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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
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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.
#goneinsixtyseconds #nicolascage #angelinajolie #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Alita: Battle Angel is Robert Rodriguez's Pearl Harbor
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/ee/Alita_Battle_Angel_%282019_poster%29.png)
Blender Dumbass
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In my review of Michael Bay's Bad Boys II I brought up an interesting theory people have about the film. The amount of Bayhem! it holds in could be a direct response to the out-of-the-comfort-zone feel Bay must have had experienced making Pearl Harbor. Basically, the film was so different from what Bay usually does, he had to crank the next movie's Bayhem! up to 11, to make it feel right again. After Robert Rodriguez directed Alita: Battle Angel with an estimated budget of about $200 million, he had to come back to his comfort-zone too. And 3 months later ( that same year in 2019 ) he released Red 11. A micro-budgeted horror film made on almost exactly $7,000.
#alita #alitabattleangel #robertrodriguez #jamescameron #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
The Killing of a Sacred Deer 2017 is Yorgos Lanthimos's attempt to show Lars Von Trier how to properly corrupt the audience
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8f/The_Killing_of_a_Sacred_Deer.png)
Blender Dumbass
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I was afraid of 2017 absurdist horror film by Yorgos Lanthimos The Killing of a Sacred Deer, because I know it involves a murder of a child. Ever since Lars Von Trier utterly traumatized me with his depiction of this very thing in The House That Jack Built I avoid movies like this. But seeing Bugonia the other day, where I attempted to psycho-sexually analyse Lanthimos, I realized that I avoided a movie that potentially has a lot of what I need for such an analysis. So I braved myself and saw the damn film. Now I think the film was about corrupting the audience enough that they would feel good about a child being murdered. I'm not joking. That is how the movie is structured.
#thekillingofthesacreddeer #YorgosLanthimos #horror #film #movies #review #cinemastodon
Superman 2025 has not enough Hawkgirl
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/32/Superman_%282025_film%29_poster.jpg/250px-Superman_%282025_film%29_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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I love Isabela Merced. Ever since I saw her being this absolutely amazing girl in Michael Bay's Transformers 5 where there isn't enough of her either, I was a fan. I even genuinely tried to like Madame Web because of her part in it. And so it was rather disappointing to see how little screen-time she has in the new 2025 James Gunn film Superman. In case you didn't understand the title, she plays Hawkgirl.
#Superman #DCU #JamesGunn #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
So Did Avatar 3 Use AI?
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/avatar_ai.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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While James Cameron has denied that Avatar 3: Fire and Ash used any generative AI. On January 24, 2026 Joe Letteri ( the visual effect supervisor from Weta Digital ) sat with the Corridor Crew for their weekly show of VFX Artists React where he said that the facial animation for the hero characters for both Avatar 2 and 3 involved a neural network. A neural network? Isn't that a fancy way to say "AI"?
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Was the 2014 "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" directed by Michael Bay?
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/09/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_film_July_2014_poster.jpg/250px-Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles_film_July_2014_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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While Steven Spielberg was producing a Michael Bay film Transformers 4, Michael Bay was producing a Jonathan Liebesman 2014 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And like with a Spielberg-produced film The Poltergeist by Tobe Hooper about which people started claiming that Spielberg himself directed the movie in question. With the 2014 TMNT people started claiming Michael Bay was the actual director on this film. It is absolutely and utterly poetic that both Tobe Hooper and Jonathan Liebesman also made movies in the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise.
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Piranha II 1982 taught James Cameron how not to make sequels
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f1/Piranha_II_-_The_Spawning_%28movie_poster%29.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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We all know that James Cameron is a master when it comes to making sequels. His films like Terminator 2, Avatar 2 and Aliens are extremely good examples of how to make a sequel right. Unlike Steven Spielberg that avoids sequels. Steven avoided doing the second Jaws movie. James Cameron goes for it and wins. Speaking of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, not only sequels from that film were produced. Rip-offs, like the 1978 Piranha by Joe Dante also were produced. Those were parody material B-movie exploitation films. And so writer / director James Cameron decided to take the project of making a sequel to that Jaws rip-off, with his 1982 Piranha II: The Spawning.
#Piranha2 #JamesCameron #horror #movies #review #film #cinemastodon
One Battle After Another 2025 is PTA doing a Machete remake
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5d/One_Battle_After_Another.jpg/250px-One_Battle_After_Another.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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In my review of Robert Rodriguez's film Machete Kills I speculated that Quentin Tarantino introduced a small reference to Grindhouse movies in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood to fulfill a rather outlandish promise from the fake trailer of Machete 3 in the beginning of Machete Kills. That there would be a Grindhouse movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. I think Paul Thomas Anderson just beat Tarantino in this regard. His 2025 film One Battle After Another ( starring DiCaprio ) is a straight up remake of the first Machete.
#OneBattleAfterAnother #PaulThomasAnderson #LeonardoDiCaprio #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
No wonder The Fabelmens takes place in the desert
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/Troler/0SUX9D9NIS9XH9EH.jpg)
Troler
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In the year 2022 Steven Spielberg directed a film about his own life, in a little known feature The Fabelmans. Although not a full documentary, it's semi-fictional nature was still education. The movie was teaching the audience how to make movies, how a single spark of The Greatest Show on Earth inspired Spielberg to become a director.
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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.
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Her Private Hell 2026 is once again a reason to look into NWR's psycho-sexuality
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Nicolas Winding Refn appears to be incapable of making a movie that I don't want to analyze psycho-sexually. I would say more than that. I would say, that given the nature of his 2026 film Her Private Hell, we can assume, it is a direct sequel to his 2016's masterpiece The Neon Demon ( which I thoroughly psycho-sexually analyzed ) and a movie he made just before that Only God Forgives ( that deserves its fair share of analysis ). So...
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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
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
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