they stole it.
They stole the scene.
Yeah.
I mean, sure, I'm sure.
You know what?
You got to stop because it makes the ringerverse.
It makes the ring reverse feel orphaned when you do that.
Captain America Winter Soldier.
Captain America the Winter Soldier.
Captain America, like colon, winter soldier.
Yeah, who's the winter soldier?
Bucky Barnes is the winter soldier.
Oh, I forgot about him.
Captain America's best friend, and then he, whatever.
So they steal shit from the broken.
There's an iconic elevator scene where Captain America is on the elevator, and all these people behind him are actually Hydra agents.
Yeah.
And he realizes that he doesn't know that they're Hydra agents yet, but he realizes that they're trying to capture him.
And so he looks around and he goes, before we get started, does anybody want to get off the elevator?
And then he proceeds to fuck all of these people up.
And that's essentially the same scene.
It's the exact same thing that happens at Diehard with a video.
Yeah, except John McClain puts a gun in a guy's head and is just like, got the fucking God.
This is like
a lot reservoir dogs, right?
I slow-moed it
to figure out how he did it.
And my wife was just in the...
in the TV room with me doing on her iPad and just looking over at me like, wow, this is just never deranged.
You're just like a deranged human being.
But he's got the two people behind him.
They edit it really fast, so you almost don't know what's happening.
But he takes a gun, he shoots through his coat behind him at the two guys, and somehow nails both of them, then turns it around, somehow kills the third guy, and then is in the standoff with the fourth guy.
But I'm going to say the degree of difficulty is about an 11.2 out of 9.
I don't think John's getting out of there, but it's a great line when Zeus is like, Are you okay?
And he's like, Oh, yeah, it's not my blood.
Yeah, it's not my blood is a classic.
That elevator scene's great.
I like when the guy calls it a lift.
Yeah, they float off the tip off.
Calls it a lift.
He also says it's raining like dogs and cats.
And then nobody knows the lottery number, which is like the number one.
John's like, and he's wearing Walsh's badge.
He sees Walsh's badge number.
So all of you are going to die.
John, by the way, his policing, he doesn't say, hey, you're under arrest.
And YPD.
No, John just, he notices that you're a bad guy, and then he kills you.
I think that scene could have been longer where he could have just done more things to realize those guys weren't real, like be like, What's up with Patrick Ewing?
Is he ever going to get over the top?
Tino Martinez got a soft glove.
That's a girl.
Can you believe that Madden Lee is Yankee?
Just could have kept going for me.
But Wade Bob's on me.
A couple more quick ones.
Because you split for real.
Wade Box.
Yeah.
The kid saying, Look around, man.
All the cops are into something.
It's Christmas.
You could steal City Hall.
It's just a great voila moment.
John McQueen, good at the voila moments.
One of his
signature things.
I like on the boat just when Irons takes the gun from Sam and just shoots him in the leg.
Yeah.
That's the swagger.
That whole scene's swaggering while he's eating the egg.
Yeah, he's eating the egg.
He is never afraid of him.
He realizes guys is not combat tested.
Yeah.
Let me see that real quick.
Got to take the safety off.
Where's McLean?
That's like cool villain shit.
And then the ending is ridiculous, but I do enjoy it.
Say hello to your brother.
What do you got for most rewatchable CR?
I have the same sequence that you were talking about.
If I had to pick one, I'd probably go cab ride downtown.
Van?
Exactly.
Same thing.
Okay.
What's the most 1995 thing about this movie, CR?
I got payphones.
I had those as well.
I had crucial scenes with payphones.
Crucial payphones and crucial taxi cabs.
World Trade Center is there and Rodney King references.
Rodney King references.
There were only 42 presidents.
Yeah.
That's a good one.
So that's a big part of it.
I'm going to add that one.
And
the look of New York City.
This is one of the last movies because when you get movies filmed or set in New York now,
it's a, I guess, post-Juliana New York cleanup.
So you get a different version of New York almost.
I know this is New York month, but New York existing as the Warriors New York or as the New York that was in all of these different movies.
Kind of gone now.
Happier, sunnier New York.
Happier, sunnier.
No internet yet, no bikes.
It's more more corporatized now instead of
businesses, yeah.
No pot.
If you do this,
if you do this pot smoke everywhere now.
All right, Dam Bondi, relax.
Maybe clean up the pot a little bit.
New York, but in New York, when I go there now, you drive pop places.
There are activations everywhere.
There's all kinds of stuff.
You can tell that the city has kind of a different ethos to it now.
But this is one of the movies where you could still have that New York as a character in the film.
I have the lady saying, and I'm going to marry Donald Trump.
Yeah.
And a Hillary Clinton reference in this one, too.
Yeah.
I have the Twin Towers that you mentioned, but I blew it out.
Bruce and Sam jogging, both with hair with the Twin Towers behind them.
Very 1995.
Yeah.
And then Bonwit Teller.
Yeah.
Department stores.
Jack, you have any idea what Bonwit Teller is?
Absolutely not.
I don't know.
What was the big Boston department store?
I mean, all the same ones.
Makers.
JC Pennys, all those.
I mean, the big one in Connecticut was Calder's.
Okay.
Or Caldors.
Caldors?
Yeah.
We had Gotcha's.
Yeah.
I don't know what happened at Calder's.
Gotcha.
Yeah, Gotcha's is
a, it was, it lasted through the 80s into the 90s, but then thing like Macy's bottom or something like Gotcha's was like a
Louisiana
department store.
Department store chain, yeah.
Gotcha.
Bloomingdale's was big in Boston, but I think that's.
Bloomingdale's is all around.
It's all around.
Yeah.
It is funny when you only live in one place for a while and then you go to other places.
They have a Bloomingdale here?
Did you guys have Dillards?
No.
No.
We had Dillards in the South.
Yeah.
Love Dillards.
We don't always do this category, but did this movie need a better title?
Can we talk about the Die Hard with a Vengeance thing for a second?
Yeah, I mean, is there a New York thing that we could have...
I mean, if you just call it Die Hard in New York, that's pretty good.
How about Die 3 Simon says?
Well, is that just a better title?
Am I crazy?
Here's the thing: is I, by the way, why can't this be diehard 3 colon something?
Why did we get away from that?
Well, I call it diehard 3.
Honestly, when I said that I wasn't super jazzed about going to see it, I went to see it.
I was seeing movies so much at that time.
It was kind of because of the title a little bit.
It's like, what is this?
I mean, there is Vengeance.
It's Simon's Vengeance.
It is Simon's Vengeance.
Die Hard 3, Simon Says.
I don't know.
It's just better.
Or just call it Die Hard 3.
Die Hard 3, the other grouper?
Second grouper.
We'll take one more break and we'll do what's aged the best.
All right, what's age the best?
I have a bunch.
What do you have, CR?
I gotta say, I have a bunch as well.
I fucking love a black guy and a white guy working together.
You know what?
Sometimes we've been at odds, but Jesus Christ, when it clicks, it clicks.
That is my what's aged the best by far.
The first thing you learn about Zeus is we don't need no help from white people.
Really, the movie is about a racial reckoning where white people and black people help each other.
White people and black people help against like when they're at Easton Square Park, he's like, say it.
He's like, what?
I was going to call you an asshole.
I'm like, yo, yo, that's actually the center of the movie.
And it's
against the crazy Europeans.
The crazy Europeans are the enemy.
As the OJ trial is happening in your life,
that's what's aged the best.
That's the lesson of this movie.
McLean always has, well, he went away from it, but McClain is with us.
He always has a brother that's helping him out.
It's funny.
48 Hours basically starts that,
and it just keeps going in that thread.
So this movie is both ripping off 48 Hours and ripping off itself because it's a die-hard movie.
But this movie doesn't.
A lot of those other films, they play the racial differences like it's subtext, right?
It's jokes, it's whatever.
48 hours is obviously, but in this one, you have the um, the Zeus character who has a direct way of looking at things, and that's kind of a the times were a little fraught.
So, it's kind of McLean who just wants to get to mission accomplishment, and Zeus, who has all of these other
views on the game.
Well, the shoot the gun thing is funny where he goes, look, all brothers don't know how to shoot guns, you racist motherfucker.
Right.
Yeah, it has a lot of moments sprinkled like that.
Even when Zeus at the payphone is like, Police business, hang the fuck, get fucked get a new fucking phone or whatever.
And he's like, Don't do that shit.
Like, you're here, like, as like my assistant, basically, but you're not a cop.
And he's like, I'm going to fucking walk away then.
How about that?
Yeah.
You need me more than I need you.
Like, it's, it's got like power dynamics in a really cool way.
