The film had big shoes to fill… possibly a bit more care in the editing might have helped to make things clearer.
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yeah, i know. it’s more just rhetorical frustration because of the so completely on the nose metaphor that is die hard’s ending.
( really, the whole framing of the movie: woman swept up by corporate america and foreign thieves - is probably intentional 80s moralizing about the destruction of the family. a fantasy about blowing up women’s independent lives away from their husbands - and them being thankful for it.
but i focus on the watch because the movie is - on the whole - a lot of fun )
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Swept up by a foreign corporation and foreign thieves. Who smoke! No wait, that was okay back then.
Lots of fun, one of my favourite christmas movies.
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My wife! My family!
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1980s Hollywood Exec 1: Know what would be a super wacky premise? If the mom was the one bringing home a salary and the dad was the stay-at-home caretaker!
1980s Hollywood Exec 2: Cool, just as long as the natural order of things is set right by the end of the movie.
1980s Hollywood Exec 1: Well that goes without saying.
Disney/Pixar, 30something years later: Know what would be a super wacky premise?
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Equally true 30 something years earlier:
(And TIL that the place that Lucy and Ethel were working was called Kramer’s Kandy Kitchen, which is a very unfortunate name.)
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If it’s not explicit, it’s implied in the sequel when she’s jetting to DC from LA that she has an executive job and IIRC they are discussing moving to DC for her job advancement.
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That wasn’t my point.
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I agree, I’ve always hated the gender-based demographic assumptions Hollywood likes to make. Some women, like me, don’t need their arm twisted to watch action movies, and I’ll happily choose sci-fi, fantasy or horror over romcoms and such, most of the time.
The “Dad thriller” as a media-analysis concept isn’t exactly awful. I read through the whole newsletter entry, and while the theory seems like a work-in-progress, I think there’s some interesting ideas there. I like the breakdown into subgenres by common plot elements of the era (especially the everyman-stumbles-into-dangerous-drama trope.) I’d love to see a more detailed, polished piece on the subject.
*This was meant as a reply to @PurpleFlower and @Mindysan33 above, the link went wrong.
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yeah, see above. ( tho i will say it’s still for the context of the relationship to the dude, not just something her character does because that’s who she is )
i can’t remember but i hope she at least got to sit in first class.
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It shouldn’t be the case, but stay-at-home dads are still seen as kind of a weird thing in reality, not just movies. During the Great Recession, a number of my friends who had lost jobs decided to take care of their kids for a while rather than jump back into looking for a job right away. This was kind of accepted for the women, but the men constantly got asked when they were going back to work.
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Sure, but we’re also conditioned to look down on things like romcoms or historical dramas and the like, because they are genres aimed at women. Whenever we like those genres imagined to be for men (which I like too), we’re applauded as being daring and “cool”… even when those genres can be full of misogynistic assumptions (which @gatto addresses above).
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And I don’t like it, never have. Let’s toss the stereotypes and like what we like.
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Sure, we should do that. But we should also be aware of the phenomenon that celebrates culture made for men and denigrates culture made for women.
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It’s something we need to be consciously aware of, if we’re going to dismantle it (and we should!)
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it’s like the cool girl trope, but in real life 
originally posted by somebody not me in a different thread
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I hate this timeline.
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“Give me a woman who loves beer and I shall conquer the world.” - Otto von Bismarck
So, yeah, the notion of Cool Girl has been around a long time.
The whole premise is ridiculous, to classify these as “dad” movies. It’s “action and thriller movies first watched by many current 30- and 40-year old people when they were in late adolescence.”
As pointed out several times in this thread, there are dozens of movies that perfectly fit the definition that long predate all of the movies listed. Perhaps North by Northwest should be classified as a “grandad” movie.
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Enemy of the State. Totally falls in this category. I mean, great movie, but absolutely by dads, for dads.
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