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    1999 Was a Great Year for Movies. It Was the Best Year to Write About Them.

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    At the box office 25 years ago, hits like “Runaway Bride,” “The Sixth Sense” and “Bowfinger” hint at the abundance that overwhelmed a young critic.One thing to love about time is how liberating it can be. I, for instance, am at liberty to look at the Top 10 movies for the weekend of Aug. 20, 1999 — when “The Sixth Sense,” in its third week out, began its monopoly of the chart — and declare “The Thomas Crown Affair” the best of the lot.What could be going on here? Am I actually saying that a Pierce Brosnan-Rene Russo remake of the old Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway love heist, from 1968, was always superior to M. Night Shyamalan’s where’d-that-come-from supernatural smash? Or have 25 years ripened one and grayed the other? Hadn’t “The Blair Witch Project” opened in July yet was still very much a thing? (It had, yet it was, down at No. 5.) Only one of the 10 movies was a sequel. In the mix were Julia Roberts, at her commercial peak, in “Runaway Bride” (No. 4, after opening in July) and Steve Martin and a gonzo Eddie Murphy, holding at second, in “Bowfinger.” More

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      ‘Die Hard’ Comes to the Christmas Stage in London

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      The poet Richard Marsh is winning praise in London for a one-man theatrical version of the action movie.LONDON — Every year in the run-up to Christmas, Richard Marsh wraps presents while watching “Die Hard,” the 1980s action movie in which Bruce Willis, playing the cop John McClane, single-handedly takes down a terrorist group in a Los Angeles tower block on Christmas Eve.But this year, Marsh said, he might have to give the ritual a miss. Since the end of November, the poet and playwright has been the star of “Yippee Ki Yay,” a one-man retelling of “Die Hard” at the King’s Head Theater in London.Over 75 minutes, Marsh recreates the film, with the help of just a few props. Speaking mainly in verse, he embodies all the movie’s major characters including McClane and the evil Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). He has had to rewatch the movie to perfect his accents, he said, and so watching it in his free time might be a little much.“But who knows,” Marsh said in a recent interview: “I haven’t started wrapping my presents yet.”“Die Hard” has been a contentious holiday movie ever since it was released in July 1988. Early reviewers focused on its action credentials, and made little reference to the film’s Christmas Eve setting, or McClane’s desire to reunite with his children and partner for the holidays. In 2018, Willis declared that “Die Hard” wasn’t a Christmas movie, it was a “Bruce Willis movie!”Yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, “Die Hard” regularly appears on polls of the greatest holiday movies. And theater has started to embrace this popularity, too.In the show, Marsh recreates specific scenes, including dramatic moments starring, top left, Bruce Willis and, bottom right, Alan Rickman.20th Century Fox; Rod PennMarsh, 48, is not the first performer to adapt the hit, with “Die Hard” having long been staged as a comedic Christmas musical in Chicago and Minneapolis, and as a comedy in Seattle. Jeff Schell, part of the team behind “A Very Die Hard Christmas,” which ran at the Seattle Public Theater through Dec. 20, said in a telephone interview that he felt these theatrical versions were appearing because people “who remember seeing it in junior high” were getting to an age where they could stage shows.Michael Shepherd Jordan, who wrote the book for “Yippee Ki-Yay Merry Christmas: A Die Hard Musical Parody,” which debuted in Chicago in 2014, said in a telephone interview that “Die Hard” worked so well onstage because of the absurdity of trying to act out a “big, bloody action movie” with a tiny budget. In his show, a police car that is central to the movie has to be recreated with