Back in the spring, author and journalist Brian Raftery amplified an increasingly popular opinion of contemporary film culture. As the title of his book teases, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up The Big Screen entertains the possibility that cinema—or at least American cinema—may have peaked in ’99, which now gets regularly cited alongside 1939 and 1974 whenever someone raises the question of which single year, exactly, is Hollywood’s greatest. It wasn’t like movie-lovers and critics didn’t know they were experiencing something major, a true bumper crop, while it was happening. But in the two decades since, ’99’s reputation has only grown, to the point where it’s now frequently treated as a kind of mini-renaissance: an unexpected rush of wall-to-wall classics, all released on the cusp of the new millennium.
If 1999 isn’t, as many now insist, the best movie year, it’s almost certainly one of the most movie years. To scan the ’99 release calendar is to encounter one important, groundbreaking film after another. It gave us the final work by a reigning master, and debuts by masters in the making. It delivered arguably the most anticipated franchise extension in movie history, and also one of the most profitable movies of all time, a low-budget horror sensation that rode word of mouth to big box office (and maybe bigger backlash). It was a watershed moment for teen comedies, animated features, and special-effects blockbusters. And for all the talk of great American movies, plenty of terrific international cinema—from Japan, Iran, and elsewhere—made a splash.
When it came time to rank our favorites of 1999, The A.V. Club laid down some ground rules, similar to the ones that governed our rundowns of 1997 and 1998’s best, as well as our annual critic poll. To qualify for inclusion, a film had to be released in America sometime in ’99. That meant excluding certain films that only premiered that year—including, unfortunately, some great work by female directors, who had to fight even more then than they do now to get movies made and seen. (Check back in a year, when we’ll surely be singing the retrospective praises of The Virgin Suicides, Beau Travail, Ratcatcher, and But I’m A Cheerleader, all of which made it into U.S. theaters in 2000.) It also meant making room for films, many of them not American, that found their way to America in ’99—though we narrowed the eligibility window to five years, which is why you won’t find, say, the 1990 masterpiece Close-Up on the list below. This is, after all, the Best. Movie. Year. Ever. We had to narrow the field somehow.
25. Boys Don’t Cry
More so than most of the other movies on this list, Boys Don’t Cry feels like a product of a different time. Even the most glowing contemporaneous reviews couldn’t get the pronouns right (they were heavy on deadnaming and talk of “gender confusion”), and elements of the film itself—including having a cis woman, Hilary Swank, play a trans man—are pretty dated, too. All the same, there’s undiminished, howling empathy to Kimberly Peirce’s ripped-from-the-headlines drama about Brandon Teena, who was raped and murdered by acquaintances when they discovered he was transgender. Though Boys Don’t Cry builds, with gut-wrenching inexorability, to Brandon’s death, it’s every bit as sincerely interested in envisioning what his life might have looked like—in investigating his dreams, his rebellious spirit, and how he navigated the rural Nebraska of 1993. And though the casting may look like a mistake from the vantage of our marginally more enlightened now, Swank’s Oscar-winning performance retains its vitality and power, conveying the adrenaline rush of being who you really are, no matter the risk. [A.A. Dowd]
24. Perfect Blue
Before screens became such a ubiquitous part of our daily lives, before catfishing had its own MTV show, and before movies like Cam and Unfriended picked up on the internet’s menacing, psychologically distorting potential, there was Satoshi Kon’s directorial debut, Perfect Blue. Following Mima, a former pop star plunged into the rabbit hole after discovering a fan blog manned by an unhinged and obsessive host, the film peels back into a hellscape interrogation of celebrity, self-image, and privacy in the digital age. Considered one of Darren Aronofsky’s biggest inspirations (Black Swan, with its evil doppelgänger and ballerinas, is practically a rip-off), this animated masterpiece unfolds through sharp and fluid editing as it descends into goosebump-inducing surrealism. And as a story of what its like to inhabit a woman’s body, it pulls no punches; this might very well be the film Vox Lux wishes it was. [Beatrice Loayza]
23. American Movie
Of course most Hollywood studio movies are about pursuing and attaining your dreams; they’re written by professional screenwriters, people who have already completed their years of struggling and come out on top. An uncompromised paean to striving and failure like American Movie could only come from the no-budget independent fringes, where we find quixotic autodidacts like DIY filmmaker Mark Borchardt. Chris Smith’s Sundance-winning documentary follows the semi-skilled director, debt magnet, and alcoholic-in-training on the harried production of his self-financed horror picture Coven, which Borchardt sees as the stepping stone to the movie he really wants to make. First, though, he’ll have to overcome the limits of his own talents, a crew made up of untrained incompetents volunteering their time, a prohibitively finite budget, and a script that just won’t hold together. American Movie dares to wonder at what point a person should accept that their life’s aspiration simply ain’t happening, and in truly American fashion, concludes that all the financial ruin and self-destruction in the world can’t keep a person from a sense of purpose. Borchardt’s own movies may have been ramshackle operations, but this one is—to put it in his words—kick-fuckin’-ass. [Charles Bramesco]
22. The Iron Giant
In one way, The Iron Giant couldn’t be simpler; it’s made of familiar stuff, including a kid befriending a strange visitor, grownups not understanding (except when they do), and bravery and empathy as superpowers. On the other hand, Brad Bird’s exceptional animated debut is unafraid to wade into the muck of some big, dark material: violence, paranoia, greed, recovery from trauma, the list goes on. The Iron Giant, voiced by a young Vin Diesel, has the ability to rebuild himself when he’s broken—a metaphor as powerful as the revulsion the towering robot inspires. As much as Bird understands that fear, he also grasps why Hogarth—ostracized by his classmates, small and smart with a funny name and love for the lonely—would see what the title wonder really is before anyone else. It’s a great kids’ film, a triumph of animation (both traditional and computer-generated), and above all, a potently compassionate fairy tale. Plus, the giant robot is really cool. [Allison Shoemaker]
21. Autumn Tale
The fourth and final installation in Eric Rohmer’s “Tales Of The Four Seasons” cycle, Autumn Tale would seem to be a romantic relic in the landscape of edgy teen comedies and all-American Nora Ephron movies that distinguished the late ’90s. But though Rohmer preserves his decades-running penchant for chatty and witty dissections of ordinary people, he throws a curveball by centering the story not on young people, his usual subjects, but on the inner lives of women in their 40s. Featuring two of his former collaborators, Béatrice Romand and Marie Rivière, the film tinkers with magical realism as it draws parallels between the beautifully ripened women and the resplendent vineyard that one of them settles into as her solitary haven. A late-career entry into the Rohmerian canon, this thoughtful, leisurely exploration of midlife anxiety and suspended desire is a convincing argument for the timeless appeal of the filmmaker’s seductive naturalism. [Beatrice Loayza]
20. After Life
Last year, Kore-eda Hirokazu won the most prestigious film prize in the world, the Palme D’Or at Cannes, for his domestic drama Shoplifters. The movie’s delicate humanism was no surprise to anyone who’s followed the Japanese director’s career over the years—and especially not to those who have seen his thoughtful, moving second feature. After Life envisions the world beyond death as a kind of banally decorated administrative building, where a team of celestial caseworkers help the recently deceased make an important decision: What memory from their bygone lives would they like to carry with them to heaven and relive for all of eternity? In this simple prompt, Kore-eda finds a rich vein of philosophical inquiry, gently offbeat workplace comedy (NBC’s The Good Place contains perhaps accidental echoes of its bureaucratic vision of the afterlife), and even a metaphor for filmmaking itself as an imperfect but valuable way to process, immortalize, and make sense of experiences. One could say Kore-eda’s laurels were overdue; he earned them 20 years ago, with a meditative delight that’s held up as well as a forever-cherished memory. [A.A. Dowd]
19. The Insider
When director Michael Mann and co-writer Eric Roth told the behind-the-scenes story of a controversial 60 Minutes segment, they were really delivering a warning about some alarming trends in the American media—a warning the public has largely failed to heed. Al Pacino gives one of his best late-career performances, more muted and less shouty, as Lowell Bergman, a producer who chases down a scoop regarding previously unknown smoking hazards. Russell Crowe plays The Insider’s insider, the tobacco-industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, whose personal problems—and his non-disclosure agreements—give his former bosses the weapons they need to try to intimidate CBS News. What emerges is a disturbing portrait of two corporations effectively conspiring to bury the truth, because money and power matters more than the citizenry learning about how they’re being poisoned. [Noel Murray]
18. Three Kings
Although David O. Russell started his career with a transgressive indie, there’s something unconvincing about the recent charges that he’d sold out with star-powered Oscar bait. After all, most of Russell’s movies tell accessible stories—farce, underdog sports, romance—through quarrelsome characters and a restless camera. To that end, his third feature, Three Kings, may be his deftest feat, a post-war war movie and a heist picture where a gold theft orchestrated by a quartet of Gulf War soldiers (George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg, and Spike Jonze, forming an improbable chemistry) is hijacked by their compulsion to do what’s right. The bleachy, blown-out cinematography makes this Russell’s most stylistically adventurous film, as well as one of his most purely entertaining—like a darkly funny, less bombastic Oliver Stone project. A few years later, real life would mount a more expensive, more catastrophic sequel to the Gulf War, and Three Kings’ depiction of America’s role in Middle Eastern turmoil would feel both more resonant and, in its smaller scale, a little quaint. [Jesse Hassenger]
17. Bringing Out The Dead
Martin Scorsese’s last film of the ’90s brought him back to familiar territory: a lonely insomniac driving around Manhattan, this time in an ambulance, carrying the horrors of the world on his shoulders. But Bringing Out The Dead has a much more generous spirit than the director’s ’70s masterpiece, carving out space for forgiveness within an indifferent landscape. In one of his finest performances, Nicolas Cage plays paramedic Frank Pierce (a kinder, benevolent version of Travis Bickle), who walks through the world in a daze, haunted by the lives he couldn’t save. He moves through writer Paul Schrader’s eminently specific world of EMTs and hospital workers who shrug off their low success rate—a foreign concept to a man who takes every death personally. Featuring one of Scorsese’s best soundtracks and a bevy of great supporting talent, Bringing Out The Dead boasts a poignancy that sneaks up on you, often in moments when you least expect it, e.g., Frank convincing a suicidal man to accompany him to the hospital where they’ll kill him for free. Compassion comes in many forms. [Vikram Murthi]
16. All About My Mother
“I’m every woman, it’s all in me,” sang Chaka Khan. Pedro Almodóvar likewise sees femininity as a vessel for just about everything meaningful in life: purity and sin, sex and sainthood, passion and decay. When Cecilia Roth’s Manuela leaves her job as an organ-transplant nurse to go tell her ex in Barcelona that their son has died, she makes the acquaintance of several women who appear to her like variations on a theme: a pregnant nun (Penélope Cruz), a lively sex worker (Antonia San Juan), a haughty actress (Marisa Paredes), a lesbian addict (Candela Peña), and her former spouse (Toni Cantó), who’s since come out as trans and now goes by Lola. Each contains a dimension of womanhood filtered through the humid melodrama of Douglas Sirk and the cocked-eyebrow wit of the camp classic alluded to in the title. Almodóvar had by that point earned global respect as a profane rascal, but a newly reined-in but no less vivacious style, along with enlightened ideas about gender and the AIDS epidemic, kicked off a new era of vibrant discipline for the artist. [Charles Bramesco]
