Jan de Bont
58 connections found
View:
Connections, in both directions
Sonic the Hedgehog is The screenplay by Patrick Casey and Josh Miller has a few funny lines and references for adults, i.e. when Sonic spies on Tom and his wife while they watch Speed.
He learns human behavior by watching action movies, so his idea of life on earth is informed by "Speed" and the "Fast and the Furious" saga.
Sonic hides out near the local sheriff, Tom Wachowski (James Marsden), and his wife (Tika Sumpter), essentially acting like their invisible child as they relax at home and have movie nights where they watch films like Speed and The Naked Gun.
Gamely voiced by comedian Ben Schwartz (perhaps best known for playing Jean-Ralphio in TV's Parks and Recreation ), Sonic makes a cutely cartoonish hero as we find him alone on Earth, forced to watch his favourite movie ( Speed – what else?) through other folks' windows.
When the couple sit down to watch Speed —subtle!—there’s Sonic watching from the outside of their living room window.
He observes them from a distance, becoming an invisible part of their routines, such as watching TV reruns of Keanu Reeves in Speed – natch.
I actually stopped documenting the movie's deluge of references after about 30 minutes, but here's a shortlist of some of the stuff that the Friedberg and Seltzer send up: 10,000 B.C., American Gladiators, Amy Winehouse, Facebook, Flava Flav, My Super Sweet 16, Dr. Phil, No Country For Old Men, Superbad/ McLovin, Angelina Jolie in Wanted, WWE Divas, Juno, High School Musical, Kanye West, the Jonas Brothers, the "Souljah Boy" dance, Justin Timberlake, Hannah Montana, Hancock, Sex and the City, Jumper, Step Up 2: The Streets, Twister (notice - the first actual disaster movie of the bunch), Hellboy, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Cloverfield.
You would think a motion picture called “Disaster Movie” would actually focus on films that have plots revolving around disasters, but aside from a few brief nods to “Cloverfield,” “The Day After Tomorrow” and “Twister,” it's just an onslaught of no-name cast members (What does it tell you when Kim Kardashian and Carmen Electra are probably the best known thespians in the bunch?) going through re-creations of scenes from unrelated movies.
The film's basic structure parallels Cloverfield (which sort of qualifies), and there's a reference to Twister -- from 12 years ago -- and the only joke is that a tornado keeps throwing cows around.
The targets for “Disaster” hold little surprise: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” “Sex and the City,” “Juno” (I thought that was already a lampoon), “Step Up 2 the Streets,” “Enchanted,” “Twister” (yeah, take that 1996!), “Beowulf,” “Speed Racer,” “The Love Guru,” “Hellboy II,” “Hancock,” and “Get Smart.”
The story can be described in two ways: as a rip-off of Only Angels Have Wings, in which Paxton's implausibly intuitive tornado expert is torn between two women, his ex (Hunt) and his fiancée (Gertz), and two lives, a safe weatherman job, or a risky return to the group of crazily devoted storm-chasers trying to get a gizmo up inside a twister's 'suck-zone'; or as a repetitive spectacle where all that happens is that the objects hurled around in the air simply get bigger.
The film lifts its romantic melodramatics of the adventurer hero torn between two lovelies from "Only Angels Have Wings."
Forget the many redundant references to The Wizard of Oz, this hasn't a fraction of that movie's logic, imagination or ambitions.
They also drop so many references to The Wizard of Oz that families can make a game of counting them.
Bill Paxton's tornado measuring machine is named Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz, naturally), lines of dialogue are lifted from Star Wars ("that's no moon, that's a space station"), and Repo Man ("normal people spend their lives avoiding tense situations, Repo Man spends his life trying to get into tense situations.")
A cinematographer for more than 30 years, De Bont has worked frequently with fellow Dutchman Paul Verhoeven and has been behind the camera on such big-time action pictures as "Die Hard," "The Hunt for Red October," "Black Rain" and "Lethal Weapon 3."
