Prior to the year 1988 when the film Die Hard came out, it was almost unheard of that any TV star was ever able to break out of being famous for a TV show – Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, and then transition to being a movie star. Bruce Willis was probably the first actor to ever break out of being a TV star and he definitely did this faster than any actor in history. Around this same time, Tom Hanks did the same thing but in a different way and his transition took much longer than Bruce Willis having started in the TV series Bosom Buddies in 1982.

What was so great about the movie Die Hard is that it was the first “believable action” movie where the main character is a regular person engaging in an impossible situation but the situations that he was in and then survived were not so over the top that they were not believable. The Terrorist attack in the Nakatomi Tower building where John McClane, played by Willis meets his wife was very believable. The action and the acting that followed was also very believable. The fights were awkward and what you would expect a fight to be in real life. McClane gave as well as he got and was hurt himself in many cases, unlike over the top of action films where the lead actor has such an easy time beating up everyone in sight. I cannot remember any movie before or since that had this level of believability within a story that had this many fight scenes and gunplay. For me, the best part of this entire film was the friendship that happened over the phone between McClane and Sgt. Al Powell, played by Reginald VelJohnson and their meeting at the end of the film, which was one the best and emotional of any action movie I have ever seen. The late actor Alan Rickman was also outstanding in his role as the lead terrorists and he played this particular level of evil in this movie better than any actor I have ever seen. Alan Rickman is one actor who will be very sorely missed by everyone.

When Die Hard 2 came out in 2 years later, I thought at the time that in some ways this movie was even better than the first one. What it lacked was believability because the action scenes were not on the level of the first movie where McClane was barely surviving but believable. In this movie, John McClane seemed more like a super-hero than the everyman he was in the first film. Some of the action scenes in this movie were both over the top but very entertaining, including where McClane ejects from a plane to escape being blown up and the scene where he fights several terrorists all who have machine guns and kills them with just a pistol. This scene is another example where the believability factor in the first movie was removed from this scene in favor of extremely entertaining action. Regardless, Die Hard 2 was a very good movie and one of the rare times when a sequel was as good if not better than the first movie.

Unfortunately as always happens with a movie franchise that makes a lot of money, producers only care about making more money and do not care if they have a great script. The 3rd Die Hard came out in 1995 and it was called Die Hard with a Vengence, and it starred Samuel L. Jackson’s as an ordinary citizen named Zeus Carter, who gets involved with McClane in what turned out to be a ridiculous plot of riddles and McClane and Zeus running around New York City. Very surprisingly the 4th movie in the series, Live Free or Die Hard was relatively good, starring Justin Long who gets paired up with Willis in another terrorist plot. This movie was far-fetched but some of the action scenes were the best of the entire series.

Unfortunately, the fifth and hopefully final Die Hard movie “A Good Day to Die Hard” was a very bad movie which probably ruined the franchise for good. This movie came out in 2013 and since that time it seems that Bruce Willis has been making mostly very bad B movies, which shows how harsh the movie industry really is and once you have a huge bomb, you may just never get another chance to revive your career. Why or how a movie this bad, which had such a bad screenplay was ever made is part of the problem of embedded profits because of name recognition over quality. This is a mistake I have seen made many times over the years.

If you have not seen Die Hard or Die Hard 2 you owe it to yourself to see 2 of the best action movies ever made.

There should be a massive study of the film industry in Hollywood. As a screenwriter who has written several screenplays, I knew from day one the extremely low odds of ever breaking into the movie industry as a screenwriter. I also know how difficult it is to write a 100-page quality screenplay that follows the paradigm that film producers want and also follows the exact syntax that screenwriting agents in the movie industry expect. All screenwriters hear about the thousands of screenplays that are written every year and how so many are so quickly rejected and never even read by anyone. There are screenwriting contests where people have a remote chance at winning a screenwriting contest that one would hope to somehow break them into this impossible field. Other than that, its just pure luck or contacts that might give you that 1 in a million miracle opportunity.

Then a movie like “Max Steel” makes it to movie theaters and a major sense of disbelief sets in almost immediately as you sit through this mess of two wasted hours. When you consider the extremely long odds for any script, how could a screenplay this bad ever be greenlighted into a movie? On top of this, how can two well-respected actors like Maria Bello and Andy Garcia be in this terrible film? Was it because of favors they owed? Were they having financial problems? Were they worried that if they don’t work often enough, producers might forget about them? How much were they paid for this embarrassingly bad movie? Perhaps this movie was made because Max Steel is owned by Mattel as some kind of a toy and they thought that it had a ready-made audience, so they just slapped any horrible script together, thinking that it really didn’t make any difference if the story was any good.

