Cyber-Criminals

[Eddie Love]

I completely agree with this part of your discussion of the fourth film. I'm getting tired of cyber super-villains showing up, particularly in crime novels like Michael Connelly's THE SCARECROW or in some of the recent Jeffrey Deaver books, who I really like. These creations seem like easy outs to me. And no matter how brilliant and devious theses guys are, they invariably must also be adept at guessing people's password's, which is absurd. Something like: "he noted the framed picture of the black Labrador on the desktop, smiled to himself and entered 'fluffy.' The laptop gurgled softly, and then gave up it's secrets..."

One other point about the first DIE HARD, which I love: it's the prototypical, perfect action film, and I love all the great standalone action set-pieces. Oh wait, there aren't any. It's all one long taut, grabber. No scene is there that doesn't make sense to the scenario. Today action films -- even great ones like CASINO ROYALE -- seem to stop dead in their tracks and offer up the big, slam-bam action scenes. They've become like musical production numbers. In DH the first scene in the elevator shaft is high-tension genius, but it's hardly as if McTiernan pulled out all the stops -- he just serves it to perfection. There's a great bit on the DVD commentary track where one of the awed crew is like "Look at this stuff! The best director I ever worked for."

[tombitd]

Jun 9, 2010 18:52:01 GMT -5 Eddie Love said:

I completely agree with this part of your discussion of the fourth film. I'm getting tired of cyber super-villains showing up, particularly in crime novels like Michael Connelly's THE SCARECROW or in some of the recent Jeffrey Deaver books, who I really like. These creations seem like easy outs to me. And no matter how brilliant and devious theses guys are, they invariably must also be adept at guessing people's password's, which is absurd. Something like: "he noted the framed picture of the black Labrador on the desktop, smiled to himself and entered 'fluffy.' The laptop gurgled softly, and then gave up it's secrets...

It's as if screenwriters--who, you would think, would understand simple things like, you know, research and would go and find out how computer security and firewalls and stuff works....but no. After all, cybercrimes is almost magic so let's just treat it as if it is magic....

One other point about the first DIE HARD, which I love: it's the prototypical, perfect action film, and I love all the great standalone action set-pieces. Oh wait, there aren't any. It's all one long taut, grabber. No scene is there that doesn't make sense to the scenario. Today action films -- even great ones like CASINO ROYALE -- seem to stop dead in their tracks and offer up the big, slam-bam action scenes. They've become like musical production numbers. In DH the first scene in the elevator shaft is high-tension genius, but it's hardly as if McTiernan pulled out all the stops -- he just serves it to perfection. There's a great bit on the DVD commentary track where one of the awed crew is like "Look at this stuff! The best director I ever worked for."

I think Derrick and I make comments about how Bond lives and dies in Casino on pressing the 'last call' button on everyone's cell phone....

And I've always felt that the true masterfulness of DH is that it is shorn completely of any extraneous elements, characters or set pieces. Everything moves forward, everything progresses toward a conclusion, and every person has a part to play. It's one of the things I mentioned in the original review in Episode 20(?) of BITD.

[Dino]

The password thing always irritates me when it's used in fiction. These characters are portrayed as so smart and yet they can't think to throw in at least a few random numbers into a password that's going to protect their most sacred secrets?

It goes beyond understanding how firewalls work -- do these writers not have e-mail or bank accounts protected by a password or PIN?