Die Hard On A Blank

It’s Die Hard on the streets! This week on DIE HARD ON A BLANK we’re discussing Richard Donner’s 2006 action-thriller/character study 16 BLOCKS, a film that some fans consider an alt-universe DIE HARD sequel! To get to the bottom of this we enlisted special guest Mitchell Beaupre, head of editorial at Letterboxd and an avowed 16 BLOCKS (and FREEJACK) fan!  Aging, alcoholic New York City detective (Jack Mosley) is a depressed deadbeat waiting for death when he’s given an unwanted but seemingly routine assignment: to transfer petty criminal Eddie Bunker (Mos Def) from a jail cell to court, where he is planning to testify to a grand jury. However, after he saves Eddie from an assassination attempt, Jack comes to discover that everyone – including his own NYPD colleagues - seem to want Eddie dead. In dire need of redemption, Jack becomes determined to get Eddie to court on time, no matter what the cost or the consequences…  The guys discuss the abundant DIE HARD DNA (and 48 HRS connections) and place this performance in the wider context of Bruce Willis’ career. They discuss the historic importance of LETHAL WEAPON-helmer Dick Donner making a DIE HARD-adjacent movie, and examine the film’s thematic interests, tonal inspirations, and ultimate ambitions. They discuss the film’s supporting cast, including Mos Def/Yasiin Bey as the interestingly named ‘Eddie Bunker’, podcast favorite David Morse as corrupt cop Frank Nugent, and David Zayas as the trigger-happy Bobby Torres. Awards are dispensed in the ‘Die Hard Oscars’ and as always events culminate with the ‘Double Jeopardy Trivia Quiz’, where the scores can really change!TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqffzRFzdcoAt the time of release, 16 BLOCKS is streaming on Hoopla in the US and is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Fandango and all the usual platforms! It is also available on physical media!Click here to subscribe to our Patreon feed 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES!www.patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymoviesPre-order NO ESCAPE on 4K (featuring our commentary track) here:https://shop.umbrellaent.com.au/products/no-escape-1994-4k-blu-ray?srsltid=AfmBOoqnRCaCPMg02WCWvNPTkK_8_fwYeelYFr90HpRlEuQQZ0025adT Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s Die Hard in a mansion!This week on DIE HARD ON A BLANK we’re discussing the 2005 Bruce Willis action-thriller HOSTAGE! And to break it all down we brought in special guest Jim Penola!After a fatal miscalculation in a previous siege, hostage negotiator Jeff Talley (Bruce Willis) quits the LAPD and becomes the police chief of a small, quiet, remote California town. However, Talley is thrust back into the limelight when a trio of young criminals rob the mansion of the wealthy local figure Walter Page (Kevin Pollak) and take his children hostage. When the siege goes public, the situation becomes further complicated when it is revealed that Page is a mob accountant. The mysterious criminal syndicate then pressurize Talley to retrieve a valuable item from the house, putting Talley and his own family between a rock and a hard place.  Given its presence and its leading actor, it's a film positively overflowing with DIE HARD DNA…yet unlike the 1988 Christmas classic, HOSTAGE has a particularly mean-spirited and abrasive tone. To make sense of this picture, we enlisted the help of Jim Penola, a connoisseur of the “home invasion” movie, and together the guys discuss this film in the wider context of the “action-horror” subgenre, the French extremist movement, and Bruce Willis’ career. They hand out awards in the DIE HARD OSCARS and pit their wits against the quizmaster in the Double Jeopardy section! You won’t feel like a hostage listening to this episode!!! (etc. etc.)TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCt4L7RPweEAt the time of release, HOSTAGE is streaming on Hoopla in the US, and is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Fandango and all the usual platforms! It is also available on physical media! Click here to subscribe to our Patreon feed 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES!www.patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymovies Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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It’s Die Hard in a phone booth!This week on DIE HARD ON A BLANK we’re in a glass case of emotion with special guests Katie Walsh and Blake Howard as we discuss the 2002 high-concept thriller PHONE BOOTH, starring Colin Farrell and Forest Whitaker!Slick, sleazy, unscrupulous celebrity publicist Stu Shepard (Colin Farrell) lies for a living, hustling on behalf of his clients while strutting the streets of New York, and constantly making and taking phone calls with the help of a young intern named Adam (Keith Nobbs). However, while visiting one of the city’s few remaining phone booths to secretly call a young actress he is trying to sleep with behind his wife’s back, Stu suddenly finds himself in the middle of a terrifying situation…when an unidentified “Caller” (Kiefer Sutherland) informs Stu that he will kill him with a sniper rifle unless he remains in the phone booth and follows all his demands… As the two hosts of the MIAMI NICE podcast, our friends Blake and Katie are no stronger to the joys of Colin Farrell…nor of director Joel Schumacher, whose life, career and filmmaking style are all discussed at length. We also get into the film’s long and tortured development history, other directors who were considered to helm Larry Cohen’s long-gestating screenplay (including Michael Bay), and of course, the surprisingly high amount of “Die Hard DNA” crammed into that confined space. We hand out some awards in the “Die Hard Oscars” and wrap things up with the “Double Jeopardy Quiz”…where the scores can really change. Schumacher stans rise up!TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUqTCsjCsA8At the time of release, PHONE BOOTH is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Fandango and all the usual platforms!Click here to subscribe to our Patreon feed 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES!www.patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymovies Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

