1999 In Film: A Listless Decade Waddles to a Close
Just a note, I'm taking a break, then I'll come up with my decade in review practice.
1999
TOP GROSSING
1. Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
2. The Sixth Sense
3. Toy Story 2
4. The Matrix
5. Tarzan
6. The Mummy
7. Notting Hill
8. The World Is Not Enough
9. American Beauty
10. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
COMMENT: The 90’s end with George Lucas’ vigorous destruction of everyone from the 70’s childhood and a few quite good tech films like The Matrix and the Mummy. You can see where the Otts are headed.
WHAT WERE WE THINKING: The World Is Not Enough. This is the other bad Brosnan Bond movie before the last one.
ACADEMY AWARDS:
BEST PICTURE NOMINEES: American Beauty, The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider, The Sixth Sense
Best Picture: American Beauty
Best Director: Sam Mendes - American Beauty
Best Actor: Kevin Spacey - American Beauty
Best Actress: Hilary Swank - Boys Don't Cry
Best Supporting Actor: Michael Caine - The Cider House Rules
Best Supporting Actress: Angelina Jolie - Girl, Interrupted
COMMENT: Hollywood puts its foot down – political movies are the only kind of art. And Angelina gets a pre-emptive academy award.
THE REAL TOP 10:
1. Fight Club
2. Office Space
3. The Matrix
4. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
5. The Thomas Crowne Affair
6. Eyes Wide Shut
7. The Sixth Sense
8. South Park
9. The Blair Witch Project
10. Payback
MOST OVERRATED: American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, The Boondock Saints, Magnolia
Let me explain. I liked American Beauty the first time I saw it. I thought it was brilliant. I was 18. The girl I went with said her dad did the same thing with her friends. Anyway, I grew up. It’s not brilliant. It’s an artifact of late teenage despair. What I don’t get is why grown adults think it’s brilliant. Are they still 18 inside? Anyway, let’s not pretend this was a great film. It wears its ideas on its sleeve. The floating bag is trite, the notion that all the gay people are normal, the conservative is gay, and the straight couple is jacked up is the distilled essence of all the standard ‘non-standard’ thought of the time. It is a relic of the counter-culture-as-culture mindset. As for the others, Being John Malkovich is better on paper than in execution, like most Spike Jonze movies, overthought. Boondock Saints is one of the growing fad of ‘because its cool’ movies. I like Irish accents, but this just didn’t do it for me. Magnolia I remember being regarded as a big deal, but in retrospect, it is tedious and unwatchable.
MOST INFLUENTIAL: Fight Club
MOST 90’s: American Beauty
SHOULD HAVE SEEN: The Insider
SLEEPER/CULT HIT: Office Space
TOLERABLE ROM-COM OF THE YEAR: Notting Hill
BEST LINE (IN A BAD MOVIE): Tie.
- The Muse, “Are you a lesbian?” “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.” “Oh, come on, dignify it with a no.”
- The World Is Not Enough, “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.”
BEST SCENE: Samuel L. gets eaten by a shark in the middle of his Deep Blue Sea inspirational speech.
SHAMELESS PROFITEERING: You might wonder why Analyze This and Mickey Blue Eyes both came out this year. Both of these movies are fairly funny movies about regular Joes getting mixed up with gangsters. The Sopranos started this year. For shame sirs. This makes me wonder – is Hollywood secretly sitting on all the good scripts, waiting for some reason to cheapen them by making them seem like quick profiteering schemes?
BEST SEQUEL: Austin Powers 2, Toy Story 2.
IMPLAUSIBLE PLOT TWIST IN HIGH SCHOOL MOVIE: So football players go to a strip club the night before a game, and we’re supposed to hate the coach because of their rampant irresponsibility?
TOTALLY IMPLAUSIBLE PLOT IN HIGH SCHOOL MOVIE: She’s All That. Let’s get this straight, Freddie Prinze, Jr. is well-liked…because he’s a soccer star and honors student. Because that sounds a) like America and b) likely for Freddie Prinze Jr. So then his high school girlfriend leaves him for a reality TV star she met at spring break…because a) high school girls go to spring break and b) that’s legal. So he makes some bizarre bet that anyone can be his girl friend and his best friend has to pick the least hot girl to turn into a decent girl friend. And his best friend picks the girl who, if she were to take her glasses off, is a model. Not even Paul Walker is that stupid. Everyone knows, in that situation, you pick the fatty. There’s not even a debate. The fatty. This was a Saved By the Bell episode. They picked the fatty. How else do you learn a lesson? The lesson in this movie is, "If a cute girl takes her glasses off, she's cute." The point is supposed to be to pick a physically unattractive person and teach us all about not being so shallow. Instead, Freddie Prinz Jr. teaches us, "You may not think you're hot, but you are."
HEADED THE WRONG DIRECTION: Comedy. Big Daddy begins Adam Sandler’s listless quest for mediocrity. The Man on the Moon hammers home Jim Carey’s already overlong quest for self…or an Oscar. Neither showed up.
HEADED IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS: Renee Zellweger chases Chris O’Donnell in ‘The Bachelor’. Unlikely that'll happen again.
GOING TOGETHER IN OPPOSITE DIRECTIONS: Ryan Phillipe and Reese Witherspoon hook up in Cruel Intentions. I could have told her then this was a bad career decision.
WE SHOULD BE DONE HERE: The Runaway Bride. Apparently people will pay 150 million dollars to relive Pretty Woman. Richard Gere should have gone away by now.
WE REALLY ARE DONE HERE: Kevin Costner - For Love of the Game, Message in a Bottle. Not even a desperate attempt to recapture Field of Dreams pays off…I guess Kevin can sympathize with being washed up and alone. The message in the bottle says, “it’s over.”
YEP, THAT WAS A BAD HALF DECADE: Arnold’s “End of Days”. A little too close to home with that title.
SHOULDN’T WE HAVE STARTED HERE: South Park creators finally make a South Park movie.
IT WAS A BAD YEAR: Matthew Broderick. The alarmingly tedious Election vies with Inspector Gadget for a career quickly slipping into ‘standing next to Sarah Jessica Parker’ status.
WHY DIDN’T THAT WORK: Wild, Wild West.
CAN WE TRADE THIS BROSNAN MOVIE FOR THAT ONE: Is there some reason The Thomas Crowne Affair wasn’t just declared The James Bond Affair, and then we could be spared 1-2 further bad Bond films. It’s light years better than The World Is Not Enough.
KILLING ALL GOOD WILL FROM THAT ONE SONG: An American Tail: The Mystery of the Night Monster. Fivel sells out.
I HAVE TO SAY: Everytime I see the title ‘Love Stinks’ I think of the deodorant commercial. “Love Stinks, Arid Works.”
I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING TO SAY: Sleepy Hollow. Tim Burton does these sorts of things.
BEST INAD…WAIT, CHECK THAT, ALARMINGLY EXPLICIT TITLES: Just A Little Harmless Sex, The Loss of Sexual Innocence, The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human,
BEST INADVERTANT PORN TITLES: Anywhere But Here, Better Than Chocolate, The Bone Collector, In Too Deep, Dick, Sweet and Low Down, Why Not Me?
