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writer-akihiko · 4 years

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Chapter 2 - Hanging Out [STARISH]

Chapter 3 →

Otoya Ittoki

You were with ST☆RISH in their studio, coming up with their new song. Masato decided that everyone should take a break, so he, Tokiya and Syo went out to get some food for everyone.

Ren and Cecil had a costume fitting, so they went with Haruka. That left you, Otoya and Natsuki in the studio. Natsuki went ahead and took a nap on one of the couches.

Things between you and Otoya were... awkward to say the least. After completely being frozen on first contact, you didn't strike up any conversation with Otoya.

You decided to relax yourself by fidgeting with your laptop. You played around with one of the downloaded songs you had.

"That sounds great YN-san!" Otoya complimented.

"A-Ah, thanks..."

Otoya then proceeded to sing along.

"Your voice is nice Otoya-san, I'm glad I'm working with you," You complimented back. Internally, you were having a mini panic. I just complimented a guy... Your face turned red at the thought.

"Really?!" Otoya said. "I... was never that confident about how my voice sounded!"

"Trust me, it's great! Better than mine..." You said sheepishly.

Otoya asked, "Do you sing YN-san?" You shook your head. It was one of the reasons you decided to become a DJ anyway. You could make good music, but never have a voice for it.

"Then do you play any instruments YN-san?"

You nodded. "I play the [instrument]."

"Then we can do a duet together! Wait here, I'll get my guitar!" He says. He ran out, and quickly came back with an acoustic guitar.

Since your instrument was in the room as well, you went to it and Otoya struck up a chord. You knew this song. It was one of your compositions. You played along to him.

"I'm sorry about what happened earlier," he confessed.

"Don't be," you said. "I was just extremely shy. It's not a good thing really..."

"Eh? But you were really cute YN-san!"

"Really... Cute..."

Your whole face reddened to the tips of your ears. You stopped and froze like a statue in place.

"Oh no I've done it again!"

"Otoya?" Cecil says as he walks in. "What did youー"

Haruka exclaimed, "YN! Oh no, come back to me!!"

Let's just say that things continued to be awkward between you two.

Masato Hijirikawa

After finally getting a break well-earned from your senpais, you met up with Masato to show him around.

"Hey Prince Charming!" You waved over to him. He came to you with his group of friends.

"So you guys are from Saotome Arts?" You said after introductions. Masato nodded.

"Thank you for showing us around."

"No sweat. Least I could do for beating you in basketball."

A few of his friends snickered at what you said. "Stop that!" Masato says to his friends.

"What do you guys want to see first?" You said. The red-haired boy named Otoya said he wants to meet the football team.

"Sure! They're near the food stalls so we can grab a bite as well," You led them ahead to the wonderful walkway of street food.

His friends went along and left Masato with you to find a bench to sit on. He's a little stiff... you thought. I know how to get him to relax...

Once you two found a table, you went to a friend of yours on the track team. She was handling a yakisoba stall.

"Hey! Mina, add a little kick in it alright?" You reminded her. Mina nodded. You came back to his friends. You took a seat next to Haruka and handed Masato his extra 'kicked up' yakisoba.

"The best yakisoba of this academy!" You said proudly. You watched as he took a bite. He coughed, begging Tokiya for water.

You casually ate yours, pretending that you could handle the spice. "Wanna swap?"

"Please..."

"Okay, glad to see you're not so stiff anymore!" You smiled at him. You could handle your spice, so you were fine.

"You sure have the appetite YN-san," he commented.

"Are you saying something about my weight?!" You mockingly said. You laughed when he made such an apologetic face. "Sorry, you're just fun to tease Prince Charming. Your face gets all red and you just stand there..."

"I-I deny your accusation!" He said.

"You're doing it again! Also, what do you expect? I played at least 3 hours’ worth of game back there. Of course I need some compensation," You said. "Anyway, don't be so stiff! It's a festival after all!"

You left since you needed to go back to the club.

"She's interesting..."

Natsuki Shinomiya

He had come to the café again, but this time he was alone. He brought stacks of books and folders along as well.

You noticed he bought a lot of sugar filled treats today. He had his cell phone close by and was texting whenever he had a puzzled expression.

Since the shop was empty during the evening, you decided to get yourself a warm muffin and sit across from him.

"Natsuki-san?" You said, trying to catch his attention. "Are you okay?"

He continued writing.

"Exam week?"

He nodded.