a remote-controlled toy. Explosions are similarly silly.That absurdity is fun to watch, Marsh said, but he felt the movie was also relatable in ways that worked well onstage. “Die Hard” is ultimately about a couple, McClane and his wife Holly, arguing under the pressure of Christmas Eve and struggling to apologize to each other, Marsh said. That was a scenario that anyone could identify with, he added, even if “unusually, John and Holly cannot apologize to each other because of terrorist action.”Over the past decade, Marsh has had several fringe hits in Britain with stories told through poetry, including “Dirty Great Love Story,” written with Katie Bonna, which started at the Edinburgh festivals before heading to the West End. Marsh said he got the idea for “Yippee Ki Yay” — named after one of Willis’s most memorable lines in the movie — so long ago that he couldn’t remember the date. “My plays often start as jokes,” he said, “and the idea of doing ‘Die Hard’ as an epic poem was this delightful contrast.”Last year, as British theaters were reopening following the coronavirus pandemic, Marsh said the idea popped back into his head. He had been working on a play about grief but decided audiences would prefer to see “something that is joyful and hilarious and warm and enlivening.” Soon, he had written a draft, and then was working with the director Hal Chambers and the movement director Emma Webb to turn the movie’s main scenes into low-budget reality.“For all the Hans Gruber-ish terrorist action,” Marsh said, “there’s an emotional truth at the center of ‘Die Hard.’”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesOnstage, Marsh recreates “Die Hard” often just using sound effects and the audience’s imagination. Early on, he stages a fight with a teddy bear that is meant to be a gun-toting terrorist. Afterward, he dabs himself with fake blood to give the impression of injuries. Later, Marsh, using a stool, recreates a scene in which McClane throws a chair loaded with explosives down an elevator shaft. He then covers himself with cocoa powder to look like soot.The only thing Marsh doesn’t do is take off his shoes. Early in the movie, Willis removes his own and is left to chase terrorists barefoot, cutting his feet on broken glass. In the play, Marsh tells his audience there’s a simple reason he’ll be keeping his on: “Have you seen this floor?” he says.The experience of developing “Yippee Ki Yay” — which is running in London until Dec. 30 before going on a British tour — wasn’t entirely easy, Marsh said. After he performed its first preview, a friend said the show was really funny but didn’t have much emotional impact.“It was a brutal note, but extremely useful,” Marsh said. Afterward, he changed the play so it didn’t just tell the story of “Die Hard,” but also interlaced it with the tale of a romance between two “Die Hard” fanatics who meet on an internet forum.That emotional arc has won praise from reviewers. Dominic Maxwell, writing in The Times of London, said that it was “one thing” to have the idea of turning “Die Hard” into an epic poem. “It’s quite another to deliver on it with this level of panache, wit, insight and — unexpectedly — tenderness,” he wrote.Marsh said the final play drew out what “Die Hard” meant to him today. When he first watched it as a teenager, he simply enjoyed it as a full-throttle action film in which a wisecracking hero overcomes preposterous odds to beat up bad guys, Marsh said. “But it’s different watching it now. I’m a dad, I’m in midlife.”Today, he sees the movie as much about how children can be a “colossal hand grenade” in any relationship, he said, and how families try to connect — a message at the heart of most successful Christmas movies including “Home Alone” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”“For all the Hans Gruber-ish terrorist action,” Marsh said, “there’s an emotional truth at the center of ‘Die Hard.’”That, he added, “is probably the reason why it’s lasted as long as it has.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Paradise City’ Review: John Travolta and Bruce Willis Reunite

