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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.
#goneinsixtyseconds #nicolascage #angelinajolie #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Final Destination 3 is a return to form
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b2/Final_Destination_3.jpg)
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Final Destination 3 is yet again directed by James Wong who is a very needed return. The second movie in the franchise seemed almost like the parody of the genre. With the third film, came back the suspense and the good acting and most importantly, the movie suddenly hits again.
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Weapons 2025 should be nominated for best picture
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6d/Weapons_film_2025.jpeg/250px-Weapons_film_2025.jpeg)
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It is not often that a horror films appears to tickle the right nerves from the high-brow crowd of cinema critics. With 93% Rotten Tomatoes score though, it is safe to assume that Zach Cregger's Weapons from 2025 is one of those rare movies.
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The Disappointing Impressiveness of The Sugarland Express 1974
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Steven Spielberg's first true theatrical feature film The Sugarland Express didn't make much money. It was a minor success since with the budget of just 3 million dollars it was able to gather 12 million in box office. But it is nothing like his next film Jaws, which on a budget of just 9 million made a whopping 495 million in box office. Yet with all that said The Sugarland Express is still a very interesting movie to try to take apart.
#theSugarlandExpress #sugarland #spielberg #stevenspielberg #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Havoc ( 2025 ) is a pornographically satisfying violence movie
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Again I found a movie that makes me question my own ideas as a filmmaker. Havoc ( directed by Gareth Evans ) is so stylized and fucking awesome that they had to go a CGI route for a lot of the shots to even be possible in the first place. Which created a similar situation, which I discussed in my review of Shazam! 2.
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Red Heat 1988 is unintentionally funny for those who speak Russian
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Red_Heat.jpg/250px-Red_Heat.jpg)
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Our main character Ivan Danko ( Arnold Schwarzenegger ) is introduced with a shot showing his magnificent muscular butt-cheeks, right before a fight breaks out between naked men in the snow, all trying to scream words and sentences in Russian, sounding utterly stupid doing so. That is how Red Heat, a 1988 Walter Hill movie, begins.
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Le Dernier Combat 1983 doesn't need subtitles
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French 1983 Luc Besson film Le Dernier Combat has 2 spoken words throughout its 1 and a half hour runtime. Both of those words are Bonjour, which I bet you already know the meaning of. The film is about a post-apocalypse future where humans lost the ability to talk. The one time two characters in the film have an exchange of Bonjours doesn't even require the understanding of the word to get the impact. It's about them finally being able to utter a word. It is not about them exchanging information.
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What is the meaning of "The Lovely Bones" 2009 by Peter Jackson?
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In my review of Transformers 4 I touched upon the uncanny resemblance of it to Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones. I have not seen the movie when I did that. I knew it existed. I knew what it was about. I've only seen it now, for the first time. And the uncanny resemblance ( as in, the father is played once again by Mark Wahlberg and the villain is played once again by Stanley Tucci and we have Steven Spielberg's involvement ) is rather strange. It begs a rather profound question, what was the point to make the movie?
#TheLovelyBones #PeterJackson #SaoirseRonan #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Oe Uniltìrantokx säfpìl
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Troler
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Pamrel si tsawl tspang oe, kolan, ya Eyweveng txum. Oe plltxe, filesngä'i rel arusikx kan eltu lefngap reltseo kurfyavi tawtute nemfa srer rel arusikx smaw meoauniaea Na'visì atxkxe.
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Bronson 2008 is how you make a low budget film
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Having only a quarter of a million dollars, director Nicolas Winding Refn and actor Tom Hardy decided to make a period piece based on true events. Just so you know, period pieces are usually far more expensive to make than contemporary films. And yet they had almost nothing, in terms of budget to pull this movie off. How the hell did they do that?
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Black Hawk Down ( 2001 ) tries hard to beat Saving Private Ryan
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In 1998 Steven Spielberg shocked the cinematic frontier with his film Saving Private Ryan which had one of the most brutal depictions of warfare, with its opening battle-scene. This caused a small shift in the ways Hollywood was trying to cinematically portray war. And who's better than Ridley Scott, to attempt at beating Spielberg at war footage. Which he tried to do with his 2001 film Black Hawk Down.
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Why I'm Not Going to Watch Ice Cream Man ( 2026 ) ?
![[thumbnail]](/pictures/thumbs/icecreamman.png)
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If you ever read my reviews of films like Ballerina or Weapons or stuff like that, you know that I'm the kind of guy who should very much enjoy the bullshit that Eli Roth put into the trailer of his new movie Ice Cream Man that was just released into cinema. But you can also notice that it isn't a review. I have not seen Ice Cream Man and I will never see it. This is an article about why.
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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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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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