DHOAB is on summer hiatus! However, to continue to hear our beautiful voices, sign up for 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES at patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymovies. Use code DHOABBREAK40 to get your first month for $3! To wet your whistle, we're giving you our episode on LETHAL WEAPON 2 today, for free.This week on 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES, we tackle one of the defining entries in the genre — LETHAL WEAPON 2! For Liam, this one’s personal: a formative film that helped shape his love of buddy movies and action cinema. We unpack the evolution of Riggs and Murtaugh’s partnership, from antagonistic sparks in the first film to full-blown brotherhood here, and how that emotional core elevates the surrounding mayhem. We dig into Richard Donner’s slick direction, Joel Silver’s architectural in-jokes, the reverberating echoes of Shane Black’s voice in the heavily re-written script, and the film’s perfect cocktail of gunfights, jokes, and toilet-based suspense. Plus: the politics of apartheid-era villains, the joys of Joe Pesci’s scene-stealing turn, and how this sequel helped codify the rhythms and tropes of the modern buddy action movie. A foundational text — and a very special episode! You won’t be “immune” to the vibes of this one!Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFE2P3tASIAt the time of release, LETHAL WEAPON 2 is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube and Fandango and on physical media through selected outlets.Click here to subscribe to our Patreon feed: 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES!www.patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymoviesCREDITS"Miami Nights - Extended Theme" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/police2.wav by guitarguy1985 – https://freesound.org/s/70938/ – License: Creative Commons 0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s Die Hard in a war zone!This week on DIE HARD ON A BLANK…it’s war! Not just on screen, but also between Phil and Liam, have very different opinions about this divisive film!During a disastrous mission in Somalia, a group of U.S. soldiers find themselves besieged by scores of enemy militia in the city of Mogadishu, a situation that is compounded when not one but two Black Hawk helicopters crash in the middle of the war zone. With the situation worsening by the minute, inexperienced Staff Sgt Matt Eversman (Josh Hartnett) must use all his skills and determination to bring his men home, save the pilots, and honor the Army Ranger credo: ‘No Man Left Behind’. As our hosts debate the relative merits and demerits of this undeniably powerful picture, the conversation also widens into a larger discussion of whether any film can legitimately be an anti-war movie or whether all war films are inherently propagandistic on some level. The boys also discuss some of their own brushes with military personnel and how that informed their views about this film…and Phil even recounts his own experience of flying in a Black Hawk! As always, events culminate with the Die Hard Oscars and the Double Jeopardy trivia quiz. Helo heads rise up!  TRAILER: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GfBkC3qs78At the time of release, BLACK HAWK DOWN is available to stream on Netflix, Hoopla and Kanopy and is available rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Fandango and all the usual platforms, as well as on physical media!Click here to subscribe to our Patreon feed 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES!www.patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymovies Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s Die Hard in a bank!This week on DIE HARD ON A BLANK, we plug into SWORDFISH — the slick, post-Matrix cyber-thriller produced by Joel Silver and directed by Dominic Sena. With Hugh Jackman hacking mainframes under extreme duress, John Travolta dropping pseudo-Brechtian monologues, Halle Berry delivering the most famous topless scene of the early 2000s, and Don Cheadle constantly violating people’s civil rights, it’s a film that dares to ask: does it matter if a movie makes no sense, as long as it’s entertaining? We also dig into Swordfish's dense meta-layering and debate the broader question: when is too much meta actually bad for the form? As always we break the film down in detail in our ‘Anatomy of an Action Movie section’, hand out some ‘Die Hard Oscars’ and wrestle with some ‘Double Jeopardy’ brain teasers…heck, there’s even a Vinnie Jones impression thrown into the mix for good measure! What more could you possibly want?! SWORDFISH trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFwtY1bxlNcAt the time of release, SWORDFISH is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Fandango and all the usual platforms, as well as on physical media!Click here to subscribe to our Patreon feed 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES! Sign up on the website (instead of the app) to save $$$!www.patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymovies Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s Die Hard on an ice cream truck!I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream! This week on DIE HARD ON A BLANK, we’re trying to keep our collective cool as we discuss the 1999 buddy-comedy/action-misfire CHILL FACTOR! Joining us on our adventure is none other than special guest Matthew Strohl, a professor at the University of Montana and author of the books Hard to Watch and Why It’s Ok To Love Bad Movies!  When an experimental military chemical weapon nicknamed "Elvis" accidentally falls into civilian hands, a hapless ice cream truck driver (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and down-on-his-luck diner cook (Skeet Ulrich) team up to keep it away from the ruthless mercenaries who are trying to steal it. The catch is that if "Elvis" heats above 50 degrees, it will detonate with catastrophic consequences – forcing the unlikely duo to outrun the bad guys and keep the temperature under that threshold, all while attempting to safely deliver the precarious device to a military facility! We start by analyzing the film’s DNA, which includes genetic links to a myriad of movies including DIE HARD, SPEED, THE ROCK, THELMA & LOUISE, and most surprisingly, A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT.  Backed by Matt’s spirited defense case, we try to give this much maligned (and largely forgotten) motion picture its day in court, applying the thesis espoused in his excellent books to the film. Against the odds, this approach leads to a passionate (and unexpectedly deep) discussion about how we choose to engage with art…as CHILL FACTOR becomes a living example of “why it’s okay to love to bad movies”! But the fun doesn’t stop there...because as always we wrap things up with the DIE HARD OSCARS and the DOUBLE JEOPARDY trivia quiz!CHILL FACTOR trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYNiikB4wvIAt the time of release, CHILL FACTOR is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV/iTunes, YouTube, Fandango and all the usual platforms, as well as on physical media. It is also available in its entirety on YouTube at the following link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7ede9OJ6pwClick here to subscribe to our Patreon feed 48 HOURS OF BUDDY MOVIES! Sign up on the website (instead of the app) to save $$$!www.patreon.com/48hoursofbuddymovies Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.