You were about to leave, thinking it would be better for him to concentrate without you bothering him.

"AHHHH I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS!!"

"Natsuki-san?"

"YN-senpai, I don't like this! Masa keeps scolding me when I ask for advice! He also talks in a language I don't understand."

"U-Uh... What subject are you learning?"

"Math..."

You pitied the teenage boy. You took a look at his notes. His handwriting... was something. It was quite cute actually.

"I think I can help," You said. You rushed to the apartment you lived with your uncle upstairs and looked through your shelves. You took out a (f/c) translucent folder.

You returned to Natsuki. You handed him the folder.

"What's this?"

"My notes from high school. I didn't have time to clean out my books, so I still have them. You can use them," You explained. "I have no need for them anyway."

"Elizabeth!" He yelled and hugged you.

"Natsuki-san, that's not my name."

"Ah sorry!" He quickly released you and skimmed your notes. "Your little doodles are really cute!"

You blushed at the comment he gave you.

"YOSH! I CAN DO IT!"

"I knew so," You said, applauding him.

You allowed him to study until...

"YN-senpai, I don't know how to solve this question..."

Ren Jinguji

You were navigating through troublesome Tokyo with your cousin. She brought the idol group she is working with since they too had some errands.

Haruka left you and Ren alone since she decided to go to the bathroom.

Ren, curious, decided to play 20 questions with you.

"So fairyー"

"I am not a fairy."

"Sorry, YN-san. So... what's your favourite food?"

"(F/f)."

"Favourite colour?"

"(F/c)."

Ren paused as he was thinking about another question. Unbothered, you asked him one since he was taking a while.

"Is there a purpose asking me all these questions?"

He coughed, "Well, to get to know you better."

"Then may I propose that we do something productive while asking them?"

"What do you suggest?" Ren asked, intrigued by your statement.

"A shogi match." You showed him your portable shogi board.

He led you to a park where there was a bench. You sat on opposite ends, the shogi board in between.

He started to ask the questions again, halfway through the game. "You surprise me, YN-san."

You eliminated one of his kyosha. Placing his piece on your side platform, you commented, "How so? The fact that I captured your kyosha or was it something I said?"

"Something you said," He clarified. "I first thought you were... a tsundere of sorts. But then throughout this trip, I found that you simply speak your mind and are open-minded as well. However, you rarely speak. Even if you do so, it's barely a few words."

You snickered. "You are observant, Jinguji-san," You said, moving your piece. "However, not observant enough."

He glanced at the board.

"Checkmate."

Cecil Aijima

You were at your rehearsal in the auditorium. With your fellow classmates, you were practicing the steps for a dance sequence.

Of course, it was a classical dance. Which you often struggled with. Your senpai ーwho was also your dance partner ー was noticing that you couldn't keep up and asked for a break.

"We'll rehearse again after a 15-minute break. Prepare for the next scene as well," He told the crew.

You plopped on the ground with your head hung low. "I just can't get it right..."

"Hey Goddess YN!" Cecil called to you. He was watching you the whole time. You forgot that tiny detail. You waved back, getting off the stage. You were slightly embarrassed at the nickname as some of your peers stared at him.

"You don't have to call me that Aijima-san," You told him.

He held out his hand to you.

"Huh?"

"Allow me to dance with a goddess," He sweetly said.

"Sure... I guess..." His smooth talking seriously caught you off and you couldn't respond properly.

He then positioned himself in the exact same dance as you were practicing just now.

You were assuming he did not know the steps and began to lead him. Once you had finished half of the steps, Cecil lifted you up and twirled you around.

"Cecil! What are you doing!"

"Hey Leader-san!" Cecil yelled to your senior. "YN can do it!"

"W-Waitー"

Your senpai was speculating the entire scene. "Your friend is actually right... You're actually better at leading! I apologise for never noticing LN-san."

After your break was over, your senior made changes to the dance breaks. Finally when rehearsal was over and everyone had left, Cecil was still hanging around.

"Cecil, I want to thank you for your help today," You bowed to him. "I would've never figured it out..."

"It's nothing really! You can get up ー I was just serving a goddess, that is all!" He said, winking.

You laughed. "You never really stop it with the goddess thing, do you?" You noticed Cecil twirling around the stage.

"Hey Cecil, I can teach you some of the routines in the play. How about it?" His eyes sparkled when you told him. "Really? I can? You're too kind! Your performances are really enchanting to watch!"

