Die Hard

Apparently it's Christmas or something coming up. Which means I get to watch all the Christmas movies. And nothing says movie or Christmas like Die Hard.

Firstly, what's with Bruce Willis's nose? Like me, I bet you only noticed it's a weird nose when Thingyamebob Levett-Bloke had to have his nose made all weird so he could be a younger version of Willis in Looper. But once you've spotted it it's like the Kirk Douglas chin dimple - it becomes far larger in the mind than it actually is in real life. Willis' weird nose is bigger than Alaska to me, these days.

This doesn't stop him flying off to see his wife for Christmas and saying yippie-kay-ay, motherfucker. He claims it was an ad-lib to make the crew laugh during a sequence of retakes on a tough day of filming. It's not even an accurate ad-lib as Roy Rogers never said it. The closest any singing cowboy came to it was Bing Crosby in a very forgettable western from the thirties or forties. No, I haven't done the research, why should I?

Terrorists who are really just highly ambitious burglars take over the building Willis's wife works in and people begin to die. Most of the dead turn out to be the gang of bastards after the millions in the vaults. Yup, John McLane (that's what we have to call huge, weird nose Willis in this film so we can suspend our disbelief), becomes a massive fly in the bad guy ointment. And cuts his feet. And learns what a TV dinner feels like. And hopes he hasn't completely screwed up his marriage by not moving away from New York when his wife got her job.

But we all know why we think it's a Christmas movie, right? Well yes, it is set at Christmas but that's not it. Memes have brainwashed us all into no longer accepting that Christmas is happening until we see Hans Gruber falling to his death from a great height. In slow motion. In a splendid suit. As Alan Rickman,

Oh Rickman, you silly man. Dying just after Bowie in January of this year and thus not quite being mourned as deeply or as properly as you should have been. Oh the wand-fans cried for you but many of them have no idea of your prior history as an incredible and hardworking character actor, lighting up such diverse movies as Truly, Madly, Deeply, Dogma, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves and so many others. And your nose was just about perfect,

It's easy to forget now that Die Hard has become a fully milked Hollywood franchise that this first outing from 1988 changed action movies forever. And changed Willis's life. Without this film, would he have been considered for Fifth Element, Twelve Monkeys, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense or Lucky Number Slevin? Possibly not and they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to worthy movies starring that weird, ginormous nose. And of course Looper.

Willis is more coherent than Stallone or Arnie and also possesses something neither of his main 80s/90s action hero rivals did - a sense of vulnerability in the eyes which allows him to go all out action man without becoming too much of a parody or unbelievable figure. He's Everyman. If Everyman has a gargantuan nose made of weirdness.

Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho.