Tuesday

Tonight, after a quick soup and salad at Italian Café, we headed to the zombie multiplex to see the new installment of Bruce Willis' Die Hard tetralogy. To be fair to the multiplex, nothing overtly zombie happened tonight. But this was the very first time we've made it through that place without creepy encounters with some oddball staffers or navigating unnerving expanses of eerily deserted building. I was surprised I enjoyed Live Free or Die Hard* (which has a very bad title) as much as I did. As a matter of fact, with each new towering implausibility, hackneyed narrative trope, and stock half-D cast archetype, I became more surprised. The movie was just getting worse and worse, and I was still really enjoying myself. I don't love talking about movies currently playing, so here's the short story: NY police detective John McClane--previously trapped in a skyscraper, an airport, and a bad third movie when a gang of supposed terrorists attack--again finds himself trapped, this time in all of America, when supposed terrorists hack into space-age computer rooms and shut down the eastern seaboard. John must team up with his own hacker just to fend off the ensuing chaos, no small trick in a country with citizens so dumb they'll plow into busy intersections based on terrorist traffic light manipulation. John must also fend off an unabashed late-model dragon lady, machinegun-toting French Canadian thugs, a hovering jetfighter, computer-generated imagery, and a fashionable mastermind with pretensions of being Bondvillian Eurotrash. So why did I like it? Oh why not? There were even great previews: a Michael Mann-produced post-terror actioner located between Miami and Syriana,* a Jodi Foster rape-revenge in highbrow chicksploition style,* and the Simpsons Movie* trailer, funny from frame one. I can't wait to see them all. [Cavin]