Anyway, it's just like, I, I,
I say, like, every five years we get out.
So, Zeus does.
So, Zeus says, all brothers don't know how to use the gun.
gun, and then he does exactly what McLean tells him to do.
He does exactly what McLean asked him to do.
What else do you have?
Can I do Katya now?
Save it for the end.
Okay.
What do you have for WhatsApp is the best?
Hangovers.
Yeah, it's one of the great hangover movies.
One of the great hangovers.
He just needs a couple of aspirin.
Yeah.
A couple of aspirin, but then.
His head's really hurting him.
Yeah, hangovers.
Filming this much of New York, we mentioned.
I have for WhatsApp is the best
anytime a character the phone rings and somebody in the police station answers and the cop doesn't want any part of it and they go i think you better take this walter
i think you better take this it's always good um i like when evil brothers turn out to be the one wreaking the revenge yep which is but had mixed results another 48 hours gans's sure gans's brother didn't totally work but you know what this movie does great is they hide simon like the shark from jaws shows up at minute 50.
Yeah, and when he shows up, and you're like, God damn, Jeremy Irons is blonde and he's killing people.
This is crazy.
Then they let him, then they let him rip for a little while.
Yeah, then you get him acting like somebody else.
You get the moment where one of my favorite moments in the movie,
Mr.
Vanderflug, yeah, he's Mr.
Vanderflug, and then at the end of the movie, where McKinley McClain thinks he's gonna die, and he just goes,
Your brother was an asshole.
Yeah, and it hurts Simon.
Sure, and you could tell.
And so, you know, know, I don't know what's going on with that.
If Fantasy had been murdered at the Braves game, Jesus Christ, and then
CR
becomes, he becomes the Simon Gruber.
He goes to Atlanta for revenge.
He goes to a Hawks game.
He's trying to blow up a Hawks Hornets game to get revenge for Sean.
That's basically.
I'm just doing action movie premise.
Why are you staring at me like that?
You're a sick motherfucker, bro.
Hungarian Army.
Hungarian Army explosive expert now working for the Iranians.
Targo.
A quote actually said in this movie.
Yeah.
Hungarian Army explosive expert now working for the Iranian
last draft pick of the bullets.
Yeah.
I really like when they do the does the name Gruber mean anything to you?
And they do the flashback of Hans falling.
Yeah.
Yeah, Iranian.
So this is my biggest nitpick, but yes.
What?
That reveal.
Oh, you wish.
When the therapist is like, he spoke with a German accent, you'd be like, Yeah, I know a German guy.
Oh, you think you would have caught that earlier?
Good point,
good point.
CR.
Any experience with German people in your past?
Like, yeah,
here's another what's age the best: when we have an action film and a car chase, but somebody's in a cab, and then just a random passenger gets in the cab thinking it's entering a cab, 100% success rate.
It's never not worked ever in the history.
Also, love when they steal the Mercedes Commander people's vehicle and And they're like, who is the 42nd president?
He's like, go fuck yourself.
Commandeeering vehicles seems like it would be the single most fun thing about being a police officer.
Be like, I'm just going to take your car.
It's a slightly more controversial act now, but yeah.
Yeah.
Alcoholic hero cops who have people say to them, Jesus, you look like shit.
Can't be
this.
Every pond you start with me, you look like shit.
You look like shit.
But like out of a place of
concern.
Yeah.
Like, what the fuck is going on with you?
By the way, that Bruce, that's Bruce Willis's place in the action movie Pantheon.
That's his place.
Yeah, the everyman cop who looks like shit, but can rise to the occasion because stuff's at stake.
I have two storytelling mechanisms that have aged the best.
Yeah.
There is a constant ticking clock in this movie, a series of ticking clocks, basically, because every task they have to do is you have 15 minutes, you have this.
Sometimes they actually keep the action to the amount of time that they have to get.
They go real time.
They go real time.
So that plus
the
changeover in the middle of the movie where they can't use the radios anymore.
And everybody is now we're in the dark.
We can't call.
Like we can't, you know, and it's like they have to use the switchboard.
I also love the switchboard.
So you're like, the whole fucking world just called 911.
Yeah.
Also, the fact this movie gets into like dueling plots because diehard is
intimate, right?
yeah but not this one this is not an intimate diehard and obviously the subsequent sequels which we haven't talked about at all they're not intimate at all right but this one is yeah not your diehard it's pretty tough yeah but like this one is justin long as a tech hacker this one is
uh mclain's well dummy mission that he's actually on
Then the existential threat of the bombs at the school with the guy trying to diffuse the bombs.
There's multi-front wars and then the heist going on at the same time.
So it's kind of a blueprint to a contemporary action movie where it's just not about the thing.
There's four or five different things happening.
I think this is a what's age the best.
You tell me, because everyone does Sam Jackson impersonations, right?
Does it come from this movie or Pope?
Pope.
You could argue he's doing more of the Sam Jackson impression of Sam Jackson in this movie than in Pope.
No, you couldn't.
I think you could.
It's Pope.
This is like on the level of my
Joe Pesci was better in Lethal Weapons 2
than Coco State.
This is on the same level.
It's Pulp Fiction.
Okay.
Yeah.
On my way to St.
Ives, I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife has seven sacks.
Every sack had seven cats.
Every cat had seven kittens.
Kittens, cats, sacks, and wives.
How many were going to St.
Ives?
John just nails it.
There's no way I'm nailing that.
Zeus nails it.
Zeus nails it, I mean.
No way I'm figuring that out.
Just one.
I think you just hear it once.
There's no way.
It's hard.
It's hard.
So Zeus nailing it is a wet stage the best because I'm just so impressed that
it's cool that he's like, I'm good at puzzles.
Like,
let me think about this first.
Also, that's too fucking hard.
The movie is, Zeus is kind of the brains of the operation when it comes to that whole thing.
It's another little thing that the movie is doing, subverting expectations, but that's a nitpick for me is some of these things that they have to do?
I just don't have any faith they would have figured them out.
The question is whether or not they were supposed to or not.
True.
And then any action movie villain playing Simon says, sign me up.
Oh,
can I talk about Katia now?
Do you have?
I thought for sure you would use that as your CR flex category.
You just let him do that here.
Go ahead, dude.
He wants it so badly.
Katia is played by the country music singer Sam Phillips.
Yeah.
Her entrance in this film is among the three or four four greatest character entrances of all time.
She is wearing a cigarette in her mouth.
Popped collar, green army shirt.
Her blonde hair is slicked back.
She's got sunglasses on and she's got a cigarette dangling from her mouth.
And then she cuts a guy to pieces so that she's covered in his own blood.
And it's the hottest thing I've ever seen in my life.
Save Edie.
Even better than Edie Falco Cupwood?
This is really the heyday for you.
Those movies are a year apart.
These are the two.
This is like
Ollie Frazier of blonde smoking is Edie Falco.
Does she ever actually smoke or she just has the smoke?
She's got it dangling out of her mouth.
Yeah.
I think he's dead, my dear.
She's mute.
Yeah.
And the Israelis try to get it.
It's funny that she's a country Western singer who just by mere body language and a
sneer in her face looks like a German.
I didn't learn this till I started doing research last night.
I would have bet anything.
That she was an Eastern European and didn't look like that.
She was like Bulgarian.
No.
Yeah.
She's like a critically adored country musician's married to the guy
like i i literally looked that up last night i mean this does lead to did the the maller rubin award for did this movie need a better sex scene it would have they said they threw that in because mctierian's like we're getting an r anyway let's get a little also can i just say we could have maybe unleashed her like the kind of vision we need exactly is we're getting like i'm getting an r anyway we're getting an r anyway is the greatest sentence anyway more headshots and there's gonna be some fucking yeah, I love that.
But you know what killed that?
Remember when we Craig Craig, who's not here today, but remember when we talked to Craig
a little while ago, like last year, two years ago, and he was like, this movie had unneeded boobs.
Like, why did this movie need boobs?
Remember when we were having that conversation?
Yeah, that was.
You know why the movie needs boobs?
Generational.
Because this is fucking America.
That's why the movie fucking needs boobs.
Hasn't there been a bomb in a strip club in this movie?
Exactly.
Like, that's why the movie is.
What's the name Cheetah?
What was the scores in the 90s?
Scores was the fancy.
Yeah.
Scores.
Which I think,
you know, my wife might be watching.
What was the one?
90s?
Pandas?
You think carriers?
But yeah, scores.
Yeah.
Scores, yeah.
Still, they put a bomb in scores over the school.
Don't give away free IP.
All right.
What do you have for Big Kahuna Burger Award for best use of food to drink?
Aspirin.
Aspirin, you.
Okay.
