A Review of the Trailers

Saw Live Free or Die Hard (aka Die Hard 4.0 for you foreigners), good stupid film. Emphasis on stupid. Plot holes you could drive a truck through, improbability piled upon improbability, and computer hacking as a filmic device gets old in about 30 seconds, but for a big dumb action picture, it's very good at what it does.

And Dana Stevens has absolutely no excuse for misidentifying the F35B Lighting II in the film, they identify the plane as an F35 in the picture. Here it is 5 days since the review was posted, and still not corrected, bet if they misidentified the shoes Anne Hathaway was wearing in a review of the Prada film as Jimmy Choos instead of Manolo Blahniks, they would have got that corrected right away.

But this post isn't about that, this is about the trailers. 20th Century Fox has a few big pictures coming so they attached them to this film (plus plenty of trailers from other studios).

The Simpsons Movie=The Simpsons Movie, enough said (other than maybe 12 years too late)
Hitman=Another (crappy?) videogame to film adaptation. Starring a bald and barcoded Tim Olyphant (sheriff in Deadwood, bad guy in Die Hard 4.0)
The Kingdom=Syriana+Jarhead (and who keeps punching Jennifer Garner in the mouth, one of these years that swelling has to go down)
Balls of Fury=Greatest Movie Ever Made!!!
Rush Hour 17=OK, it's not really Rush Hour 17, just Rush Hour 3, but it seem like they're up to 17. And would somebody please take Chris Tucker's balls out of whatever vice they'v e been in all this time. That high pitched voice is getting old.
The Heartbreak Kid=Ben Stiller doing his Farrelly Brothers buddies a big, big favor
The Bourne Ultimatum=More evil government conspiracy action, can't get enough of that (this one actually looks good, though).
Lions for Lambs=Meryl Streep plays Judith Miller (possibly). Redford gets to spew every bit of commie propaganda he can think of (from in front of, and behind the camera, he's doing double duty), and Tom Cruise gets to play the eeeevil Republican congressman. OSCARS FOR EVERYONE!!!

Hollywood seems to find a writer and then suddenly pick up everything they ever wrote. The writer of The Kingdom, also wrote Lions for Lambs, and has two more corrupt government pics on the way.

The Lions for Lambs trailer was especially craptacular. Here's the plot summary up at imdb:

Simultaneously: 1) a Senator on Capital Hill debates a current crisis in Afghanistan, with the Reporter who made his career ... 2) a Professor teaching Political Science tries his best to convince a good student not to give up his studies, using two former students who passionately enlisted in the Army as an example ... 3) both of which (coincidentally) are currently under fire in Afghanistan -- the very same crisis the Senator and Reporter are debating over.

Doesn't that sound like a peach of a film. The trailer was a series of HuffPo talking points strung together, would imagine the entire film is just more of same. Tom Cruise runs United Artists now (sort of), seems interesting he casts himself as the heavy in this pic. Guess he's hoping that being a properly slimy and evil Rethuglican will be a guaranteed Oscar. Shame of it is, he's probably right, it will at least earn him a nomination.

Most of the trailers can be found here, watch them yourselves, if you dare.

How Long Before Slate Notices . . .

This will be a good experiment to see the kind of readers Slate still has.

In her review for Live Free or Die Hard, Dana Stevens writes this

Thus begins a jolly chase in which McClane and Matt, pursued by international villains, airborne cars, and at one point, a Harrier jet, make their way toward the top-secret NSA facility that's become Gabriel's command center.

They even link to a site that shows Harriers. I've seen the trailer, and the hovering jet in the film is clearly not a Harrier. The Harrier is being replaced by the F-35B Lightning II, aka the STOVL version of the JSF. The F-35A has only just begun flying, the F-35B won't be operational until 2012 (according to the linked wiki), but that doesn't stop Hollywood from throwing their CGI'd versions of the machine into the latest action flicks.

Slate's usually pretty good about corrections, plus they include the original information that they corrected, so no memory holes there (unlike at the memory hole filled wire services).

She's letting her military ignorance show, not surprising, easily corrected, but they don't have an editor over her, or a fact checker under her who's aware that the Harrier is no longer the only "jump jet".

