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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
👁 11 💬 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
Iron Lung undersells itself
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Iron_Lung_%28film%29_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 22 ❤ 4 🔄 2 💬 4
Watching the trailer of Markiplier's Iron Lung movie made a certain type of impression on me. The movie is obviously low budget. The set looks hilarious ( outside of the context or the source material ). And shot choices look rather amateurish. Watching Iron Lung itself, on the other hand, makes me believe that Mark Fischbach ( Markiplier ), the writer and director of this movie, had a cinematic Ace up his sleeve. And he was just playing the long game.
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Citizen Kane feels like a Scorsese picture
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c0/Citizen_Kane_poster%2C_1941_%28Style_B%2C_unrestored%29.jpg/250px-Citizen_Kane_poster%2C_1941_%28Style_B%2C_unrestored%29.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 10 💬 1
Orson Welles ( born in 1915 ) being a 25 - 26 year old flipped the cinematic landscape upside down with his 1941 black and white film Citizen Kane. A film that feels like a mandatory watch for anybody who is even remotely interested in cinema. People say that Citizen Kane is the best film ever made and stuff. Almost forcing that film onto people in an uncomfortable way. Making you be sure that it is some sort of experimental, black and white extravaganza that you will not understand. And that it is way too old, for today's audience, to enjoy. And that to appreciate the qualities of the film, one needs to learn some academic bullshit and pay very strong attention, to try to understand why back in 1941 critics specifically, might have liked what they saw. The thought of watching Citizen Kane feels like homework. But then you actually watch it.
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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
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)
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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.
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Angel's egg boils my heart
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/user_upload/Troler/Y1NOR6V3VL1PHG3L.png)
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👁 18 ❤ 1 💬 3
It is far too easy to drown in the flow of information we have to endure. Most with to take a break from it by rejecting it all together. I say, one ought to train themselves by entertaining to a slow dance. It can be a book, or... a movie. One of such movies is Angel's Egg
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Madame Web 2024 feels like it had potential
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/f/f0/Madame_Web_%28film%29_poster.jpg/250px-Madame_Web_%28film%29_poster.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 18 💬 1
Having a sort of a cyber-crush on Isabela Merced to the point I watched her Dora the Explorer movie made me okay with putting one of the most hated movies of 2024, S. J. Clarkson's Madame Web. One more interesting thing is that me and my girlfriend ( who is okay with me having a crush on Merced ) were discussing the American Eagle commercials and how maybe she ( my girlfriend ) looks a bit like Sydney Sweeney which also appears in this film. So I had two very strange reasons to give this movie a try. And I think this movie had potential.
#madameweb #spiderman #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Magnolia 1999 is Paul Thomas Anderson asking you to respect the kids
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4b/Magnolia_poster.png)
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I have a fear about my current movie project that is not entirely unfounded. If everything works out as it should and I get to the point of pre-production, I might need to hire a good lawyer. The script has major roles for children, but due to the child-labor laws, the money for such roles is paid to the parents and not the children themselves. I want to come up with a way to make it so the kids are the ones that control the money. Otherwise I fear, the parents will steal it from them. Kind of like what we see in the 1999 film Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson.
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She Rides Shotgun 2025 is a hidden gem of near perfection
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/7d/She_Rides_Shotgun_poster.jpg/250px-She_Rides_Shotgun_poster.jpg)
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I'm furious! How the fuck nobody knows about the 2025 Nick Rowland film She Rides Shotgun starring Ana Sophia Heger and Taron Egerton? What the fuck is this? This movie is so good, yet because studio-heads apparently didn't get it, there was no advertising for it. And only a limited theatrical run. Which resulted in very little people seeing the damn film in the cinema. This fucking film! Are you fucking kidding me? They have fucking best picture Oscar material, and yet they try to hide it from everybody? What the fuck is wrong with you, Lionsgate? Fuck!
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Dream Scenario 2023 is about Richard Stallman?
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Kristoffer Borgli's 2023 film Dream Scenario starring Nicolas Cage is a movie about a man, who is being dreamed about by a lot of people. At first his family have weird dreams about him. Then people related to them. Then the whole world. At first the dreams make him famous. But then they take a turn for the worst. At first he is just doing nothing in those dreams. Then he is being a creep. And then he literally murders people in those dreams. Which makes the public, in the real life, react to him with greater and greater rivalry. Apart from, for some reason, people in France.
#DreamScenario #NicolasCage #film #review #movies #cinemastodon #RichardStallman #RMS
Déjà Vu 2006 is Tony Scott's Minority Report
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cf/DejaVuBigPoster.jpg)
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Tony Scott famously didn't care about the time travel plot of Déjà Vu which freaked out the writers of the film. As they said, he cared more about the action and surveillance aspects of the movie. He famously cared a lot about surveillance, as visible from his previous Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration Enemy of the State. And that means, that a sort of sci-fi surveillance movie, marks Déjà Vu as the closest thing Tony Scott did to Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.
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Rush 2013 is not the same as F1 2025
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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.
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Black Swan 2010 is Aronofsky trying to outcompete Charlie Kaufman
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Black_Swan_poster.jpg)
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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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