Irwin Winkler
11 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
The other film it brings to mind isn’t a classic thriller but the 1995 movie The Net , in which Sandra Bullock plays an isolated systems analyst who socializes online and orders pizza off a website, behavior that’s entirely commonplace now but was presented at the time as the height of disconnection.
Kimi is ultimately a very basic thriller built on threads from far better ones ( Blow Out , The Conversation , The Net , 1995; Copycat , 1995; Intruders , 2015) but it’s a blue-haired Kravitz that keeps viewers fixated.
Essentially, Kimi is Rear Window meets The Net, set during the COVID pandemic.
Again, the smart devices of the movie aren’t the canvas that the film is painted on - it’s not The Net - but objects placed in the portrait.
Simple, personal stories can work on the big screen if there are elements of greatness in them (i.e., American Beauty ).
George's personal journey is often put on the back burner in favor of sexual hijinks reminiscent of both "American Beauty" and "Three's Company."
He might as well be talking about this film, a weepy melodrama/comedy that is not only the most transparently obvious movie in recent memory, but it also swipes heavily from "The Ice Storm" and "American Beauty."
Engaging, metaphor-laden, dysfunctional family drama with a strong resemblance to American Beauty – it succeeds in (narrowly) avoiding the pitfalls of sentimental weepie-dom largely thanks to the quality of its performances.
There are eerie shadowings of American Beauty at work here, from the premise of a man near the end of his life trying to live it to the fullest to the final existentialist voice over and all the quirky twists in between.
Like American Beauty only cuter, it follows a man's mid-life crisis and ensuing rebirth (in this case, precipitated by a terminal illness), as well as his reconnection with maladjusted son (Hayden Christensen, a.k.a.
Just as the cheesy 1995 Sandra Bullock drama "The Net" reflected a sense of the unknown associated with the evolution of technological communication, "Transcendence" implies that the machines have irrevocably changed our relationship to reality in ways we have only begun to fathom.
But in “Transcendence,” which might have been titled “Him,” it’s very much back to square one: the culture of technophobia that gave us the predatory mainframes and cyborgs of “2001,” “Demon Seed” and “Alien,” and that early ’90s wave of cyber-paranoia thrillers (“The Net,” “The Lawnmower Man,” “Virtuosity”) that now seem as quaint as dial-up Internet.
There have been quite a number of movies dealing with the negative fallout from cyborgs including 2001 , Demon Seed , The Net , and Virtuosity.
As with 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix and–unintentionally hilariously–The Net, Transcendence envisions this dire cyberpunk future in an effort to freak you out like a plus sign on a home pregnancy test.
Those pesky neo-Luddites, led by Kate Mara (whose character seems primarily defined by her smoky eye makeup), kidnap Max and pinpoint the location of the system, but Evelyn manages to save Computer Will by uploading him to the Internet, where he is able to access everyone and everything, which throws the movie into a tailspin of Jaron Lanier-style technological paranoia, wrapped up in an understanding of “being online” that’s barely more sophisticated than that of The Net.
When all that fails, Antwan takes a fire ax to the server room, which strikes me as one of those Hollywood conceits — like the virus in Sandra Bullock thriller “The Net” melting the screens of every computer it infects — that the filmmakers have embellished to make a thoroughly uncinematic geek concept more exciting.
And, let’s face it, in five years this movie will be as outdated as Sandra Bullock’s “The Net.”
The game gets as big as The Game and the dark web that runs it is as easily accessible as The Net.
So observed Roger Ebert upon the release of The Net, almost 20 years to the day before that of the social media thriller Nerve.
He's a renowned producer who's been behind some terrific movies over the years, everything from "Rocky" (1976) to "Raging Bull" (1980) to "The Right Stuff" (1983).
Cineast Factor: Irwin Winkler produced Rocky, Raging Bull, The Right Stuff and Goodfellas.
In 1995, when Sandra Bullock appeared in "The Net," the World Wide Web was new enough that audiences could be creeped out by the film's techno-paranoia.
The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
Directed by Derek Cianfrance
influenced by Life as a House (2001)
Characters
DeHaan where’s every ounce of pain on his face, similar to Hayden Christiansen in Life as a House (2001).
“The Matrix Resurrections” is part ’90s cyberpunk (remember “Hackers,” “The Net” and “Johnny Mnemonic,” which also features our beloved Keanu Reeves ?), part zombie flick and part ’20s bracing critique of internet corporate overlords like Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Here, it casts a Net for the Clueless crowd, with a tale of teen screen jockeys who must, I kid you not, “pool their resources to battle The Plague, a master hacker” who has framed them “in a diabolical industrial conspiracy.”
Columbia/TriStar's 2002 "Special Edition" ($24.95) disc comes with two commentary tracks, a boring one by director Irwin Winkler and producer Rob Cowan and a terrific one by screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris (The Game and Terminator III), plus two featurettes, trailers and filmographies.
The Net’s screenplay, by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, was probably as intelligent and exciting as their screenplay for the excellent David Fincher thriller The Game.
Another asset is its literate and sophisticated dialogue (by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote "The Net" ) reminiscent of Stanley Donen's "Charade" (written by the estimable Peter Stone).
The screenplay, by the folks who brought you The Net (with an apparent polish by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker), is effective but irritatingly simplistic.