blenderdumbass . org
Reviews
by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
From 1 years ago.
Information or opinions might not be up to date.
7 Minute Read
What is it with Jerry Bruckheimer of the late 90s and early 2000s and with Nicolas Cage? First in 96 we get Michael Bay's The Rock. A year later in 97 Jerry puts Cage in Simon West's Con Air. And then in 2000 Dominic Sena under the supervision of Bruckheimer puts Nicolas out of his Cage and into a driver's seat of 1967 Ford Shelby GT500, in the subject of this review, the loose remake of H. B. Halicki 1974 film Gone in 60 Seconds.
↩ Reply
26% Rotten Tomatoes rating doesn't seem like a good indicator. The film must have been stupidly terrible. Right? Well if you read my other reviews you sometimes may see that ratings are not necessarily the best predictor of enjoyment. A lot of the "best movies" are dull as fuck. And a lot of the "worst" ones are entertaining as hell. And Gone in 60 Seconds is not an exception. Yes it is a bit rough. But so is Con Air and so is The Rock and so are most Jerry Bruckheimer produced films. But Jerry Bruckheimer is Jerry Bruckheimer and Jerry Bruckheimer has a very fucking good sense for entertainment value.
↩ Reply
Like in Con Air this film has an ensemble cast. We obviously get Nick Cage showing us the unbearable weight of his massive talent. We get Robert Duvall who helped Cage's uncle Francis Ford Coppola win some Oscars on The Godfather films. We get Angelina Jolie who you may know from other Angelina Jolie movies. We get Giovanni Ribisi who worked with Steven Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan and will work with James Cameron on Avatar. We get Will Patton who had the most emotional arc in another Bruckheimer movie, Michael Bay's Armageddon.
↩ Reply
We get an evil British character in the form of Christopher Eccleston who played an evil British character in a Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. We get a nice British character ( that sometimes can be a little intimidating ) in a form of Vinnie Jones who you may know from early Guy Ritchie films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. Which is by the way an interesting Bruckheimer moment here. I discussed on my review of Bad Boys how Michael Bay apparently got inspired by Tarantino to change the dialogue in the movie. And that prompted Bruckheimer to actually hire Tarantino for dialogue touch-ups for Tony Scott's Crimson Tide and Bay's The Rock ( giving us a film where Michael Bay directs Tarantino dialogue spoken by Nicolas fucking Cage ). But then Tarantino apparently had enough of this job and quit working on other people's movies. So poor Jerry has a problem now.
↩ Reply
In that same time, on the other side of the globe, young Guy Ritchie was imitating not just the dialogue of Tarantino, but his entire writing style altogether with his first few films. Which coincidentally are also starring... you guessed it, Vinnie Jones, who gets then hired by Bruckheimer, probably chasing some remains of the Tarantino sauce. Even if it's Pepsi.
↩ Reply
But the cast doesn't stop there. We get Scott Caan who appears throughout the Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven franchise. We get Timothy Olyphant who actually ended up working with Tarantino on Once Upon The Time In Hollywood. We get Chi McBride who worked with the legendary Alex Proyas alongside Bad Boy's Will Smith on I, Robot. We get Frances Fisher who worked with Cameron on Titanic and we even get Arye Gross who played the husband character Howard Marks in 2002 Steven Spielberg epic ( which ended up being the cause for Michael Bay to quit Bruckheimer and join Spielberg ) called Minority Report.
↩ Reply
The plot of the movie is simple: our protagonist needs to GTA 50 rare cars in one night, for a mafia boss, unless he wants his brother to die. It feels a little bit like Ocean's Eleven heist, but not because of some big game money ambitions. The reason is personal, in an attempt to paint the characters as morally right. Maybe that was what the critics thought was kind of weak. The entire cast of thieves are either inexperienced teenagers who didn't start doing anything illegal yet. Therefor they are innocent. Or old car thieves who decided long time ago that this sort of thing isn't for them. And now are forced to do it, to save a live of somebody near and dear to them. Perhaps the movie could work emotionally a lot better if the protagonists just wanted to steal those cars, because they just wanted to steal those cars.
↩ Reply
The director Dominic Sena is actually quite good. The opening sequence moves with pretty compositions. And the action in this film is a bit less rough than the stuff Bay and West were putting out in those days. I do think, though, there is one major flaw to Dominic Sena. He tries to take the characters seriously and then goes for a Bruckheimer action scene with them, with a cool techno track playing as the characters chase each other or something. This doesn't quite work. Bay uses a more traditional score which works a lot better. At least at that time. If you look at something like 6 Underground ( a fairly recent Michael Bay film with a very mature action direction from Bay ), you can hear him use a mixture of no-music, a score or a known pop-song, for the most interesting moments. Dominic Sena in Gone in 60 Seconds just uses a bad techno-beat bullshit which is just cringe to listen to.