Great shot, Gorda award, most cinematic shot.
For me, Bonwitt Tower exploding
was just really good.
Yeah.
What do you have?
That is actually, I was going to say the opening three or four shots of the sun coming up in New York City, and you're just like, I'm now hot.
Great stuff.
Yeah.
Chess Rockwell, Brock Landers, a water.
I have one for Great Shot Gorda.
What's here?
The fucking guy getting cut in half.
Oh, from the wire.
Oh, wire.
That is when I realized, oh, fuck it.
They said fuck it.
I like what they drag him to.
We should put that in one stage of the best.
And they're pulling the two different parts.
Yeah, you get the legs.
Intestines everywhere, by the way.
That's way messier.
Chess Rockwell, Brock Landers, were our best character names.
Zeus Carver is pretty tough to beat.
Yeah,
what do you have for flex category, CR?
Okay, I got two.
One that's pre-existing.
And it would have been water jugs.
I still don't understand it.
I've read extensive explanations to how they figure it out.
And it's just weird.
My brain brain just figures this shit out.
I couldn't do it.
So you would be able to do water jugs.
Yeah.
But you wouldn't have gotten through St.
Ives.
I just, he said it so fast, I don't think I could have remembered it.
Water jugs, I would have gotten.
But I did make up a new category for my flex here.
Yeah.
It's the ratzo.
New category.
Yeah.
Ratzo Rizzo.
I'm walking here.
Most New York quote for.
Nice.
We did.
Why keep calling me Jesus?
Do I look Puerto Rican to you?
The Wall Street guy saying, your lights are on.
Look, I'll make this very simple.
112 Wall Street, or I'll have your medallion.
What?
You don't like white people?
I like Zeus going, I'm not jumping through hoops for some psycho.
That's a white man with white problems.
You deal with him when
he crosses 110th Street.
And then Walter saying, get a hold of Musson in Triboro.
Tell him to close the East River Bridges north of 59th Street, looking for dump trucks.
And Connie goes, dump trucks?
And Walter's like, McLean says there's dump trucks headed up the FDR loaded with gold.
Connie, Walter, they don't allow dump trucks on the FDR.
So I like that one the most.
That's a good category.
Yeah.
I wish we had had that three, three episodes ago.
All right.
Butch's girlfriend, a word for week link of the film.
So this movie has the Apocalypse Now Flight of the Valkyries problem, where the action in the beginning of the movie is so good, there's no way to have a finale.
It's like the helicopter is an apocalypse.
So it's like the first 113 minutes of this movie are fucking perfect.
And you just can't top it.
You can't top the subway car with the end of this film.
And
they kind of give up.
They kind of shrug their shoulders.
Yeah, we'll go when we do half-assed, we'll go into the alternate ending.
I had basically the same thing, but I'll even go a little more precise.
Why is Zeus involved in the last 40 minutes of this movie?
It's fucking ridiculous.
He's a normal person.
There's a moment in this movie where it's like, all right, Zeus, thanks for everything.
Yeah.
Maybe you should go back to your store and your family.
And this is now like a point of view.
Simon no longer needs you.
Simon, you're not involved.
You're not.
This isn't a buddy cop movie anymore.
Thank you for everything.
But instead, he's just now a cop.
He's on the in a chopper leading the attack.
He's shot in the leg.
He's fine.
You're doing wind horse fingers.
Yeah.
Because I was going to fucking
get at Bill, but there's no reason to.
It's a good point.
You know what?
This happens so often in these mid-90s action movies.
Do you remember how Erica Eliniak becomes a fucking commando?
She pops out to one of the great, great
adolescent Van Lathan moments of milk of the early 1990s.
It's just, bro, I'm not even going to fucking try to act like I wasn't like, oh shit, when that happened.
And then
by the end of the movie, she a fucking Navy SEAL.
Yeah.
So that does happen in these films, and it's something that they've gotten away from.
They don't do that that much.
No, that is probably for the best.
I mean, 48 Hours invented it.
Reggie Hammond goes from, he's on a 48-hour,
you know, whatever.
By the end of the movie, he's
trying to find games.
Did you have a week link or no?
I did.
Holly.
Got sick of it.
The wife.
No more mention of her.
Hey, McLean, call your wife right now.
Go call Holly.
Man, fuck all that.
We got to get to the end of the mission here.
Stop bringing Holly back into the movie.
I know she was a big presence in terms of the driving narrative force of particularly the first die hard.
And you could say.
She's on the plane.
She's on the plane.
But like,
at this point, it's over.
he saved basically two different cities and holly's still not fucking with him can i can i give you i had this for casting couch
a twist that would have made this movie better the colleen camp character we make her annabelle shiora and john mclaine's involved with her post-divorce but she's dumped him because he's an alcoholic but she works in the in the police department with him And now we have a little sexual attention and she's pissed and blah, blah, blah.
And the movie's just better.
And then then it makes it.
You take the phone call.
We have the meeting.
Yeah.
If that's a
better movie.
And then it gives it a little bit more sense.
Oh, I got to call Holly.
Oh, now I got to call her.
Is Bedelia in any other diehard movies?
I don't think so, right?
And honestly, probably we talked about this.
You could talk yourself into her not being in Die Hard 2.
I know they shoehorn her.
I think it's sort of like they basically make it.
That's why John isn't like, I'm just going to turn this over to airports.
It's a little shoehorn for him the diehard three is ridiculous what stage is the worst um we get it mclaine has a bad headache he mentions it 42 times
by like the ninth reference a little stale what else do you have uh i mean explosions in the new york city financial district are are a little touchy uh
and then this whole thing came out around the oklahoma bombing yep um so they had to do a lot of like
basically like preemptive press to say like it had nothing you know obviously we're not making light of this, but we're also
press tour for it, and they're like, there will be no bombing questions.
We're just talking about the movie we made a year ago.
So, probably that, I would say, the two reached the worst.
So, McClain's policing.
John gets to the point to where he just, if he thinks, he just kills you.
Okay.
Yeah.
Like, he doesn't give a fuck.
Yeah.
If you have an Eastern European accent, you're dead.
You're dead.
Like, particularly when he walks up on the guys and the things just boom, boom, boom.
I get it, though.
He's in a combat situation.
And And
although I like it aesthetically, the heist where there's been an explosion, and there are
five or ten dump trucks that are going down there and taking all of that gold, and the cops are just like, oh, okay, this guy said, that just doesn't make that much sense.
That's something that you have to believe in order for the movie to work.
Do you know what actually also has aged the worst is probably the
reputation of like city services?
Because, like, in this movie, when they're like, we're going to have to find the bomb ourselves,
and it's like the sanitation workers and the librarians and the firefighters are all just like, we're going to fucking walk into schools.
There might be a bomb.
We got to do it.
And now it's kind of like everybody's like, I don't know, these guys, they take too long to respond.
Who needs libraries?
What's age worse?
Well, they
even McTiernan has acknowledged this.
The gold is just way heavier than this.
The dump trucks could say.
They need like 100 100 dump trucks.
They would have needed 480 dump trucks to take out as much gold as they took out.
Each gold bar weighs 25 pounds.
One of the funny things is that they
completely fucked it up.
There's in the Fed, the Federal Reserve, there's only apparently a billion and a half dollars or something like that.
Oh, so where did it get the other 300 million?
Oh, it was 174 billion.
Yeah, they took some liberties.
Okay.
But it's like,
that's not even like a piece of the Lakers at this point.
Right.
Because the Lakers sold for $10 billion.
$10 billion.
Valuable franchise.
Of all time.
Ever.
$10 billion valuation.
Yeah.
$10 billion.
You kept $4.8 billion for it.
$4.8 billion check, actually.
$10 billion.
And by the way,
the Minnesota championships don't count thing is absurd.
It's absurd.
Okay, so if OKC wins on Sunday, we're taping this before game seven.
We should have a OKC, like, we've won our second title.
Honestly, it's ridiculous.
This is what you should do.
if okc wins on sunday you should do like a live pod from seattle congratulating them yeah congratulating the sonics fans for pulling off their second title if the sonics fans want to say that's our franchise they can it but it's the same franchise right you won 11 titles that's fine you've still won a load it's they've won 17 titles five titles in minneapolis when then they moved to la but it's the same franchise and they just kept the name lakers
they're the lakers though they're still the Lakers, though.
It's bullshit.
You win a title in a city.
That's where you won the title.
17 championships.
Minus $10 billion valuation.
16 championships.
16 or something.
Wait, now you made me screw up my
Boston blitzed your mind.
No.
The ending stinks.
Yeah.
It's bad.
This is
the flaw of the movie.
It's the what's age the worst.