"Speed," directed by Jan De Bont (cinematographer on "Die Hard" and "Lethal Weapon 3"), isn't a movie so much as a driver's-seat video game.
First-time director De Bont (cameraman of Die Hard and Basic Instinct) makes good use of a hand-held camera and conveys a real sense of volition: you'll believe a bus can fly!
Yes, it's "Die Hard" on a bus, but that's a pretty good bloodline.
He conspicuously lacks charm -- he has none of the bemused irony that made Alan Rickman's terrorist so deliciously attractive in "Die Hard."
The directorial debut of acclaimed cinematographer Jan De Bont, Speed--made for the paltry (considering the complexity of the shoot: real elevator shafts; real freeway lanes; real subway cars) sum of $28 million--is nothing less than a thing of alchemy: De Bont would go on to helm the abominations Twister, Speed 2: Cruise Control, and The Haunting ; screenwriter Graham Yost (son of TVOntario's "Saturday Night at the Movies" host Elwy Yost) subsequently scripted Broken Arrow (John Woo's worst film) and Hard Rain (a steaming turd); Reeves and Bullock last gave us Sweet November and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood , respectively; and if the sub-genre of Die Hard rip-offs had run its course by the time Speed came around, consider that Speed is, after all, Die Hard on a bus, a claustrophobic one-man-against-one-terrorist-in-a-limited-location thriller.
“Unstoppable” is, of course, reminiscent of the 1994 smash, “Speed.”
Contrast “Unstoppable” to “Speed”, where Jan de Bont shows Keanu’s bus zipping by other cars and buildings to show us just how fast this crazy thing is going.
Likely to replace "Runaway Train" (the 1985 thriller about escaped convicts onboard an unmanned and brake-less train) in the minds of most viewers in terms of this sub-genre of the action field, but not quite as fun, exciting or entertaining as that other transportation thriller, "Speed," this one delivers as needed.
But since Washington is Washington and Scott is Scott and Hollywood is Hollywood, Unstoppable feels strictly old hat: Speed with a train, located in Scott's tiresomely hyperactive, tirelessly dumb oeuvre of high-tech "man caves" and pointless snap zooms.
Unstoppable is like Speed for a new generation and it makes for some of the most thrilling 100 minutes you’ll experience in 2011, I’m sure of it.
Even in a movie like “Twister”, there’s stupid Cary Elwes in his black van and his polo for Bill Paxton to worry about (I’ve tried to think of non-Jan de Bont films, but movies based on “things” seems to be his thing).
Like a cross between "D.O.A." and "Speed" with a little bit of "Oldboy" and Michael Douglas' "Falling Down" thrown in for good measure, the directorial debut of commercial directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor is certainly not like the action movies we see every year.
Crank can’t match the sustained conceptual ingenuity of its inspirations, namely Speed and D.O.A.—hell, I’m not even sure if its makers could successfully spell D.O.A.—but the amount of stylish carnage on display generates its own cheerfully moronic slipstream.
It’s kind of like D.O.A. meets Speed, only instead of a bus it’s Statham’s one-man wrecking crew that has to keep moving.
The plot of the action/revenge-thriller "Crank" is very similar to the 1994 hit "Speed."
Their intent is an updated "Speed," with star Jason Statham ("The Transporter") replacing both Keanu Reeves and the bus.
It seems like more of a movie pitch (D.O.A. meets Speed) than a movie, but Crank gets by on a unique kind of absurd, deadpan humor in which the most implausible stuff cheerfully happens anyway.
Phone Booth, a sort of Speed-meets-Twelve Angry Men, is kept basically within the confines of a single "room" and focuses on a life-or-death dynamic between two men, one of whom is a psychopath with a dangerous weapon.
You know the creative well has run dry when a cinematic high concept amounts to Speed in a phone booth.
Phone Booth takes the formula of Die Hard and Speed, in which the protagonist is trapped in a confined space by a wily psychopath with whom he communicates only by phone (or walkie-talkie), to its narrowest physical dimensions yet.