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      Almost 30 years after “Pulp Fiction,” these kings of cool team up for a Hawaii-set action feature that isn’t as much fun as it sounds.An action movie starring John Travolta and Bruce Willis that shares a title with a 1987 Guns N’ Roses song sounds like one of those fake movies joked about on “Seinfeld” or “30 Rock.” And yet “Paradise City” is a reality of sorts, albeit an uncomfortable reality.This movie was completed before it was announced that Willis would step away from performing after being diagnosed with aphasia, which affects the brain’s language center, and before upsetting reports of Willis’s struggles on set and of the accommodations he sometimes required.In his relatively short on-screen time, Willis, playing a hard-bitten bounty hunter shooting his way through Maui, appears relatively alert and aware. But his one scene with Travolta, who plays a fat cat trying to secure mining rights on Indigenous Hawaiian lands, was clearly achieved through editing, and many of Willis’s other exchanges don’t have him sharing a frame with his co-stars. More than once it sounds as if his dialogue was dubbed in by a similar-sounding actor. It’s a far cry from 1994’s “Pulp Fiction,” in which Travolta and Willis had minimal, but crucial and memorable, on-screen interactions.Directed by the action veteran Chuck Russell (“The Mask,” “Eraser”), the scenario of land-grabbing and righting wrongs mostly centers on do-gooder mercenaries played by a laconic Stephen Dorff and a fresh-faced, but not exactly sure-footed, Blake Jenner.The movie’s generic quality is spruced up by eccentric plots points (go-go dancers who also serve as undercover eco-activists, a nice Andy Sidaris-like touch) and kooky dialogue, as when the villain played by Travolta observes, “The only thing I’m scared of is me. And I am me, so there’s nothing to be scared of.”Paradise CityRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Fortress: Sniper’s Eye’ Review: Back to the Bunker

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      A barely-seen Bruce Willis heads up this lifeless action sequel set in a remote forest compound.In the wake of Bruce Willis’s recent diagnosis of aphasia, it’s worrying to note that he has no fewer than seven movies still waiting to be released. We can only pray that one of them is a more worthy swan song than Josh Sternfeld’s execrable “Fortress: Sniper’s Eye,” a sequel so dumb that no effort by Willis could reasonably be expected to save it.Not that he’s onscreen long enough for us to judge, given that his character, a battle-hardened former C.I.A. agent named Robert, spends most of the movie conveniently confined to a hospital bed nursing a gunshot wound. Roughly a month after the murder-y assault detailed in last year’s “Fortress” (the name of a nebulous forest retreat with a high-tech command bunker), we find the survivors reassessing their lives — and, one hopes for the actors who play them, resolving to make better career choices.Before landing in that bed, Robert had journeyed to Russia to rescue the supposed widow of his nemesis, a gloating villain unaccountably played by Chad Michael Murray. Elsewhere, Robert’s cyber-savvy son (Jesse Metcalfe) is making eyes at Kate (Kelly Greyson), the impressively ripped director of the facility whose habitual crop-top-and-shorts ensemble — as we learn when the inevitable second assault kicks off — also comes in commando olive.Plot-wise, Alan Horsnail’s screenplay is as dull as the cinematography and as awkward as the performances. It does, however, make swiping money from a U.S. Treasury website look so easy we should probably all be doing it.Fortress: Sniper’s EyeRated R for ropy action and risible acting. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Movies

