1998 in Film: Another Year of a Nation Without Direction

This is about to get ugly. Those with a sense of artistic decency should avert their eyes.
TOP GROSSING
1. Armageddon – Passably fun disaster movie – in the end, things don’t go boom.
2. Saving Private Ryan – Spielberg rocks the first 20, then steals the rest from better war movies
3. Godzilla – A childhood icon gutted and turned into an overlarge iguana.
4. There’s Something About Mary – Funny movie.
5. A Bug’s Life – Ho-hum computer animation. Family attendance compulsory.
6. Deep Impact – Not so fun disaster movie – things go boom. Climax: climb a hill.
7. Mulan – Less than ho-hum old school animation. Family attendance still compulsory
8. Dr. Doolittle – Eddie Murphy’s selling out begins
9. Shakespeare in Love – No complaints
10. Lethal Weapon 4 – Jet Li was a better addition than Joe Pesci. My favorite thing about the Lethal Weapon movies, as Chris points out, is that apparently there are no black or hispanic drug dealers in Los Angeles.

Academy Awards:
BEST PICTURE NOMINEES: Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, Life is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line
Best Picture: Shakespeare in Love
Best Director: Steven Spielberg - Saving Private Ryan
Best Actor: Roberto Benigni - Life Is Beautiful
Best Actress: Gwyneth Paltrow - Shakespeare in Love
Best Supporting Actor: James Coburn - Affliction
Best Supporting Actress: Judi Dench - Shakespeare in Love
Best Foreign Language Film: Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella), directed by Roberto Benigni, Italy
HOW BANAL CAN WE BE: Three movies about WW2, two movies about late renaissance England.

THE REAL TOP 10:
1. Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
2. The Big Lebowski
3. The Wedding Singer
4. Rushmore
5. Shakespeare In Love
6. There’s Something About Mary
7. A Civil Action
8. Life Is Beautiful
9. Rounders
10. Saving Private Ryan
OVERRATED MOVIES:
- American History X. Social issues movies always age poorly.
- The Truman Show. High concept usually ages poorly as well.
- Saving Private Ryan. 20-minutes of epic footage does not a movie make.
- Out of Sight. We’re all supposed to like this movie because it’s about George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez being cool. So they are; it's still not a good movie.
UNDERRATED MOVIES:
- A Civil Action. I’m not much for crusading lawyer movies, but absent the Grisham hype, this movie quietly was much better than the bizarrely popular early-90’s adaptations that tore up the box office.
- Dead Man on Campus. After Jessica Spano pounded the stake into the heart of Saved by the Bell that had been placed there by The College Years, Zach quietly made a pretty funny movie.
- Dirty Work. I will always wish Norm McDonald had a career. Guy kills me.
CHARACTER OF THE YEAR: Jesus – The Big Lebowski. Close runner-up: Cliff – Dead Man On Campus.
TOP 10 REASONS THIS WAS A BAD YEAR FOR MOVIES:
1. Lingering 90’s detritus that refuse to go away – 1 too many sequels (at least): 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain, Air Bud: Golden Receiver, An American Tail: The Treasure of Manhattan, Major League: Back to the Minors, Dennis the Menace Strikes Again, Halloween: H20, Species II. Bride of Chucky almost seems reasonable.
2. Bad remakes and conversions: Blue Brothers 2000, The Avengers, The Mask of Zorro
3. Waste of Talent: BASEketball, Vince Vaughn in the Psycho remake
4. Bad, Purely Political Movies: Bulworth, Primary Colors.
5. Lazy Animation Cash Cows: Antz, A Bug’s Life, Mulan, The Prince of Egypt
6. Forced to Pretend Movies About Writers are Interesting: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I like Johnny Depp as much as the next guy, but come on. Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘style’ was to get drunk and high and send in his notes because he couldn’t finish. A pox on what he did to writing.
7. Ethan Hawke continues to make movies in a misguided attempt to be taken seriously as a literary figure: Great Expectations.
8. Godzilla is a rancid disappointment
9. Pretending a foreign movie is good: Run, Lola, Run.
10. Attempted RomCom Sequel : You’ve Got Mail.
MOVIES I SHOULD HAVE SEEN: A Night at the Roxbury, Apt Pupil, Enemy of the State, Half Baked, Ronin
MOVIES I WANT TO LIKE: He Got Game, Meet Joe Black
I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT WORKED: After Chris Tucker ruined the Fifth Element, they give him a whole film to be annoying in (Rush Hour) and it’s actually pretty good.
PASSABLE ROMANTIC COMEDIES: Shakespeare in Love AND The Wedding Singer AND There’s Something About Mary.
GOOD BAD GUY: Jet Li made Lethal Weapon 4.
WORST MOVIE REVIEW: The guy who wrote the I Still Know What You Did Last Summer review I read didn’t sit through the whole movie and called out a supposed plot hole, that they get the capital of Brazil wrong, which is in fact explained at the end. If your job is to review movies, don’t you think you should at least sit through the whole thing?
BEST MOVIE REVIEW: As I walked out of the dollar theater where I watched The Thin Red Line, some Sacramentan said to no one in particular, “Three hours of fruit bats. Some war flick.”
BEST TITLE: What could beat How Stella Got Her Groove Back? Simple: Ultraman Tiga and Ultraman Dyna: Warriors of the Light.
90’S-EST MOVIE: You’ve Got Mail. What’s this new fangled internet business? Woof. How’s AOL’s stock doing these days anyway? Can’t Hardly Wait – good effort, but still a little too relevant.
MOVIES THAT SEEMED IMPORTANT AT THE TIME AND INVOLVED ‘THINGS’: Wild Things, Very Bad Things
MOVIES THAT SEEMED IMPORTANT AT THE TIME NOT INVOLVING THINGS: Waterboy, X-Files
BEST INADVERTENT PORN TITLES: Deep Impact, Dirty Work, Great Expectations, He Got Game, I Got the Hook-Up, No Looking Back, Slappy and the Stinkers, The Thin Red Line, The X Files.