And then you can see the alternate movie, the alternate ending on the special edition, all the stuff.
And it's on YouTube.
I sent it to you guys.
The actual ending of this movie didn't happen.
McLean goes and finds him in Hungary
and plays McLean says with Jeremy Irons and eventually kills him with a rocket launcher.
And it's really interesting.
It's the most interesting.
John McClain scene of the first three movies.
And of course, the studio is like, this is too dark.
We can't end the movie this week.
It's like he's a vigilante.
Yeah.
So they basically hustle this reshoot.
They spend a lot of money on it.
They, oh, it's like, oh, it turns out because he has the location on that aspirin.
What's going on?
It's crazy.
You're like, so there's like a idiotic.
Like a Quebec bottle of aspirin means you know he's going to be back there now.
Like literally at that location.
And then there's a helicopter and then they shoot him.
And then it's like Zeus is just sitting on the
sidewalk.
Why is he in Quebec?
If I'm Zeus, I've had enough.
Yeah, I'm not going to Quebec.
I don't know how it turns out.
Or when we get to Quebec, we're not going to go jump this guy and put the spotlight on him when he's trying to have sex with Katya.
We're going to just go arrest him.
Or send in SWAT.
Sister's like, my leg's fucked up.
Yeah.
I'm going to skip Quebec.
I walk with a lip now.
Where's my money for all of this?
It's really dumb.
So, all right.
So we're going to go now to
my flex category.
The Rufflohan and Rubinikart Jover acting word.
Sam dials it up a couple times.
Sam dials it up and Iron styles it up a couple of times.
Dan, what's your flex category?
It's the Ed Norton reverse dunk award that this movie need a random sports scene.
Yeah.
You don't consider the brothers on the stoop.
Yeah, there's some good passes.
Yankee Stadium should have had a game going on.
Well,
yeah.
Yankee Stadium should have had a game going on.
There should have been a game going on.
You know what I think happened?
Wayne Boggs, Don Madley, Paul O'Neill, Danny Tartable, all of those yankees i have the answer for you what i think the lockout had happened the strike oh i don't think that i think that's how they were able to film so was yankee stadium just available for people to drop you and check it out i don't think it was i don't think there were games but should have been mentioned in the movie though i look back at that era because that's right before the yankee golden era starts year before year before they're in the 95 playoffs against seattle
so you know uh some of these guys that would go on to become you know mainstays it's a pre-Jeter.
It's a good call.
Yeah, but there should have been a game going on.
Could have gone to, yeah, or they could have done the Met Stadium probably makes more sense for this movie.
Yeah, probably.
The CR thinks Luke Wilson could have been Harrison Ford's hottest take award.
Not sure how hot this is.
Okay.
How hot is it to say it's the best die-hard movie?
And to go along with your points earlier, how hot is it to say that it's perhaps improved by not imperiling Holly, by not having that kind of like
weight on McClane, that it's really just more about him trying to save the city and save himself.
So Die Hard's one of the best movies of all time.
I'm just, I just, the hottest takeaway.
I think everybody needs to calm down on that take.
No, I know, no, because I think there are people out there who are like, diehard 3 is the best diehard movie and not even hottest taking it.
Like they actually genuinely believe it.
So it's interesting.
I wanted to say it, but I didn't have the nuts for it.
But this is my favorite one.
That's fine.
I'm not saying that this is better than Die Hard, right?
Because Die Hard's family is right.
I think that's okay.
It has a perfect ending, whereas this ending is not.
Rocky 4 is my favorite Rocky movie.
This is my Rocky 3.
This is my favorite one.
One of those two is my favorite.
It changes all the time.
Not the best one, but this is my, I could, I could see how people say it's the most entertaining.
My favorite one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's fair.
All right, I'm going full hot.
Good.
I think they blew it using the Simon Says gimmick for this movie.
And I think it was a franchise.
And I think it was just sitting there.
And I don't know why.
Initially, it was a script called Simon Says, written by the same screenwriter.
Lethal Weapon grabbed it, couldn't figure it out.
It's silver bottom.
Gave it to Die Hard 3 and they use it.
I think it's either an action movie franchise or a horror movie franchise.
And I actually think you could say it's a better horror movie franchise.
I mean, it just basically saw.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It did saw.
But the whole Simon Says gimmick, I didn't say Simon that time.
I think, I think I just see murders, blood, and sequels with it.
Wouldn't it be crazy if we found out that Trump has been getting Simon Says for like two years?
And like, every day he gets a phone call.
It's like, Simon says, you got to do this.
And he's like, fuck.
All right.
I got to tweet this out.
Right.
Well, so.
Really?
That's actually kind of the plot after America Brave New World.
Well, so Simon Says was supposed to be a Brandon Lee movie, and then he died.
He passed away, yeah.
So if he doesn't die and Simon says just because, like, could they have made like five Simon Says?
It's been 30 years.
We literally could probably get Simon Says going right now.
They could probably get it made.
Bring our film.
Jack, does your generation care about Simon Says?
Sure.
Okay.
Oh, y'all played that?
Oh, yeah.
Interesting.
You know what I didn't see?
And maybe I missed this.
Why did Joe Silver not produce this movie?
They had a falling out, falling out.
Yeah, who had a falling out?
I think Williams.
Oh,
okay, cool.
You know, Willis was feeling it a little bit.
He's married to Demi Moore.
Joel, a combative personality?
20 million.
Yeah, I think Joel wasn't.
I think because that was
there was a piece in the research about like Shane Black was maybe going to write this when it was Joel Silver.
And then
interesting that Joel Silver,
this movie does not get made with Lawrence Fishburne.
And he goes on to make some matrix with him.
I think this is true.
I'm not positive.
For Casting What Ifs, we did Fishburn, but that Sean Connery was their first choice for Simon Turin.
Yeah, I saw that.
So we think that's true?
I mean, I think he makes the phone.
I saw that in the research, but Sean said he didn't want to play like a
such a, but then he
did Medicine Man, though.
Remember the Medicine Man movie?
I just think that movie bombs if he's, I don't think it's the same movie.
I don't think it works.
Yeah.
I don't buy him as like an evil, plus him trying to do a german accent
he's like got the tank top on he's ripped doesn't work when did sean has sean gone bad in anything fantasy no
atlanta uh conner has uh connery gone bad in anything besides he in like the 70s and stuff he's like i mean i haven't seen hunt for red october but is he a bad guy in that he defects to
so does that count no he defects to the the americans americans is that on is that streaming dude come on What is this Hunt for Red October thing?
I'm not in on this stream.
He's just like a white wave.
It's like one of the most important things.
You've never seen that before.
No, I've seen it.
Oh, I was about to ask you.
I like it.
We just haven't done it yet.
And he keeps giving me like, he's Simon Sezing me.
He's like, Simon says if you want to do Hunt for October, you got to watch Insight movie.
A phenomenal movie.
I'm waiting until CR becomes a divorced alcoholic.
Then we're going to do it.
Shut up.
Just fucking smoke and save.
God, CR, you look like shit.
He's bringing those little airport liquor bottles with him, pouring his coffee.
McTiernan turned down Batman Forever so he could do this.
That's good casting late.
Best That Guy Award.
It's Colleen Camp Count or is she Colleen Camp Count?
She's Colleen Camp.
The
Kevin Chamberlain is bomb expert Charles Weiss.
Yeah.
This is the bald guy with the glasses.
Yeah.
Just if you saw him after that, it would be this.
But I think the answer.
is Walter Cobb.
Larry Brighman.
Larry Brigman.
Never knew what his name was.
big time New York theater actor.
He's in the Al Pacino Richard III movie that got made like a little bit after this, but he's like when in that movie, you can see he's like a big time.
And he's in Injustice for All.
Yes.
Yeah.
I had Anthony Peck as Walsh is up there.
He's also in Hunt for October.
John Doman, who's Rawls from the wire, is the construction foreman when they go into the tunnels.
And I don't know if this is a that guy, but it's a that guy, like if you if you know, you know, is Elvis Duran.
Oh, yeah, radio guy,
young Elvis Duran.
Yeah, young Elvis Duran.
I have Phyllis Yvonne Stickney,
the black lady who says, in the movie, who says everybody just called 911 at the same time, a mainstay.
You see her everywhere.
This is Malcolm X, all different types of roles.
Shout out to her.
I don't want to call her, she's a fantastic career by someone.
Shout out.
I'd never do this, but I have to go back to a movie we did last week because I messed up a best that guy award.
Okay.
And it really bothered me all week because I didn't realize it was the same.
Best Marathon Man and That Guy?
So the guy who recognizes Zelle but doesn't recognize him right away and then follows him on the sidewalk.
