Die Hard Three

Every time I travel I learn something new. For this post I’ll share with you what I’ve discovered so far on this trip (Day 6)

1. If you travel to Europe for longer than 90 days you need a visa (called Schengen). For my trip in 2011 I was here for 94 days and they let me right in. For this trip (also 94 days) I needed a visa (the online check-in asked… nay, demanded, I produce one before issuing my boarding pass). 

I was aware of this 90-day rule when I booked back in January and my plan was to (in the middle of my travel) visit a non-Schengen country and then immediately walk back into Shengen and say something clever (still workshopping exactly what) as I defeated their stupid, unenforceable rules.

Then I read the fine print and learned that the 90 day limit is *within* a 180 day period. And by “read the fine print” I mean I changed my ticket so that my trip was exactly 90 days and the system still rejected me. 

I guess my visit to Germany back in Nov/Dec actually counted towards my limit. All this happened literally 24 hours before I had to fly. So I changed my flight a second time so that I’m now here for only 76 days (boo!)

Seeking clarification, on the way in I asked the dude at the border control what the deal was and he was like “just go and do your stupid original plan where you leave and come back” and when I asked about the 180 day thing he told me “no one cares”.

Not true. Me. I care.

So, I’m probably going to change my ticket back to my original return date. Also, visit Serbia.

2. The rail pass is amazing. Europeans can’t get one so you have to tell ’em how awesome it is every chance you get.

I paid $1050 USD (around $1458.28 CDN) for three months and 33 countries of UNLIMITED second-class rail travel. By Day Five I’ve gone from Frankfurt to Siegburg then back to Frankfurt and then on to Berlin. All on the high speed trains. Individual tickets would have run me… maybe… $300 CDN. So this is a very good deal. The best part is that I don’t have to prepare, I can just go!

You can sleep on these trains, eat on these trains, meet people on these trains. So far I’ve met a nice German person, Beautiful Luna, and a nice Dutch person (who, like me, is also learning German and hates Geert Wilders).

For comparison the 19-day first class unlimited “global” pass I purchased back in 2010 was about $1,800 CDN and a Bahn 100 Card (unlimited first class travel within Germany) is around 7,000 EUR for one year.

So there you have it. The two new things I’ve learned. I will keep you updated as my travel continues.

I like to include an image with each post but I haven’t snapped a lot of pictures so far on this trip so here’s an un-shopped photo from this morning of a delivery van in front of my apartment complex.

This morning I left Bad H for Frankfurt main station with a seat reservation on ICE 578 to Berlin with a transfer in Hannover. My train was delayed thirty minutes and as I was waiting, another pulled into the station. I waited some more, staring at this new train for about 15 minutes before realizing that it (like me) was also going to Berlin but (unlike me) the new train was direct (no transfer).

I debated getting on sans-reservation and fighting for a seat – one of the DB workers said that the second half of the trip is fully booked – so I decided to stick with my original plan.

And just then, as I was finished talking with the Train Man, I turned around and there she was… just standing there waiting for her train… and let me tell you, she took my breath away.

Now I know it’s impolite to tell someone they’re beautiful and that you love them within 90 seconds of meeting them, but I’ve never been one to play by the rules. I’ll spare you the details, but fast forward to now, 45 minutes out from Hannover and I have been enjoying the journey with my new favourite person; let me introduce you to Luna!

She’s three years old, super friendly and I love her. Just when you think the ICE trains can’t get any better you learn that you get to travel with the best kind of companion: a canine one (sorry humans!)

I really regret not getting a proper photo of her. Those train floors are absolutely disgusting.

Bad Homburg is a small city north of Frankfurt Germany (25 minutes on S5 from Frankfurt HBF). Before November I’d never even heard of it. Now, it seems like I’m there all the time (three visits and counting).

The city dates back to the late 1980s so there’s a very strong chance that its founder is still alive, which is really weird cause no one seems to know anything about him. I’ve asked around and there’s no consensus at all!

Was he bad like, “No. don’t hire that guy. He’s not very reliable”? Or is it a kind of “he’s dangerous” situation (but not like a terrible forklift operator is dangerous, more like how a gangster might be)? And then there’s the third, (ironic) option where “bad” actually means good. Like how the character of “Little” Bill Daggett in Unforgiven (1992) was played by Gene Hackman who is actually 6’8″ (or 203 cm).

The only thing we can definitively say about him is that he is (or was) English. If he were German, they would called his city Schlechtes Homburg. And that doesn’t sounds like a pleasant place to live and/or work.

Gilroy does something else in his stories that I wish were applied to every character in every movie. And that is: every character in the story (not just the main ones) is the protagonist of their own story.

In the real world everyone is the main character of their own story. There’s no person who is waiting around to sell you (and only you) a hotdog. There’s a guy whose job (or second job) has him standing outside in all kinds of weather interacting with all kinds of different people, selling them hot links. That person should act on screen like that is their day-to-day.

I love this scene from Michael Clayton (2007). Gilroy gives a masterclass in how to deliver information to the audience. It’s short, 30 seconds – have a watch.

The entire purpose of this scene is to tell the audience three things.