You and Cecil spent the entirety of the afternoon learning the dance. Cecil made a few jokes here and there, making you crack up. Soon, it was time for you go. "I have dinner with friends," You told him. "If I ever meet you at the twins' studio, let's hang out!"

"Sure thing..."

You closed the door.

"My goddess..." His voice echoed through the empty auditorium.

Syo Kurusu

You and Syo had grown immensely close after the shooting. Syo admired your hidden strength and you admired his determination. Weeks went by, and you went back to your shrine duties and Syo to his idol work.

You had to admit, more visitors started to come due to ST☆RISH's new release. Oh, the power of fame.

One particular day, you were about to close the shrine and a man in a suit carrying a briefcase walked up to the gate, approaching you.

"Sorry, we don't accept salesmen," You said, about to shut the door.

"Wait!" The man called out. "I'm a TV producer and after ST☆RISH's music video, I hope I can film a short variety show here!"

"What?"

"It's a short promotional show about their new album. This place was recommended by Haruka."

"Nanami?"

"Yes."

You let the businessman in and called for your cousins. As your cousins were discussing regulations with the man, you decided to call Nanami.

"Did you recommend the shrine to Mr. Kagurazaka?"

"Yes. Well, not really... Syo actually said it. I had to say it in place of the group. He said since we filmed here, why not promote here?"

After much discussion with Mr. Kagurazaka, the shrine once again welcomed ST☆RISH.

You were in no contact with Syo most of the recording. You didn't make an appearance in the show as well, for privacy's sake. You did see him once in a while.

You had finished your duties early and decided to get some archery practice in. You weren't a big fan of kendo, so you settled for traditional archery.

"You're really good!"

You yelped in surprise and turned around. Syo was watching you. You prayed that it wouldn't be for the whole time.

"Kurusu-san! You surprised me. Please don’t do that..." You said to him. He was wearing a casual yukata, most likely from just shooting the show.

"I didn't mean to! I mean I didn't want to disturb you, but you were so focused, and I didn't want to bother you, but I still wanted to talk to youー"

You smiled. "I get it. Nice to see you too.”

You two caught up which somehow eventually led to Syo wanting to try out archery. You agreed and took out another set for him.

"Don't shake. Try to steady yourself," You said, straightening his arms.

"Okay."

Syo released the arrow which landed on... a black.

"It's okay Syo! You can try again!"

You stood behind him and adjusted his arms behind him. "I can't see the target since you're taller than me..."

"I'll try my best!" He said. His voice sounded a little nervous.

He shot the arrow. It landed on a red.

"That's a good score!" You congratulated him. "Hey Syo..."

"Hmm?"

"Your face is a little red. Are you okay?"

"Y-Yeah. It's nothing! I should... go now. Masato's gonna kill me so... bye!"

"Um... Bye!"

Well, he's still an odd boy. Nonetheless you still quite liked him.

Tokiya Ichinose

You two walked around the convention and talked about the mangas you have similar interests with.

His other idol friends were dragged around by Natsuki, who wanted to check out the Piyo-chan booth. You pitied the boy in the fedora who was especially victimised.

After a tiring walk around the tables and booths of the convention, Tokiya suggested that you two went outside for some fresh air.

"To be frank, I also wanted to ask your permission for a picture or two..." He sheepishly said. "I didn't ask before since the others were around."

"Ah! Send me a copy of it too!" You said. "I'd like to rest for a bit though. We can take the photo near the fountain outside!"

He nodded in agreement. You two sat near a bench which was close to the other cosplayers who were posing in front of their photographers. Tokiya volunteered to get some drinks. You gave him some cash for your drink.

"Excuse me Miss, can I take a photo of you?" A man asked.

You agreed, thinking nothing of it. From the distance, you saw Tokiya. He was coming closer to the scene. However, when he was right behind the photographer, he snatched the camera away.

"Tokiya-san! What are you doing?!"

"Saving you," He said. He passed you the camera. This man had taken panty shots of you!

The other photographers and cosplayers nearby heard the commotion.

A camera man spoke up, "Apologise! It's people like you that give us a bad rep!"

"Yeah! Apologise!" A cosplayer shouted. Many joined in asking the harasser to apologise. Before he could, the security had noticed the noise and came over. He took away the man and the camera.

"Thanks," You said. "You really are like an ikemen!"

His cheeks reddened at the nickname.