15. Fight Club
Since basically flopping at the box office, Fight Club has been widely misinterpreted as a sincere glorification of male violence. That reading misses the point of David Fincher’s adaptation of the satirical Chuck Palahniuk novel, which addresses legitimate concerns about culture commodification, cannibalistic capitalism, and increasing social isolation but ultimately argues we shouldn’t give into our darkest impulses when trying to change the world. Edward Norton’s wonderfully unhinged performance meets its match in Brad Pitt, who brings gleeful mania to Tyler Durden’s personified id. The push-pull magnetism between the pair adds emotional depth to scenes that masquerade as mere masculine posturing, and Helena Bonham Carter’s Marla Singer, with her own brand of anti-establishment survivalism, is the film’s secret weapon. Those performances, combined with the Dust Brothers’ trippy score and Fincher’s customarily confident visual flair (bringing the IKEA catalog to life with the rhythmic population of Norton’s apartment, for example), cemented Fight Club as a cult classic to be feverishly consumed (and misunderstood) for years to come. [Roxana Hadadi]
14. The Straight Story
“David Lynch does Disney,” as one might offhandedly describe The Straight Story, sounds like a recipe for disaster. But break down the fundamental elements of the director’s only G-rated film, and the combination doesn’t seem so strange. Here are the small towns, the little routines, the unavoidable specter of mortality, and the admiration of resilience that characterize much of Lynch’s work—as well as, honestly, the Mouse House’s. Here is the familiar, uncanny softness of Angelo Badalamenti’s score, and the moments of humanity, simple but precious to characters and filmmaker alike. And above all, here is the great Richard Farnsworth, playing Alvin Straight, a man who really did drive a lawnmower hundreds of miles to see his ailing brother. Farnsworth’s face is a map of a life; when he smiles, one aches. Both Farnsworth and The Straight Story are a lot like Straight’s trip to Wisconsin, come to think of it: unexpected, straightforward, and special. [Allison Shoemaker]
13. The Sixth Sense
“I see dead people” is a line that remains clamoring around the pop culture consciousness 20 years later, but the impact of M. Night Shyamalan’s big breakthrough as a writer and director is greater than that. Bruce Willis’ increasingly self-aware performance as psychologist Malcolm Crowe was a refreshing change of pace for the actor; Haley Joel Osment gripped viewers with his deeply felt terror as pint-sized medium Cole Sear; and Shyamalan’s twist ending gave the filmmaker his calling card. The film derives its power primarily from its questions about the responsibilities of the living and the regrets of the dead, and its unexpected reveal only elevated that duality. Although Shyamalan would return too often to this gotcha brand of storytelling, The Sixth Sense effectively took viewers on a journey from external dread to internal horror, helping usher in a revival of methodically tense, Victorian-style ghost stories, including Nicole Kidman’s The Others, a solid chunk of Blumhouse’s oeuvre, and Mike Flanagan’s House On Haunted Hill. [Roxana Hadadi]
12. Princess Mononoke
When it finally surfaced Stateside two years after its record-breaking run in Japan, Princess Mononoke didn’t have the kind of success that Disney/Miramax, its U.S. distributor, might have hoped for. But there’s no question that this Studio Ghibli film, helmed by legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki, possesses the heft, grandeur, and epic scope to match—or indeed better—just about any blockbuster released in 1999. Set during Japan’s Muromachi period, the film observes as the last Emishi prince becomes drawn into a violent conflict for the future of a forest threatened by destruction. The film’s eco-fable elements are clear enough, but the story—imaginatively drawn from Japanese mythology and folklore—is politically and morally complex nonetheless, augmented at every turn by the animation’s visual splendor and sheer kineticism. Three years later, Miyazaki’s follow-up, Spirited Away, would take home the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but Princess Mononoke was the arrow that pointed the way forward. [Lawrence Garcia]
11. The Limey
Steven Soderbergh’s follow-up to his sleek, sexy mainstream breakthrough was another crime film, only this time he traded kicky fun for a semi-Proustian meditation on regret. A downbeat revenge thriller populated by character actors and a ’60s legend, The Limey has the infrastructure of a Point Blank but the heart of a Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Sarah Flack’s fractured editing style, Lem Dobbs’ sharp script (famously pared down to its bare essentials by Soderbergh), and Ed Lachman’s sun-drenched photography create a memory film whose structure resembles a ruined life flashing before one’s eyes. Terence Stamp, equally menacing and penitent, determinedly stalks Los Angeles to avenge his dead daughter, but his vengeance mostly underscores his own past mistakes. Despite its rueful emotional register, The Limey still embraces a relaxed California vibe, one that permeates the melancholy with nostalgic monologues and crass wisecracks. Soderbergh closed out his first working decade with a towering achievement, one driven by a collaborative spirit and a craftsman’s eye. Thank god they’re still fucking coming. [Vikram Murthi]
10. Topsy-Turvy
At the time best known for his portraits of contemporary working-class British life, Mike Leigh first ventured into period-drama territory with this vividly detailed chronicle of Gilbert and Sullivan putting on The Mikado, one of the Victorian-era duo’s most successful operettas. A rare depiction of artistic process from the writer-director (Mr. Turner would follow 15 years later), Topsy-Turvy assembles a sprawling ensemble cast of Leigh regulars like Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, and Timothy Spall, each vibrant and memorable. The film’s greatness, though, lies in Leigh’s deft orchestration of contrapuntal tones, mixing exhilaration and exhaustion, elation and resignation, sadness and joy with seemingly effortless flair—not to mention a number of varied, hilarious musical performances. At once a moving paean to creative pursuit and a sobering look at its limits, Topsy-Turvy captures the veritable chaos of the artist life like few films have managed. It’s the world turned upside down. [Lawrence Garcia]
9. The Blair Witch Project
The film that launched a thousand arguments, not to mention an entire horror subgenre that’s still going strong 20 years later. At the time, people were ready to believe that they’d be watching actual recovered footage from three young people who’d mysteriously disappeared; American audiences descended on theaters in droves (adjusted for inflation, it grossed about $215 million, roughly the same as Mission: Impossible—Fallout or Ant-Man And The Wasp), with many people emerging 81 minutes later absolutely livid at the absence of anything overtly terrifying. Ignore the hype, however, and The Blair Witch Project is bone-chilling in a different way—more akin to Sartre’s No Exit than to The Exorcist. Improvising in the woods for several days, the three lead actors inevitably start to turn on each other, achieving levels of frustration and resentment that would be nearly impossible for amateurs to fake. (Try to get Heather Donahue’s famous snot-nosed apology from an actor who’s just come from the craft service table.) The bogeyman here isn’t the never-seen Blair Witch. It’s human nature itself. [Mike D’Angelo]
8. Toy Story 2
Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4 have both been widely praised for grappling with serious existential questions, investing what are ostensibly kids’ movies with genuine emotional depth. But it was the franchise’s second entry—only Pixar’s third feature overall, after the original Toy Story and A Bug’s Life—that laid the groundwork for subsequent explorations of creeping obsolescence and time’s indifferent arrow. Here, nobody’s faced with or seeking oblivion; instead, Woody, stolen by a collector, discovers his storied past, meets forgotten friends, and is faced with a difficult decision: allow himself to be rescued by Buzz and the gang (eventually to be discarded by Andy), or become a treasured display in a Japanese museum? Toy Story 2 finds the ideal balance between poignant and hilarious, even briefly achieving both at once when Buzz encounters a still-delusional doppelgänger. Plus, Jessie’s flashback rivals Up’s prologue as Pixar’s most downright ruthless tearjerker. Not bad for a sequel that was originally intended strictly for home video. [Mike D’Angelo]
7. Election
Who would’ve thought that one of the truest and funniest movies ever made about politics would be set at an Omaha high school? Director Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor adapted Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name into an unsparing satire, where nearly every character is at once painfully familiar and overtly ridiculous, from the perky, soulless overachiever Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), who’s running for student council president, to the self-righteous, hypocritical social studies teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), who convinces himself that by sabotaging Tracy’s campaign he’ll actually be making a real difference in the world. The plot’s petty stakes only make Election more stinging. When McAllister tries to illustrate the importance of the democratic process by comparing apples to oranges—and then drawing identically featureless circles on a chalkboard—it’s hard to imagine a more brutal depiction of how American elections usually go. [Noel Murray]
6. A Moment Of Innocence
Abbas Kiarostami ultimately became the torchbearer for Iranian cinema in the West, but back in the ’90s, Mohsen Makhmalbaf was considered every bit his equal. (They even collaborated, in a way: Kiarostami’s Close-Up is about a Makhmalbaf impersonator.) A Moment Of Innocence, Makhmalbaf’s masterpiece, sees him transform a shameful incident from his youth—he’d stabbed a policeman during a political protest—into something deeply and unexpectedly cathartic. Hiring an actor to play his teenage self, he persuades the officer he’d assaulted (also played by an actor, but the film deliberately blurs these lines) to participate in a filmed re-creation. “You say you want to make the world better?” Makhmalbaf asks his avatar, trying to get him in the correct headspace. “Then you have to stab, stab!” But neither the fake culprit nor the actual victim feels comfortable with these destructive emotions, and the movie gradually builds to an abrupt repudiation that’s among the most gorgeously hopeful moments the movies have ever produced. [Mike D’Angelo]
5. Magnolia
Magnolia is not the tightest or most restrained movie writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has made. By most accounts, including the director’s own, it’s probably the least disciplined: an operatic tribute to his hometown of Los Angeles, his idol Robert Altman, and his sprawling cast, among other things. But while the control Anderson would subsequently bring to his later work is admirable, it also makes the open-hearted intensity of Magnolia feel fleeting and precious, a marathon of foolhardy young-person swings, from Ricky Jay-narrated anecdotes to cross-cut Aimee Mann sing-alongs to raining frogs. As heavy as Anderson’s hand may feel in the movie’s technical and storytelling flourishes, it might not have worked without that roster of top-notch performances, varying in tone and tempo: the heartbreaking sweetness of John C. Reilly, the frayed nerves of Melora Walters, the crumbling bravado of Tom Cruise, and on and on. “And on and on” also describes the experience of watching Magnolia, a tapestry that doesn’t stop unfurling until that perfect final shot. [Jesse Hassenger]
4. The Talented Mr. Ripley
