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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
How an Industry Was Created for a Single Film, The Glassworker (2024)
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dc/The_Glassworker_Official_Poster_2024.png)
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Suppose you live in a war torn country, where there are military stops in every major road. The economy is in shambles and there's a smell of gunpowder in the air. The people go to watch low budget produced films and are most valued in the global market for the cheap labor.
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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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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)
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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
Con Air 1997 is Bayhem! but Rick-Rolled
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1d/Conairinternational.jpg)
Blender Dumbass
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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
Domino 2005 is Tony-Scott-hem!
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/10/Dominoposter.jpg/250px-Dominoposter.jpg)
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Tony Scott appeared to be trying to outgrow Michael Bay in the 2000s. In 2001 he does Spy Game which is a kind of slightly bayhem-ish movie. Where Tony Scott is no longer trying to make pretty pictures, but is trying to go for ultimate intensity. His Enemy of the State before that, is still more of a classic Tony Scott. While making Spy Game his brother Ridley Scott was making Black Hawk Down while Michael Bay was making Pearl Harbor. While Pearl Harbor has the Bay's explosions and stuff, the colors of the film still look relatively normal. Only his next film ( 2003 Bay Boys II ) go crazy with colors. Spy Game, while being more energetic in directing and editing department, than even Enemy of the State still looks like a normal movie, albeit it is a little desaturated. But Black Hawk Down ( probably in attempt of messing with Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan ) is super moody, with extreme contrast and intense colors. A thing that Michael Bay tries to replicate right away for Bad Boys II and then Tony Scott also replicated for Man on Fire in 2004. And then on Domino in 2005, Tony Scott goes even harder with the style. While Bay is doing roughly the same thing in his own way in The Island.
#Domino #TonyScott #MichaelBay #movies #film #review #cinemastodon
Final Destination 2 is a parody of itself
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/dd/Final_destination_two.jpg)
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The second installment in the Final Destination saga is different from the first film. While the first film was breathing mystery and suspense, this time around, the film feels almost like a slapstick comedy, if not for the gruesome deaths.
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The Eight Wonder of Cinema is King Kong 1933
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f3/Kingkongposter.jpg)
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👁 6 ❤ 1 🔄 1 💬 3
The 1933 film itself is not too special. For its time, there's a lot to laud. Comparing what Peter Jackson would do later, there's night and day. I do not mean the special effects, which are exceptional.
#KingKong #MerianCCooper #FayWray #RobertArmstrong #BruceCabot #MaxSteiner #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" 2005 is too epic to be scary
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/83/War_of_the_Worlds_2005_poster.jpg/250px-War_of_the_Worlds_2005_poster.jpg)
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In the recent "lie detector test" video of the legendary Fanning sisters, it was revealed that Elle Fanning was indeed jealous of her sister Dakota Fanning, when Tom Cruise gifted her a fancy mobile phone back in 2005. Why would Tom Cruise gift anything to a ( then ) 10 year old girl? Well Tom and Dakota were the two leads of the 2005 science fiction horror film by Steven Spielberg called War of the Worlds.
#WarOfTheWorlds #TomCruise #DakotaFanning #StevenSpielberg #film #review #movies #cinemastodon
Man of fire toasts Bad Boys 2
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e8/Man_on_fireposter.jpg)
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Bad Boys 2 is Michael Bay's most Bayhem! film. Man of fire is a huge leap in Tony Scott's directorial career. It is depressive, slow, simple, yet affective. It is both flashy and gruesomely slow. It is both overly edited and undercut.
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Is Strange Days 1995 about James Cameron's personal life?
![[thumbnail]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0c/Strangedays.jpeg)
Blender Dumbass
👁 18 💬 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
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)
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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...
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