"Wait!"

You whipped out your pen and notebook. "An ikemen character in the fantasy series. One who doesn't look for trouble and just gets by his own way, with his good looks!"

You scribbled away and Tokiya was confused. "Sorry," You said. "I get too excited when I get inspiration for a story."

"A character... based on me?"

"Yeah! You were really cool back there." You commented. "So how about that picture?"

You two sat near the fountain and posed.

Click!

"Hey Tokiya-san, see you at school!" You waved at him, as you had to go back to your crew.

He waved back.

"Sure thing, my writer," He whispered to himself.

Chapter 3 →

#uta no prince sama #utapri boyfriend scenarios #utapri ren #utapri natsuki #utapri syo #utapri otoya #utapri masato #utapri tokiya #tokiya ichinose #ren jinguji #uta no prince-sama #masato hijirikawa #otoya ittoki #syo kurusu #natuski shinomiya #utapri cecil #cecil aijima

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Die Hard 2: Making the Sequel to the Greatest Christmas Movie of All

https://ift.tt/2Wue6gW

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – for Die Hard fans.

While there may be a little less festive cheer to go around this December, one thing remains constant during the holiday season: the debate about whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie.

And one man who probably knows better than most is screenwriter Doug Richardson. Besides Bruce Willis himself, Richardson has had a hand in more Die Hard films than almost anyone out there, starting with the similarly festive follow-up Die Hard 2: Die Harder.

While Willis is firmly in the “no” camp on the question of whether Die Hard and its sequel are Christmas movies, Richardson disagrees.

“It is a Christmas movie,” he tells Den of Geek.

“At this time of year, the internet starts to erupt over whether it’s a Christmas movie. It’s very amusing. But I think it fits the movie and if people gather to watch it at this time of year it’s a Christmas movie whether it’s Die Hard or Predator. The argument that comes up is ‘What makes a Christmas movie? Does a Christmas movie have to have Santa Claus in it?’ Suddenly you are defining what a Christmas film is. If it involves Christmas and if it is screened as a perennial every year by streaming services and broadcasters it’s a Christmas movie.”

Richardson points to fans who have specifically told him how the Die Hard films have become part of their holiday celebrations.

“People tell me it has become their Christmas tradition to watch either Die Hard or Die Hard 2 or both of them with a meal in the middle,” he says. “That’s terrific. Maybe I’ll try that sometime.”

Still, Richardson acknowledges that the first film “wasn’t written as a Christmas movie” but rather “written in mind that it’s Christmas time.”

In the case of Die Hard 2, the snowbound airport-based sequel to the Nakatomi Tower-based original, it wasn’t even written as Die Hard 2 to begin with.

58 Minutes

Richardson made history in 1990 as the first Hollywood writer to sell a spec script for a million dollars and would go on to work on the script for the wildly successful Bad Boys.

But back in the late 1980s, when Die Hard first hit multiplexes, he was just starting out as a screenwriter.

“I was, what you would call in Hollywood at the time a baby writer, as in unproduced, cheap but getting a lot of attention,” he explains. “Die Hard had been out for about three weeks and I had already seen it twice. I got a call from [Die Hard producer] Lawrence Gordon, and he and another producer Lloyd Levin invited me in for what I thought was just a general meeting. They wanted to know what I thought of Die Hard. So, I said a whole bunch of nice things about it and they said ‘Well, here’s the thing…’”

Richardson describes what followed as “one of the smartest things I had ever seen anyone do in Hollywood” as Gordon laid out his scheme.

“Leonard Goldberg, who was the President of production at Fox, wasn’t yet ready to put Die Hard 2 into development. He was being cautious,” Richardson says. “But Lawrence was insistent they were going to want Die Hard 2 and he kind of explained to me the process of doing the sequel. It’s a process that can be overwhelming for producers because as soon as you announce there is going to be a sequel every agency in town starts asking you to meet with their writers or hire this guy or hire that guy and … They didn’t want to have to deal with any of that.”

There was another reason why the producers were keen to avoid such fanfare: Joel Silver, the infamous producer who, according to Richardson, someone compared working with to a “heart attack.”

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“Once it was called Die Hard, once they used that in the sequel, that was when Silver’s contract to come in and produce kicked in,” Richardson explains. “To work with Silver on development of this big sequel was not going to be fun.”

