Film Is Die Hard really a Christmas film...

strongwalker said:
I've stayed away from run-of-the-mill Hollywood standard products for a while now, with a very few exceptions.

I've explained my reasons a few posts before. Just my opinion, if you have a different one, its absolutely fine with me :)
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I've not seen Home Alone either. I didn't watch it as a child so expect I have missed the boat in terms of enjoying it.

I reckon Die Hard is a Christmas film for the good reasons mentioned in this thread. As you are clearly a fan why not bang it on in the next few days and see if it gets you in the festive mood:)?
 
Mrs Smoker said:
First hour of Home Alone is wonderful, very enjoyable. Second half so so.

Old people might enjoy it as well.
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That may well be so, but Mr. McCaulkin or whatshisname is not in the very small group of test-tube created 120% perfection Hollywood child actors that i can watch longer than 3 minutes without needing a vomit bag (did i tell you i'm complicated?)
 
Yes it is. If Hans Gruber getting thrown off the tower doesn’t fill you with a warm fuzzy Christmas feeling, then you are weird
 
Mr Anderson said:
Yes it is. If Hans Gruber getting thrown off the tower doesn’t fill you with a warm fuzzy Christmas feeling, then you are weird
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Especially as Mclane drew the gun to shoot Hans from a makeshift holster made of festive tape.
 
http://www.laweekly.com/arts/why-ar...whether-die-hard-is-a-christmas-movie-7710521


Let's begin with names, first, "John," an allusion to "John the Baptist," or more appropriately, "John the Apostle," one of the most loyal apostles of Christ. Loyalty is the driving force behind McClane's instinctual need to reunite with his wife, Holly Gennero, who is named after a decorative Christmas plant. At the end of McClane's struggle to kill the final terrorist, Holly (with a gun being held to her head), finds him looking like a half-dead missionary. "Jesus Christ," she says, as he returns to her like a resurrected Christ, the film's savior, a martyr who nearly dies for the sins of the greedy yuppies at Nakatomi, or the LAPD and FBI, who refuse to listen to his sage advice on how to handle the terrorists. In this regard, Die Hard is an antigovernment film. It is, as Bill O'Reilly would happily say, a Christmas movie, not a holiday movie, and most certainly not a faithless liberal Hollywood interpretation of the genre. Feeling hopelessly trapped, McClane shows us he's a believer, like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. "I guess that's up to the man upstairs," he says, leaving his fate to God.

There are 13 terrorists trying to force McClane to meet his maker. Yet their leader, Hans Gruber, maintains that he is not a terrorist: "Who said we were terrorists?" he asks a Nakatomi executive. At one point, as he intellectualizes over the model set of Nakatomi's Indonesian development, Gruber espouses his "classical education," and even quotes a Greek *********** to distance himself from his less worldly partners. So if he is not a terrorist, we then have exactly 12 card-carrying terrorists in Die Hard, like the 12 apostles of Christ, and the "12 Days of Christmas." Like Santa Claus, McClane carries a list, one he writes on his arm with a Sharpie he uses to keep track of terrorists he's either killed or plans to kill.

Die Hard is even littered with ugly Christmas sweaters, including the most infamous in the Christmas canon. When McClane scores his first kill, he decides to send the other terrorists a gruesome greeting card. The dead terrorist is sent down an elevator from the 32nd floor to the lobby, where he appears to his cronies as a bloodied Ken doll with red letters scrawled across his chest: "Now I have a machine gun. Ho-ho-ho." This is McClane as a sociopathic Santa, where his chimney is a stainless steel elevator.

There's even a miracle, but rather than 34th Street in Manhattan, it happens in Century City. When Theo the terrorist says it would require a "miracle" to crack through the vault's electromagnetic seal, Hans seeks help from above: "You asked for miracles, Theo ... I give you the FBI." When the bumbling feds turn off 10 blocks of city power, they crack the vault's seal open to reveal the biggest Christmas present in cinematic history: $640 million in negotiable bearer bonds, a moment scored by the orgasmic notes from Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."

As the terrorists open their present, McClane engages in one of the genre's other most beloved traditions: Christmas dinner, which is an expired Twinkie he salvages from a construction worker's lunchbox. How deliciously American, and, of course, another reason why Die Hard qualifies as "classic fare."

In terms of thematic connections to films in the Christmas movie canon, there's nothing more classic than a father's need to return home to see his family. This is the basis of Die Hard, as McClane attempts to thwart the terrorists and go home with his wife to their 6-year-old daughter. In Home Alone, the McCalister matriarch has to hitch a ride to Chicago with a Midwestern polka band when she can't get a flight home to son Kevin. In It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey attempts to regain his life with the help of a guardian angel before he can return home. The threat of terrorism in Die Hard unites the McClane family in a paternalistic embrace of family values. In the final scene, Holly addresses herself as "McClane," as opposed to "Gennero," which is her gift to her husband. Thirteen dead terrorists and countless carefully executed C-4 explosions bring them together under the "snowfall" of bearer bonds and printer paper that falls from the burning skyscraper. Vaughn Monroe's "Let It Snow," a song that was written in Hollywood during a heatwave in the summer of 1945, ends the film in classic fashion — as classic as we care to stomach.
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Nah, it's just a film set at Christmas.
 
People bum Love Actually as a "must see Christmas film" but that isn't about Christmas either...It's a mixture of connected love stories which is set around Christmas time...
 
Twins said:
Exactly, I mean he single-handedly kills 10+ terrorists to be able to spend Christmas with his family!
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:lol: if that isn't Christmas then I don't know what is.
 
Annihilate Now! said:
It's not though, because it being Christmas also plays into the plot.
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It was released in July, search traffic on Google is consistent throughout the year and if the film was set in February it would make very little difference. It's about as much of a Christmas film as 21 jump street is a religious film for it's frequent mentioning of Korean Jesus.
 
"Christmas films" in google.

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Game, set, frame.
 
Rado_N said:
I know what a Christmas move is, you're the one with the crazy definition, I want to know what you DO consider to fit the bill.
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A film about Christmas. Prometheus was set at Christmas and its as much of a Christmas film as @The Black Pearl is a real farmer.
 
Christmas movie is a genre in itself. I personally see die hard as more of an action movie than a Christmas one.
 
Rado_N said:
You're being deliberately evasive here, it's obvious there is no metric by which Die Hard can be called not a Christmas movie.
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No I'm not. It has to be ABOUT Christmas, the festivities, the traditions etc surrounding it. Casper isn't a horror movie because it has a ghost in it.

If it was a Christmas film, why would they release it in July?
 
ivaldo said:
No I'm not. It has to be ABOUT Christmas, the festivities, the traditions etc surrounding it. Casper isn't a horror movie because it has a ghost in it.
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It is about Christmas. It's set at Christmas, takes place at a Christmas party, has a man visiting his family for Christmas, is backed by Christmas music, it being Christmas is referenced countless times throughout the movie and the ending is the protagonist and his wife being reunited for Christmas. It's a Christmas movie.

If it was a Christmas film, why would they release it in July?
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What does that have to do with the content of the movie?
 
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