I think it's
was also the gardener at the beginning of Bad News Bears Breaking Training.
Oh, shit.
Who was like...
What was up with Marathon Man and Bad News Bears Breaking Training?
In Bad News, they use him.
He's like basically the special needs gardener, and they pretend he's the coach, and Kelly League teaches him how to say, hello, how are you?
How are you?
I don't want to do Bad News Bears Breaking Training.
I just can't believe.
I love that movie, and I can't believe I missed it.
Is that the Astro World one?
Astrodome.
Astrodome one, yes.
Kelly League drives.
He's 13.
I'm sorry.
That was controversial Bad News Bears when they went to Astro World.
When Travis Scott takes over the
case, they lose a couple of the kids.
Kelly League drives the van to the Astrodome.
Yeah, they go play.
They play against the Houston Toros.
The Houston Toros, yeah.
And then there's another one where they play against a Japanese telepathy.
We don't talk about that.
That's a sequel we don't discuss.
Deion Waiter's award.
It's Sam Phillips.
It's Sam Phillips, without a doubt.
That's easy.
Or there's only one more person,
the Chester A.
Arthur truck driver.
Oh, Jerry.
Yeah.
Jerry comes
along.
Cooks for a little bit.
Solves a riddle, gets the fuck out of Dodge.
We did, I already did my recasting couch of Annabelle Ciora in the Colleen Camp with some history with John McClain.
If Joe Pantigliano is in here as Walter Cobb, I'm not going to argue.
I mean, Graham Green's.
Joe Pantaliano is in the movie.
I'm not going to argue.
This is like peak Joey Pants.
I feel like we could have snuck him in somewhere, but him as Walter Cobb just getting mad at McClain and calling him a drunk.
I don't think the movie's worse.
Yeah.
What do you have?
For recasting, I was thinking more about City.
Could this have been in any other city?
San Francisco.
Because LA, it's just, you're just in traffic and you're dead.
Simon wins.
Simon says, do the collateral drive of LAX to downtown in 20 minutes.
Simon says, go to Eagle Rock.
Fuck!
It's going to take three hours.
Well, they're putting in a bike lane in Hollywood Boulevard.
I'm dead.
Half-fast internet research.
So they were trying to make diehard 3 for a couple years, and Bruce is just rejecting scripts left and right, and especially because there have been so many diehard rip-offs.
But one of the scripts was called Troubleshooter,
which had McClain fighting terrorists on a Caribbean cruise line.
And Bruce Willis said, no, thanks.
Sounds too much like under siege.
They repurpose it, make it speed 2.
Can I do a little number here?
Because I was looking at.
I had to.
That's speed 2.
It literally became speed 2.
And one of the issues with them developing this at the time was that there were so many studios had so many scripts in development that were just diehard in a, you know, like that were just basically.
So here are some of the ones that they had going at the time.
Some of them got made, some didn't.
Sandblast, which was diehard in a sandstorm.
No safe haven.
Die Hard on Martha's Vineyard.
Rosillo, let's go.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
Trackdown, Die Hard in English, in the English Channel 2.
What was the Martha?
Sandblast.
No, no safe haven was Die Hard in Martha's Vineyard.
Now with Rosillo?
Rosillo is
John Lalina.
He's John McClain and Rosillo.
He's Saint Scott Caster like hanging out at Martha's Vineyard.
He's on the vineyard.
Him and Chris Long go out for a really long night on Martha's Vineyard.
They're hungover, and then it's like the fairies, they're not running.
So Trackdown is diehard in the English Channel tunnel.
Suspension, Die Hard on the George Washington Bridge.
Platform and Rig were both diehard on oil rig movies.
High Roller was Die Hard in Vegas, which is basically Con Era at the end, I guess, right?
Yeah, but they never.
Vegas was still sitting there in the 90s as a full action movie.
You could have done Die Hard.
By the way, sitting there right now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What else?
In Contempt, Die Hard in a Courthouse.
He Who Dares, Die Hard in the British Embassy in the United States.
I feel like you're making these up.
No, these are all from IMDb.
L4, Die Hard at the Center for Disease Control.
That is just like, and
a bunch of diehard in Hurricane.
Donaldson, Tie Hard, Wuhan.
Yeah, Tie Harden.
We got to keep the virus in.
It's actually, you got to kill the terrorists, but you got to keep the virus in.
Die Hard Wuhan is going to be a little bit more than that.
They're going to release this if we don't stop them.
Damn.
Man, that Martha's Vineyard one.
What a great location for an action movie.
There's no way in, no way out.
And you could have, like, maybe Rosillo,
like over the course of the movie, he falls in love with like a yuppie girl who's only there for the summer.
Right.
Die Hard Catalina is sitting there too.
Driving around like buggies.
That's good.
Yeah, just like wedding at Catalina.
Oh my God, such a pain in the ass to get there.
And then it's just the island, you know.
The screenwriter, Jonathan Hensley, was detained by the FBI because the Federal Gold Reserve stuff in this movie was so accurate that they thought he had like inside intel
and actually brought him in for questioning.
What was his research?
Where'd he get it from?
Where'd he get the stuff?
He just said he read everything in the New York Times.
was blank.
Yeah.
Didn't want to take the chance.
They CGI'd it.
Yeah, they didn't want to pop it.
They thought it was offensive.
Yeah.
And then
Van How did they do the four-gallon jug thing?
Just want to see if you could do this right now.
I can't.
The four-gallon jug thing,
I really don't know how you would do it.
I told you I would die during that.
I have no idea.
Like, if the idea is that you can't subtract, you can't be off by a couple of ounces, then I wouldn't be able to do it.
You take the three-gallon jug,
you pour all of it into the five-gallon jug.
So now there's three in there.
You take the three-gallon jug again,
you pour all of it into the five-gallon jug, but only two of the gallons go, one gallon stays in the
gallon left.
So you keep that one gallon in the three-gallon jug because you've you've poured five of the six gallons into the five.
Okay, yeah, then you pour out the five-gallon jug,
you take the one gallon that's left in the three-gallon jug, you pour that into the five-gallon jug.
So now that is one gallon, then you do the three-gallon poured in you have four.
That's actually pretty, it's pretty smart.
Okay, well, how about this since it's so easy?
Uh,
what we'll do since it's because i because you're talking your shit right now that's fine i'm not talking about i'm just saying it actually wasn't that hard the other one i think was way hard there's a room over there get fan duel to fucking sponsor it the bill simmons jug challenge for the ringer network and i i will take odds and we'll make bets about whether or not you can get this done but we have to switch it up yeah we can switch up the numbers because he's he's obviously man to figure this out yeah but if you really feel like you can do this i'm actually i already said i could i already said how to do it we'll figure out a different one the bill simmons jugs challenge you just want to do the bill simmons jugs
that's where that was all going
uh apex mountain bruce willis no
well you could say that these couple years are but i don't know man
i think there's a case that's right here's the mountain i think you can make a case that's here.
Okay.
Okay.
I mean, I want to hear the case.
Well, so he's red hot as an actor.
Yeah.
Then it dies down.
Then he has pulp in 94 and this in 95.
And that leads to the 12 monkeys Armageddon, 5th Element, Siege, 6th Sense, holding 9 yards.
This is his run.
I feel like he's kind of the number one call.
in 95 for anything with action or kind of cool anything, right?
Like Hanks is like the Hanks has the Hanks corner.
Yeah.
I just think Bruce, this is it.
Yeah.
I think he has.
I think if you're making a movie, it's like, can we get Hanks?
Can we get Bruce?
Can we get Cruz?
Those are the first three calls.
That's what you mean.
Can they get out of the target fourth?
And when you talk about like culturally, the Demi Moore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Also, like.
Demi Moore, this is right around when she got the 20 million for strip tees.
I think it was 12, but yeah.
As a couple.
Well, you just Lakers Lakers valuationed him.
Yeah, exactly.
As a couple, it's about as good as it gets for a couple.
He's a huge, huge star.
Sam Jackson, I don't think so, but I also
couldn't tell you when it was.
Maybe Jackie Brown?
No, I think it's later.
I think it's this
area?
This area doing pulp and diehard with a bunch of people.
I still feel like it's like, how long is this guy going to be up here?
And then at some point, that flipped.
Yeah.
He's just done so many different types of movies.
It would be difficult to pin down
when he was the most relevant and most at the peak of his powers because he made it.
It's somewhere in the 90s, though.
We can agree on that, right?
Maybe.
But at some point, he became like, oh, Sam Jackson's just here now, and that's how it's going to be.
Maybe, but you could then argue that it's Sam C.
Yeah, you know.
So maybe when he gets Star Wars,
that's 99.