The late Anthony Minghella was never a fashionable director, but he produced at least one classic with this intelligent, suspenseful adaptation of the first novel in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley cycle. Neither the first nor the last film on this list to deal in identity games, social masquerades, and thwarted desire, The Talented Mr. Ripley stars Matt Damon (in one of his best performances) as the title character, a part-time pianist who is recruited by a tycoon to track down his wayward son (Jude Law) in Italy, and quickly ingratiates himself into his life and social circle. In a stark departure from the source material, Minghella transforms Highsmith’s cold-blooded master con into a tragic chameleon; we sympathize with his desperation and gut-wrenching insecurity even as the charade turns deadly. With its sparkling 1950s atmosphere and terrific supporting cast (including such burgeoning stars as Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman), Ripley has only gotten better with age. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
3. The Matrix
In the wake of Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s respective comings-out as trans women, critical opinion on their game-changing hit The Matrix has coalesced into reading it as a metaphor for its creators’ transgender identity. And the thing is, that interpretation totally tracks. All of the Wachowskis’ work deals with themes of identity, but The Matrix makes explicit the techno-utopian ideal of the mind—and the internet!—as vehicles for transcending the limitations of the human body. But even without this radical subtext, the influence The Matrix has had on every action and sci-fi film made in its wake is difficult to overstate. And it’s not just the film’s oft-imitated “bullet time” technique or cyber-goth aesthetic that made an impact: Featuring “wire-fu” effects and martial arts choreographed by the legendary Yuen Woo-ping, The Matrix brought the union of Hong Kong action aesthetics and American blockbuster filmmaking to its kickass culmination. It also launched the career of future John Wick director Chad Stahelski, who’s since evolved from serving as Keanu Reeves’ stunt double to directing Reeves in a whole new wildly successful action franchise. It seems safe to say that this was a transformative film all around. [Katie Rife]
2. Eyes Wide Shut
Deceptively marketed as an erotic thriller, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding, posthumously released final film takes the pessimistic maestro’s career-long fascination with male ego and insecurity to strange places. A successful Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise) sets off on the Kafkaesque odyssey to cheat on his wife (Nicole Kidman) after she admits to having once fantasized about an affair; along the way, he stumbles upon a secret society of the rich and powerful. The fastidious artificiality of the film, which still holds the record as the longest continuous shoot in Hollywood history, only adds to the overwhelming, unresolvable dream logic. The result is, in some ways, as much of a head trip as 2001: A Space Odyssey, slipping from paranoia (about sex, relationships, and plutocracy, among other things) into black comedy; while Cruise’s Kubrick-referencing turn as the pick-up guru in Magnolia may have more pyrotechnic moments, this is the performance that really subverts his star power. But speaking of weak-willed men stuck in the nightmare of their desires… [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
1. Being John Malkovich
Twenty years ago, just about everyone could agree that Being John Malkovich was the most original, bizarre, madly inventive movie of the year. No one had ever seen anything like it. Truthfully, age has only underscored the singularity of the film’s cracked daydream ambition, which looks all the more miraculous when held against the reboot redundancy of modern Hollywood. Shaking off the shackles of network-sitcom duty, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman offered the first of his big-screen high concepts, spinning the funny-morose tale of a puppeteer (John Cusack, bravely unlikable in a career-high performance) whose attempts to cheat on his wife (Cameron Diaz) with a co-worker (Catherine Keener) are suddenly complicated by an unlikely discovery: a portal hidden behind a filing cabinet that leads straight into the brain of Hollywood actor John Malkovich, playing himself. The mix of gut-busting surrealism (seriously, this thing boasts about a laugh a minute) and neurotic psychodrama would become a hallmark of Kaufman’s one-of-a-kind work. But the film also kicked off the parallel (and sometimes intersecting) movie career of his collaborator, the deliriously gifted music-video director Spike Jonze, whose talent for madcap orchestration keeps the whole crazy project afloat. Beyond introducing the world to two kindred spirits in soulful bug-fuckery, Being John Malkovich anticipated a new era of identity fluidity. Which is to say, even more so than The Matrix, perhaps, it was a harbinger of the techno-connected world to come: a portal into the 21st century, when the internet would provide everyone the opportunity to be, or at least pretend to be, whomever they wanted. [A.A. Dowd]
537 Comments
1999 was a crazy year, looking back, with how many solid movies were releasedA fun audio examination of that yearhttps://twitter.com/ScreenDrafts/status/1156618907328712705
honorable mentions/missesvirgin suicidesghostdogOffice spacelock stockto me that year was magnolia vs malkovich…two movies so ambitious that their reach almost exceeded their grasp….almost.
As mentioned, at least The Virgin Suicides and Ghost Dog count as 2000 releases.
i mean i see ghost dog as a release date in may of 99.
Premiere, maybe, but not commercial release? I think that’s how it works.
Yeah Office Space and Lock Stock are both far better than Eyes Wide Shut.
i like eyes wide shut just not more than magnolia or malkovich.
I don’t like it. It’s beautifully shot but the story is a boring mess.
A lot of movies are better than Eyes Wide Shut. I never understood the praise for that boring, overlong pile of dreck.
Most everything is better than Eyes Wide Shut.
Mystery Men is my favorite movie of 1999, but I’m not sure I’d put it on a good movies list.
Lock Stock… was 1998.But Office Space, yeah. The plot has what the kids today might call a ‘third-act problem’ but it’s a strong and precinct satire of corporate efficiency culture that remains viable today–honestly other than the lack of iPhones and social media it still feels fairly contemporary. And the jokes don’t stop landing throughout. It’s not just one of the best movies of 1999 it’s one of the best comedies of the decade, and far preferable to the bloated and gormless Apatow bilge that was just over the horizon.
march 99 in the US
True, but UK release was August 1998. Not sure what AVC’s policy is here.That said, if it’s properly a 1999 film yeah it should be on here
Office Space is an absolutely fantastic movie, but I think it’s going through a bit of a(n appropriate) critical re-evaluation now that millennials are coming of age and Gen Xers are aging into the management roles the movie vilifies. Office Space exists in the same space as American Beauty and Ghost World and a ton of other pre-9/11, pre-recession films that essentially boil down to bemoaning the lack of excitement in life and the banality of steady employment. It’s a bit of a stretch but I think you could make the argument that the central thesis of these sorts of 90s movies is “the central lie of the American Dream is that achieving it will make you happy.”Whereas younger people coming of age in a world dominated by perpetual war, failing US hegemony, endless financial insecurity, and increasing diversity in their immediate environment (and therefore exposure to people other than the disaffected white folk featured so often in 90s movies) see the protagonists in these movies and think “wtf do they have to be complaining about?” Lots of millennials would argue that complaining that the American Dream hasn’t made you happy is itself a privileged position, because “the actual central lie of the American Dream is that it is achievable at all.”Again, I think Office Space survives this re-evaluation a ton better than many of its contemporaries,agree that it’s still relevant today, and agree that it’s one of the best comedies ever made. But I’m super sympathetic to criticisms, and think the criticisms reveal a lot of interesting things about 90s pop culture generally.
I think both Office Space and Ghost World are more grounded than American Beauty, though, which makes them work a lot better for what they are. American Beauty just gets more and more smarmy, patronizing and unpleasant as time goes by.
Yeah American Beauty has aged like a dumpster in the sun.
Ghost World! Love that one.
Yeah, someone beat you to that as far as that analysis:
Like i said, I’m just repeating the critical re-evaluation I’m already seeing. Not saying my analysis is new or groundbreaking. But thanks for the video! Always interested in reading/watching stuff like that.
Interesting take but that point—“the central lie of the American Dream is that achieving it will make you happy”—predates the 90s.Anyway, the most interesting point that movie made, which is a corollary to the above, is that there’s nothing wrong with not achieving that “dream.” That it’s ok to work in construction. I guess that might not be as true now as in the 90s but it’s still a valid idea.
Interesting take but that point—“the central lie of the American Dream is that achieving it will make you happy”—predates the 90s.That the point was made before (and oftentimes better) before the 90s doesn’t really change the fact that the 90s saw a major boom in both the production of media concerned with that issue and in its popularity. And I think it’s obvious why. In a lot of ways the 90s were America’s high water mark. We emerged victorious from the Cold War as the undisputed world hegemon, had tremendous economic prosperity, and everything looked up. For white suburbanites the future never looked better…so why were they still so unhappy? Cue American Beauty and Fight Club and Office Space and on and on and on.
This is such an insightful and level-headed comment that I went through to trouble of creating a (burner) account to write this message. Well done.
Thank you!
I mean the whole “ I speak to the engineers so the sales people don’t have to” scene is just so spot on to a lot of people’s jobs.
And the jokes don’t stop landing throughout. It’s not just one of the best movies of 1999 it’s one of the best comedies of the decade, and far preferable to the bloated and gormless Apatow bilge that was just over the horizon.Yes, and I remain fascinated by how everything Judge makes is either amazing or terrible. His only real problem is he ALSO predicted our modern problem of fetishising the blue-collar guy in a diener as some kind of benchmark for authenticity and masculinity. To be fair, though, a lot of writers do that shit.
Fuckin A, man.
Some of those aren’t technically no ‘99 releases, but Office Space’s omission is a crime against both movies and “best of” lists.
I was in college in 1999, and taking a Film Studies class.And I’ve still only seen 9 of these films. I would say I’ve probably not even heard of 9 of them.
I don’t get the “David Lynch does Disney” comparison at all, yes, it’s a gentle, sweet and touching movie (and one of my favourites) but just because it’s not disturbing doesn’t mean it has anything in common with Disney flicks, many of which are vibrant, exciting and action packed, and even those which aren’t don’t really compare to The Straight Story.
Well, there’s also the fact that it literally was a Disney movie.
Hi, Dowd. I’m looking forward to “The Lighthouse”.
Me too!
Well, that’s certainly the glib, snarky answer – as if you didn’t comprehend what he meant by “Disney movie”.However, there’s a reason for its (again, obvious,) outlier stance: Disney had *nothing at all* to do with the film’s development and production, which was underwritten and supported as a StudioCanal/Film Four film. Disney just bought it for U.S. distribution after its very-successful premiere at Cannes. (And, like Shoemaker, its execs apparently had no clue of the very-subtly-revealed backstory of a drunk Alvin setting fire to his home and destroying his family, which sets up his trip-of-atonement. They simply saw a ‘heartwarming journey’ and ticket to award season.)If you long to see a filmscape in which 60-70% of movies are *actually* “Disney movies”, i.e. Disney-incubated, -approved, and -produced, well, A.A. – strap your fucking belt tight on. It’ll be a long ride.
I’ll take glib, snarky, and accurate over petulant “well actually” nerds any day. And I’m a huge Lynch snob.
I think you’re being too hard on the characterization. Disney did a bunch of live action family-focused dramas in the 1990s, such as Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, A Far Off Place, Iron Will and Endurance. It wasn’t nearly as big a focus as the animated movies or comedies like Mighty Ducks, but it was still a notable piece of what they did in the 90s (as well as before and since).
“Disney just bought it for U.S. distribution after its very-successful premiere at Cannes.”
And you have to wonder why Disney would distribute a movie like this, huh?