The plan was ingenious in its simplicity. The studio had recently acquired the rights to Walter Wager’s 1987 thriller novel 58 Minutes, and they wanted this to form the basis for Die Hard 2, much like how Roderick Thorp’s Nothing Lasts Forever was adapted into the first film.

“The point was that they were not going to call it Die Hard 2. Because if they called it that, everything just described would avalanche over everybody,” Richardson says.

58 Minutes told the story of Frank Malone, a divorced NYPD cop who, while waiting for his daughter at JFK airport, must foil a plot involving a mysterious man calling himself “Number 1.” The menace is threatening to cut the power to the runway lights unless his demands are met.

“I actually only read it once, in a day, and caught the drift of it. It’s Die Hard at an airport,” Richardson says. “It’s going to be John McClane at an airport. That was the deal. So from the moment I read it I was reading it as Die Hard. I was adapting it in my head the entire time. It was very unfaithful. No disrespect to Walter Wager, but the job was Die Hard so you had to keep it to Die Hard.”

While the idea of writing a follow-up to one of the most iconic action movies of all time might be daunting today, the timing and secrecy of Richardson’s work meant the pressure was off.

“Die Hard was just a film that was getting attention,” he says. “It wasn’t a big hit yet. Back in those days, movies played in theaters a lot longer so it took a while with word of mouth to turn it into a hit. My main concern was I had never written an action movie before. They had read a script I had written called Honor Bright that was almost made like four different times. They really liked it. There was some action in it but it wasn’t an action film but they had faith that I could pull it off. I was still this unknown writer and I was lucky to be working and happy to be working. I was getting paid to write another movie. It was awesome.”

Die Hard in an Airport

Though Richardson’s script was adapted from Wager’s book, he still did his homework on the nuts and bolts of a major international airport.

“I sat in the tower at JFK for three days learning about how planes fly,” he says. “I asked about a few different scenarios: one involving terrorism and another involving whether some planes actually fly with relatively little fuel at some point.”

Richardson submitted his script to Gordon and Levin who were impressed. His timing was perfect.

“Pretty much almost to the day, I’m not kidding, Joe Roth takes over from Goldberg at Fox and says ‘I need Die Hard 2. Where’s Die Hard 2?’ and Lawrence says ‘funny you should ask…’ And then of course the rest happened.”

Though he was warned of what to expect once Silver got involved, it was still difficult to accept.

“I was told that the minute it was announced as Die Hard 2 and Joel’s contract would kick in and he would do what he did on Die Hard which was fire Jeb Stuart [the original writer] and hire Steven E. de Souza and that’s also exactly what happened.”

A prolific screenwriter and script doctor brought in to rewrite and inject more action and humor into pre-existing screenplays, De Souza’s other credits included Commando, 48 Hours, and The Running Man.

He was, and still is, as big as they come but that didn’t make it any easier for Richardson.

“It was a difficult thing to accept that you got a movie greenlit and your reward for having done good work is to get fired,” he says. “Joel’s line to me, which was pretty prophetic, was ‘What are you complaining about? You just wrote a hit movie. Don’t complain, let me do what I do.’”

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One of de Souza’s most notable contributions to the script came with Franco Nero’s General Ramon Esperanza, the military dictator of Val Verde, a fictional central or South American country created for the purposes of the film. There was no denying the obvious subtext of General Esperanza’s backstory though with de Souza borrowing heavily from America’s real-life involvement in the controversial Iran-Contra affair.

But while that change served the sequel effectively other tweaks have not aged as well.

In the film, William Sadler’s villainous Colonel Stuart recalibrates the instrument landing system at Dulles, impersonating an air traffic controller to deliberately crash a British jetliner, killing all 235 people onboard.

According to Richardson there was “a little bit of slap back” over the sequence when the movie came out and he too acknowledges it goes against “the poppy, hyper-action tenor and tone of the movie.”

Richardson’s original script featured a far more palatable alternative.

“I didn’t want to kill a plane load of people so I crashed a FedEx or UPS aircraft where just the pilots and crew died,” he says. “I did not feel comfortable with that level of terrorism. The whole point of it was to prove what they can do as terrorists. It was meant to be like ‘this is what we can do, don’t mess with us or the next one will be full of people.’ I think de Souza and or Silver or whoever made those decisions at that point.”

The crash could have had even more serious consequences for 20th Century Fox too after one major behind-the-scenes blunder.