Yeah,
it's right around around there.
Yeah.
Jeremy Irons probably win in the Oscar.
Or merchant call.
How about Harlem as a movie location?
Shit, no.
What would you have?
Harlem as a movie location?
Yeah, in a movie.
I mean, I said that so quickly, and now
what about Harlem Knights?
I mean, not very well-liked movie, but I think has had a culturally.
No, I get it.
I know, but it was a bomb when it came out.
So you got Harlem Knights, you got the Cotton Club, you got Hoodlum.
These are all going to be black movies.
You got,
I don't know.
I just wouldn't think about Harlem as a movie location, Die Hard with a Vengeance being.
It's only like in Harlem briefly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wouldn't think.
What about movies set during the summer?
Like summer moody?
Action movies, maybe.
Okay.
That needed the summer as part of what they were doing.
Crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's fair.
The Wall Street school system.
Yeah, for sure.
Apex Mountain, never discussed before or since.
The Gold Reserve.
Bond with Teller, 100%.
For sure.
100%.
Maybe the first and last time it's been mentioned in a film.
Colleen Camp.
Who's Your Girl?
The Cigarette Smoker?
Sam.
Sam Phillips.
Sam Phillips, all of them.
Cruiser Hanks for this.
Oh, I got a couple of other Apex Monzo.
Go.
Let's hear.
Die Hearts Equals.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
John McClain Sidekicks.
Yes.
Yes.
So this is
bigger than Bill Johnson, bigger than Justin Long.
Who's the dude in two that helps him with the air traffic control?
He barely has a partner in that movie.
Yeah.
So John McClain Sidekicks, this is definitely an Apex mountain of John McClain Sidekick.
Cruiser Hanks.
To me, easy Cruise.
The running Cruz is McClain.
Yeah.
I could also see Cruz as Simon.
Oh.
Oh.
Blonde.
OCR.
Now we're talking.
Fucking raw.
OCR.
Trying to do a German accent.
Yeah.
Say OCR one more time.
And then he's got a problem.
Gigantic pause.
All right, Phil Simmons Jugs movie.
No, that's actually awesome.
Yeah.
So, Cruz with the collateral hair where it just goes blonde, tries a German accent, like Valkyrie.
He tries it for like 10 minutes and then he's like, Yeah, I forget it.
What thing would Cruz have learned how to do?
Um,
he probably drive a dump truck, learn how to do all the construction stuff.
He's like, We don't need Targo.
I can, I can do all that.
I've actually studied gold.
What if you drop the racial component?
Cruise is Zeus, it's Cruz and Hanks together.
Why drop the racial component?
Why not have Cruz running an electronic store in Harlem?
Just be like, hey, I'm the first gentrifier.
Yeah, I'm the guy.
Like, everybody knows him.
They love me here.
Scorsese or Spielberg, I would say Scorsese.
Yeah, Marty, New York City.
What role would Phil Hoffman have played?
Simon.
Yeah.
We're good.
Good Simon.
He doesn't have to be a good one.
Or you could have done maybe
the Graham Green part.
Yeah.
I thought that would have been funny.
Piccadinets.
John.
We mentioned
everything being open at 7.45 in this neighborhood is a little dicey.
Zeus
leaves the store, doesn't lock up, nothing.
Just leaves it open.
Well, I mean, it's not like that.
I think he tries to get back to his store multiple times.
Yeah.
Never says at any point.
We hear about Holly 45 times.
We never hear Zeus stay over the next 15 hours.
Shit, I left my store open.
He's also a staple in the community, so maybe they're not going to write.
Doesn't he think his
destroyed, though?
Yeah.
Oh, he said those guys are.
Oh, he does say that.
Yeah.
Because
he does.
Actually, he does say that.
He just feels like he'd be a little, it'd be on his mind a tiny bit more that his entire livelihood is about to destroy.
Because he stuck up for McClane and he says, what those guys are doing to my store right now.
Yeah, he does say that.
How did Simon know that McClain wore the sign?
It seems like they are watching them at any moment.
Like he knows when they're in the van with the FBI.
Yeah, he's looking at the bad.
And the NSA guy that they're like are you still you know putting your glasses in your mouth
simon's planning this whole thing he's got a hundred people working for him because we see them all the eyes yeah there's a lot of dudes remember he's got two football teams of people well yeah is there like a mike vrabel meet meet the group moment and three months before the heist
hey guys So you're asking Simon Gruber, so you guys are going to be able to get a lot of people.
There's some kind of paramilitary organization or something.
Yeah, they're all like mercenaries.
But you're asking, does Simon Gruber have a Connor Stallions who's constantly on rooftops looking at McClane?
Yeah, it's like,
well, the dudes in Yankee Stadium.
He's like, Luther, you're going to be, you're going to do drive the truck with me.
And Bobby, you're going to be over, you're going to be in Harlem making sure McClane's going to wear that sign.
Yeah.
Like, how, or did they just put a camera there?
Well, my unanswerable question.
for this, which is tied directly to this, is how many of these tasks did Gruber reasonably expect McClain to complete?
and how did he know they were being completed uh i mean yeah whatever he was doing he was obviously keeping them busy until but if they the st ives thing up was there even a bomb in the trash can what well at you know at the end when they ask him they go there was never any bomb in the school he goes i'm not i'm a soldier i'm not a monster right so i don't know how many but he does blow up
blow up the train and the train if it stayed on the train would have killed thousands or hundreds yeah so i'm gonna go maybe you were a monster you're about to blow up 200 people.
Right.
But he had to blow them up to achieve his goal because he needed to go in there.
So yeah,
definitely a monster, though.
We mentioned the 480 dump trucks.
My internet pick for me, I think movies fuck this up a lot.
I just think McLean is just covered in blood.
Yeah, I had our main character.
I think blood is every, I think he's had brains.
Like, think about Marvin getting his brains all over like Sam Jackson's hair in pulp fiction, getting shot point blank.
There's four Marvins marvins in the elevator like there's just
all over john mclane so take it a step further if i bang my shin in the middle of the night like getting back into bed i'm limping for like a day they get a train derailment they get shot zeus gets shot they get splinters from a winch wire struck stuck in shoulders they get trapped in a flood then shot through a manhole cover flip a mercedes traveling at high speed fall halfway off a bridge onto a hard surface and they're more or less like walking around a dude excuse me and And McClain gets hit in the head with a bottle.
Yeah.
This character, the John McClain character, is the same character from Unbreakable.
That's him in Unbreakable.
Yeah,
because he is so fucked up.
There's actually one scene where he's all fucked up, blood everywhere.
And it's almost as if the water rejuvenates him because he takes the water, he wipes the blood off, and then
he's ready to go back in the game.
It's hungover.
Just needs some ass.
I got a couple picking nits.
Go.
So McClain doesn't even think about taking the $12 billion.
Right.
Right.
Or even just being like, what's important is we each get a gold bar here.
Right.
So the gold bars are everywhere.
He says, we'll make a deal.
There's 12.
Think about the stakes here.
People are going to look at Van like he's an asshole, but I have to just put it out there.
This is not like, hey, we got a suitcase.
full of a half a million for you, $200,000 to put.
It's $12 billion.
McLean,
the Boy Scout, doesn't even think about it.
Doesn't go, or even, doesn't even tell Zeus or somebody else they did offer us $12 billion.
This happened in Marathon, man, last week.
Yeah.
Hoffman just could have left with all the diamonds.
He's like, nah, I'm too good for the diamonds.
A diamond.
Yeah.
A diamond.
That's too much.
It's two in your pocket.
Jesus Christ.
Secondly,
the henchmen that are in this are all six foot four German dudes with crew cuts.
Yeah.
There's just no fucking way you're going to believe that these guys are cops or guys that are going to be aware of.
Yeah, Walsh fucks this up when they all arrive.
Yeah.
And all these guys get off and simon gets off the truck is like hey there partner and it's like why is there like a fake german texan man who's in charge of city services here like who's gonna do all the like demolition work simon was like sam presty like he liked length and athleticism right
a lot of three and d guys
um
we didn't talk about the biggest picky knit McClain, first of all, he drowns in the tunnel.
But even if you're going to say he doesn't, then the thing shoots him out.
He gets shot up in the air.
Who's driving by?
Zeus Carver coming back from Yankee Stadium.
Hey!
What's up?
Fucking ridiculous.
That's where, like, to me, that's the jump the shark moment of this movie.
We're like, all right, this is now getting stupid.
I do, for the same way that you were talking about how you'd like to test yourself with the water jug thing.
I do want to do the move that McLean does where he's like, take the anti-lock brakes off.
That's a badass fucking shot, bro.
Yeah, that was good.
