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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)
Blender Dumbass
π 11 π¬ 103
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.
#goneinsixtyseconds #nicolascage #angelinajolie #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Orphan left me in hopeful despair
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/Troler/0MCWP17IB5D2UB4Z.jpg)
Troler
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Orphan by LΓ‘szlΓ³ Nemes is a bleak introspection into the psychology of a lonely adolescent Andor (BojtorjΓ‘n BarΓ‘bas), desperately searching for his father. Just like I am by Romas Lileikis, the focus is put more so on the atmosphere and the world rather than much the plot.
#Orphan #LaszloNemes #GregoryGadebois #BojtorjanBarabas #EvgueniGalperine #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Con Air 1997 is Bayhem! but Rick-Rolled
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/Conairinternational.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
π 12 π¬ 2
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer didn't only work with the legendary Michael Bay. He worked with other legends too, like Tony Scott and in the case of Con Air Simon West who directed the Rick Astley music video Never Gonna Give You Up. Yet probably due to it being the first collaboration of Bruckheimer and West ( because it is West's directorial debut when it comes to feature films ), Bruckheimer steered him a bit to copy a style of another director he worked with. Michael Bay.
#conair #nicolascage #simonwest #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Hollow Man 2000 takes the horror trope of not seeing the monster to a whole new level
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e1/Poster_Hollow_Man.jpg/250px-Poster_Hollow_Man.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
π 13 π¬ 1
Before Kevin Bacon played a much more complex man with a psychological sexual abnormality in 2004's The Woodsman, he played a man with a psychological sexual abnormality in 2000's Hollow Man. Where the fetish is voyeurism and the crime is ghostly rape. You kind of know it is a Paul Verhoeven movie from this description.
#hollowman #paulverhoeven #film #review #kevinbacon #movies #cinemastodon
Gone in 60 Seconds ( 1974 ) is an enjoyable mess
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0c/Gone_in_sixty_seconds_1974_movie_poster.jpg/250px-Gone_in_sixty_seconds_1974_movie_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
π 15
Watching the Nicolas Cage and Jerry Bruckheimer remake made me extremely curious to see the original Gone in 60 Seconds. And let me tell you that, the film is impressive when it comes to the shier production value H. B. Halicki ( writer, producer, director and star ) put into this film. But on the other hand the film is very hard to follow.
#goneinsixtyseconds #hbhalicki #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
I don't remeber Wanted ( 2008 ) to be that good
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/98/Wanted_film_poster.jpg/250px-Wanted_film_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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If you never was in post Soviet country in 2008 you don't know how much of a big deal this movie was. For Americans, I suppose, it was just another action film. For anybody who speaks Russian it was a miracle.
#wanted #TimurBekmambetov #JamesMcAvoy #AngelinaJolie #film #review #action #movies #cinemastodon
Prey 2022 tries to be annoying to concervatives
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f4/Prey_2022_poster.png/250px-Prey_2022_poster.png)
Blender Dumbass
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The Predator franchise started its life as a masculine super-macho, mega-violent little B-Movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. In my review of the first film, I even speculated, for a second, that it might have even been racist. Something that a certain side of political spectrum finds to be a quality of a movie. That certain side of the political spectrum really didn't get when Dan Trachtenberg decided, he is making a feminist, native-American movie in the same franchise.
#Prey #Predator #movies #review #film #cinemastodon #DanTrachtenberg
Transformers 4 is a ballsy brave film
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0f/Transformers_Age_of_Extinction_poster.jpg/220px-Transformers_Age_of_Extinction_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
π 43 β€ 1 π¬ 6
So here is a movie from Paramount Pictures that was executive produced by Steven Spielberg with Stanley Tucci playing a villain and Mark Wahlberg playing a dad of a teenage girl. The movie touches on very hard emotional topics of sexual abuse and age discrimination. And Peter Jackson does a very good job... Oh... wait... it's not The Lovely Bones... ah... yeah... so... Transformers: Age of Extinction!!!
#transformers #MichaelBay #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #MarkWahlberg #StanleyTucci #VFX #CGI
Peter Berg's Battleship 2012 is a strange mix of stupidity and amazingness
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6e/Battleship_Poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
π 11 β€ 3 π 1 π¬ 5
After Michael Bay made a hit out of Transformers, Hasbro ( who made the toys, Transformers were based on ) decided that it would be a good idea to make more, similar films, based on other Hasbro toys. So they chose to adopt, fucking Battleship. Really?
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Spaceballs takes the Jews vs Nazis theme to a whole new sexual climax
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/45/Spaceballs.jpg/250px-Spaceballs.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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Jewish filmmakers like to poke fun at Nazis. Spielberg did that with Indiana Jones and Mel Brooks does it here with Spaceballs. But unlike the original Star Wars for which Spaceballs is almost direct parody, Brooks goes onto another level to measure pipis with the Nazis.
#spaceballs #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #comedy #starwars #melbrooks
Mandy 2018 tries to out-do the weirdness of Only God Forgives
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/Mandy_%282018_film%29.png)
Blender Dumbass
π 14 β€ 1 π¬ 2
In 2019 on the Cannes film festival director Nicolas Winding Refn ( the director of the 2013 film Only God Forgives ) released episodes 4 and 5 of his ( then ) new multi-episode picture Too Old To Die Young. Episode 5 titled "The Fool" contains a car chase scene. Some argue it is one of the most romantic car chases in cinematic history. The joke is, that the car chase is set to a romantic Barry Manilow's 1974 hit "Mandy", making the juxtaposition rather hilarious in nature. But given the ass-born theory specialist that I am, I must suggest an interesting twist to this whole ordeal. During the principal photography of the first episode of Too Old To Die Young another film-maker Panos Cosmatos released a film, strangely similar in style to whatever Refn is doing. And his film was called Mandy. We can theorize that maybe Refn responded, in his strange way, recognizing the stylistic similarities, so to speak.
#mandy #nicolascage #panoscosmatos #nwr #horror #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Pearl Harbor 2001 made me cry for 3 hours straight
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3c/Pearl_harbor_movie_poster.jpg/250px-Pearl_harbor_movie_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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In my review of Bad Boys II I talked about how Michael Bay needed to discharge from Pearl Harbor and do a properly Bayhem! movie. This speculation of mine is largely based on some stories from the set of this movie, where it looked like Bay tried to actually make a properly directed film in the very beginning and then suddenly snapped and started setting up Bayhem! shots out of nowhere in the middle of production. And when people pointed that out to him he told them to "Shut the fuck up" and that he "knows what he is doing".
#PearlHarbor #MichaelBay #movies #film #review #cinemastodon
American Graffiti 1973 is some strong shit
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e6/American_graffiti_ver1.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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You will probably laugh at me right now, but so far I've seen 1973 George Lucas film American Graffiti just twice. First time I stopped at about 25 minute mark, not getting the hype around the movie. This time I decided to get through to the end, no matter what it takes. And believe me, if you are not laughing at me right now, you don't understand. This is fucked up! Holy fucking shit!!! I see it now!!! I see it!
#americanGrafitti #GeorgeLucas #HarrisonFord #movies #film #review #cinemastodon
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