“its execs apparently had no clue of the very-subtly-revealed backstory of a drunk Alvin setting fire to his home and destroying his family”
Yeah, they probably didn’t realize Bambi’s mother was killed either. Or Simba’s father.
As Allison pretty clearly lays out, this film is a demonstration that there *is* some overlap in Lynch’s values and those of what you could conventionally identify as a “Disney movie,” intended meaning of comment included. It’s fine not to see that compatibility, or to not agree that it exists, but Disney surely saw it, which is why they chose to buy the film and release it under their umbrella. In any case, search me on what any of that has to do with a desire I certainly don’t possess to see Disney achieve a full monopoly on “60-70%” of movies. Also, if I *wanted* that, why would it be a long ride for me?
Wasn’t 99 the year Studio/Canal started distributing their own films in collaboration with other companies?
Lighten up, Francis.
Well now I just feel stupid!
I always do.
Disney is toilet water
I’m surprised the reviewer didn’t mention the Sissy Spacek performance. She had relatively little time on the screen, but she haunted the rest of the movie.
And at that point she wasn’t doing a lot of films… An SS sighting for fans of hers was like glimpsing a rare bird, not to mention it was a quirky and endearing performance.
“And at that point she wasn’t doing a lot of films… An SS sighting for fans of hers was like glimpsing a rare bird”Sure.I mean, both Affliction (Dec 98) and Blast From the Past (Feb 99) came out less than a year before A Straight Story (Oct 99), but yeah, let’s make up a false narrative about her because, you know, reasons.
But really only as side roles and though Affliction was a solid film, Blast was a quirky second level spot. Straight was a wonderful character study, fascinating to watch and a nod to her special talents. False narrative? Wow, self-important commentator, sorry someone pissed on your cornflakes today, but please amble on back to whatever Reddit forum that allows you to spit on a passing comment not requiring you to insert yourself on any level.
aka Tractor Movie!
Back in the 90s, Disney put out a LOT of live-action family films.One of which happened to be directed by David Lynch.
Also, it’s not a straight story because we never quite know what the fall out in the family right? I don’t think it’s a Blue Velvet like sinister doings, but there’s some room in the movie for more complexity.
Damnit, AV Club. Now i can’t stop thinking of that Superman in the Iron Giant. “I’m… Superman.”That movie was a masterpiece. Everything about it. What it meant to be a hero, how to choose who you want to be, how paranoid idiots screw things up for everyone. Honestly, I think it may be one of the most perfect movies with a timeless message.Also, props to your number 1 pick, which i don’t think I could have predicted. Great movie i think is usually overlooked way too much. More props would have been given if the last paragraph was just the word Malkovich over and over again.
I was not prepared for how emotional that last scene in Iron Giant was going to make me. That movie was a harbinger of great things to come from Brad Bird.
When he opens his eyes and smiles at the end is one of the most satisfying endings of any movie for me, and the triumphant beat the score takes when we see his leg marching along the snow really hits you in the gut. I’m so glad they never tried to do a sequel; this is one of those movies that can just stand alone and be remembered as something really great.
The decimal point in its ranking needs to be moved one place to the left.
Underrated about the Iron Giant: they actually use its PG rating. There’s some mildly salty language, and the scene where the characters resign themselves to dying in a nuclear explosion is pretty harrowing, yet still functions at a child level.
And the blood when Hogarth smacks his face into a tree limb. That didn’t need to be there. In any Disney movie it likely wouldn’t have been. But it’s a great detail that relates that even though these characters are animated, they are still human and can be harmed as such. It really helps bring the world to life and set the stakes for later encounters (like the bombing).
Iron Giant is Jennifer Aniston’s best movie, right? And also Harry Conick Jr.’s, and definitely Eli Marienthal (who voiced the kid) and also Vin Diesel’s.
Q: how far down the credits list do you have to go to find an actor with a better move on their résumé?
An argument could be made for the Hudsucker Proxy, MAYBE. I feel that’s an underrated gem that doesn’t get talked about a lot, except when the Cohens release a new movie.
“Eyes Wide Shit” is quite a surprise at number 2.
Oh wait, maybe number 2 is exactly where it belongs.
Yup, it’s poo.
More like Eyes Wide Shit.
You got a star for repeating a joke made in the OP. Congrats!
One spot too low, but still gratifyingly high considering its initial reception.
It’s so trippy and pretty to look at that I think people give it a lot more credit than the actual film deserve. It’s interesting, but hardly great.
I still have no idea what exactly the point of that movie was.
It’s a movie about money disguised as a movie about sex. It’s about the commoditization of everyday life, class envy, the relationship between money and power, and, if you want to extrapolate, the malaise of late capitalism.
Hm.
Bingo, it’s obvious and it’s so obvious people miss it despite the film going out of it’s way to let you know there’s not some grand unified theory there’s just a bunch of powerful men who sate their desires and they’ll kill people for messing with them if they won’t be missed or have avuncular old guys give you a nice speech about how there’s no point in fighting them if you’re likely to be missed.
I think Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter pegged it perfectly in his original review back in 1999, dubbing it Dr. Normal Love: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Have Sex With My Wife.
The movie tells you straight up early on that there’s less meaning than you think. IIRC one of the old dudes who catches Tom Cruise trying to sneak into an event tells him that fairly early in the film.
Epstein
Who?
As much as I love Kubrick’s hypnotizing visuals (I could watch Barry Lyndon all day), this film seemed pointless to me. At the time, I considered it no more than a name dropping money grab. I haven’t watched it since.
I don’t think Kubrick was able to put himself into it the way he typically did. He died a week after delivering the final cut.
Death: wrecking plans again.
“He died a week after delivering the final cut.”
So how did dying of a heart attack in his sleep after finishing the final cut of the movie prevent him from putting “himself into it”?
y’all hatin. Eyes Wide Shut rules
Are you sure you didn’t just enjoy the boobs?
it can be two things etc
Boobs usually are.
I hated it, but your well though-out and well-argumented defense of it changed my mind completely. Thanks!
It’s one of those movies that I hated upon watching, then had to endure being called a philistine for the next 10 years.
You’re still a philistine, just 20 years older.
Starred not because I liked the film, but because you made me laugh and spit out my coffee on the dining room table.
You’re not alone. Don’t worry. We are legion.
Eyes Wide Shut got higher rankings because it took every one 6 attempts to get through it. So it is really like 6 movies.
Yeah, I endured the judgy looks from the lady at the Blockbuster twice just because Roger Ebert insisted that this was an artistic masterpiece, and I was trying very hard to learn film language.It’s just a bad film. I get that Ebert loved Kubrick, but it’s just a bad film with a lot of very naked people, with not much going on except a guy who has rich white people problems, and wants to believe that his pretty-good existence can be improved by the presence of a hidden orgy and a murder mystery. It’s not that I don’t get it. It’s not that the ennui isn’t the point. But it’s still just a bad film.
Or it’s a deeply weird film with a complicated mixture of tones that presents itself as a thriller but it really a shaggy dog story about a married couple who needs to stop being jerks and fuck each other.It’s hard to overstate the shaggy dog aspect. It has essentially no plot, just a series of bizarre incidents leading to Tom Cruise’s realization that he dodged a bunch of fucking bullets and that his wife is hot. It’s a deeply low-stakes story presented in a very elevated fashion. Obviously I like it more than you, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad. It’s just weird in a way that few movies attempt.
I just watched it last night for the umpteenth time, and I think it’s probably Kubrick’s second best film. It really does have new relevance now that the Epstein stuff has come to light. The actual reveal that the elite actually DO get up to this sorta stuff makes it all, well, it actually seems rather tame now compared to what has been in the news.It’s a strange film about money, power and corruption. It’s actually got very little to do with sex, and would be a great double feature with Blue Velvet.
It’s certainly the Kubrick movie I enjoy the most (along with 2001). And it’s true – Cruise spends the whole movie looking for an outlet for his sexual frustration and general insecurity, and he encounters a series of grotesquely perverse takes on sex. Then in literally the last second of the movie, his wife reminds him that they’re both supposed to be taking care of each other. It’s kind of sweet.
It’s interesting and kinda cool seeing so many people defending this film on here. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it but I remember watching it and expecting it to be the worst thing ever, but in the end found it pretty watchable and entertainingly weird, certainly not deserving of the scorn it received upon opening.
The actual reveal that the elite actually DO get up to this sorta stuff By no measure was this a reveal in 1999, film or general news or otherwise.
I feel like Ebert—while undeniably knowledgeable, passionate and articulate—was “wrong” on occasion. He decried Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter as filth (considering the genre, this was one of the better made/written ones); his review of Lynch’s Blue Velvet was 1 star; and he refused to acknowledge video games as art. As much as I looked up to him (went to school for film theory), I eventually realized that his opinions were fallible.
He also gave a Thumbs Up to Garfield.
I get what you’re saying and sometimes he would be both for and against things that were similarly themed in a weird soapbox kind of way, but opinions can’t be fallible as that’s all they are…opinions. You like what you like as much as you don’t like what you don’t, and sometimes that can mean you enjoy something that is generally regarded as garbage(I’m a big Troma fan) and dislike something that the whole world loves. I feel like over the years as social media has developed, we’ve come to putting more stock in critics than seeing the actual product for what it means to us personally because you can get so much info now before actually digesting it. When I saw Eyes Wide Shut, I had no idea what I was really walking into beyond “the secretive Stanley Kubrick project” and I really miss that kind of experience.
I agree that “fallible” was a poor word choice, because I do agree that opinions can’t be right or wrong. But there are certainly good or bad opinions, and I believe Ebert certainly had some bad opinions.
I definitely agree…he didn’t like Fight Club, Donnie Darko, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, Reservoir Dogs, and the list goes on and on. I know there are detractors for every one of those films, but I just think in a time before Rotten Tomatoes he’d be the most public voice.
If he gave one star to Blue Velvet and praised this crap, I’d seriously reconsider his status as a critic.
Yeah, it’s one of the worst best-reviewed movies I’ve ever seen.
Overall it might be shit, but I think most people can appreciate Kubrik’s bold choice for the score. Instead of hiring a “composer,” he just sat a semi-conscious Captain Hook in front of a grand piano.
I took a “Music In Film” class, and the professor pointed out that the piano score is completely in sync with Tom Cruise’s footsteps, which is pretty insane and totally the type of thing Kubrick would do.
Very few people jumping straight to “maybe you just didn’t get it”.Well done, A.V. Club. I’m proud of you!
You need many stars, not least for saying out loud what I’m thinking silently in my little corner of commentariatland, but also for not one but two wonderful jokes in one go. Well done!
The biggest snub I see is Rushmore. It’s not my favorite film of 1999 (that would be Magnolia, which also happens to be my favorite film of all-time), but It’s pretty great. Certainly better than The Blair Witch Project and Bringing Out the Dead if nothing else.
Bringing Out the Dead really doesn’t belong on this list, and certainly not ahead of The Insider. This is one of my all-time favorite movie scenes. You tell ‘em, D-Day!
