Living free and oblivious

Weeks have passed since I saw the latest Die Hard film, Live Free or Die Hard, and given the nobody-cares-two-minutes-later world of today there's no point in bothering to talk about it any more. However, at the time I was theoretically inspired to compose a blahg entry. In theory, it would lament how, when viewing the sequence with the car-running-into-the-helicopter, I recognized it was shot near the office where I work in downtown L.A. (even though in the movie it was purported to be Washington D.C.) and how that took me out of the scene.

(I contemplated included links from Rotten Tomatoes showing the scene (see Killed A Helicopter With A Car) or noting here it is on YouTube, for those who hadn't seen the movie and gave a crap about seeing what I was talking about.)


I even took some pictures of the area (because it wasn't out of my way) to show how the spot on 4th St. that they made seem like was a tunnel entrance was merely the underpass of the Grand Avenue bridge. (I would have put it to the right, and identified that the vantage point for the picture was looking down at the spot under the bridge where they'd erected false toll booths for the movie scene.)

(I might have noted that the shot at the top of the post was looking out from under the bridge, toward the buildings that are clearly in the background of the scene when the car actually hits the copter. And being taken at dusk it gets kind of artsy. But that would have been utter digression.)

I even found a production still from the sequence that I conceivably would have included.

However, nothing more came of it.

Par for my course. In the days immediately after seeing the film, inspiration didn't strike at times when I had time to get into it. And the opportunity to seem timely quickly evaporated, and now I'm sure it's no longer worth bothering with dragging up my particular mental dilemma (again), especially this far removed from the release of the film.

If I did, the reaction from the reader would be along the lines of: Wow, you're really screwed up, Doug (which would be entirely accurate).

I'd concede purporting one location to be another is part and parcel of the nature of film making (later in the film the 105 freeway near LAX is made out to be Baltimore, for another example).

Then I could attempt to make some kind of argument about how nothing ruins the movie-viewing experience like having familiarity with how the movie got made. However, I would admit I don't actually work on movies. I'd have to concede I am merely familiar with an area used in a number of movies and TV shows and commercials (because it's so easily blocked off without causing serious traffic snarls); yes, occasionally I walk past the trailers parked on the street and the crew erecting sets, but I don't sit there all day watching them shoot the scene over and over. Presumably that would utterly destroy for me any potential for enjoying the film in its finished form. Of course, were I in that position, I'd probably get used to it.

Furthermore, I probably would have admitted I am not a good barometer of how those in the entertainment industry regard the output of the entertainment industry. (Then I'd follow with the entirely predictable line: I am hardly a good barometer of how I regard the output of the entertainment industry.) That would lead to pointing out that either those people who work on the films get jaded or they don't, and even if so, that still may not prohibit their ability to sit back and get caught up in the story and the characters without being distracted by the aspects that are manufactured for the movie and are not precisely accurate with (so-called) real life.

I'm sure I would have made an old inside joke: It's entirely possible that they are better at putting on their suspenders to hold up their disbelief.

The only larger thesis of any worth to others might have been: Be glad if your mind doesn't deconstruct your reality on a near-constant basis; you'll probably never realize how good you have it.

And I'd have to close with an insincere apology about how if I'd adversely affected the reader's enjoyment of the movie Live Free or Die Hard by revealing that they didn't really run a car into a helicopter in our nation's capital but thousands of miles away (like anyone would believe the government would allow shutting down a busy tunnel for a silly movie shoot—ah, but everyone knows L.A. has no such problems).

(The closest thing to a clever wrap-up I might have come up with--and would have included parenthetically--would have been the slight redemption of not knowing where they actually filmed the portions of that scene that are inside whatever tunnel they used for the parts of the scene actually shot in a tunnel. I'd be sure it wasn't in D.C. either, but not being some place I knew would allow those portions to seem much better, thus rendering the overall movie to be not a complete loss for me.)

Or so I would have noted if I were bothering to post about it.