A sad explanation for Bruce Willis' choices

Two 1990s action icons may have seen their careers end this week -- one by his own stupid actions, and one by something far less within his control. 

Bruce Willis had taken on the aspect of a laughingstock in recent years, a man so indiscriminate in his choices that he might have appeared in a teenager's first backyard movie if there were a couple thousand dollars in it for him.

But aphasia is no joke, and now we may never see Willis in a movie again. 

It was announced this week that the actor has been diagnosed with a form of brain damage that prevents its victim from being able to formulate or comprehend language. Presumably, that includes the speaking of lines of movie dialogue, and the ability to react to other people's lines of dialogue.

It means he's retiring from the business.

It's a sad day. 

Sadder: Apparently he was really being taken advantage of on set. It was clear he didn't know what was going on, couldn't remember his lines, etc. But they just kept on rolling him out there, making money off him. One might argue they did it to make Willis himself enough money so that he would be set once he could no longer work, but I'm skeptical. 

I can't remember where Willis stands in our good graces outside of the bad movies he's been appearing in, whether he's on the correct side politically (I remember some possible Republican leanings) or whether he's a good guy personally (I remember Kevin Smith hated him on Cop Out). I suspect the undeniable charm and charisma he once displayed had long since curdled into something far more toxic. I could look it up, but today is not the day to do so. 

At the height of his powers, though, what a movie star.

I won't go on at length about him as I might in an "in memoriam" piece -- he isn't dead -- but I did think it would be nice to highlight the top five times Willis' star wattage made a huge difference in a movie. That doesn't mean only that a "big name" was needed for the role, or that being a star was what made his performance in it memorable. I could have just called this "top five Bruce Willis roles" but I don't think that's exactly what I mean either. Maybe it is, you be the judge. 

Anyway, here is the list. 

5. Looper (2012) - This was sort of a comeback for Willis as it followed a long fallow period for the actor -- fallow as in not fruitful, though still as busy as ever. Especially paired with Rian Johnson's heady and intriguing concept, it reenergized our relationship with Willis, and Willis did his part to vanquish the accusations that he cared less and complained more. (I suppose he may have complained behind the scenes, but I didn't hear about it.) It's an interesting role in the sense that there is something sinister about it -- there's a moment of very poor judgment that leads to him committing a truly horrific action -- but it all comes from a place of sorrow, informed by all this foreknowledge of his preordained fate, and the loss of a loved one. Anyway, the performance really works for the film.

4. Twelve Monkeys (1996) - Willis really works well with heady subject matter involving time travel, doesn't he? He really communicates the disorientation his character finds himself in in Terry Gilliam's film, which involves trips through war zones, both actual (World War I) and metaphorical (an insane asylum). It's also a performance that eschews vanity, as he's broken and beaten up and sometimes without any clothes. Especially against a performance by Brad Pitt that's characterized by all its tics, you can appreciate how Willis underplays this material, and you really get a sense of his chemistry with Madeleine Stowe.

3. The Sixth Sense (1999) - This was not the first "unexpected" usage of Bruce Willis but it continues his ability to pair up with directors with a certain vision. Willis' work with M. Night Shyamalan was truly of the internal variety -- particularly in their follow-up collaboration, Unbreakable -- and Willis played that perfectly in setting up one of the biggest surprise twists in recent film history. (From which Shyamalan himself may have never fully recovered, artistically, as it set him off on the path that has caused us all to laugh at him so much.) This was one of the first times I remember feeling real pathos for a Willis character, which was present in other of his films but overshadowed by a more dominant tone, such as confidence or wise-cracking.

2. Pulp Fiction (1994) - Less than a decade after he even came on the radar for most of us, Willis already felt like a surprise addition to Quentin Tarantino's follow-up to Reservoir Dogs, and perhaps the first example (along with John Travolta) of Tarantino's knack for 70's style stunt casting, where a big name comes along at the end of the opening cast list to really put a spin on your expectations. Butch Coolidge is probably Willis' second most iconic role, though funnily enough, I just had to look up what his last name was. (Do they ever even say it in the movie?) This role may demonstrate more range than Willis has ever displayed in one performance, from the eternal take of Butch quietly listening to Marcellus' speech, to the anger and frustration involved with the loss of his watch, to baby talk with his girlfriend. This, here, is a star.