“Ed Trudeau was the tower manager at JFK when I visited. He was a well-regarded air force veteran who spent a lot of time with me during my research,” Richardson says. “I put his name in the script as a placeholder for the airport traffic control tower manager but somehow they ended up keeping his actual name in the movie. I didn’t find out until three months before it came out. They had locked me out of the process by then which wasn’t fun. I eventually got a copy of the final shooting script and saw they had used Trudeau’s name. I had to call him and tell him that the tower manager in the film had the same name as him and that a plane crashes and over 200 people die. I wasn’t sure if that was something he would want to have been associated with. The studio should have picked that up before but because I had been frozen out of the process they hadn’t checked with me.”

Fortunately, Trudeau was a good sport, and only wanted to know if the movie was “going to be any good.”

On balance, Richardson is happy with the contribution he made to Die Hard 2 even if there are some elements of the finished film and his experience on it that irk him slightly – like the fact de Souza took the film to arbitration, claiming sole writing credit.

“I would say it was pretty much my film until the snowmobile sequence, which was where it felt like a James Bond movie all of a sudden,” Richardson says. “That was where it turned more into what de Souza was doing with it. There were bits and pieces of my work all the way through though. De Souza decided he wanted sole credit which was ludicrous and I told him it was ludicrous for him to try. I can’t complain though. Joel was right: I got to write a hit movie and I am very grateful to Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin for being so damn smart.”

Die Hard 3 is NOT a Christmas Movie

Richardson would return a few years later to lend a hand in developing Die Hard with a Vengeance.

Though Jonathan Hensleigh’s script titled Simon Sez formed the basis of Die Hard with a Vengeance, Richardson made a few major contributions – including ditching the Christmas setting.

“My version of Die Hard 3, which there is very little of in the film, was definitely not set at Christmas,” he says. “‘Let’s not do Christmas again’ I remember that was my initial pitch and Bruce was like ‘sounds good to me’. This was when we were up in his place in Sun Valley in the snow in winter. I just said ‘let’s change it to the middle of summer and have it be hot’.”

Richardson’s other main contribution came with the plot point that saw Jeremy Irons’ Simon Gruber rob the Federal Reserve.

By then Richardson had struck up a good working relationship with Willis, even if he does dispel the notion that the star ad-libbed his way through Die Hard in the way Eddie Murphy did with Beverly Hills Cop.

“I know he ad-libbed Yippee-ki-yay but the movie wasn’t as improvised as some people like to think,” he says. “A few lines of dialogue. Except for an aside or a tagline or two they really never were. I don’t think Bruce is the greatest ad-libber in the world. Sometimes I have had to go in and say ‘that’s not good, let’s not do that.’”

Die Hard 4.0

Richardson’s good working relationship with Willis proved to be a blessing and a curse when it came to Die Hard 4.0, a film he says he became involved in after making the mistake of reading a script Willis gave him and offering feedback. Suddenly there was a meeting and suddenly he was writing the movie.

“Die Hard 4 was rough,” he says. “There was a lot of pressure working on Die Hard with a Vengeance but Die Hard 4.0 was ridiculous stupidity. You ended up writing the movie you swore you would never write with the actor who swore he would never be in it anyway.”

The sequence in which McClane essentially fires a car at a helicopter is regularly cited as the moment the franchise jumped the shark – but it was nearly much worse.

“I did in one version of the script have him use a motorcycle to jump on a train. I remember when I wrote it I thought ‘okay this is a little nuts.’ I did eventually get rid of it.”

With the studio setting a release date long before work had begun on the film and Willis still far from convinced with any of the scripts being sent his way, Richardson endured a difficult time on the project – but it hasn’t put him off Die Hard movies or Willis, who he remains on good terms with.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

“I love the franchise,” he says. “How many franchises go that far without jumping the shark a bit? It’s hard not to.”

