‘Under Siege,’ the Steven Seagal action-thriller set aboard a Navy battleship that turns 25 this month, took the by-then-well-established “Die Hard formula” and followed it step by step — except for one massive mistake.
In the tradition of ScreenCrush series like You Think You Know Movies and You Think You Know TV comes a new YouTube series: Top Five! Each week (or so; we’ve got a lot of other stuff going on), ScreenCrush editor and critic Matt Singer will count down a particular topic from the world of movies (and probably write these introductory posts in the third person).
This morning’s big Oscar nominations announcement had to contend with an even more major and affecting piece of breaking news. A few days after David Bowie passed into the next dimension, cancer has taken another sixty-nine-year-old Brit from us: esteemed actor Alan Rickman. Flip to the word “arch” in the newest editions of the Oxford Goes To Hollywood dictionary, and there you’ll find a photo of Rickman, single eyebrow raised, his tone of dour bemusement audible even from the printed page. The man gained the most international recognition from a choice role in a certain franchise about a boy wizard, but he was an actor of boundless versatility who gifted audiences plenty of fond moviegoing memories.
Alan Rickman, the tremendously talented British actor behind such iconic roles as Hans Gruber in Die Hard and Professor Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films, has died at the age of 69 following a bout with cancer.
Before he was cast in Die Hard, Bruce Willis was known primarily as the star of ABC’s TV comedy Moonlighting, so he wasn’t the first person Hollywood thought of to star in their big action movie. In fact, before they offered Willis the role, they actually approached Arnold Schwarzenegger hoping to turn Die Hard into a Commando sequel. This is just one of the Die Hard facts in the latest installment of You Think You Know Movies!