Fun fact. The good guy lawyer in that scene is based on the real-life Ron Motley. He tried his last case as co-counsel with my firm. If anything, the movie understates what a gonzo dynamic lawyer he was. Not only did he successfully challenge big tobacco, he was also one of the pioneers of asbestos litigation. At the time of his death his pet projects were suing Arab princes over the camel jockey slave trade, and going after the banks which funded 9-11. An absolute titan.
Oh yeah, I know who he is. His legacy is definitely complicated by what the asbestos landscape turned out to be.
Asbestos litigation produced some of the best and some of the worst lawyers I’ve ever worked with. Unfortunately, by now it’s more the latter than the former.
Sheila O’Malley wrote a good piece largely on this scene: https://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=10052Bruce McGill’s contributions to a film like The Insider are not, in general, pointed out or celebrated. They are taken for granted. They’re appreciated, but in an invisible way. This is the blessing and the curse of the character actor. McGill wouldn’t be nominated for an Oscar for The Insider. The part is too small. But if you want to see an actor tap into what my acting teacher in college called “the pulse of the playwright”, if you want to see an actor easily illuminate every single thematic element of the movie as a whole – without being didactic or obvious, if you want to see an actor who understands that every element of a film is like a fractal (what is happening in the top tiers has to be happening in the lowest tiers too), if you want to see an actor enter a film and, with only one or two moments, remind us of the stakes, so urgently, so ferociously, that he makes all else pale before him, if you want to see a guy almost stroll away with the entire picture – watch Bruce McGill in The Insider.
A very articulate summation. He would have walked away with the entire picture if the acting in it hadn’t just been incredible across the board. Crowe, obviously, the (thankfully) restrained Pacino, Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace…all perfect.
“WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE!”
It’s a 1998 U.S. release and on the 1998 list.
Whoops.
That’s because Rushmore was released in ’98.
You’re right. I keep forgetting that it squeaked in there on December 11th.
D’oh
I know! I keep getting more and more likes because I can’t edit my comment. Haha
That’ll happen for a week or so. Same thing happened to me on a Kotaku article where I was more blatantly wrong than you were here.
Go easy on yourself. I’m sure you’re not the only one who thought Mario was Dutch.
I tried to come up with a Dutch Mario joke and failed. Maybe he wears wooden shoes, idk.
“Ik ben het, Mauritz!”
Rushmore is my favorite of Wes Anderson’s films and more so than Bottle Rocket, brought him into the public eye. I think it deserves to be on this list.
What did you dislike about Bringing out the Dead? I’m halfway believing that the people snarking at its inclusion here haven’t seen it, but I figure your reasoning will likely give me some insight.From where I am standing, it has a great cast who gave solid performances across the board. The story is meandering, admittedly, but just following Frank around for the weekend kept me entertained throughout. Plus, the soundtrack is killer.
I thought it was decent, actually. Solid performances as you said and great mise en scene. It reminded me a lot of After Hours, which is one of my favorite Scorsese films. But it just never came together into a satisfying whole if that makes any sense. If it was by an unheralded filmmaker, people would probably like it a lot more, but if suffers from being compared to Scorsese’s other work.
I have seen less than half of these, despite being old enough in 1999 to watch them all in the theater. Shameful. I agree with all the ones I’ve seen, though. Sincerely surprised that Office Space didn’t make it (as jodrohnson pointed out).
And then 15 years later Vin Diesel would make us cry all over again.
There’s a joke about Vin Diesel only being good when doing voice over work for monosyllabic monsters, but I’ll be damned if I can work it out…
Minimal dialogue is also why Pitch Black was excellent, but the sequels were shite.
Yeah when I was an early teen i saw “Chronicles of Riddick” on theaters and was like “whoa this is badass” and had never even heard of “Pitch Black” but then later when I was in my twenties I finally saw “Pitch Black” and found it to be vastly superior. I’m glad I saw it when I was old enough to really appreciate why it was the better film.
That scene probably would have made more of an impact on me if I’d seen the damn movie in theaters before I knew of the existence of “Baby Groot.”
Eyes Wide Shut is a lousy movie that is in no way better than The Matrix.
Ripley was really great. Peak Damon, peak Paltrow, and you’ve got Cate Blanchett, superbronzed Jude Law, and PSH going “Tommy, how’s the peeping?” on top of that. So great.
Hoffman just oozes condescension and malice in that movie. Between this and Boogie Nights a couple of years earlier he really showed off his range.
Hoffman was so great – equally believable as snobbish, WASPy jerk and a total pathetic loser schlub.
Take Boogie Nights, Ripley, Punch Drunk Love, Charlie Wilsons War, and The Master, and you get his entire range, and dear lord was it vast. I miss him on the big screen, such a talent. I’m not sure I know of an actor who can play complete sad and pathetic, but also uber-charismatic and vicious with such perfection like PSH did.
“How’s the peeping?” is the one thing I remember about that movie which I haven’t seen in 20 years. Great delivery,
The only thing I know about The Talented Mr. Ripley is that it made Tommy Wiseau cry.
When I look at the list above there are only a few movies that I have watched multiple time sand Talented Mr. Ripley is one.
Unlike the AVC writers, I don’t find Tom sympathetic at all. He’s just unpleasant to spend time with. My favorite Ripley movie is The American Friend because the protagonist is the sap Ripley tricks into doing some of his dirty work (Ripley’s Game covers the same material but with an emphasis on showing how cool Ripley is).
Came for the intrigue, stayed for the lush atmosphere. Spent most of the film rooting for Tom. Also, still awed at how gorgeous Cate Blanchett is in this movie. Damn straight I’ll watch it if it’s on.
Cate Blanchett is super gorgeous in that movie, but I still think her best look was as Hela in “Thor:Ragnarok” because that goth look really worked for her.
One of the most subtly unsettling movies ever. For me anyway. It hits some deep nerves.
A movie I really enjoyed from ‘99 was Outside Providence, which seems all but forgotten lately. I think of it as thinking person’s American Pie (another gem from that year).
Oh no… Let’s not start talking about American Pie again.
I will give American Pie credit for establishing Alison Hannigan’s “sweet naif who’s actually dirty as hell” persona. It had a noticeable impact on how they portrayed Willow in Buffy, and it basically defined her character on How I Met Your Mother. Otherwise it’s unwatchable garbage with an awfully good cast.
Is the cast even really that good? Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge are good in the Christopher Guest movies, but outside of Hannigan and Natasha Lyonne’s recent career revival with Russian Doll and OITNB, who from the young cast has been in anything you’d actually want to watch in the last 10 years?
“Goon” was a pretty good movie and it had Sean William Scott in it. Eugene Levy is in “Schitt’s Creek” which is surprisingly good for what seemed like another “Arrested Development” rip-off. Though you are pretty spot-on, from that young cast it has been mostly Lyonne and Hannigan who have succeeded, unless we count Tara Reid’s resurgence in Sharknado series.
I did not like Goon at all. Though I’m aware that a lot of people do for whatever reason.
Probably because they had a different opinion than you. It has been known to happen. I’m not putting the movie itself in my top ten or anything, but I think that Sean William Scott was very good in his performance.
Sure Chris Klein was in the most recent season of The Flash, but that’s not a point in its favor.
John Cho. He’s in it for like a minute. I didn’t know that until I read “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.”
Makin sex is like Chinese dinner. It ain’t over til ya both get ya cookies. Remember I said that.
When I saw the trailer, I remember thinking, ‘This is one of the goddamn dumbest lines I’ve ever heard in a movie.’. Thanks for the reminder. /s
I legitimately adore this movie. I was working at a summer camp, and Outside Providence was one of the few videos we had in the counselor room, so we’d watch it like once a week and somehow never got sick of it.
I’ve actually met Peter Farrelly and told him I liked the book more. (He prefers the movie.)
I feel like Outside Providence is definitely underappreciated!“Do you have a friend called ‘Drugs’?”“Drugs Delaney?”“How many individuals named ‘Drugs’ could you possibly associate with!”
Pouring one out for the South Park Movie.
Honestly Matt and Trey’s show taught an entire generation that anyone who cares about social issues is a bad person and, likely unintentionally, helped led to the normalization of far right ideology.
That’s the show, in my opinion – the movie has a different kind of fish to fry, a very deserving target, and it totally nails it (with some great musical numbers along the way).
I’d argue the film was more of an A Broken Clock is Right Twice a Day-scenario. Sometimes Matt and Trey will actually have a solid point, like the episode on Richard Dawkins. But that’s because stuff like Dawkins’ Militant Atheism clashes with their brand of Libertarianism.Other times they’ll say that people who’ll defend bigots’ who discriminate against LGBT people because LGBT people “shouldn’t force bigots to accept them.”.
Pretty sure they’ve never said anything like that. You’re just taking the messages that you want out of their work so you can act like a sanctimonious asshole, which seems to be your thing.
“Cartoon causes fascism”. I swear this is just as bad as the “video games cause gun violence” argument. And then capping it off with “likely unintentionally.”
Yeah, that’s what he said.
Yeah, and it’s why you’re a fucking moron.
That doesn’t even make sense
Nice Straw Man/False Dichotomy combo. I never said South Park caused fascism, that concept exsisted decades earlier. What I said was that South Park introduced right wing thinking points into the mainstream with their excuse that they “made fun of everyone.”, which served to help normalize regressive ideologies.This video explains how South Park’s edgy style of humor helps normalize far right ideology.
Meh. “Normalize” is just a word used by people to warn those they disagree with to watch what they say. I find the word “normalize” to be “problematic.”
Excellent video. As a side note, it’s infuriating to see the fallout of the “video game violence” discourse to have ended up with a huge swath of 18-34 year old men believing that media has no effect on how we think at all. Like, just because video games don’t cause you to shoot up your school doesn’t mean that the art we consume doesn’t effect our emotional state or thought processes. That’s the whole point of art.
I dunno, I feel like South Park gets a bit of a bad rap because it confronts political issues so directly, while a lot of shows that are much more regressive get a pass because their politics is never made explicit. For instance, I can’t think of a show pitched to young people that shilled harder for shallow materialism and oppressive conformity than Saved by the Bell, but it’s laughed off as harmless, good-natured fluff. And police procedurals have been pumping America’s collective consciousness with rah-rah law-and-order horseshit for decades, but they’re considered harmless popcorn fare.
It just seems weird to argue that one of the few shows that actively explores social issues is responsible for making people not care about said issues. I’d be much more apt to blame the many, many shows that take the regressive stance on an issue as a given and don’t even open it up for debate.
By such stupid logic, virtually all adult cartoon TV shows since the 90s and 2000s helped “normalize far-right ideology” since they all make fun of everyone and toss PC norms out the window, which is ridiculous.
Nah
Oh wow the youtube video you linked to TOTALLY proves beyond a reasonable doubt that anything “edgy” is bad and only emboldens right wing racists. What a legitimate and well thought through statement to make.
The same with Team America World Police, but I still consider it one of the funniest movies I’ve seen.
No it didn’t.
