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Inside Nigeria's Growing Film Industry

Zadie Smith first met Nick Laird when she submitted a short story to a collection he was editing. They were both undergraduates at the University of Cambridge. Her story, Laird told The Telegraph in an interview in July 2005, "...was just head-and-shoulders above anything else." Smith's career took off after that. Her first novel, White Teeth, was an international bestseller and won critical acclaim. Later, Laird said that going to literary parties with Smith made him feel "two feet tall." Even so, the two writers support each other – showing each other their unpublished work and exchanging advice.

Smith has also publicly described their relationship. In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, she explains that she and Laird work in the same library in New York — on different floors. At the end of the day, they tell each other about the people they have seen out and about, and re-enact the conversations they have overheard (at one point she says she couldn't wait to tell her husband about a cat-eyed teenager in a Pocahontas wig she saw "sashaying" down Broadway). "The advice one finds in ladies' magazines is usually to be feared," she writes. "But there is something in that old chestnut: 'shared interests.'"

For Valentine's Day, Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy shares a family love story from 70 years ago.

I always knew that my mother's aunt Debika was the most beautiful of all the great-aunts. I didn't know that when she was young, she jumped off a moving train for love.

She is now 90. Bent with age, she shuffles with a walker. But she's still radiant, her hair perfectly dyed.

It sounds like a typical Bollywood story. Boy meets girl in pre-independence India. They fall in love. Her family says no way. The boy came from the same clan. That was regarded almost as marriage between siblings. And there were far more suitable boys for such a beauty, like the son of a top-ranking civil servant. Debika says her uncle and brother kept two guns handy to shoot over-eager Romeos on sight.

So one night in 1941, she decided to escape. She packed a bundle with everything she needed: a couple of blouses, a petticoat and two albums — one with family photos, the other with postcards of Hollywood movie stars like Norma Shearer and Claudette Colbert.

She put a roll of false hair on the pillow so it looked like she was sleeping. There were dozens of servants to be evaded, big dogs patrolling the yard and many locked doors. She retraces her steps for me more than 70 years later.

She left barefoot, in the kind of sari housemaids wore, to look like a young woman going to work in the breaking dawn. Her fiance was waiting to take her to the train station, but she panicked when she realized the taxi driver recognized her. She was afraid her powerful uncle would show up at the next station with guns. So the runaways decided to jump off before the station. Guards came running, but they nonchalantly strolled away as if they jumped off trains every day.

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This is the Magpie School of action filmmaking: Anytime things start to make so little sense that you might lose the audience, just throw something shiny up on screen to distract. Hence lots of slow-motion jumping and falling while fiery explosions billow up in the background. Cars seem to do more flying than driving, jumping off of overpasses or over other cars, rolling and flipping through the air. In one particularly inspired bit of lunatic misdirection, one of the Russian thugs chasing McClane delivers a menacing speech to the hero ... while loudly eating a carrot.

I have no recollection of what plot details were conveyed in that speech. But I do remember the carrot — and I'm guessing that's exactly the effect director John Moore was going for.

There's little left of the qualities that made the original Die Hard such a masterpiece — or even the things that made the substandard sequels marginally watchable. Where before McClane was out to save the life of a family member or a school full of kids, here — after the self-preservation that drives him in the opening sequence — he's fighting mostly to save his son's reputation and also to thwart a vaguely defined potential terrorist threat.

Humor has always been an essential element of McClane's appeal, but the attempts here aren't even in character. Are we really meant to believe that McClane would answer a cellphone call from his daughter in the midst of a car chase? Or knock out an innocent civilian who's (justifiably) yelling at him for running out into traffic?

Even McClane's trademark one-liners are fewer in number, generally clunkers, and often nearly drowned out by things going boom. It's difficult to tell if the mildly bemused air Willis carries with him through much of the movie is a character choice or just smug satisfaction that he's actually getting away with getting paid for this.

A Good Day to Die Hard does have one redeeming aspect: It has finally ended the debate over whether Die Hard 2 or 4 is the worst of the series. We finally have a clear loser.