FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Die Hard (1988) is not my favourite film

and it hasn’t been for some time.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now – it’s something I’ve revealed only to close friends and family. At the beginning I needed a shared secret that could be used to verify the identity of the person I was texting with. In a crisis situation I would ask some variant of “what’s my favourite movie?” and the kidnappers (having done some background research on me) would respond, “Die Hard.”

I would then abruptly end the chat, turn to my partner and tell him, “Your foster parents are dead” – the real answer eluding the villains and giving me (and my lovable but naive partner) the upper hand!

But as the years have passed my reasons for needing a secret passphrase have slowly evaporated, like unfrozen water in the sun. So I have chosen today to share with you what I have come to discover is my one true cinematic love – because it was thirty years ago today, on March 2, 1990, The Hunt for Red October (1990) was released in theatres.

I’m not going write about why HFRO is objectively the perfect film and current pinnacle of human achievement, I have another project lined up to explain all that. And I’m not going to go into why Die Hard (1988) has fallen from the top spot – it’s a great film, near-perfect and genre defining. Today is not about knocking things down, it’s about building them up.

So let us all enjoy Hunt for Red October Day as we celebrate with our friends and family. This business is under control.

And we’re lucky to have lived with it.

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