No it didn’t.
That’s weird. I watched it from the beginning. I was 17 or so when it started. I never felt instructed to believe such nonsense. Anyone who got that and only that from it, and then turned that into a whole ideology just started off wrong.
I wouldn’t say that it normalized far right ideology as much as it possible helped lay the pop-social groundwork for false ideological equivalency. However, if that is what you mean by normalization, by all means, yes.
Please shut the fuck up. You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
Certainly I think there’s a pretty direct line to be drawn from the South Park movie to the explosion of “musical episodes” that TV shows did in the 2000’s. In that way especially it was very influential.
Well there’s also a little later Buffy. Just because a musical for a cartoon isn’t completely odd ever, a more straight forward show doing it WAS less likely.
No arguments except that I really didn’t understand the appeal of Three Kings. But there’s a lot of good picks here (nice to see The Limey alongside some less surprising choices).
The most important point I think Three Kings made is that we had no business being in Iraq
Fight Club needs to be much higher (top 5). The Talented Mr Ripley sucked and should not be on this list. Knock Eyes Wide shut down about 8 spots.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is a movie that has long lived in my head. Maybe its because I graduated high school in 1999 and keenly identified with Tom’s outsider standing and intense longing to be part of something. His incredible self hatred and how it leads him to destroy everything he ever wanted is something I’ve never forgotten.You can’t compare that with Magnolia or Eyes Wide Shut, which were cacophonies of muddled themes and pure fucking ego. Magnolia I forgot almost as soon as I watched it. Eyes lingers only for the sense of sexual perversion it provoked, something that I expect would seem tame upon rewatch.
I couldn’t believe Magnolia was received so well at the time, and I still can’t believe that it remains highly regarded. ‘Muddled themes and pure fucking ego’ is right, it’s the sort of film you can imagine the director saying ‘do you get it? it’s a metaphor’ at the end of every scene.Aimee Mann’s soundtrack is actually quite good though.
I saw Magnolia in the theater as a teenager and thought it was awful, pretentious crap. I actually got up and left and walked around the lobby and came back and it felt like it was a million hours long. I revisited it as an adult and still didn’t care for it at all. I think it’s the weakest PT Anderson movie and never understood why people liked it so much.
I’m still annoyed by those frogs.
I think I liked Magnolia so much because I loved Julianne Moore so much. Still do! She can convey more emotion with a single expression than most actors can with an entire script full of dialogue.
I get that, I like her in anything. I do think some of the actual performances in Magnolia are quite good, I just do not think the movie as a whole is my thing, whatsoever.
It’s my second favorite of his (after Punch Drunk Love). The language, though, does get to be a bit much after 3 hours. I think the frogs are great.
Punch Drunk Love is great. I honestly think Magnolia might be the only movie of his that I dislike.
Her soundtrack is pretty much the only good thing about the movie.
My sister and I saw Ripley together. I remember us both saying two things at the same time right after the movie:
“Matt Damon is ugly!”
and
“Jude Law is a golden god.”
1999 is all about Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow”, yo. Which was like, his last overtly decent movie, dare one say.
I’m an unapologetic advocate for Big Fish, which I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It was the in-flight movie on a 8AM filled almost entirely with businesspeople, and it was fun watching half the plane pretend they weren’t crying.
Big Fish to me almost comes off as Burton trying to do Coen Bros. I like it, but there are times when I thought it got less Buton-y and more Coen-esque.But, hey, if you’re going to ape anyone’s style, you can do worse than copying the Coens.
I’m not a fan of Burton but I love the Coens and yeah, you’re absolutely right.
One of the reasons I like it is that it’s much more restrained than the usual Burton outing. Good call on the Coen influence.
My wife often forgets that Big Fish is not a Coen Brothers film.
I am also a fan of Big Fish. I liked its dealing with what was essentially magical realism. Plus, I grew up in a family where tall tales were often shared at gatherings.
The best call the story made was using tall tales that were just the fantastical side of reality. Finney’s stories were nonsense on their face, but Crudup dismissed them out of hand as being too ridiculous. It made the layers of reveals at the end wonderful.
I’m more interested in hearing about a communal in-flight movie in 1999. They still had those at that point?
Oh yeah. There were seat-back monitors, but it was still all linked to one system. I don’t think the on demand option came along for another five years.
Oh that’s right. I remember that. I also remember the screen that came down at the front of the cabin which ended some time in the 90s probably and those horrible stethoscope type headphones.
To me that’s where he drops off, not too long after making his masterpiece, Ed Wood. It should have fit so well and I remember being excited about it, but then feeling underwhelmed, like Tim Burton had finally become aware of himself as a brand. Just my response.
Sleepy Hollow gets my thumbs-up largely thanks to the moment where Ichabod Crane arrives at the scene of the latest killing, walks up to the bystanders staring at a headless corpse, and declares, “It’s alright; I’m here now.”Also, the excellently spooky opening credits sequence.
Sleepy Hollow was perfectly solid up until the ending.
I liked Sweeney Todd which would have been better if it’s two leads were better singers.
I liked “Sweeney Todd” too. Not much Burton could have done as a director about the singing voices of his leads, except dub over them maybe. The scenes were all pretty great, and I liked that sad montage about HBC’s character wanting a nice life with Sweeney Todd but knowing it wasn’t going to happen. I also liked “Big Eyes” but 90% of that was due to Adams and Waltz
I imagine Tim Burton these days feeling a lot like Peter Jackson in that picture of him (Jackson) on the set of The Hobbit; like his soul has been crushed into dust. Filmmaking no longer holds any thrill for him. It’s a goddamn job, now.Still, Sleepy Hollow, awesome as it is, is hardly his last decent movie. I will definitely go to bat for Sweeney Todd. A perfect match of material and director. Plus, Depp and Carter are terrific in their roles, not to mention well-cast; it’s not just an affectation that they’re there.
Nope – his best was his first, flaws and all…Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.
What do you think is the best for movies since then?
Cruise should have won the Oscar for Magnolia. Everyone agrees
That was the first time I saw Cruise and thought, “Wow, he actually can act.”
That interview scene where the lady breaks him the fuck down, is masterful acting.
It’s some of the most riveting acting I’ve ever seen, and is incredible considering how silent he is throughout
That year was stacked – Cruise, Osmet, Law, and Duncan. I would’ve given it to Osmet, but any of those was a worthy choice. Of course, they gave it to the absolutely worst choice that year, stupid Michael Caine.
I saw 14 of them. And no way is Blair Witch or Sixth Sense better than All About My Mother.
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich Malkovich. Malcovich? Malcovich Malkovich…Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich!
Your right-wing screeds are getting real tiresome.
Hey, Malkovich! Think fast!
Um, I prefer Revolver to Sgt. Pepper but I’m not sure why you’re asking in Swedish. And no, I do not want fries with that.
Came here for this.I can’t hear Malkovich’s name with spouting entire one word sentences—to the confusion of those who aren’t familiar with the movie.
Maximum Malkovich!
Anyone who would interpret Fight Club as a sincere glorification of male violence is too thick to merit consideration.Also, Mike Flanagan didn’t direct House on Haunted Hill. William Castle directed the original and William Malone the remake, but I assume you meant to write The Haunting of Hill House here.
I was really disappointed in Being John Malkovich. It’s such an interesting premise that ultimately devolves into an uninteresting lovers’ quarrel. All of the characters are pretty terrible people (which is fine), but only one gets punished. It’s cruelly arbitrary, but doesn’t seem to have a good reason for it.I think Kaufman and Jonze’s Adaptation is so much better.
Came here to say the same thing. I’m fine with not finding characters likable, but there has to be something mitigating that unlikability.
Keener was smokin’ hot?
I agree with your take, and certainly think Adaptation (and Eternal Sunshine) is better, but BJM is so impressively nutty and so memorable that I still don’t mind seeing it here.
Fair enough. And without it we might have never gotten those or Synecdoche, so I’m glad it exists. I just can’t agree with it being the best movie of such a great year of movies.
Right there with you. It fell apart for me after about a half hour.
American Beauty?
Is awful and should not be on this list. I agree.
But I ended up dating a plastic bag for 3 years because of that movie!
It really set back the expectations between human/plastic bag relationships over the years.I don’t think it deserves the hate it gets or the praise it gets. I’d like to see a real look at the movie itself, rather than the kneejerk reactions to it.
I’m sure that having Spacey as the lead hasn’t helped it age well, so I doubt it will get seriously rehabilitated in critical opinion.
The nice thing about dating a plastic bag is that it’s not degrading, though.
500 points to Gryffindor!
Gumbercules? I love that guy!Points for best pun on this entire thread.
It’s really amazing how far this film, which was so lauded back in the day, has fallen. Even before the Spacey ugliness, there was a significant downgrade that is almost equal to Garden State. Is it the emo floating bag that did it in? Outside of Annette Bening, no one from this movie really made it out, either. Wes Bentley, whom I thought was Tobey Maguire then; Thora Birch has basically disappeared; Mena Suvari and her confetti of rose petals seemed like a breakout star, but no, no, no…
I saw this movie after the first round of hype so I always thought that I was reacting to the overreaction around it. But then I watched it again a couple of years ago and found the movie insufferable.Chris Cooper and Annette Bening are okay in it. They’ve done better in better films.
I think the shock of 9/11, then the Great Recession and then the rise of Trump makes people find the whole 1990s angst “We have a great life materially but it is empty somehow” rather repellent.
The contrarian hate for this movie is truly hilarious.
I’ll freely admit that some of my initial dislike for it came from a contrarian place. I was led to expect a much better movie due to the hype. But, at it’s best, it is an emo time capsule that didn’t earn its self-seriousness when it first came out and is a mockery of itself now..
Kevin Spacey’s most personally sincere performance.
Swimming with Sharks is probably the only movie people can watch right now. He gets the shit kicked out of him in.
Or “L.A. Confidential” cause bad things also happen to him in that one
More like Rolo No-massi, AMIRITE?
Not really, because his character decides against sleeping with someone because they’re underage.
Eh? The character was lusting after under-age girls, not under-age boys.
Asshole with sex stuff involved seems close enough.
It didn’t even hold up when I rewatched it on video months later.
Is the brand of spaghetti I buy if De Cecco is sold out.
How Charlie Kaufman has not been given total carte blanche for new projects astonishes me. America’s best screenwriter, hands down, has made two movies in 11 years. Ridiculous.
And one of those movies, Synecdoche, New York, was Roger Ebert’s final “film of the decade.” If anything, I think Ebert undersold just how good it was.But very pleased to see Malkovich topping this list. The movie had more brilliantly insane hilarity in its throw away jokes than most writers could achieve in a lifetime. I mean jesus fuck, Marry Kay Place’s “hearing impaired” receptionist is about the 35th funniest thing in the movie, and she was goddamned hilarious.
For my money, Synecdoche, NY is the best movie I’ve ever seen. So I agree. Agreed on BJM – the thing that sells it so well is that it is a great comedy, but one that is so well grounded in its characters and sense of place. The ending is absolutely perfect tragicomedy.
