Los Angeles (Die Hard)
Die Hard, the 1988 action classic, doesn't scream L.A. when you first think of it. A tough-as-nails Bruce Willis goes about wrecking the plans of a nefarious outfit of German terrorists who have taken over a shiny but unremarkable office building (Fox Plaza, standing in for the fictional Nakatomi Plaza) over the Christmas holiday. The action and suspense is all indoors, with the hapless LAPD milling around outside. But perhaps there's a larger truth here about a city, which, as is oft said, isn't really a city as much as an endless stretch of suburbs threaded together by numbing highways. Maybe Los Angeles really is like a faceless structure, filled with a few leather-clad Europeans carrying some incendiary baggage. Besides, Willis' character, officer John McClane, is like a lot of other L.A. residents: from New York City, and on holiday.