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July 10, 2020 · 1:12 pm

The Set of 400: #39 – My Favorite Stolen Necktie

Today! Because everyone who drinks is not a poet. Maybe some of us drink because we’re not poets –

Arthur (1981)

Directed by Steve Gordon

Starring Dudley Moore (x2), Liza Minnelli (x2), John Gielgud (x3), Jill Eikenberry, Barney Martin (x2), Ted Ross, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Anne De Salvo, Stephen Elliott, Paul Gleason (x2), Lawrence Tierney (x3)

I’m not sure how expressly I’ve stated this before, but clearly I’ve got a thing for drinking comedies. I know I’ve referenced my long lost Best Drinking Films list from a MySpace blog – a list I’m sure I have somewhere but still can’t locate – but that was created largely because of my affinity for buffoonish alcoholic adventures on the big screen. This list has featured a bunch of them – mostly teen comedies like #231 American Pie, #348 Road Trip, and #67 Can’t Hardly Wait, but also your #147 Quiet Man, that one scene in E.T. (that’s probably where I mentioned this list before, right?), and now the greatest comic drunk character of all time, Dudley Moore’s terrific soused millionaire layabout Arthur Bach.

Completely underrated as a drinking film (and I now realize hasn’t appeared on this list yet)

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Tagged as Arthur, Barney Martin, Dudley Moore, Favorite Movies Ever, Jill Eikenberry, John Gielgud, Lawrence Tierney, Liza Minnelli, Paul Gleason, Steve Gordon, Ted Ross

October 28, 2019 · 1:17 pm

The Set of 400: #223 – My Favorite Christmas Debate

Today! Because now I have a machine gun. Ho ho ho –

Die Hard (1988)

Directed by John McTiernan

Starring Bruce Willis (x2), Alan Rickman (x3), Bonnie Bedelia (x2), Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, Hart Bochner, Paul Gleason, De’voreaux White, Alexander Godunov, James Shigeta, Robert Davi, Grand L. Bush, Rick Ducommun (x2), Mary Ellen Trainor (x4)

I’ve got a couple disparate ideas on the first Die Hard, none of which talk too much about how great the movie is, so let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. It’s an almost perfect action movie. It’s got a great villain, great little twists, great continually escalating stakes, some pretty funny moments, and the dad from Family Matters at his peak. As it became the template for so many action movies over the next few decades, I don’t think I need to recount the plot, or really anything else about this movie. Die Hard is a masterpiece.

But as the ways to adapt this concept into other action movies ran out long ago – Die Hard on a plane! Die Hard in space! – isn’t it about time we come all the way around to “Die Hard in a Die Hard!” Hear me out – taking footage from the original as the backbone, we have De’voreaux White’s limo driving Argyle (now played by, I don’t know, Brandon T. Jackson) dealing with an entirely different locked-in terror crisis in the parking garage, while John McClane sorts out the Nakatomi Plaza terrorists above. I know, this would require some retconning of story elements from Die Hard, but hey, it’s better than the “Let’s ignore all the sequels and make a new first sequel” idea that has become so popular. Maybe there’s a Russian drug running scheme from a van on level 3! Maybe there’s a secret under-underground human trafficking operation! And the limo driver is our only shoot-’em-up hope! Okay, this might be dumb. Or, is Argyle Hard so dumb it might be great??