Being John Malkovich was my all-time favorite movie . . . until I saw Synecdoche, New York a second time (the first time the movie was clearly smarter than me, and I wasn’t in a position to judge it).Both movies remain at the very, very top of my my favorites list to this day.I was a Kickstarter backer of Anomolisa. I didn’t love it all that much, but I’d contribute to anything else Kaufman wanted to make in an instant. His “failures” are a hundred times more interesting than most other films.
Same. I suspect we’d get along well. I’ve liked everything Kaufman has ever worked on, even counting his TV days. He’s so committed to being himself and being interesting.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman was great in Synecdoche! Of course you could say that about like 90% of the movies he’s been in, even if the movie itself was not great.
Ripley was one of those movies that, going into the theater, I wanted to hate but really liked. Could quibble with some of the placements. But not sure Bringing Out The Dead belongs on this list. The Insider, The Limey and Magnolia… such a solid group of three in there.
Yeah, Bringing out the Dead was a decent enough book, but the movie was awful.
Don’t make me take my sunglasses off.
Hard to believe that people got Fight Club so wrong. I didn’t see it in the theaters because, based on the marketing and the critical reviews I saw at the time, it seemed to be just a glorification of violence done purely for shock value. When I saw it on video later I remember thinking that it wasn’t at all what I had been led to expect.
Young angry white dudes saw what they wanted to see from that movie. I remember chatting with a co-worker about it (I hadn’t seen it – he had), and he explained to me how great it was because it showed that chicks are destroying guys by trying to make them more sensitive and stuff.
Young angry white dudes saw what they wanted to see from that movie. I remember chatting with a co-worker about it (I hadn’t seen it – he had), and heexplained to me how great it was because it showed that chicks are destroyingguys by trying to make them more sensitive and stuff. How do you even GET that from the movie? Of all the ways I’ve seen to misinterpret that, how do you even arrive at that conclusion where there’s one chick, she’s barely in it, and more messed up than the narrator (at least in the beginning)? It’s a movie about how the big tragedy is that a guy doesn’t have interesting home furnishings, so he needs to get way too into his neighbourhood MMA club and steal credit cards.
I did see it on opening, based on the director and was startled, by how twisted the perceived film message became for a certain demographic, but it is STILL getting misinterpreted years later!
I did see it on opening, based on the director and was startled, by how twisted the perceived film message became for a certain demographic, but it is STILL getting misinterpreted years later!You don’t think it gets misinterpreted because of how cool and fun Fincher made evil look? The narrator lives the MRA/incel/alt-right dream. People give you money because they’re scared of you and you can bully them. You have great taste, cool stuff, and a great body. No one can stop you. No one tells you no. No one tells you you’re full of shit. It’s a total adolescent fantasy, and between this movie and American Beauty, the late 90s had some serious, serious, problems.
In retrospect I can see it but at the time I wasn’t thinking about it being cool, though Fincher is a master of sucking you into his little worlds, even as you are holding on for dear life…The reaction I felt from the young guys in the audience reminds me of Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers which played to a certain demographic as a military recruiting film rather than as a satirical warning. Subtlety and nuance? Lost on the high testosterone crowd.
When it came out, a classmate of mine had an interesting observation. By throwing that dick flash at the end, Fincher was saying we’re the children in the theater from earlier in the film that don’t really understand what we’re seeing.
I had not heard that, how interesting… I gather from watching his interviews, he loves to manipulate audiences, in a very Kubrick/Hitchcock kind of way.
I remember seeing alot of movies in 99 in theater. Fight Club had about 6 other people in the theatre but I enjoyed every minute of it. But my pick for the most underrated movie is The Insider, I know it’s on the list but it’s not a particularly well known movie.
Fight Club is an extremely subtle movie. Sure on Level 1 you have the uncritical glorification of male violence, and on Level 2 you have the criticism of said violence and the resultant slide into becoming a totalitarian drone of a completely different sort, but there is a third level to this story.
Notice something. Unlike many glorify-then-condemn movies, like say Point Break or Green Street Hooligans off the top of my head, which want to have their cake and eat it too, by first reveling in the excesses of masculinity and then tut-tutting their finger at the whole thing towards the end, Fight Club is very unique in never de-legitimizing the impulses which drove men into such a movement. As such, it works as a powerful and scathing indictment of the way in which men are treated in modern-day society.
Look at, for example, the abject ridiculousness of ‘Remaining Men Together’, the absolutely idiotic idea that any painful setback or development in life can be handled by ‘therapy’, that any lack of intimacy can be substituted by hugging random strangers at such a breathtakingly fake environment, that any grief at not having any romantic prospects or not being able to have children can be just patched up with a verbal band-aid, and so on.
There is this constant push in the modern society since at least the 90s to essentially treat men as defective women by telling them to ‘open up about their feelings’, to ‘learn how to emphatize’ and so on, all the while conspicuously ignoring or even deriding actual issues men face under the guise of ‘women have it harder’ or ‘see, patriarchy hurts men, too. If anything, Fight Club has in the last few years become almost prescient, practically predicting the emergence of MRA and MIGTOW. Whatever your opinion on these movements, it’s Fight Club that started the conversation 20 years ago.
‘Nothing was solved, but then again, nothing mattered.’ (If you don’t understand this sentence, you don’t understand men.)
They are horrible movements and nothing should legitimize them
Very well said.
Fight Club is an extremely subtle movie. Sure on Level 1 you have the uncritical glorification of male violence, and on Level 2 you have the criticism of said violence and the resultant slide into becoming a totalitarian drone of a completely different sort, but there is a third level to this story.It didn’t do any of that. If there was a point that Edward Norton not knowing his dad was in anyHe has a desk job! Poor baby! He buys mass-produced plates! Poor baby! He doesn’t look like Brad Pitt with his shirt off! Poor baby! Strangers don’t worship him! Poor baby! The solution is, basically, creating a cult that starts off as what’s basically a local boxing club that takes itself way too seriously, and uh, stealing stuff and blowing stuff up! Anarchy! Meaning! He expected everyone to empathise with him, and the big tragedy of his life is that no one does. That’s what Fight Club ostensibly IS. A place for men who understand his great tragedy. His tragedy of not having a cool apartment or an entourage. He demands constant empathy. He demands people begging him for his attention, to stand outside his cool art-directed apartment and lick his boots. It DID predict MRA but that’s not one of it’s strengths, that Fincher didn’t make the satire obvious enough.
From your comments it sounds like you missed the entire final third of the movie where our hero realizes that he is literally insane and that the cult he created is wildly dangerous and he is now trapped in it. The story of the movie is simply about a search for fulfillment on a personal level. Norton couldn’t find it when he hitched his wagon to all the material promises of his consumerist society, so he creates Fight Club, trying to find meaning in something directly opposite – but in fact he just goes from an extreme to a far greater extreme, solving none of his issues and just creating his own army of mindless, sympathy-free drones. It’s ridiculous and a dead end and in the end Norton has to reject Tyler and Fight Club before he can even think about having a normal life. Neither crimes nor anarchy nor material wealth is an answer. The answer is figuring your shit out on your own and creating your own happiness and making your own genuine connections with other people.
The story of the movie is simply about a search for fulfillment on a personal level. Norton couldn’t find it when he hitched his wagon to all the material promises of his consumerist society, so he creates Fight Club, trying to find meaning in something directly opposite – but in fact he just goes from an extreme to a far greater extreme, solving none of his issues and just creating his own army of mindless, sympathy-free drones.Except the movie paints Fight Club as glamorous and sexy, something that never lets up even in the end of the movie, when Edward Norton is with his beautiful, sexual, exciting girlfriend, watching buildings cinematically explode off in the distance where they don’t hurt him, and no the movie never thinks a real office drone like he was at the beginning of the movie, could die. Fight Club is the most consumerist part of the movie, where instead of a drab office job and Ikea furniture, Norton gets a cool architectural loft with tons of open space, vintage bathtubs, a movie star gym body, and an exciting job where people worship him. And pays for it all by selling a luxury good. Everything that makes Fight Club appealing is consumerist. It’s about stuff. “This awesome, fun, morally-righteous, exciting, cool, thing where you have tons of friends and no responsibility and everyone adores you is actually bad, kids! Don’t be like these super hot guys having the time of their lives!”
I don’t see anything glamorous or sexy about Fight Club, and I don’t think the movie does either. It’s a bunch of dudes misguidedly grasping for meaning by punching each other in basements and plotting acts of terrorism in… “a cool architectural loft”? What? It’s a dilapidated shithole! And none of these guys are real friends to Norton. The movie sees why the idea of a Fight Club would be appealing; but it also sees through the bullshit of the real thing, and can’t stop taking the piss out of it. It’s no solution to anything.
He lives in an abandoned, crumbling house next to a paper mill, not a trendy loft space.
He lives in an abandoned, crumbling house next to a paper mill, not a trendy loft space.He moves from a bland, Holiday-Inn-looking condo to a beautiful, spacious, prewar, airy, original molding and furniture space that looks artistically disheveled and, especially in the late 90s, would cost a fortune and be featured in the kind of art magazine so cool it publishes on matte paper. You can’t deny the movie makes the fight club lifestyle look glamorous as hell. Compare that with, say, Office Space, where you can’t walk anywhere and everything is an ugly office park and ugly chain restaurant and you drive hours every day and live in a cheap, shitty development that’s so badly built you can hear your neighbours. THAT movie actually made the surroundings ugly. Everything in fight club looks like a CK ad.
If it didn’t look exciting, no one would join. It’s not consumerist, though. It’s taking advantage of consumerism to finance the endeavor. But it’s not putting the money into anything “modern life” would consider valuable. It’s using it to bring destruction to modern life. Yeah, it’s an old house that is architecturally interesting, but it’s not remotely nice.As for the war thing, Tyler isn’t wanting war, he’s talking about the direction and purpose it has provided. He’s saying that we have it easy, but it doesn’t seem to have brought fulfillment. Of course the idea of destroying everything and starting again at zero is nuts. But, then again, so is the character.
If it didn’t look exciting, no one would join. It’s not consumerist, though. It’s taking advantage of consumerism to finance the endeavor. But it’s not putting the money into anything “modern life” would consider valuable. It’s using it to bring destruction to modern life. Yeah, it’s an old house that is architecturally interesting, but it’s not remotely nice.It’s consumerism because the point is, stuff. Being in fight club gives you a Brad Pitt body. Being in fight club gives you kinky sex with a hot girl. Being in fight club gives you surroundings that are nicer than dockers and Ikea. I don’t know how old you are, but Fight Club came out around the samew time as Adbusters and No Logo. Sneering at the masses for being sheelpe drones and destroying the planet because they needed to buy stuff, and oh, how terrible that is. Mass-produced was the enemy. Popular brands were the enemy. The worst thing you could do was look and act like everyone else. Never mind that we all need to buy stuff to live, and how is it less consumerist, more a slave to the man, to live in a condo instead of an abandoned house? You need plates, what makes it more consumerist to buy them from a mass retailer instead of buying the pottery equipment and making them yourself. It was every bit as elitist as the advertisers Tyler Durden insults. The value is no one else can buy an old, unrenovated house so there aren’t many of them. To get one you need more than money, you need coolness and connections and style. It’s extremely elitist because so few people ever make it to that level. It’s judging people by their stuff, which Adbusters and No Logo claimed to deplore, but worse because you can’t just buy your way in with money. It’s hipsterism before we called it that.