1. Michael has been trying to get a meeting (not yet clear what for) with his boss
2. His firm might be merging with another firm
3. This merger could cost him his job

Bad exposition happens when a character simply says the thing the audience needs to know. It’s not how the real world works – the thing you need does not just simply show up in front of you. There’s ALWAYS a cost. Also, just showing up: it’s boring. There’s no struggle.

The battle in this scene is that Pam clearly wants to know if her job is safe. She has to figure out how to get that information from her boss who is unlikely to confirm it for her. This how a real person in the real world would behave. And Sharon Washington’s performance is perfect. That look she gives Michael as the scene ends. Perfection.

As I was researching this I learned she also had a part in another one of this blog’s favourites: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996).

The scene’s purpose is character background/motivation for Mitch plus a setup for a future payoff. In her 20 seconds of screen time Washington has to convince us that she was once married to Mitch and what that was like. Again, she nails it.

And to complete the trifecta, she also had a part in this blog’s namesake.

What a great performance. I’ve only watched Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) about six hundred times and I’m just seeing her now. Notice how her breathing is that of someone who’s done no physical exertion but whose heart rate is up. Exactly like you would expect of someone who just spoke on the phone with a psychopath who detonated a bomb in a densely populated city at rush hour. I believe it’s small things like that – things you would never consciously pick up – that build great, rewatchable, movie experiences.

I want to close this essay with some thoughts on the screenplay.

In his writing, Tony Gilroy tries to make every scene a battle. Some of the battles are small and provide background (Selena’s interactions with her boss) while some are large and move the whole story forward (the bank scene). But every single character interaction is a battle. This makes for compelling storytelling.

The battles in Dolores Claiborne (1995) are “courtroom” (using words) save one or two that are “boxing ring” (a physical altercation). When it comes to showing the impact on screen (because film is a visual medium) one would think boxing ring would be the easier of the two.

This is (obviously) a false dichotomy. There are many stories that do one or the other or both very well. But I’ve noticed a couple of problems with the general execution of both kinds of battles that sometimes show up in movies and their sequels.

First, the audience will naturally understand the impact of words (statements/questions/answers/truth/lies) because communicating via words (spoken or typed) is our existence. So provided the storytelling is clear, the audience intuitively understands who is winning a courtroom-style battle. The same is not true for the boxing ring.

Because most people have never been (for example) knocked out in a fistfight, the average movie-goer’s understanding of what it’s like to take an unblocked, full-power shot to the head by professional heavyweight boxer in the prime of his career is usually based on the final ten minutes of a random Rocky movie.*

This on its own is not a problem. The idea that Rocky can take beating and not go down, it really works in the Rocky movies. There are two reasons. First, they amp up the intensity in the sequels by simply making Rocky older. They don’t have to give his opponents special powers, robot arms and such.

Second, the insane, hyper-unrealistic fight only happens once, at the end of the story. Too many modern action movies will have several of these kinds of fights throughout the movie. In a protracted contest between two opponents (without taking special care to plan/metre out the hits), physical battles can lose impact as the story progresses when they move from plausible/fantastical up into the cartoonosphere where the characters routinely survive things like asteroid impacts or swallowing lit sticks of dynamite. Where’s the tension if our hero is impervious to atomic weapons?

The same thing happens in movie sequels where the character(s) in the first movie are everyday Joes and Julies but by the fourth movie they’re basically superheroes. Sometimes it works (F&F movies) and sometimes it does not (Die Hard).

Back to the courtroom battles, I feel they’re best when there’s a healthy back and forth and the final score is 10-8 like in A Few Good Men (1992). I was going to use the famous “do you like apples” scene from Good Will Hunting (1997) to give an example where the final score was 10-0 (the antagonist was simply an asshole, he started the fight, took some swings, landed none) but then I watched it on YouTube and was like, “Nope. Perfect. Change nothing.”

What affects courtroom-style conflict is the Jessica Fletcher problem. When the plausible/fantastical part of the story is the inciting incident (a possible murder) it can be challenging to find anywhere to go anywhere in the sequel that does not come off as “what are the chances?” The Hangover Part II (2011) was great but like, come on.

*In reality you would die 100% of the time – your head would literally detach from your body, fly across the room in a perfect parabolic arc, hitting the rim of a garbage can and circling for five seconds before falling in.

I’ve tried to write here about Dolores Claiborne (1995) without including any spoilers. But as we get to the end of this essay, we gotta talk about the end of the film. 

What really sets this film apart from its contemporaries is that while the ending is satisfying, its resolution is one where the two main characters are still broken like they were at the start, only slightly less worse.

A common trope in Hollywood character-driven dramas is to have the main character, usually a man, who is oblivious to the impact of his actions and who leaves a trail of destruction wherever he goes. At the end of the film he’s able to see the error of his ways and change (typically against the backdrop of a large, dramatic event) – like Tootsie (1982) or Flight (2012). Even A Few Good Men (1992).

The change is large and suggested to be permanent. Hooray! Our flawed but likeable protagonist is cured! Everything is good!

