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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
Is Strange Days 1995 about James Cameron's personal life?
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Strangedays.jpeg)
Blender Dumbass
π 18 π¬ 2
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...
#strangedays #KathrynBigelow #jamescameron #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
True Lies 1994 is James Cameron doing a Michael Bay movie
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/81/True_Lies_poster.png)
Blender Dumbass
π 11 π¬ 1
1994 film True Lies feels like watching a James Cameron directed Michael Bay movie. It has explosions, check, it has outlandish set pieces, check, it has beautiful shots of the military, check, it has sexy ladies, check, it has teenagers with an attitude, check. It is a Michael Bay movie through and through. Yet it is a James Cameron movie, so what happened?
#TrueLies #JamesCameron #ArnoldSchwarzenegger #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
American Graffiti 1973 is some strong shit
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e6/American_graffiti_ver1.jpg)
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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
The Odyssey to see The Odyssey (2026)
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/Troler/YVK9X1UWS9TUUQWG.png)
Troler
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As it is, the movie is infused with Nolan realism. Everything is serious and grim. The contrast between mythological events and reality creates this clash. I have not seen Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy, so I cannot tell how much of this juxtaposition has existed before. Still, the contrast of what I saw on screen and how the movie portrayed such events, threw me off the loop.
#theodyssey #christophernolan #LudwigGoransson #AnneHathaway #MattDamon #RobertPattinson #Batman #odyssey #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Pulp Fiction 1994 is kind a amateurish actually
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/3b/Pulp_Fiction_%281994%29_poster.jpg/250px-Pulp_Fiction_%281994%29_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
π 4 π 75 β€ 4 π 2 π¬ 2
Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary at some point in their early film-maker lives came up with a bunch of tiny little stories that they wanted to develop into movies. And one day a stroke of genius struck these two. Those little stories could be told together as one film, with interconnected characters. Quentin took off with the concept and wrote the final script. And then took off with said final script and made the movie itself. A movie that a lot of people consider to be one of the greatest masterpieces ever made. Yet, with that, re-watching it for this review, it struck me how amateurish the movie feels, despite its greatness.
One of things that slightly annoyed me on this re-watch...
#pulpfiction #film #review #cinemastodon #movies #quentintarantino #tarantino #stevenspielberg #spielberg
Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen - made me cry
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cb/TF2SteelPoster.jpg/250px-TF2SteelPoster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
π 12
It is infamous at this point that the production of the Michael Bay quickly assembled into something from which a good script could be written. This movie started production without a script, only a rough idea of the story, which is not a bad rough idea. But all of the little details were not there at all by the time of production, leaving Bay pretty much at the helm of coming up with stuff on the spot.
#transformers #revengeofthefallen #michaelbay #film #review #cinemastodon #movies
Rush 2013 is not the same as F1 2025
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d0/Rush_UK_poster.jpeg)
Blender Dumbass
π 13
After seeing a somewhat of a racing movie called American Graffiti starring Ron Howard, the next movie to watch was an obvious choice. A directed by Ron Howard 2013 racing film called Rush, which might feel like a predecessor of 2025's Joseph Kosinski film F1. But watching it I found this movie to be closer to Scorsese's The Wolf Of Wall Street rather than F1.
#rush #racing #ronhoward #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
The Voice of Hind Rajab or how a 5 year old was shot
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b5/The_Voice_of_Hind_Rajab_film_poster.jpg)
Troler
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The heart was blackened with tears from Kaouther Ben Hania's feature film The Voice of Hind Rajab. The choice of the story being told about Hind Rami Iyad Rajab was lead by the individual need to speak out. The director wasn't the only one to do so in big screen form.
#TheVoiceofHindRajab #Hind_Rajab #MotazMalhees #KaoutherBenHania #HindRajab #film #review #movies #horror #cinemastodon
13 Hours is Michael Bay at his most serious
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a2/13_Hours_poster.png/250px-13_Hours_poster.png)
Blender Dumbass
π 13 β€ 1 π¬ 6
There are two modes for Michael Bay: The playful mode of him having fun. This is the Bay of Bad Boys and Transformers. And a serious mode. That is the Michael Bay of films like Ambulance, Pearl Harbor and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. The latter of which is his most serious film ever.
#MichaelBay #13Hours #Benghazi #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #juliabutters
Hot Fuzz 2007 shows that Edgar Wright understands Michael Bay
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c9/HotFuzzUKposter.jpg/250px-HotFuzzUKposter.jpg)
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π 32 π¬ 4
Edgar Wright with his 2017 film Baby Driver shows that he can make some awesome clean action if he wants to. And yet watching his 2007 film Hot Fuzz you feel like something isn't quite wright. The camera is too shaky and the editing is too quick. Is he trying to "hide something"? No! He simply imitates Michael Bay, that's all.
#hotfuzz #edgarwright #michaelbay #movies #film #review #comedy #cinemastodon
The Taking of Pelham 123 ( 2009 ) is Tony Scott continuing to mess with Michael Bay
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cf/Taking_of_Pelham_123_%282009_film%29.jpg/250px-Taking_of_Pelham_123_%282009_film%29.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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Tony Scott's 2009 film The Taking of Pelham 123 is a remake of a 1998 TV movie with same name, which is a remake of a 1974 movie with the same name, which is an adaptation of a 1973 book, with the same name. Strangely enough, apart from Denzel Washington playing the hero and John Travolta playing the villain, the film also prominently shows John Turturro and RamΓ³n RodrΓguez which, the same year, also appeared in a Michael Bay film Transformens 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
#TheTakingofPelhamOneTwoThree #TonyScott #movies #review #film #cinemastodon
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