↩ Reply
There are good music action scenes in the film. The ending with the Ford Mustang is scored properly. And the main moment of that sequence ( the jump ) has some proper tension building score which explodes into a crescendo of orchestral magic. Good stuff. But sometimes you just roll your eyes from the tonal whiplash the music gives you in this movie.
↩ Reply
The movie is far from being a bad film. It doesn't have this bad movie vibe, that something like Ultraviolet, or The Room might have. It looks and feels like a proper summer blockbuster ( from that time ). And yet there is this feeling of slight weirdness to it. I cannot put it into words. Some shots and sometimes entire sequences feel a bit strange. I have this gut feeling that something about it doesn't quite work. But I can't see what exactly.
↩ Reply
Perhaps it is the lack of tension building, for most of the action scenes. We just go-go-go, but why be excited about it? Good film-makers will always build toward something like this, even a little bit. Here oftentimes we have nothing at all. The action just starts out of nowhere. It doesn't mean that the movie isn't ever building to anything. It surely does. But not as well as other Bruckheimer films. Not as well as Simon West did in Con Air. And surely not as well as Michael Bay does.
↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!!
↩ Reply
0
Find this post on Mastodon
Mission: Christmas is a fusion of joy
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/Troler/Y4P5OK3D02KVJN5X.png)
Troler
🔐 2 👁 18 💬 2
Christmas is all about spreading joy and happiness to all. Sometimes the festivities pierce your heart, other times you feel as about die from loneliness. The 3 movies reviewed here feature a wide spectrum of emotions. At the end, all end on a happy note.
#IgnasMeilūnas #AaronBlaise #KęstutisDrazdauskas #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Why "Halloween" 1978 is a classic?
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Halloween_%281978%29_theatrical_poster.jpg/250px-Halloween_%281978%29_theatrical_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 17 ❤ 1 💬 1
Compared to the contemporary slasher films ( with blood and guts displayed viscerally ) and even compared to John Carpenter's other horror classic The Thing, 1978's film Halloween is rather un-scary in comparison. Yes, it is a slasher, where a lot of teenagers die. Yes it has a lot of disturbing ideas and a lot of rather good cinematic tension. But it is weak in the blood department. Which begs the question: What's so special about this movie?
#halloween #horror #johncarpenter #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
The Naked Gun ( 2025 ) is a descent movie about enshitification, but not as funny as the originals
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/The_Naked_Gun_2025_poster.jpg/250px-The_Naked_Gun_2025_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 18 💬 1
Paramount snatched "The Naked Gun" / "Police Squad" rights from Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams and instead gave the material to a different Jew Akiva Schaffer to adopt. And while Schaffer is a good comedy / parody director, it seems like the movie ended up being just "merely clever".
#theNakedGun #policesquad #LiamNeeson #PamelaAnderson #film #review #comedy #movies #cinemastodon
Mindlocking Trickery of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/Troler/864W0G9NI8W9YPAI.jpg)
Troler
👁 19 ❤ 1 💬 3
Pairing a mystery, where each clue matters with a director behind Revolver, where the symbolic meaning of the film is hidden unless the viewer has pen and paper, and knowledge of gematria, and Hebrew. As such, a detective movie, of Sherlock Holmes nonetheless, is quite an invigorating blend.
#SherlockHolmes #GuyRitchie #HansZimmer #RobertDowney #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Lucy 2014 Pretentious or Profound ?
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/14/Lucy_%282014_film%29_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 16 💬 2
On the surface level 2014 Luc Besson film Lucy starring Scarlett Johansson is a scientific thesis that is trying to say some grand truth about the world, while pretending to be an action film, to make people go see it. On the other hand though, it is an action film that injects a lot of profound-sounding pretentious pseudo scientific bullshit, to make itself appear as something better than it is: a dumb action movie. Which one of them is it? Or did I miss something?
#lucy #lucbesson #ScarlettJohansson #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Bronson 2008 is how you make a low budget film
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e0/Bronson_poster.jpg/250px-Bronson_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 36 ❤ 1 💬 1
Having only a quarter of a million dollars, director Nicolas Winding Refn and actor Tom Hardy decided to make a period piece based on true events. Just so you know, period pieces are usually far more expensive to make than contemporary films. And yet they had almost nothing, in terms of budget to pull this movie off. How the hell did they do that?