In Dolores Claiborne (1995), Selena and Delores are victims of boring old patriarchy. The scene in the bank illustrates this perfectly.
– Structural/economic – Dolores could not open a bank account without her husband co-signing
– Gender norms/social – she (rightly) gets upset but she has to lower her voice to have her complaint even heard by the manager.
– Power Dynamics/Classism – she’s a woman, just one of the poors, at the mercy of whatever the bank manager decides. She has to resort to special pleading to even have a chance.

The forces that keep Selena and Dolores permanently on the back foot are the same ones that enable the aforementioned leading men. So at the end of our story, after making landfall, Hurricane Patriarchy continues inland, never losing power. Our characters survive with small, positive changes and some hope, but they’re still broken and surrounded by destruction.

There were two things that prompted me to write this series. The first is my love for this movie. The second is that it features a total solar eclipse very similar to the one that is about to… what does an eclipse do? Attack? Block? Doesn’t matter. A total solar eclipse is scheduled here for later today and it’s going to continue all the way to Maine (the American state where Dolores Claiborne (1995) is set). So it’s very relevant. And the one non-Maine location in the movie is Manhattan. That ties nicely into the New York part of our trip.

We’re currently driving north on I-81 North and it looks like it’s going to be super cloudy so… who’s up for Iceland 2026!? Like I really have to experience an eclipse now. For some reason it was really low on my list of atmospheric phenomena I want to see. That is no longer the case.

Anyone who’s ever been with me on a long drive has heard my rant about the proliferation of progress bars in movies and why that is bad. The solar eclipse in Dolores Claiborne (1995) is not your typical time pressure device in that there’s no large calamity at time equals zero. It’s an event around which the story focuses and not what the story is about. No one is trying to stop a solar powered runway train.

One of the most unusual things about Dolores Claiborne (1995) is how it fares taking the Bechedel test (a measure used to evaluate the representation of women in fiction)

The test has three criteria (it’s a very low bar and MANY films do not pass):

• The work must have at least two named female characters.
• These characters must engage in a conversation with each other.
• The conversation must be about something other than a man.

Dolores Claiborne (1995) doesn’t just pass the test, it’s textbook example of a movie that goes all the way in the opposite direction. All of the male characters with speaking roles (not just the named ones) and all their conversations are exclusively about one of the two main characters (Selena or Dolores).

And I find this really refreshing.

I think of it like this: when a filmmaker innovates and everyone is like “that’s really great!” and the innovation becomes commonplace. Like Spielberg in Jaws (1975) not showing the full shark until the final battle. End-of-movie monster reveals are now just the way things are done.

The problem is that “making movies that centre around the lives of women” is not an innovation. It’s just a choice. In an ideal world we would get a healthy number of all kinds of movies. My all-time favourite movie is probably The Hunt for Red October (1990) and in this movie ALL of speaking roles for women are finished before the opening credits are done. A movie like this on its own is not a problem. The problem is that there are lots of Red Octobers and very few Claibornes.

Dolores Claiborne (1995) has as quality that I call “infinite re-watchability”. This is (for me) highly unusual for a movie with such heavy (often depressing) subject matter. The more times I watch a movie I tend to notice things that would NEVER be picked up on the first or even second viewings. These pickups are going to either enhance or distract from the experience.

In Lethal Weapon (1987) Murtaugh and Riggs are both naked in their respective introductory scenes. This was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers and something that for sure registered in my subconscious, but took 30 years and 30 viewings for me to actually notice. Finding hidden treasures like this one is a way of recapturing a small part of the wonder experienced the first time you watched a beloved film. Because during that first time, everything was a surprise.

But it’s also the absence of distractions. This is not to say the giant fake ear in Wrath of Khan (1982) ruins the movie. I can’t unsee it (obviously) but I had to be told it was a giant fake ear because every time I saw it I was reacting to the overt horror of what was happening to Chekov.

For me, watching Dolores Claiborne (1995) there are way more positive pickups (enhancements) than there are negative (distractions). Part of this stems from the time that passes between viewings. I gotta be in a certain mood to watch this one (it’s not exactly a dance around the maypole) so I don’t return to it very often and this distance helps with the pickups (both good and bad).

I’ve often joked that every film released between 1994 and 2002 is the most beautiful film ever made. Just go watch any random two minutes from The Fast and the Furious (2001) and compare that to the best looking scene of any movie released in the past twenty years (including Fury Road). It’s like night and day.

Modern movies shot digitally are (generally) flat, grey and boring. I don’t know why this is and I don’t care to learn. All I know is that when I watch Witness (released in 1985) I get sad because it reminds me that technology improvements have made things objectively worse.

Dolores Claiborne (1995) was (of course) shot on film and it uses a very simple technique to visually indicate which parts of the story take place in the present (1995) and which are from the past (1975). The recent scenes are grey and drab while the parts from the past vibrant and colourful.

These choices are deliberate. The past is represented as how people often remember it – better than it actually was (while truly being hopeful.) The present is where the characters are dealing with the aftermath of past trauma and the grey, somber colour pallet reflects that.

It’s beautifully shot and the cinematographic choices by the filmmakers are born from helping the storytelling and not from something outside the artistry (like the production budget).