The post Die Hard 2: Making the Sequel to the Greatest Christmas Movie of All appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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kremlin · 3 years

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here's an oldie (probably 2/5 stars imo)

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i've never worked a night shift before. it's been about three weeks and i am only starting to get in the swing of things being wide awake and ready to wind down with a beer at 7:30 AM on a tuesday is a strange place to suddenly be. living in a suddenly frozen desert swamp sort of adds to that uncanni-ness. it has frozen in texas and my pipes are cracked and broken there is almost no part of this shanty house that isn't elligible to join the AARP. it's one of the last ranch style ramblers left in montrose, all of the others have been replaced by bizzare brutalist white cube apartments which i assume house pod people our ballbusting 900 year old landlady (slum lord) sent out the handyman steve. steve is not a plumber which is a point expressly made to me, by steven, several times we were not forewarned of this & steve's arrival came unexpectedly 8:00 AM thursday morning is now my time to furiously discuss drugs, on drugs, with internet strangers soon to be nebulous internet acquaintances, then friends, then perhaps even those friends from the internet you've known for a decade suddenly from my desk, if the door is open, i catch about a half-degree of the window facing the backdoor. a full degree if i lean back. i lean back as to kind of avoid the bizzare reality that the other players of the space game seem to deal with the same problems i do at an alarming frequency. i lean back There;s a fucking guy back there angry at the fact that i have to now deal with this, i find our friend steve in the back yard, sauntering around, muttering to himself in a way that's between mumbling but below speaking "surely that man has a blue tooth head set" but i was already smiling wide knowing he didn't. if you're going to appear in my backyard unannounced, milling around babbling to yourself is the way to do it steve doesn't really speak english. you'll read that and think he's like any other non english speaker but that is not the case with steve. steve will get out about four or five sentences in perfectly spoken english before switching to (hindi?) for a bit. you'd think that if 80% of his communication was clear, that'd be enough for mutual understanding, but steve is all over the place steve was furiously pacing around the broken pipe when i got to the back door. that is a fact i'm only coming to realize is important now, writing this, because the person standing near a broken pipe with a wrench is a plumber, someone who is allowed in my back yard in this circumstance HEY YO i tried to whistle but made a stupid faring noise with my mouth he swings around at the perfect moment to make my sudden departure all the more awkward as i realized how waistbanding a pistol in sweat pants was extremely not working. remember where we are by the time im out of my room steve has his head poked through the back door YOU COULD NOT WITH YOUR FINGER POINT A WORSE PLACE FOR PIPE BREAK and boy howdy he was right. if you're going to break a pipe, don't make it the one between your meter and a valve, and especially don't make it one on the ground next to the garage you keep all your weirdo electronics and "vintage computers" you "collect" i sort of like plumbing. i've done some plumbing. there's an illegal stipulation in our lease that lets the landlord, you know, just not maintain the place. with my engineering background i am of course compelled to think i am somehow qualified to solve these problems. i'd like to use the expression "dive into with full force" to describe my approach but combine that with the imagery of a blind person gracefully swan diving into an empty concrete swimming pool but this is not about me, i am not particularly interesting. -- steve. steve is sort of interesting. his murmuring grew to a breathless combination of words which i thankfully mostly understood (individually, not collectively). steve was upset with the pipe situation to be described later in this document's best paragraph. he was upset at the last person to work on the pipes here because they fucked up. he was amused by how preposterously

inconvenient the broken pipe lay. this amusement was not anger what followed next was clearly anger. perplexed, astounded anger ice on the ground is something you see once every 4 years in (excellent) swamp i live in. it's a pretty reasonable assumption that a broken pipe after a freeze/melt cycle is due to the freeze/melt cycle this was not the case the pipe had ruptured due to a sequence of truly insane and utterly nonsensical choices made by the previous plumber who almost certainly kicked the bucket in the reagan years as suggested by the lead solder used to seal joints and lead paint used to, well, just hold on the pipe burst because a large metal rod was inserted *through* it. the details on exactly what went down are a little fuzzy as my simian mind was preoccupied with thoughts about some weird software that started as a fluid dynamics simulator and is now a physics simulator and an insane person simulator. i would digress and expound on this but my thoughts aren't yet settled on the space game the rod went through the pipe and into the ground, on the other end were rusty wires. it is a grounding rod, you know, for electricity. i unfortunately know a litle bit about this. you can ground a circuit through a cold water tap, like when you're lining the fence with copper wire to create a makeshift shortwave antenna with your weird kind of racist dad. water is conductive. more commonly the rod goes into the ground, which is also usually conductive so, this grounding rod, sitting between a 3 foot gap between the back of the garage and fence, an overgrown mess of decades of detritus and weeds that had grown into vines that had grown into weird anemic trees. this grounding rod was painted. it didn't come painted. it was painted. it was painted the same color as the garage. paint is not conductive. the circuitry in my house was not grounded. thankfully there is no ground pin on the outlets in this ancient home besides the one i strangely installed one day. the amp plugged into it now gives a hum where it didn't before. the ground was subsequently disconnected to eliminate the ground loop as we are in our early 20s and cannot die, especially not in an electrical fire it's sort of nice to know that even back in the 1940s people screwed up as royally and maximally as possible, employing such a degree of backwards demented logic as you'd expect from a home owner's association bylaws handbook or normal computer software anyways, steve, ohoho. oh boy. steve did not fuck with this at all. steve, the man who is self purportedly not a plumber, immediately took to the valve between the city's water main and our house with the wrong implement. an implement used to unwrench joints around a u-bend underneath a sink. it worked perfectly `I just use this for many valve. It works mostly. No need for heavy T` (steve's parlance doesn't transcribe to text very well) steve continued, `Too many tools is too bad. I use this one for tiling and for drywall and for ducks` (ducts?) he spoke while gesturing listlessly at nothing in particular. it became clear that steve's limited, nebulous tool set was carefully chosen. when you are the un-fuck-it man for an ice queen landlord you sort of have to be a plumber and an electrician and a roofer and sometimes a debt collector. the arcane set of tools used to approximate all of these trades made a bit more sense the lack of a monkey wrench did not make sense. none of steve's esoteric implements could wrench like we needed them too. i offered to purchase one from the nearby hardware store which was a great excuse for me to go to the nearby hardware store and purchase a monkey wrench, *my* monkey wrench. steve objected but i was deadset. i was buying a wrench today. the newly purchased wrench calmed two agitated souls: one was drowning in thoughts about drugs and space and coincidence. the other was angry he couldn't wrench down a pipe joint a few hours passed. several trips were made to the hardware store by my roommates and the new tennant in the garage apartment, less than $20 was