1. Die Hard (1988) - Number one had to be Die Hard. The best action movie of all time remains one of the all-time best breakout performances for a movie star. Willis' everyday NYC cop, unwittingly transplanted to La La Land for Christmas, is effortlessly identifiable to the audience -- not because we are police officers or would have any clue how to singlehandedly take down a building full of terrorists, but because John McClane handles every new piece of information with exactly the bemusement/frustration that we would feel, and with the ingenuity we would hope to produce. He's the ultimate aspirational character for a certain brand of audience member, who wants to brave in a time of extreme danger but also knows he or she could end up pulling broken glass fragments out of bloodied feet and praying aloud not to die. 

Honorable mention: 

The Story of Us (1999) - This is a personal favorite that I had to throw in there. It's a different sort of role for Willis, where he plays the estranged husband of Michelle Pfeiffer and the father of two kids. They have a trial separation while the two kids are off at summer camp, and the film considers the couple's present, history, and future together during the course of that summer. I suppose it has the contours of a romantic comedy -- which is actually how we first got to know Willis in Moonlighting -- but it's more poignant and contemplative than funny, and I don't think it produces any easy answers, even if it finishes in a way that feels easier than such a real world situation might be. I love this movie for its ultimate optimism, for the performances (Pfeiffer slays me in a scene near the end), and for its attention to detail, particularly a montage of moments from their history set to "Classical Gas."

All six of those movies were movies I had already tagged on my blog and written about previously. Yep, Bruce Willis has definitely been a big part of my cinematic upbringing. 

As one indication of how poor his choices had been, and how much he was being taken advantage of, he doesn't just have one or two roles in the can, as many actors who are taken from us prematurely do. No, Willis has eight movies in the can. Whether any of them will be worth a squirt of piss, or 90 to 120 minutes of our time, is another matter. 

But maybe we'll be ten percent more likely to watch those movies, and other movies he's made in the past decade, just to appreciate him -- and to see if we can see the signs of this terrible affliction. I regret any time I referred to one of his performances as "sleepwalking" through a movie. It now seems clear that giving those performances was extremely difficult for him, even if it was, at some point, the laziness and disinterest talking rather than the aphasia.

But as I said earlier, today is not the day to impugn Bruce Willis, nor to call in to question any of his past choices. Maybe even the right-wing political leanings were evidence of the aphasia. That would explain a lot.

Until they have a cure, fare thee well, Bruce.

A preference for matte finishes

I love a good matte finish.

It's why I stop and stare at cars with matte paint jobs long enough for them to start feeling uncomfortable. It's why I order my Christmas cards with a matte rather than glossy finish. It's why I make any number of other design choices that I am probably not even conscious of.

Saturday night, I learned about another.

We were invited over to a friend's house for the fourth installment of his monthly movie night, which occurs on the second Saturday of the month. We made the inaugural installment, in which the animated version of Alice in Wonderland was on the docket, back in September, but have had to miss the intervening two. And I say it's "his" movie night, but sharing hosting duties are his wife, his son and his daughter. His son is the salient connection, as he went to daycare with my son before they both went to different primary schools. I met the dad at a birthday party and we hit it off.

Although both my kids and I attended the first time -- I can't remember my wife's conflict -- only my older son and I attended this time. My wife's conflict is a lot easier to remember this time, as she is in the final days of recovering from having wisdom teeth removed on Tuesday. My younger son, meanwhile, has had a bit of a cold, and also had his birthday party scheduled for Sunday. To ensure they would both be in their best possible fighting shape for his party, my wife and he stayed home.

This month was, not surprisingly, a holiday-themed month. The movie was Die Hard, or if you were under a certain age, it was the new Netflix movie Klaus in the other room.

I was excited enough to see Die Hard, one of my top 50 films of all time, but as I only saw it most recently two Christmases ago, it did not feel like an essential catch-up for me. The more exciting aspect was the chance for a Christmas season gathering, as "holiday drinks and desserts" were promised.

As it turned out, I only saw about the first 30 minutes of the movie. The rest of the crowd was later arriving than we were, and we didn't get started on the movie until nearly 8:30. My wife had asked us to leave by 9, which would have been possible if the movie had started around 7, which I imagined it might. No worry -- I preferred the socializing with other film-enthusiastic acquaintances, and my son loved playing ping pong and cricket in the backyard with the other kids.

I watched enough of Die Hard to know that this family's TV was on the wrong setting. Or, "wrong" if you don't like hi-def, which I don't.

Another guy I'd met that night, and talked to the most in the lead-up to the movie, shared that he couldn't get used to the hi-def, an observation he made based on one of the two shorts we watched prior to starting Die Hard. I wouldn't have said such a thing, as I would have thought it seemed critical of the hosts -- a concern he obviously did not share, as he also declared that he hated one of the two shorts. (He seemed to pull it off without offending anybody too much, a balance I don't think I could have struck.)

But once he said it, I allowed myself to go into my own standard talking points about hi-def -- in a kind of one-on-one aside while others were having other conversations. You know, how it makes things look like a bad BBC production from the early 1980s. I believe the word "confronting" was also used. You don't want things to look that realistic.

Then he used a word that brought it all home to me: matte.

He said that movies in our preferred TV mode have a matte finish, while hi-def makes everything too shiny.

Yes.

There's a literal shininess to hi-def, as oils on people's skin are among the many unflattering realities that are brought to light by the format. Plus the reflections off things tend to be magnified. But there's also a metaphorical shininess that comes from the stark lines of demarcation between the objects in the frame. They stand out and pop in a way that wows on a level of sheer curiosity, but ultimately makes for an unpleasant viewing experience over the course of a whole movie, or even short bursts of a movie.

The traditional way we watch movies -- which includes viewings in nearly every cinema in the world -- is a more matte presentation. It may not be the "top of the line technological advancement," but it sure looks nicer. I'm sure actors and cinematographers the world over agree with this.

Not until Saturday night, though, did I observe the correlation between my preference for matte finishes and my preference for standard def, or as the picture mode is called on my TV, "cinema" or "movie" or something along those lines.

There's a reason the mode is called that, right?

I was just as happy to leave Die Hard at the 30-minute mark. In addition to looking unpleasant, as all hi-def images do, the form has a ghosting or stuttering effect on the movement of the images, especially in older films that never could have anticipated this technology. When John McTiernan made Die Hard in 1988, he never meant for it to be seen this way.

And after 30 minutes, I stopped seeing it that way. I took my son home to bed and watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the gloriously matte presentation of my own television.

Missing only the Stallone Christmas movie for the trifecta

If you were to name the three most iconic action stars of the 1980s, you would likely identify Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. In fact, I believe one of the Expendables movies does that very thing, getting all three together in one scene. (I only saw the first Expendables movie so I will have to take the word of some review I read.)

That designation is a little bit of a fallacy, as Willis had never done an action movie before Die Hard in 1988, and didn't get his second on his resume until Die Hard 2, which is already in 1990. But it's easier to say "the three most iconic action stars of the 1980s" than "the three most iconic action stars of the 1980s and 1990s." And besides, Die Hard is so iconic that it can fill in Willis' gaps in that decade all by itself.

Anyway, the point of telling you that is to tell you this: In the past two nights, we saw one Christmas movie each from two of those three guys.

On Christmas Eve it was Jingle All the Way, not Schwarzenegger's only foray into comedy, but his only foray into Christmas movies (that I could tell by just looking at the titles of the movies on IMDB).

On Christmas night we watched the aforementioned Die Hard for the first time in six years, not Willis' only foray into Christmas movies, but the only other of which (that I could tell just by looking at the titles of the movies on IMDB) was also a Die Hard movie: Die Hard 2.

We're just missing the Stallone Christmas movie for the trifecta, but alas, that won't be an option for Boxing Day. As far as I can tell (just by looking at the titles of the movies on IMDB), Sylvester Stallone has not made a Christmas movie.

Hadn't seen Jingle All the Way before, which is funny since I consider myself something of an Arnie completist. Then again, it's funny I consider myself that as I have also not seen Stay Hungry, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, Red Sonja, Raw Deal, Predator, Red Heat, Junior, End of Days, Collateral Damage, The Kid & I, The Expendables 2, Escape Plan, The Expendables 3 and Killing Gunther.

Anyway, I didn't like Jingle All the Way. Arnold's charm carries the movie farther than it should, but very little of the comedy works and the thing is just that fateful combination of slapstick and schmaltzy, with an ending that crosses over into the absurd. My wife gave up on it before the finish, and not only because it was Christmas Eve and we had to get to bed at a reasonable time. (In fact, the only reason we were watching it in the first place was that The Night Before didn't end up available on Netflix streaming in Australia, only America.)

It did allow me to see the movie that, I guess, prompted them to cast Jake Lloyd as Anakin Skywalker, though he was also in Unhook the Stars that same year, 1996. And though I hate bashing the acting of Lloyd -- especially considering what the experience of playing young Anakin has done to the guy's life -- he's really not good here, even for a child actor. There's one moment where he tears his neglectful dad a new one that I guess must have been the moment George Lucas saw the potential for petulant anger in him. Then again, Anakin isn't even petulant at that age, as far as I remember. I guess Lucas must have just thought he was really good.

As for Die Hard ... I imagine this would be my eighth viewing or so. I still remember the grand time I had on my first at that small four-screen theater that used to be at the Burlington Mall in Massachusetts, watching with a half-dozen friends and howling with laughter and joy. I commented to my wife last night that I half expect Die Hard not to be good the next time I see it, since upon its release I thought it was just another gritty Charles Bronson-type thriller that was already feeling like a moribund genre at that point. And of course, every time I watch Die Hard it's just as good as it was the time before.

So we got no Stallone, but funnily enough, Die Hard actually has him covered. As a matter of fact, it's got both of the other guys covered in various lines of dialogue.

First (chronologically), there is this line by Hans Gruber: "Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Just another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshal Dillon?"

Which is perfect, of course, because Stallone played Marshal Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke.

But then, just to put the cherry on top, we get this line from John McClane: "They have missiles, automatic weapons and enough plastic explosives to orbit Arnold Schwarzenegger."

Which is perfect, because Schwarzenegger played an automatic weapon in My Life as a Machine Gun.

After the movie my wife reminded me that both Stallone and Schwarzengger were offered the part of John McClane before they somehow landed on the star of Moonlighting for their movie.

I'm just as glad we don't have to live in a world where we have to see Arnie's bulky frame trying to shimmy through an air duct as I'm glad we don't live in a world where we have to see Eric Stoltz hopping in and out of a Delorean.

"Please don't let me die!"

Some movies are so good that you don't need to rewatch them very often.

That seems like a strange thing to say, but it's true. I think I've talked about that on this blog before. When these movies come up for discussion, you just nod, and you don't even need to say anything. It's understood that they're great, and even if you haven't seen them in ten years, that doesn't mean that they are any less so, or that you appreciate their greatness any less or any differently.

Die Hard is one such movie. It might be 15 years since I've seen it all the way through, though I've certainly seen little pieces here and there since then. Monday night, we decided to watch the whole thing, as a final bit of our Christmas season on my last paid holiday until Memorial Day. (Don't forget, Die Hard takes place on Christmas Eve.)

I didn't feel as viscerally enthralled watching it as I expected to feel. Some visceral thrills are possible only on a first-time viewing, and never repeat themselves. But I did appreciate the hell out of it, especially the minor details.

I frequently refer to Die Hard as the greatest action movie of all time, but I think that's a pretty commonly held sentiment. It definitely ushered in a new golden era of action movies -- or more accurately, like any trendsetter, it spawned a sting of inferior imitators. (Everything for about the next decade was pitched as "Die Hard on a ______.")