      Bruce Willis Has Aphasia and Is ‘Stepping Away’ From His Career

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      The news of his diagnosis, initially announced by his ex-wife, Demi Moore, prompted an outpouring of support and appreciation for Willis from fans, stars and other notable figures.Bruce Willis, the prolific action-movie star, has been diagnosed with aphasia — a disorder that affects the brain’s language center and a person’s ability to understand or express speech — and will step away from acting, his ex-wife, Demi Moore, announced in an Instagram post on Wednesday.“To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” Moore’s post reads. “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”“We are moving through this as a strong family unit, and wanted to bring his fans in because we know how much he means to you, as you do to him,” it continued. “As Bruce always says, ‘Live it up,’ and together we plan to do just that.”The post is signed “Emma, Demi, Rumer, Scout, Tallulah, Mabel & Evelyn” — referring to Emma Heming Willis, Willis’s wife, and his children. Moore is the mother of Rumer, Scout and Tallulah, and Heming Willis is mother to Mabel and Evelyn.The post was accompanied by a comical photo of a younger, smirking Willis wearing a bathrobe, sunglasses, a gold chain with a cross, and a towel around his head.His wife, and Rumer, Scout and Tallulah all posted the same message and image on their Instagram pages.Representatives for Willis did not respond to a request for comment.Willis, who turned 67 this month, is most famous for his role as the rough-around-the-edges, yet clever, New York City cop John McClane in the highly successful “Die Hard” movie series, made up of five films from 1988 to 2013.He has also starred in critically acclaimed films like “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012).M. Night Shyamalan, the director of “The Sixth Sense,” has said that it was Willis’s admirably level performance in “Die Hard” that showed him that Willis could pull off the subdued child psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe in his horror-thriller, which would go on to be nominated for six Oscars, including best picture. And when Shyamalan wrote the screenplay for 2000’s “Unbreakable,” he said he did so with Willis in mind.In her New York Times review of “Pulp Fiction,” Janet Maslin said that Willis and his co-stars John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson “may all sound like known quantities, but none of them have ever had quite the opportunities this material offers.” Willis “displays a tough, agile energy when placed in the most mind-boggling situation,” she wrote.In 1997, during the last days of filming the action-thriller “Mercury Rising,” Willis told The New York Times that he was, in a way, surprised to have found success on the big screen. “When I was coming up, there were guys like Robert Redford and Paul Newman and Warren Beatty — those were movie stars,” he said. “It all got handed to me pretty quickly.” Just days later, he would begin working on the highest-grossing film of 1998, “Armageddon,” from the director Michael Bay.In 2013, when asked by GQ magazine to complete the sentence: “If I live long enough, I —,” Willis said: “should approach a bigger task than I approach now.”When asked if he has a motto, he said: “‘Live and let live’ is the closest I have. It works for pretty much everything. It has comic aspects to it and it has the real-deal aspects to it.”On Wednesday, there was an outpouring of appreciation for Willis and support for his family on social media from fans, stars and other notable figures.In response to Rumer Willis’s Instagram post, Sarah Paulson, who worked with Bruce Willis in “Glass,” Shyamalan’s 2019 sci-fi thriller, said: “He was such an incredible acting partner to me, and is the loveliest, most gentle & hilarious man. He reigns supreme in my book.” (In her Times review of “Glass,” Manohla Dargis wrote, “[Samuel L.] Jackson and especially Willis remind you again of how fine they can be when asked for more than booming shtick and smirk.”)In response to Moore’s Instagram post, Jamie Lee Curtis wrote: “Grace and guts! Love to you all!”; and Rita Wilson wrote: “My heart goes out to Bruce, and all of the family. So thankful you shared this with us. Keeping you all in our prayers.”On Twitter, Gabrielle Giffords, a gun control advocate and former congresswoman, wrote: “I’m thinking of Bruce Willis and his family today. Aphasia makes it hard for me to find the right words. It can be lonely and isolating.”The actor Seth Green tweeted, “I have so much love for Bruce Willis, and am grateful for every character he’s given us.”And the actor-director Kevin Smith wrote, “Long before any of the ‘Cop Out’ stuff, I was a big Bruce Willis fan — so this is really heartbreaking to read,” referring to his 2010 movie that Willis starred in. “He loved to act and sing and the loss of that has to be devastating for him,” Smith said. He said he felt badly about his “petty complaints from 2010.” In 2011, on the Marc Maron podcast, Smith had complained openly about working with Willis, saying that working with the action star was “soul crushing.”Thought of primarily as a movie star, Willis has received more accolades for his work on television: For his role as the private detective David Addison (played opposite Cybill Shepherd) in “Moonlighting” — an ABC comedy-drama-romance that ran from 1985 to 1989 — he earned three Golden Globe nominations, winning one, and two lead actor Emmy nominations, winning one.In a 1985 Times review of “Moonlighting,” John J. O’Connor wrote of Willis: “In repose, the actor is not your average leading-man type. He could easily be mistaken for the quiet guy down the street.”Confronted with Shepherd’s “flamboyantly insinuating” character, though, Willis “becomes almost debonair,” O’Connor wrote. “He appears to be constantly bemused, complete with twinkling eyes.”In 2000, Willis also won a guest actor in a comedy Emmy for his role as Paul Stevens, the father of Ross Geller’s much-younger girlfriend, on the NBC series “Friends.”Since 2015, his filmography has mostly been an onslaught of B-movie action productions, including “Breach,” in 2020, and “Fortress,” in 2021. According to his IMDb page, Willis currently has nearly 10 movies in postproduction. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Fortress’ Review: Die Hard, Emote Hardly

