IIRC (and maybe I’m misremembering) when Hans is smoking he is holding his cigarette in the European manner. We see McClane give the briefest of glances to his hand.
OK found it and even more subtle than I remember. Look at how Gruber holds his cigarette at 0:24. Now they cut to McClane at 0:28 and look how he is holding it the American way.
I just thought McClane had good “cop instincts”, that’s all. You can spot a phony victim as easily as a phony ID. Neither one “looks right”.
Yeah, that could work as an explanation. Though oddly, at about 2:13 in that clip, McClane takes a last puff and he’s now holding the cigarette the same way as Gruber, between his thumb and index finger. Maybe he’s subtly mocking Gruber.
He held it that way to put it out, but decided on one last puff for effect. Still works I think.
When I watched the director commentary on the DVD he says there was supposed to be a scene where McClane sees the watch that Gruber is wearing and that’s how he knew.
The one thing that gets me is John had all the detonators with him, why didn’t he just chuck them all down the elevator with the chair. He had no need of them and he had to know there were other explosives around.
That’s it. I thought a watch was involved, but I wasn’t sure if I was conflating my memory of a watch with the later scene:
Gruber crashes through a window but grabs onto Holly’s wristwatch and makes a last-ditch attempt to kill the pair. McClane unclasps the watch, and Gruber falls to his death.
My dad was a long time smoker and that was also always his explanation for why John knew, it’s like the scene in Inglorious Bastards with the different way of showing 3 fingers.
A propos not-giving-away-being-non-German: in Shadow of the Vampire, they employ the convention that if the character is German, he therefore speaks all his lines in English but with a German accent. Common enough. But they cast John Malkovich as the German director Friedrich Murnau, and Malkovich’s German accent is both bad and inconsistent.
In The Fifth Element I’d tamp down Ruby Rhod’s personality into something way less annoying. I realize that the character was supposed to be annoying but they did much too good a job of it for my taste.
I always heard that it was a matter of executive meddling; that the original idea was that humans were being used as co-processors, but with the higher ups ordering the Wachowskis to dumb it down to “batteries”.
In John Candy’s The Great Outdoors I’d get rid of the subplot about the romance between the older son and a local town girl. The sappy teen romance takes away from the overall vibe of the movie, especially the scene that would otherwise be the best scene in the movie, John Candy taking on the Old 96er. The older son constantly looking at his watch while Candy does battle with the steak takes what would be a great scene and turns into a just above average scene.