It's an easy catch, too. The intakes are trapezoidal on the F-35B, on the Harrier they're rounded, plus the Harrier has a single vertical stabilizing wing, whereas the F-35B has two. It would be like looking at a 05 Viper and describing it as a 68 Charger. Sure, they're both muscle cars, they're both Dodges, but they're worlds apart in design.

I'm not a plane nut, or in the military, but I could still tell from a 2 second shot in a trailer whether or not a hovering plane is a piece of 35+ year old technology or something that is bleeding edge.

Do I suspect that the probable lack of anybody with any interest or history in the military (other than as a target for invective) at Slate has something to do with missing this obvious mistake?

Do I have to answer that?

Could This Film Actually Be Good?

Yippie!

Kai?


Yaaaaaaaayyyyyy!


John McClane is back and balder badder than ever. in "Live Free or Die Hard".

A lot to be fearful of regarding this film. Willis hasn't been in a good action picture in awhile (either the last Die Hard or Pulp Fiction depending on your taste, both more than 10 years ago). Len Wiseman has directed those messy dumb Underworld pictures, and nothing else. Plus the writing credits also have sucktacular written all over them. Mark Bomback has the main screenplay credit along with partial story credit, but his last studio film, Godsend, was a mess. The other story credit is for Dean Marconi whose previous major studio film credit was for Enemy of the State. On top of that, the germ for this story came from this Wired article by John Carlin regarding US vulnerabilities to having our communications networks being attacked in a coordinated fashion.

The article was written in 1997, which might explain why the article focuses on 'cyberwar' between states, rather than 'cyberterror' being enacted by non-state actors. Something else from the article caught my eye

Spooks and cops may well be better suited to the task, at least for holding up the defensive end of I-war. But better is only relative. I-war trashes time-honored distinctions between law enforcement and intelligence, between Americans and foreigners, between the kinds of surveillance permitted at home and what starts at the water's edge.

Undaunted, the FBI has created a Computer Investigation and Infrastructure Threat Assessment Center, expanding the bureau's three existing computer crime squads to 56 nationwide - one in every major field office. More tellingly, an executive order signed by President Clinton last July created an interagency outfit called the Infrastructure Protection Task Force. Chaired by the FBI and including representatives from the DOD and the NSA, the task force is charged with developing a "threat model" and "countermeasures." To these ends it is mightily empowered to demand "assistance, information, and advice" from "all executive departments and agencies." Says John Pike of the watchdog Federation of American Scientists, "The IPTF reeks of what everyone always worries about: the nebulous control authority. There are people who were looking for a hunting license, and they seem to have gotten it."

One proposal quietly making the rounds on Capitol Hill is to let the NSA engage in domestic monitoring, partly on the theory that digital technology makes distinctions between "domestic" and "foreign" artificial. Where's the water's edge in cyberspace?

I guess that sort of thing wasn't a problem as long as a Clinton was President (and I'm assuming would be OK again should another Clinton assume office). The article's a good read, but it definitely reads as if it was written ten years ago without an inkling of what was already brewing in the world.

Back to the film, Since they cast the Mac guy as the unwilling sidekick this time around, I think they would have done better going with this guy as the villain, but I'm sure Timothy Olyphant does a bang up job. It would have taken guts to cast Hodgman as the villain against Willis, though.

The early reviews are all pretty positive. I'm a bit shocked, and dismayed. When the type of folks who write reviews like action pictures, usually that means either the picture gets everything right, or there's something really, really wrong with the movie and it's total crap. This is the only bad review of the 9 posted early.

I wasn't thinking about seeing this pic, the idea of a another Die Hard picture this many years after the last isn't particularly appealing, and the trailer just made it look like a blue screen cgi-fest with no real sense of danger involved in any of the over the top action sequences. But, the idea of seeing this film is growing on me. It's summer, and it's been a pretty crappy summer picture-wise, so between this and the excellent looking Ratatouille (will there be Basil in this Ratatouille?), and the truly dumb but spectacular Transformers, it ought to be a good next few weeks.