On one level, it's amazing that a movie about a man being trapped inside a phone booth could be successful, but Phone Booth works for many of the same reasons that Speed does - the script takes a seemingly dead-end premise and keeps throwing in new twists.
No, they're for brooding, and Vic's hobby of snail care is meant to give him a dark, mysterious side, but all it ends up drawing is parallels to Willem Dafoe's character's fondness for leeches in "Speed 2: Cruise Control."
Though it borrows liberally and distractingly from many genre touchstones, the film that Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula most explicitly and inadvertently recalls is Speed 2: Cruise Control.
In one scene, a twister rips apart a drive-in playing The Shining, and Helen Hunt's aunt watches Judy Garland in A Star Is Born on TV.
And in action terms, there isn't a moment in this hackneyed melodrama that De Bont and scriptwriter Graham Yost haven't lifted from other, more successful movies, including "In the Line of Fire," "Die Hard" (both 1 and 2), "The Fugitive" and the Gene Hackman runaway-train movie, "Narrow Margin."
(Op cit, "Narrow Margin," "Thunderball," "Patriot Games," "In the Line of Fire," to name but a few.)
…it's like The Wages of Fear redone at roller-coaster tempo.
The result is clean, delirious, and, yes, speedy—the best big-vehicle-in-peril movie since Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear.”
And if that's not enough to unnerve those multiplex viewers expecting a thriller starring J-Law, there's also a vaginal opening in the floorboards that oozes blood, while a beating heart seems to emanate from within the walls of the house, locating this bare, cavernous abode in the same spooky neighbourhood as The Overlook Hotel in The Shining or Hill House in Shirley Jackson's seminal novel The Haunting Of Hill House (and Robert Wise's terrifying 1963 adaptation The Haunting) or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak – dwellings possessed with an eerie life of their own.
After being bombarded with flat effects void of the personality Jan de Bont brought to 1996's overrated Twister (remember the flying cows, anyone?), we are subjected to the most implausible father/son redemption tale ever committed to film.
The caretaker's wife (Marian Seldes) is like a sister to Young Frankensteins Frau Bluecher: the solemn warning she issues to her guests is hilariously inflected with the spirit of ghost movie dialogue.
Nearly catatonic with fear, they refuse to stay at the house after dark and spout lines that sound like outtakes from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein.
Given the disaster movie genre’s penchant for releasing their films in pairs, like with 1996’s Twister and Tornado!, or 1997’s Dante’s Peak and Volcano, or 1998’s Armageddon and Deep Impact, I wait with bated breath for whichever film is paired with Greenland, the latest Gerard Butler effort to grace our biggest (and smallest) screens.
Amtrak probably won’t use this movie to promote their service because of what happens at every eight minute mark, but Source Code is one of the most fun rides on public transportation since Speed.
The most evident appeal of Ripleyâ??s Groundhog Day-meets-Speed scenario is the ticking-clock factor and the emotional toll that it takes on Gyllenhaalâ??s character.
The Groundhog Day-meets-Speed structure is both playful and suspenseful, and all of the actors are well cast.
This film needed a more confident filmmaking hand, someone to replicate the sleekness Jan de Bont brought to “Speed” or Wolfgang Petersen provided in “Air Force One.”
Writers John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach (an episode of 'Diners, Drive-ins and Dives?') and Ryan Engle pull ideas from "Speed," "United 93" and "Ten Little Indians" for the type of script they seem to believe is clever with all its 'twists,' and yet when they finally unveil what's behind it, we've chosen the wrong door on 'Let's Make a Deal.' Their terrorist tells us how 'easy' it all was, but they never get around to filling in blanks as to just how it was done (and you may be sorry to find out why it was).
Though "human barometer" Bill claims to be in a hurry to start his new life as a married weatherman, he can't quite get away, and thus the stage is set for a cross between His Girl Friday and The Abyss: anyone want to bet against Bill falling for his wife and his old job before the day is out?
Not to mention that the whole movie is sort of a remake of His Girl Friday.