Within any movie, there is a story and most especially for a science fiction film technology has to be explained as well as the story or at least make some sort of sense. This movie made no sense. Nothing was explained. There is a young man about 17 who had a genius father who died, who started a technology company that created some sort of liquid energy and then for reasons completely unknown, there are aliens who become involved, or his father is an alien, and then there is this robot bat-like creature who follows the young man around to help him absorb his energy bursts so he doesn’t explode. Believe it or not, this is the plot of this terrible movie. The young man is played by newcomer, Ben Winchell and overall there is nothing wrong with his acting in this horrible movie, but the screenplay is so bad none of this matters. His girlfriend is played by the only bright spot in this film, Ana Villafañe who looks like she might have a very promising career in the movie industry and is currently on Broadway in “On your Feet”, the musical about Gloria Estefan and her husband. Unfortunately, she is on screen only a few times, not nearly enough to rescue this nightmare of 2 hours. One last thing that makes this movie especially bad is that the main character at certain points along with Andy Garcia are able to transform themselves into a metal suit that is a total rip off of the Iron Man franchise. The suit even had a light in the middle of its chest like Iron Man. How they were able to get away with this, who knows.

In my opinion, Max Steel is one of the worst movies of 2016, along with the “The Lobster”, which is also reviewed in this blog. How this movie was even released to anything but a DVD as a B movie is amazing. Someone must have made a mistake somewhere because this movie is at best a low-level B or C movie and should be missed.

One of the great things about historical movies is that you learn about things that have happened that you thought you knew about or in this case, something that you never knew even existed.

Over the years I heard rumors about some diseased people in the world who have denied that the Holocaust has ever happened but I never knew that one of them would be the subject of a major trial in England that cost many millions of dollars to prosecute and many years to prepare for and try. David Irving is an author of several books about Hitler, Germany and World War 2. Irving is also the most famous Holocaust denier. Deborah Lipstadt is an American historian and writer of several books, including one book discrediting Irving for attempting to deny the Holocaust, which is the reason for the lawsuit he filed against her and her publishing company. My thoughts while watching this movie were that how can anyone even consider denying something that so obviously happened? There are thousands of hours of videos, dead bodies, evidence including clothing, teeth, human hair. There are many crematoriums and concentration camps all throughout Europe, the most famous being Auschwitz. Even in the case of David Irving who is an Anti-Semite and clearly mentally ill, you would think that he would not want to bring a libel case against case Deborah Lipstadt, who wrote the book Denial Holocaust History on Trial where she called Irving a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot, and said that he manipulated and distorted real documents, because of course, he would lose, how could there be any doubt of this?

What this movie points out is that when you look at this case like a lawyer and without emotion then the entire legal argument changes. First of all, in England when you are charged with libel the burden of proof is on the defendant and not on the plaintiff, which is the reverse of how something like this is trialed in the United States and is also the reason why this case was tried in England. The law firm in England that handled this case, spent about 6 years reading the many books that David Irving wrote plus his many hundreds of diaries, looking for errors and discrepancies in his arguments that tried to prove the Holocaust never happened. The firm found many discrepancies and at one point of the movie the lawyer trying the case Richard Rampton, played extremely well by Tom Wilkinson told the court a great analogy about a waiter making mistakes with money and statistically speaking if the mistakes were honest ones, then they would be over time be errors both in his favor and in the favor of the customer. In the case of the historical mistakes in David Irving’s books, all of his errors were in favor of Hitler and denying the Holocaust and this was used against him in court. David Irving played extremely well by Timothy Spall was cross-examined several times by Rampton in the courtroom scenes and these are the best moments in the entire movie. “No holes no Holocaust” was another big point in the movie where Irving made the case that of the so called crematoriums were not crematoriums at all, because their roof’s had no holes in them. This was also disproven by the defense that was able to provide pictures from high flying airplanes during that time, clearly showing that there were in fact holes in the roofs of these buildings.

Most surprisingly this entire case was far from ever an easy win for the defense because they had to prove that not only were many of the historical facts in Irving’s writings were incorrect, but they also had to prove that he deliberately created and altered these facts to serve his own end of trying to prove that the Holocaust never happened. On top of this, the defense called no witnesses or victims of the Holocaust because their strategy was to make the entire case about Irving and never give him the opportunity to cross-examine any of the victims of the Holocaust. This strategy understandably created conflicts between Deborah Lipstadt and one Holocaust victim and resulted in several huge arguments between Lipstadt, played very well by Rachel Weisz and the lead attorney of the firm Anthony Julius played by Andrew Scott. Considering the time and money the law firm Lipstadt hired to defend this case and the fact that if they lost their entire firm would be ruined, you can just imagine the pressure this law firm was under for a long period time as they prepared for and eventually tried this case. I thought this movie was very well done and I do recommend it.