And every time I see it, I'm like, yeah, man, are anti-lock brakes holding me back?
Last one is a big one.
Did you have any more?
No.
No.
Simon.
Oh, just the German thing.
The second you hear a German accent, you're like, wait a second.
Right.
Simon's this mastermind.
Yeah.
Planned everything out meticulously.
And then just gives McQueen the aspirin bottle that has the address of where you got the aspirin bottle.
Well, also, how did Simon think he was going to get away with all the dumpsters being full of like metal pieces on Targo?
Just wouldn't be like, sorry about your headache, John.
Yeah.
Tells him to keep the bottle.
Basically tells him, hey, there's the bottle.
Why don't you check it out?
It's like he wanted to get caught.
Yeah, maybe.
Sequel, prequel, Prestige TBL, Blackcaster, Untouchable, where they did multiple sequels.
I just didn't like Live Free or Die Hard, not even a little bit.
I thought Olafant's good in it.
I thought it was
fine.
If I'm on an airplane and I don't have a lot of choices, maybe.
Hacking is a good die-hard thing.
No.
Saw it in theaters.
Me too.
Oh, I did too.
I saw it the day of the NBA draft.
Yeah.
What a day for you.
Well, I was trying to get ready to write the running diary.
Needed, went to like an 11 o'clock die hard for at the grove to kind of take my mind off it and was disappointed.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Yeah.
Is this this movie better with Wayne Jenkins, Danny Trail, Doris Burg, Sam Jackson, no, Byron Mayo, Barney Cousins, Tony Romo, Harling Mays, Chris Collinsworth, Daniel Plainbue, Long Legs, or Wilfred Brimley and the firm?
Got to do one more DB before the, you know, as we end the NBA season.
And I fucked up by never mentioning that earlier in the playoffs, she said, Bonjour, Mr.
Hartenstein.
So I would probably go DB saying, Oh, Federictions, Harris Brewer.
Simon Gruber,
just a mastermind.
You've played through headaches, but we see you.
He sees the whole city as a launching pad.
Just one Oscar who gets it.
Man.
McTiernan.
Yeah.
Direction.
Is there an Irons case?
No.
Nah.
No.
Doesn't do enough.
Out of curiosity,
what was this Oscars year link?
No chance for anything.
Yeah, that's what I thought.
95 was rough.
Unanswerable questions.
What's the next day like with the newspaper coverage?
What's the lead story?
Is it this subway explosion?
That's a fucking awesome.
Subway explosion.
Is it the water thing?
Can we be specific about how does the New York Post cover the market?
Onwards Heller blowing up.
Times covers it.
New York's under attack.
What are the headlines?
You have multiple explosions.
You have the flood.
You have McLean himself.
Then you have somebody getting cut in half on a boat.
You have a boat blowing up.
You have three things blowing up.
Because a lot of stuff doesn't quite happen.
I think the number one story is the subway crash.
Subway crash is on the front page in the UK.
I think it's almost a New York under attack.
Kind of.
Because the bombs in the school
finding a bomb in a school is a fucking crazy story.
but they didn't you know what i mean like it's like it's it's an almost a part of
yeah it is it's a part of the narrative
then simon dies so they get they got his face on the deal this is the mastermind of the new york it would have been cool if simon had made it a multi-day thing so that we could have had new york post simon says headlines every day yeah simon says the headlines it could have been like an eight-day thing and then the other thing i was thinking was 1994 which was an amazing time in New York City because you had the Rangers, you had the Knicks, you had the heyday of Mike and the Dog,
and then you have diehard filming in New York, probably Apex Mountain.
Wait, you're scared of 1994.
That's a very important question.
How do Mike and the Dog react to this?
Well, so that was my third.
If this is really New York City, what is the next day Mike and the Dog?
Well, so is it 1995 Mike and the Dog or 1994?
I don't know.
What is it?
We have...
Because they're filming this in 94.
But because the movie came out in May 95, we have to assume it happened in May 95.
So the Knicks are in the playoffs, and I think Dog's like, Mike, we got to talk about what's going on in New York City later.
But first, game three, Knicks paces.
Let's talk about what Huey got to do later on.
We're going to talk about how things are blowing up, Mike.
Taisa was a huge day in New York.
I just went to Bonwit last week.
I went to Bonwitzla three weeks ago.
It's a staple of the city.
But driving through Central Park, dog, it's just crazy.
I just can't believe they did that.
Yeah, I think they get to it in the second hour.
Take some calls.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then we got to talk Rangers, Mike.
Yeah.
What piece of memorabilia would you want or not want from this movie?
I want her knife.
The scythe.
The little scythe that she has.
That's good.
I thought I wanted a gold bar, but it's going to be a fake gold bar.
How much is one of those gold bars worth?
I'd want one of the bricks.
If they're like a game-used die-hard gold bricked up movie, movie-use.
Like,
how much would one actual gold bar like that for real?
Like, how much?
So apparently, they're 25 pounds.
But how much is it worth?
A 25 pound?
Depends on the price of gold at the time.
Yeah, at any given moment.
I know,
I understand financial shit, but like, what's the ball?
Well, I don't.
It would depend on gold by the pound.
So, what is it by the pound?
If it's like $100 by the pound, then that's the price.
So it's a brick.
Let's see.
They always say buy gold.
It's like gold never goes down.
I can't figure this out.
Okay.
I'm sure somebody will email us.
It's $108 by the gram today.
By the gram?
$3,300 by the ounce.
By the ounce?
$3,300 by the ounce.
So it's a.
How many ounces in a pound?
Fucking
math.
Gold price per ounce, $3,367 right now.
So each brick was like over $100,000.
Yeah.
Look at you.
Jugs.
Coach Finstock Award for Best Life Lesson.
What do you got?
If we can beat racism, we can beat Europe.
They work together.
They beat racism.
And then they beat the Germans just like we did in fucking 44, baby.
I love it.
I was going to say, just don't count out the divorced alcoholics in your life.
You never know when you're going to surprise you.
I was going to say for the piece of memorabilia that I would want is the packaged shirt that they hand John McClain at the police station to be like, here, you got to put something else on.
And then I would wear that shirt for my entire alcoholic era of podcasting.
If the sandwich board was
CGI'd.
I don't want to have to defend.
I don't want to have to defend.
And no, and you're at somebody's house and they're like, yo, I have the sandwich board.
Do you want it?
You know what's funny?
It's like all the brand of sand.
You know, if you wore that in Boston, people would be like, hey, man, how's it going?
Hell, it's probably hanging.
Can I get one of those?
Yeah, yeah.
What'd you get that at?
Would you want the blank sandwich board?
No.
No, I don't want the blank sandwich board.
Pretty good artifact from the 90s movies.
I wouldn't want it either.
Best double feature choice.
I'm going to go with Die Hard.
Okay.
Go Die Hard right to Die Hard 3.
That's good.
Skip Die Hard 2, which is kind of in its own universe.
You know what I got?
Under siege?
I got the siege.
Oh, because it's another New York.
Another New York all-whatever with Bruce Willis, who kind of starts off like he's going to be the hero and that, then ends up.
I still haven't decided whether I like that movie and it came out like almost 30 years ago.
It gets better fucking every time I look at it.
I might have to watch it again.
Yeah.
My dad's here all weekend.
Maybe I'll make a movie.
It gets better every time I look at it.
It's really good, Denzel.
And it's really good, Willis.
Like an off-kilter kind of Annette Benning.
I would probably
I'll just go pulp fiction.
Who won the movie?
I'm going to say Sam Jackson.
Oh.
Because I think.
I had Sam as well.
It's the breath of fresh air that the franchise needed.
It's one of those rare moments when you can tell.
I don't know if this is literally true, but at least on screen, you can tell that the star is happy to share the screen with the person and is like, you got this scene.
Like, you can, you can make, you can make fun of me, you can, like, make me look stupid, you can make me look small-minded, or whatever.
I love acting with you, and I think he just gives this movie a new life.
I'm gonna go, Willis.
It's just hard to beat the character
of
John McClain.
I think Sam Jackson wins because pulp fiction no longer becomes a fluke.
I see what you mean.
He is now there, he can help carry a major, major movie, and now the rest of his career falls into place.
And the movie stands the test of time.
People love it.
Like CR was at what theater were you at?
Videos, yeah.
Videos.
On Sunday.
How many people?
Pax House.
People loving it.
Yeah.
On a Sunday night.
Have you guys done, have we done The Last Boy Scout?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That was.
Left-handed throw is tough.
Don't know why they had synced that in.
Let me ask you, what is more intriguing to you, Florida Keys month or New Orleans month?
What do we got for the Keys?