The thing that made it so different from many of the action movies in the Schwarzenegger mode that had preceded it, as well as many of the action movies that have followed it, is the simple understanding of what would make us love John McClane so much:

He's human.

The feats McClane pulls off in this movie are, for the most part, in human scale. Sure, it's questionable whether anyone could truly survive the gauntlet of physical abuse he endures. Sure, it's helpful that he picks the exact right moment to jump off the roof before the bomb is detonated. And sure, it's really helpful that he can defy physics while falling down that shaft, first falling out toward the center of the open space, then falling back in the opposite direction toward the outer walls, allowing him to improbably grab the lip of an opening on the way down.

But no individual feat is presented as something there's no way a human could pull off. And even when the movie starts to veer toward that territory, McClane's reaction to the feat in question brings it back to human scale.

Take that moment on the roof. McClane is muttering to himself about what he's doing and why he's doing it, and the fact that he must be crazy. It's a trademark Bruce Willis character trait, showing up prominently in Pulp Fiction and other films as well. A lot of it is conventional comic relief, and therefore not all that noteworthy.

But this moment stands out:

"Oh God, please don't let me die!"

He's about to plunge himself over the edge of a skyscraper, relying only on the fire hose tied to his waist to stop his fall and prevent him from pancaking on the sidewalk below. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Charles Bronson (when I first saw the poster for Die Hard, I thought it was in the vein of Charles Bronson's ouevre -- that tells you where action stood at the time of its release) would never say such a thing -- they would be stoical in the face of such steep odds. Which might make them extra macho, but wouldn't do much for their believability as characters.

A great action hero, pleading with his lord and savior not to die? Before Die Hard, we assumed it would rob him of all his authority. On the contrary -- it made us relate to him, and consider his feats all the more impressive because they were performed by a real person, just as scared as you and I would be in that situation.

(And speaking of his "lord and savior," I couldn't help but notice on this viewing that McClane does make a couple references to a higher power. At one point he talks about whether or not he'll get out of this situation alive, and says "That's up to the man upstairs." The funny thing is, you could say things like this back in the late 1980s without it being a political statement, because there was not a religious divide dominating the country the way there is now. Oh sure, there was still that debate -- the fundamentalists were called The Christian Coalition back then -- but it didn't seep into our sociopolitical fabric to the extent that it does now. I'm sure none of us thought John McClane's several invocations of God's name meant that he was a Christian or that Die Hard functioned as some kind of right-wing propaganda. Ah, to return to those simpler times.)

Oh, and having just seen Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, don't think I didn't notice how much the Burj Khalifa sequence owes to this scene. I won't go into any more details for those of you who have yet to see it.

Another scene that has always stood out to me for its realism is the scene in the bathroom, when McClane has to pick all the glass out of the soles of his feet. That more than anything serves as his second act crisis, the moment when he loses confidence and is not sure he can go on. Just think about that -- after being shot at, punched, kicked and dropped down air shafts (some of his more perverse tortures still lay ahead), the thing that could finally stop him would be scampering over a floor covered with glass. A screenwriter for a standard action movie wouldn't have even considered that as a stumbling block for its hero, because the presumption is that Arnold Schwarzenegger's feet are made out of iron that's impervious to a million little cuts.

As he's picking the chunks of glass out of his feet, he's nearly crying. Yes, this kind of thing would be extraordinarily painful, and he's not just going to bounce back from it. It's going to take every ounce of his remaining stamina just to be able to keep on walking.

And regarding his running commentary to himself ... how great that instead of stoically beating up Alexander Godunov's character, he's screaming at him that he's going to fucking kill him while he's doing it? The rage and adrenaline are building up in this man, possibly the only thing that allows him to continue surviving. It's what a normal human would do. A conventional action hero, on the other hand, would consider it a solemn responsibility to beat up this man, not the act of fury and vengeance indicated by the stream of profanity Willis lays on Godunov.

I don't suppose these observations are new to the discussion of Die Hard -- I mean, of course they're not. But just as we take great films for granted, we sometimes take for granted why they're great, and writing a few paragraphs on it on a January morning can be a nice reminder.