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      A heist takes place in this thriller starring Bruce Willis, but it is audiences that might feel shortchanged.The prolific action director James Cullen Bressack spits out cheap thrillers like bullet casings. His latest sneer-em-up is “Fortress,” and in it, there are two heists afoot. The first concerns the plot: Mercenaries have stormed a secluded retirement community to seize $600 million in cryptocurrency. The second robs the audience: Bruce Willis, enlisted to play the hero, pockets his salary while giving the acting gig his absolute least. At onetime, Willis’s presence boosted a small movie; lately, he’s a liability. “It’s an emergency alert,” Willis’s ex-C.I.A. agent yawns to his estranged son (Jesse Metcalfe) as though sirens mean the postman is at the door. Whatever, on with the gun show.As a distraction, Bressack and the screenwriter Alan Horsnail surround their indifferent lead with tinsel. We get lens flares galore, drums that pound like the marching band of Valhalla High and an endearing effort from Chad Michael Murray as Balzary, the villainous leader of a death squad bringing hellfire upon morning yoga. Balzary enjoys shiny vests, Damascus steel knives and shoulder rubs forced upon his tense hostages.At the same time, a sports-bra clad resort manager (Kelly Greyson) explains that the compound was deliberately constructed on an energy vortex that scrambles Wi-Fi, satellites and drones. By the time Shannon Doherty parades in as a four-star general, it’s tempting to succumb to inanity. (Doherty is tasked to assure everyone that Willis’s character does, in fact, feel the human emotion of pride in his son — he just happened to tell her so off-camera.) But then the film starts droning on and on about wire transfers and allocated funds and registration processes and L.L.C.s, techno babble designed to drag this nonsense into a sequel (which Bressack has already filmed). The hustling director might be the only one to believe it when his own film makes Willis say: “I’m having fun.”FortressRated R for relentless murdering. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Midnight in the Switchgrass’ Review: Sordid and Derivative

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      Megan Fox, Emile Hirsch and Bruce Willis track down a killer in a film that feels familiar.“Midnight in the Switchgrass” is the first feature directed by Randall Emmett, whose trademark as a producer — according to a sprawling career overview in New York magazine earlier this year — has been a rash of low-budget movies starring misleadingly top-billed actors like Bruce Willis. “Switchgrass” is superior to those Emmett productions (“Reprisal,” “Survive the Night”), but that bar is on the ground, or even beneath it — buried under the switchgrass, if you will.A second-billed Willis appears here in a barely roused state as an F.B.I. agent, who along with his partner, Rebecca (Megan Fox), is trying to catch a man who has been hunting underage girls in the Florida panhandle. Flouting protocol, Rebecca teams up with a Florida state officer, Byron (Emile Hirsch), who is tracking a serial killer who preys on prostitutes. The victims’ profession means his superiors don’t care about the case. Byron deduces that he and Rebecca are after the same guy.The murderer’s identity isn’t a mystery to us: Ripping off “The Silence of the Lambs” (down to a climactic fake out in which Emmett misleads viewers about which character is on which doorstep), the movie crosscuts between the investigation and the killer (Lukas Haas), a trucker and family man leading a double life, to follow him as he kidnaps a 16-year-old (Caitlin Carmichael). The atmosphere is thoroughly sleazy without being distinctive, and everything about the movie — the emotionless line readings, the half-baked back stories — exudes a terse functionality. Clearly, no one even bothered to proofread the onscreen text. But “Midnight in the Switchgrass” achieves its apparent sole goal: being a movie that exists.Midnight in the SwitchgrassRated R. Violence and disturbing themes. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on FandangoNow, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More