Blogocentric Formulations

Gone in 60 Seconds

"Blog Harbor from The Talent Pond"  PROMPT (DAY 9): Guilty Pleasure Day! What movie is your greatest guilty pleasure? The movie you know is terrible, but can't help watching every time you channel surf and happen across it? The movie you're almost afraid to admit you like, and yet find yourself popping in the DVD player or streaming a few times a year anyway? Confess your guilty pleasure and tell us what you like about it!


This prompt ended up being a lot harder than I thought because the movies that immediately came to mind for me were either bad movies I like but don't really make an effort to watch and haven't seen in years (Men At Work), or are cheesy but are actually decent movies (True Lies). So does one to do when one needs to find a movie that's so bad it's worth one's time to watch it over and over again? One turns to Nicolas Cage, that's what one does.

Gone in 60 Seconds is everything you want in a turn-of-the-millennium guilty pleasure movie. It's a heist (gasp!). It's got fast cars (vroom!). It's got Angelina Jolie cashing in on her post-Oscar buzz (sure she's just playing the same edgy character she always plays, but you guys... this time she's blonde!). It's got cameos from excellent actors either on the rise or on the decline (Robert Duvall! Delroy Lindo! Will Patton! Christopher Eccleston!). And, perhaps most importantly, it has completely nonsensical plot points that are only there to look cool:

This is the perfect encapsulation of why this movie is the perfect guilty pleasure, so let's spend a couple minutes breaking it down, shall we? Please note that some salty language will be used below... but this blog is rated 18+ so you all know what you're in for.

First, it's undeniably fun to watch. A thrumming techno beat under some stylish camera work and quick cutting. It's an exciting scene to watch.

Then, even though he's being chased by four police cars coming at him from two different directions, nobody seems to be able to stop him from power sliding and gear-shifting around them. But, hey, a lot of action movies make the cops look like teenagers who just got their learner's permits. It's fine. Moving on.

Oh look, he's decided to drive down into the Los Angeles River channel. Maybe it's just me, but when you're being chased by the cops maybe the best route isn't one that's (a) out in the open, (b) clearly only goes in one direction, and (c) dead ends in the fucking ocean. I mean, it's just begging for the cops to outmaneuver him by...

Calling in a helicopter air unit! I mean, this guy's screwed now, right? They've got cops cars on his tail, an air unit monitoring progress from above so he can't disappea-- wait, why is that helicopter only twenty feet off the ground?

Seriously it's barely any more airborne than the cop cars!

And it just went under the bridge instead of over it like a normal helicopter.

"Don't lose him, Air One!" / "This is an A-Star, sir, not an Apache!"

YOU DON'T NEED AN APACHE YOU JUST NEED TO BE MORE THAN TWENTY FEET OFF THE FUCKING GROUND

"He's gone!"

Oh no! If only they had some means of tracking him... perhaps some sort of aerial craft for a bird's eye view, like a hot air balloon! And if only they could narrow down the list of places he could be going... like the actual ocean at the end, or the small handful of places where there's an egress from the river channel.

And then it ends with a great one liner.

"Man this guy can drive! ... It's probably mostly the car."

I'm not sure "going fast in a relatively straight line" qualifies as driving excellence, but sure Timothy Olyphant, let's go with that.

Okay, so here's the thing. What makes this a true guilty pleasure is that, as infuriating as that scene is (seriously, watch it if you haven't by this point)... I still watched it like half a dozen times as I was writing this blog post. And I'm probably going to watch it a couple more times after I post it. And then I'm probably going to go down a rabbit hole and watch a whole bunch of other clips from this movie on YouTube.

My second choice would have been National Lampoon's Van Wilder, where Ryan Reynolds got his start. And, incidentally, my third and fourth choices for the subject of this blog post were Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie movies (Face/Off and Hackers, respectively), but it was much for fun to live-rant about a car chase than a computer hacking sequence, or doing a Venn Diagram of Nic Cage and John Travolta acting eccentricities. Actually, that last one sounds kinda fun...