spent. i sort of farted around not helping while getting jawed at by steve who had permenently changed the subject to grand life philosophies. i'm about the last person that'll tolerate some windbag wasting my time, but between the fun of trying to decipher what the fuck steve was saying and what language (or nonsense utterances) he'd conclude thoughts with, i realized that his sensical words actually, uhh, rang true steve believes in doing a good job. read that last sentence without the disinterested, vaguely-trying-to-be-funny style this document has maintained so far this hit me on a deeper level than i was expecting i'm young and do not really understand the world very well. i'm not so young that i'm blind to the depths of what there is to understand about this world, i'm allegedly content with the resignation that for the time being i'm sort of a dumbass and will continue to be a dumbass in the future, although less so hopefully i'm going to tell you that i believe in "doing a good job", "doing things properly", "taking your time to properly solve a problem", or "solving a problem for the sake of solving a problem and nothing else". i am going to tell you that these are some of strongest and earnestly compulsions i feel. i'm not lying when i write this but i wasn't lying when admitted to how little i understand anything at all, so maybe weigh those two facts against each other nearing 200 lines, i realize i have spent the hours meant for sleeping writing a truly innappropriately verbose wall of text all because of how stoked i was that an angry muttering tom bombadil character spent an extra 45 minutes to fix a pipe properly the new pipe was measured and cut, threaded. steve's measuring tape is interspliced with further, smaller graduations he hand-scratched into a long measuring tape. the previous graduations on the tape presented steve with an unsuitably low resolution of 1/8th of an inch i'd guess this was a 12 foot measuring tape. i never saw the end of the graduations, i don't doubt for a second they extend the entire length of the tape. do you know how many notches you'd have to painstakingly scratch on to a 12 ft measuring tape to change it from 1/8" -> 1/16". well, don't: 1152 steve might be a little nuts but holy shit a master plumber could not have done a better job. the dude fuckin laid on his back, in the small pond of pipeleak water, so as to see up a length of fixed pipe so he could better lay teflon tape on the *inside threaded surface of the pipe joint*. i challenge you to try and imagine what such a manuever would be like, considering the damp slimy pipe surface, the fucking hell that is teflon tape (fuck teflon tape) all while laying in a pool of possum water at the impossibly cold temperature of 45 F my pipes don't leak anymore. there is no longer a bizzaro steel rod puncturing the most critical pipe on this property. i own a monkey wrench when i did not this morning. i am thinking less anxiously about the space game, still. me and steve sat around smoking cigarettes and communicating with each other through a method i can't describe but wasn't reliant on words. we talked about the virtues of work ethic and then we talked about those that have broken our hearts. the conversation, as well as this text, ended with a solemn mutual acknowlegement of how terrifying electricity is and how terrified of electricity we are

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