Yeah, what's in there?
Out of Time.
Oh, shit.
Out of Time is that.
What's the Hackman movie?
When I say I've been scouting out of time, it's like the fucking Mavericks studying Cooper flag tape at this point.
Like, it's going to happen this summer.
Just telling you.
Here's the only thing about New Orleans month versus Florida Keys month.
It really comes down to, in my opinion, a battle between Angel Heart and Out of Time.
And, like, which movie do you want to do more?
And that is a tough decision to make.
An Angel Heart
It's on the list.
Heaven's Prisoners, Angel Heart.
What are the other two New Orleans movies?
Big Easy?
I mean, I would say we should do it.
Can I throw a Florida keys?
Let's do it again.
Have you ever watched?
Let's do it again.
What movie?
Let's do it again.
Oh, let's do it again.
Uptown Saturday Night with Bill Cosby.
Oh, you're going way back.
And then Let's Do It Again
How about tightrope with Clint Eastwood?
Tightrope with Clint Eastwood.
Going through the French quarter, looking for
a sexual assault turn.
Kind of gets pulled in.
He's into deep.
He's getting into the dark side.
Maybe we should do Into Deep Month.
Into Deep Month.
Crossing the Line Month?
Crossing the Line Month?
Tightrope's a good one.
Yeah.
He's like, you know what?
I kind of
like the dark side of the French quarter.
We could read eight millimeter.
Well, that would be a good time to do the re-Miami Vice.
We're doing that live in LA.
My favorite Florida Keys, I think, is Night Moves, which is about Hackman plays an ex-football player turned private eye who has to go search for the teenage daughter of a B-movie actress in the Keys.
Wild Things is Keys, too, right?
Wild Things is Keys.
Wait, Wild Things might just be Miami.
I think it's the Keys.
Is it?
We could do South Florida Month.
We could do South Florida Month and get Scarface in finally.
South Florida Month.
South Florida Month would be Scarface, Wild Things.
South Florida Month.
South Florida Month, yeah.
That gets a little more interesting.
I feel like the Keys are the most underrated movie location.
I mean, Bloodline.
Movie TV.
What was that?
What was that?
Netflix show?
Bloodline.
Really used the Keys nice.
Good first season, yeah.
I just can't think of that many movies that are set in the keys that like besides the ones that we talked about.
I'm upset that New Orleans hasn't been in more movies.
Bloodline stands in for everything.
They shoot so much there.
But there's a ton that we're forgetting.
There's obviously the movie The Big Easy.
Did you like that movie?
What's the I did, but it has an age grit.
What's the Alec Ball?
Pretty dated.
The Heavens Prisoners is a classic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, I mean,
there's films on it.
We're just, we're not, we're not thinking about them.
And then there are a lot of movies.
I knew you'd be here, Robo Shaw.
Hey, can I tell you something about that?
That movie is the movie where I realized that it wasn't quite going to happen for Alec Ball.
Is Angel Heart New Orleans?
It is.
Come on, CR.
That's what I thought.
Lewis Cipher.
Because heaven's.
That's the movie that gets the rewatchables canceled from Spotify.
They're like,
we no longer like to pay drawers.
Can I be real?
When you go back and you look at that movie, there was a lot of scandal around it during that time.
It ages actually better than some of the other films that, I mean, obviously obviously she's doing wild shit in the movie.
Cliff Huxtable's daughter being in that movie was the single craziest thing that happened in the 1980s.
I would put it against anything else that happened in the 80s.
It was a conversation.
I can't even understand what that was.
My mother was like, what is that girl doing?
Because the movie was set in New Orleans, so it was a big deal.
My mother was like, what is that girl doing?
Like, because it was like Angel Heart was a devil worshiping movie and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
I forgot about that.
That was America's family.
Yeah.
Still can't believe it.
You could also like just hearing rumors about, oh, there's a big sex scene in this movie.
And it's like with Lisa Bonet covered in blood.
And then you go to the movie and you actually see it and you're like, ah,
I just.
You could also do Controversy Month.
Movies that went crazy with controversy.
Really controversial films.
Really controversial films.
Yeah, it could almost be like, holy fuck, this was a big deal month.
Yeah.
Angel Heart was one of those.
Well, then there was a whole thing with Angel Heart about whether they actually had sex or not.
Whether or not they were actually fucking sexual.
That would be a good month.
Did they actually have sex or not?
Don't look.
Yeah.
Where there's some talk.
There's some talk.
There's talk.
Don't look now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
That was a famous one.
Yeah.
Last Hangling Paris.
Was there talk?
Can't remember that one.
Yeah.
That one was problematic.
Yeah, yeah, that became a problematic one later.
There's been, there's been over the years, there's been, there was one where the couple, oh, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger in the getaway.
And they
maybe, yeah, maybe they took some liberties.
See, this is my thing with Alec Baldwin.
I don't know, I know we got to wrap up, but all of these movies mean something to me.
The getaway, I fucking loved.
Heaven's Prisoners, I loved.
I like these movies, but people just,
they weren't fucking with him.
Like, it just wasn't.
I think they were fucking with him.
They knew they Alec was like
weird choices.
Yeah.
I mean, he talked his way out at Jack Ryan.
It's not like they were like, yo, this fuck run for October.
We got to get.
Where do you stand on the Mexican?
The Brad Pitt one.
Yeah.
Julie Roberts.
Gandalfini.
Sarah once or twice.
Don't really have a really, it's not very good, but Gandalfeen is great in that movie.
Yeah.
Gandalfini was just great for the entire 90s, and nobody was kind of on it.
Get Jordy, True Romance, 8mm.
He was so demented in True Romance, yeah.
Yeah,
whatever.
But like,
he was like fantastic.
And then, once again, kind of gets to that point.
And I don't know, it doesn't happen as much anymore to me where by the time Tony Soprano comes around, you go, oh, so it's his turn now.
They're finally giving him something.
Right.
Good.
Watch Swingers with my wife and my daughter and her boyfriend who is in town.
And
who's my wife was insisting that they would like it.
And I was like, all right, they're not going to like it.
We watched it.
They both loved it.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah.
Still like really solid.
Movie's almost 30 years old.
We did it on the rewatchables a million years ago, but I was like surprised how much they liked it.
That's cool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You never know what's going to age and not age.
Yeah.
I wonder if they would like go, for instance.
Go.
We let go.
We let go.
I
love swingers, but I always think about the scene where Favreau's character calls that girl like 90 times.
That's what they were going nuts.
What a loser he was.
And that is so tough to watch it's he has like three or four scenes in that movie where like my daughter was like oh my god what's wrong with this guy but she kind of liked it but it's a really fun snapshot of la
even as the years pass and la has changed since we've even been here yeah um just what la was like back then pre-internet last thing i'll say
there's no defining piece of whatever of LA culture like now.
And that's what some of these things kind of miss.
During that time, it was like, oh my God, I want to go to LA because it's like,
I mean, there's Beverly Hills Nile 210.
There's Melrose Place.
There's Swingers.
There's even
and then Entourage.
There's indie movies happening in this
generation.
And now cities having personalities like that,
everything's so homogenous.
It's kind of like doesn't exist unless I'm missing some stuff.
No, I mean, I think the last big LA thing was probably insecure.
Listen, I hope Joanne.
Insecure is great.
Hopefully Joanna didn't hear that because we're trying to convince her to move to LA.
I mean,
LA is great, it's so cool here.
There's so many different awesome places.
It's very politically active.
It's really a special place.
They got great cats here.
Yeah.
I liked your point about Die Hard with a Vengeance just ending 30 minutes in because
somebody couldn't have gotten from Manhattan Beach to Brentwood.
Fuck, how do I get to Brentwood?
405's clogged.
All right, Chris Ryan, thank you.
Van Lathan, thank you.
Jack Sanders,
is your mic on or no?
It is.
What was your take on Die Hard with a Vengeance?
I think when Bruce Willis found out that Sam Jackson was going to be his co-star in this film, it was the closest any person on the planet Earth has felt to the moment when LeBron James found out the Cavs traded for Kevin Love.
Oh, shit.
Wow.
Look at Jack.
Jack.
I just think like this is my favorite diehard.
I think it's better than the original one, personally, even though I think there are plenty of Knicks to pit.
But when Sam Jackson shows up in the beginning of the movie,
you're locked in.
He elevates the movie so much.
It's call 911 to make sure he's about to get killed.
Tell him somebody go down here.
Somebody's about to get killed.
I was afraid to even go to Jack after the Mets got annihilated by the Braves.
I didn't know what kind of season anyways, but I thought that was pretty cool.
It's a long season.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, guys.
Great seeing you.
Great seeing you.
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