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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Happy Hacking!!!
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Gone in 60 Seconds ( 2000 ) is better than it's rating suggests
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2a/Gone_in_sixty_seconds.jpg/250px-Gone_in_sixty_seconds.jpg)
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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.
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Licorice Pizza 2021 is how PTA beats Besson at his own game, while getting a Best Picture Oscar nomination
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/LicoricePizzaPoster.jpeg)
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As I explained in my article on the matter a quality of a film could be measured in how well it "corrupts" the audience. And being a motherfucking genius Paul Thomas Anderson decided to show everybody, who's the boss. His 2021 film Licorice Pizza which was nominated for the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Oscars. And has a fairly decent 90% score on Rottent Tomatoes, is doing the same thing as Luc Besson's Leon: The Professional, but better. To put it lightly, it shows a romance between a minor and an adult. And it says that "it's okay, actually".
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We are living in the most exciting era when it comes to M. Night Shyamalan. The era I would call "A lottery". M. Night started strong. Critical acclaim and commercial success hit him hard, when he was a young film-maker. They were calling him "the next Spielberg". Then doubt possessed his sole. Some critics said something about something he did. And there he went. On a downward spiral towards the bottom. The Happening, The Last Airbender, After Earth... M. Night never truly recovered from this turmoil. He did great films since: The Visit, Split, Knock at the Cabin. But he then made strangely not so great films in between: Glass, Old, the strangely The Happening esque ending of Knock at the Cabin. Going today to an M. Night Shyamalan movie is truly a lottery. You never know what you are gonna get. With Trap we all got a fucking jack-pot!
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Man of fire toasts Bad Boys 2
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Bad Boys 2 is Michael Bay's most Bayhem! film. Man of fire is a huge leap in Tony Scott's directorial career. It is depressive, slow, simple, yet affective. It is both flashy and gruesomely slow. It is both overly edited and undercut.
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D'une manière ou d'une autre, je ne connaissais pas le film de Luc Besson 2010 Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec. Excusez mon français. I will continue in English now. I just had a pleasure of listening to people speak French for 2 hours straight, because I just learned about the existence of a movie that for some reason passed my radar. As you know I'm a big enough Luc Besson fan that sometimes I take his personal life blunders personally. I knew about his more obscure Arthur films. And I am anticipating his upcoming 2 films, that nobody seem to know nothing about. But somehow only now I heard about the 2010 Luc Besson film The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec.
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Vincent D'Onofrio pops up on my radar lately. I somehow get attracted to the same movies as the actor, which probably means that I need to review Full Metal Jacket by Stanley Kubrick, where D'Onofrio had his, probably, most iconic role. In any case D'Onofrio played an Ashkenazi Jewish gangster motherfucker in a Darren Aronofsky 2025 film Caught Stealing. Something that I had to see, just based on the absurdity of it.
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![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a2/13_Hours_poster.png/250px-13_Hours_poster.png)
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The Long Kiss Goodnight 1996 is how you make a feminist film
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At one point in time ( roughly before Tarantino ) Shane Black was the hottest writer in Hollywood. He wrote stuff like Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero ( the man is obsessed with Last anything ). And his Last film before he recovered from Tarantino induced depression and returned to the scene with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, was the 1996 movie he wrote for director of things like Cliffhanger Renny Harlin The Long Kiss Goodnight, starring Harlin's wife at a time Geena Davis.
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Is Strange Days 1995 about James Cameron's personal life?
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So in 1989 James Cameron divorces his second wife, the film producer Gale Anne Hurd, opening for her an ability to marry Brian De Palma that just divorced Nancy Allen. The same year Cameron marries Kathryn Bigelow ( the director of 1995 Strange Days ). They make the 1991 Point Break kind of together. But then that same year in 1991 they divorce. Yet, his script Strange Days about strange love dynamics and stuff ends up being actually made by Bigelow in 1995 ( four years after their divorce ). Hm...
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Black Swan 2010 is Aronofsky trying to outcompete Charlie Kaufman
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2002 Spike Jonze film Adaptation ( written by Charlie Kaufman ) is a story about a guy named Charlie Kaufman who is tasked with adapting an article about flowers into a Hollywood picture. And the best he can do is to make a meta-adaptation, where the movie you are watching is the story of writing the movie you are watching. 2010 Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan is a similar kind of meta-adaptation, this time of a Swan Lake ( Лебединое озеро ) by Tchaikovsky. While in the same time being a movie about adopting Swan Lake.
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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?
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![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b6/Revolver2005.jpg/250px-Revolver2005.jpg)
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I don't remember when was the last time I had watched a movie so strong that my mind literally cannot stop obsessing over it. Being on a Luc Besson marathon I discovered that there is a misunderstood film which Besson wrote together with Guy Ritchie, which was directed by Ritchie, which is called Revolver. The 13% score on Rotten Tomatoes, in my opinion is there just because the critics were literally too dumb, or too insecure, for this movie. Or because this is something the Ritchie and Besson literally wanted to achieve. If the film became a hit, or was well received critically, the message of the film would not have worked as well as it does.
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