The Four Kinds of Christmas Movies You See During the Summer

It's rare, but Hollywood sometimes releases Christmas-themed films at the multiplex during the warm weather months. I did a taxonomy over at MEL.

John McClane's Most Famous Line

This week, MEL is featuring stories about cowboys: the archetype, the myth, the symbol of a certain kind of rugged masculinity. My contribution was to write about how Die Hard made John McClane into a modern cowboy. (You know his catchphrase.) My piece is here.

The Best Christmas Scenes in Genre Movies

Ho ho ho. We had fun with this list over at SyFy.

'A Good Day to Die Hard' Review

Before watching A Good Day to Die Hard, I was convinced that no Die Hard movie could ever be as bad as Die Hard With a Vengeance. I was wrong, people -- at least, I think I'm wrong. I'm not going to go back and revisit Die Hard With a Vengeance to see. My review of this stinker is up at Screen International.

'Die Hard' at 25

When I was working on FilmCraft: Screenwriting -- my new book of interviews with the world's best film writers -- I was very happy to get to speak to Mark Bomback, an action-thriller writer who wrote Live Free or Die Hard. Action writers in general don't get much respect, so I was doubly pleased to include his voice in my book. One of the things we discussed was what made the original Die Hard so great; his enthusiasm and insight reminded me all over again what a fantastic movie that is. With A Good Day to Die Hard about to come out, I decided to write about the old Die Hard, which opened in the summer of 1988. Can it really have been 25 years? Yup. My piece is up at IFC Fix.