#bronson #NicolasWindingRefn #TomHardy #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Bad Boys 1995 is a Tarantino picture gone Bayhem!
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a8/Bad_Boys.jpg/250px-Bad_Boys.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 17 ❤ 1 💬 3
The first thing you notice when watching Michael Bay's directorial debut Bad Boys is that the movie is not trying to be a Michael Bay film. There was no Michael Bay films prior to it. Bay was doing music videos and commercials before this film. And while those do have some of the style Bay will eventually bring over to his cinema pictures, here it seems he is actually trying something else entirely. The best analogy for the movie would be Tony Scott's 1993 film True Romance written by Quentin Tarantino.
#badboys #michaelbay #willsmith #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Max Fleischer's Superman flew to the Sun and didn't fall
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/Troler/HZP91B02YOJ1O5W3.jpg)
Troler
👁 27 ❤ 1 💬 1
Oh Superman, who hasn't heard the story of the classic American superhero? Even in this coming-to-close year Superman still stories are being told. Knowing that 2038 the superhero is going to be a century old, it would be good to reflect on history, where it really started. It was born in the head of then 24 Jerry Siegel, child to American immigrant Lithuanian Jews, who fled oppression. Growing up in a Jewish neighborhood, made up of immigrants who fled oppression, meant he heard a lot of stories about their suffering. The competitive character common amongst Judaic culture, is not always well regarded. In a negative environment, they had to adapt and blend in the crowd. This sort of environment together with his love for Science Fiction meant the young Siegel had a particular worldview, a Jewish one. To what extent it was present can be seen in his first major breakthrough — Superman.
#Superman #MaxFleisher #Fleisher #1941 #ClarkKent #film #JerrySiegel #MyronWaldman #BudCollyer #review #movies #cinemastodon
Machete Kills 2013 is trying to beat Spaceballs
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/04/Machete_Kills.jpg/250px-Machete_Kills.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 10 ❤ 1 💬 3
As I observed 2 hours ago in my review of Machete, the first film is about US politics of 2025. The second movie Machete Kills is something else entirely. If the first film is a semi-parody of exploitation films. This one is a full on spoof comedy, parodying not just exploitation films, but other things too. By the end of the film, the bullshit is so absurd, that you cannot stop laughing. And then Elon Musk appears out of nowhere to send Machete into space.
#MacheteKills #RobertRodriguez #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Mission: Impossible III Makes References And Blows Up Cars
![[thumbnail]](https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/he/thumb/0/04/Mi_III_he.jpg/500px-Mi_III_he.jpg?utm_source=he.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=parser&utm_content=thumbnail)
Troler
👁 4 ❤ 1 💬 1
There is nothing I love more than multilayered storytelling references. Here I am not referring to plot details which have multiple layers of meaning, although that is great too. No, I am referring to the meta-textual references. There is a director whose filmography boasts a considerable amount of referential material. That man is none other that ~Quentin Tarantino}()~ [J. J. Abrams.
#jjabrams #MI3 tomcruise #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Predator: Badlands 2025 is like Avatar 2009 but Horror
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/90/Predator_Badlands_Poster.jpg/250px-Predator_Badlands_Poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 8 ❤ 2 🔄 1 💬 5
Predator: Badlands is Dan Trachtenberg's third Predator movie after Prey 2022 and Killer of the Killers 2025. And strangely enough non of these movies have any kind of connection to one other. They are not sequels. They are stand alone films, different in style and tone. Telling different stories and having different structure. The only thing that binds them together, so to speak, is the fact that they are all technically a part of the Predator franchise.
#predatorBadlands #predator #ellefanning #DanTrachtenberg #horror #action #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Hatred and Love of Putin in How To Divorce During Wartime
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/2e/How_to_Divorce_During_the_War.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=parser&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
Troler
👁 5 ❤ 1 💬 7
Suppose a family, fleeting from abuse, comes seeking shelter. Do you hesitate to take them in, provide for the basic needs, when the cause of their hardship is an old nemesis of yours. One whose family and yours have been at war since time memorial.
#lithuania #russia #ukraine #war #AndriusBlazevicius #MarijaRazgute #film #films #review #movies #movie #cinemastodon
Powered with BDServer
Plugins
Themes
Analytics
Contact
Mastodon