Man, I couldn’t disagree more. But I’ll leave ya alone on it. We just have completely different interpretations of the movie.
Oh you were talking about the house. Yeah I see what you’re saying but in 1999 those architectural and real estate trends hadn’t really happened, especially in Miami where the story is set. Outside of the big, rich cities houses like that were considered worthless and not “cool”
I think he’s talking about where the titular “Fight Club” meets
That 13 people liked this MRA drivel is disturbing but I hope at least puts you on a watch list of potential mass shooters
Fight Club was basically a Rorschach test in movie form – viewers saw whatever message they wanted to see in it. Meathead dudes saw it as a celebration of men reclaiming their generation’s stolen manhood. Feminists saw it as a sexist glorification of toxic masculinity. Baby Boomers saw it as validation for their belief that Gen Xers were all directionless brats ungrateful for the comforts of modern life. Gen Xers saw it as a reflection of Boomers hollowing out American society. Democrats saw it as an indictment of the soul-crushing disposability of modern capitalism. Republicans saw it as a dire warning about the breakdown of traditional family units. Progressives argued that the movie was pro-fascist. Conservatives thought it was pro-anarchist.
The pro-anarchy angle is especially funny because these “anarchists” had so many damn rules. It’s a running gag how many times people bring up “the rules” in their anarchist society.
Film Critic Hulk makes a very astute point about Fight Club, which is that even though it can be intellectually read as a condemnation of Tyler Durden’s ideology, it doesn’t viscerally feel like one. Basically his point is that Fincher makes fight club, Project Mayhem and Tyler himself seem so awesome and fun and cool that even when Norton comes to reject them, and even though we intellectually understand his reasons, it isn’t nearly enough to undo the feelings of awesomeness of what’s come before. I love Fight Club and Fincher, but I can’t help but feel there’s some truth to this, and that – even though idiot misogynists who take it the wrong way are ultimately to blame – it is also representative of a flaw with the film. Linked below (it’s long though, so thought it best to summarize it first)https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/01/22/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs-fight-club-and-the-work-of-david-fincher
1) Great movies very rarely ‘condemn’ things, that kind of moral didactism usually stifles art. Great movies (and works of art in general) explore new mental, emotional and social perspectives and let you make up your mind about them.
‘’ Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessel’s life. His breakfast will taste better than any meal you and I have ever tasted’’ 2) The reason Fight Club is so awesome and seductive is that it is one of the few GENUINE attempts to depict the natural progression of a mind unshackling itself from all social expectations.
“How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?”
3) Within Fight Club, there IS a scathing critique of the way men are bullied into compliance by strong forces of social expectation into lives that don’t make them happy: Despite his extreme set of solutions, there is a lot of truth to what Tyler is saying about the world we live in. That’s what makes the movie ultimately so compelling and enduring.
‘’Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.’’
‘’Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.’’Nothing really makes you sound more sheltered and pathetic that wanting war and poverty because you think they’re meaningful. That makes Marie Antoinette look like Gandhi, right there.
The story arc of Fight Club goes from 1- Ed Norton hates his life, to 2 – Ed Norton and Tyler Durden break free from the shackles of society and have fun doing it and 3 – Ed Norton realises things have gotten too crazy and Project Mayhem is just gonna make everything worse in its own way. The problem is that while the audience understands all three, they only viscerally ‘feel’ the first two, so that when Norton panicks and tries to stop Project Mayhem, we don’t feel that panic like we’ve felt things along with him on the first parts of his journey and he comes off, in Hulk’s words, as a ‘buzzkill’.
Film Critic Hulk makes a very astute point about Fight Club, which is that even though it can be intellectually read as a condemnation of Tyler Durden’s ideology, it doesn’t viscerally feel like one. Basically his point is that Fincher makes fight club, Project Mayhem and Tyler himself seem so awesome and fun and cool that even when Norton comes to reject them, and even though we intellectually understand his reasons, it isn’t nearly enough to undo the feelings of awesomeness of what’s come before. I love Fight Club and Fincher, but I can’t help but feel there’s some truth to this, and that – even though idiot misogynists who take it the wrong way are ultimately to blame – it is also representative of a flaw with the film. Linked below (it’s long though, so thought it best to summarize it first)https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2012/01/22/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs-fight-club-and-the-work-of-david-fincherExactly this. It’s a really shallow movie. The goal is to live in a cool apartment, not care about your job, have strangers telling you how awesome you are. It’s an anti-consumerist movie about how to be cool. It’s America Beauty. It’s hilarious that those are seen as so different when they are extremely, extremely similar. Men apparently have this deep, existential angst . . . that can be solved with the right stuff.
That’s basically the claim (that has often been ascribed to Truffaut, although he didn’t exactly say it) that it is impossible to make an anti-war film because no matter how much you show how war messes up both civilians and soldiers, battle scenes really are exciting to watch.
Fight Club and Starship Troopers are still regularly misunderstood. I don’t understand how, but it happens.
That’s another one. How could anybody see Veorhoven’s “Starship Troopers” and possibly think it was PRO fascism?
Now the book, that’s a different story.
Every war movie, even the anti-war movies, are pro-war movies.
Only if you choose to take a very simplistic, literal, viewpoint.
This is a long debated topic. I’m of the opinion that depicting violence without also depicting the long term consequences is dangerously close to glorifying violence. Also the passage of time changes both how we view events depicted in film, and the audience viewing these films.
Hard to believe that people got Fight Club so wrong. I didn’t see it in the theaters because, based on the marketing and the critical reviews I saw at the time, it seemed to be just a glorification of violence done purely for shock value. When I saw it on video later I remember thinking that it wasn’t at all what I had been led to expect.I was in high school when it came out. I was friends with people who loved it, and the Matrix. I watched it twice. I remember being there for the beginning (Edward Norton’s job is soulless and he hates it, got it, really spoke to my angsty, safe, middle-class soul about no one understanding me and my life not being DEEP and IMPORTANT and VITAL) and then it completely losing me once they start committing crimes. It didn’t make sense to me at all. Of course watching it now it’s crap from start to finish. Even knowing it’s supposed to be a satire, it feels like no one told the movie it was supposed to be a satire. Maybe I can’t separate the movie from its fans, but it watches like Fincher believes every word. It’s a movie about how the big tragedy is no one realises average drone is really a cool and interesting person! How dare they!
Hard to believe that people got Fight Club so wrong. I didn’t see it in the theaters because, based on the marketing and the critical reviews I saw at the time, it seemed to be just a glorification of violence done purely for shock value. When I saw it on video later I remember thinking that it wasn’t at all what I had been led to expect.It was worse. It was the glorification of violence as the morally-upright, cool, sign of being a natural leader and tastemaker.
I can’t remember who first pointed this out, but it really is amazing that the two movies most beloved by MRA types are The Matrix (a movie by two trans women that can easily be read as a parable about breaking away from standard societal norms like gender) and Fight Club (a clear satire of oppressive masculinity based on a book written by a gay man).
So few people realize that it’s a black comedy.
‘99 was a hot year for me seeing movies in the theater and I remember being 3rd wheel with my best friend and her boyfriend seeing it on Halloween. I don’t think I knew much about it other than I liked violent-for violence’s-sake movies and so it very much spoke to me in theory. I was actually a little disappointed at the time that it was more complex than I expected!
I watched Fight Club again last night and decided it could also be viewed as a romcom about a man who is afraid of commitment.
That’s intentional. Fincher and the screenwriter were mentioning that in interviews at the time. They compared it to “The Graduate”.
Fight Club would make my top 3 and I’m surprised to see it in the lower half here, but I’m not gonna waste energy on complaining, it’s always nice to see these yearly tributes. Happy to see the love for Eyes Wide Shut, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Blair Witch Project, Topsy-Turvy and Bringing Out the Dead in particular. Topsy-Turvy deserves to be at least as known and popular as the previous year’s Shakespeare in Love, BOTD is one of Scorsese’s most dizzying movies, and Ripley is precisely the kind of movie I wish Hollywood were focused on making these days, intelligent adult entertainment done with appealing craft, first-rate casting, and a disquieting streak beneath the glamour. Underseen 1999 American releases that I didn’t realistically expect to see here but that deserve more exposure and support: Show Me Love, Leila (speaking of Iranian cinema), and The Winslow Boy.
I know this is an unpopular opinion, but MAN do I hate the Matrix. Otherwise, I’m surprised how great of a list this is.
I re-watched Three Kings recently, and thought that one of the Kuwaiti villagers being rescued looked an awful lot like a young Alia Shawkat. (It was her.)
I believe she’s actually of Kurdish descent.
You Mae be right.
Her?
Not Ann Veal, Maeby.
Yeah, I was just making a joke about the “it was her” comment.
I know that is a Mae Whitman reference, but I’ve never found out where it specifically comes from.
It’s from Arrested Development.
👍
No Galaxy Quest? Office Space? Bowfinger? The Hurricane? At least one of these is more deserving on this list than Bringing out the Dead or Talented Mr. Ripley.
Not including Galaxy Quest and Office Space is downright unforgivable, as is damning Fight Club with faint praise at a lowly #15, placing Talented Mr. Ripley, one of the most boring movies I had the misfortune of sitting through, at #4 and for some reason putting Being John Malkovitch at #1 (yes, it’s a good movie, but nowhere near deserving of #1 within such a stellar year).
Well, no, because I think the slant of this article goes more toward “THE CRAFT OF FILM” rather than movies that were generally entertaining.Office Space being left off here, though, is a crime. There is no more quintessential representation of its era in film.
Where does it say or slant towards “craft of film?” And how is the Talented Mr. Ripley a more “crafted” film than Magnolia or Election? If anything, Mr. Ripley is more disposable entertainment than saying anything meaningful.
Your performative contempt for the craft of movie-making is so fucking sad, dude
If I had to pick 2 movies that do not – in my opinion – belong on the list, it would be precisely the two you’ve noted. Ripley is just plain dull. I really didn’t like it. And Bringing Out the Dead? Meh
It’s an okay and a fairly entertaining film but to say that it ranks higher than Magnolia, Fight Club, or Office Space among other great films of that year is nonsense. And I barely remember Bringing out the Dead.
You’re not very good at convincing people of things, I can tell
? I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. Just noting that I agree with the original poster that those are the two movies I also did not care for. Are you angry about something in particular?
“Talented Mr. Ripley” was a brilliant film with several all-time great performances.
Gotta have room for those international movies that only film reviewers have seen.
The Hurricane is only good if you ignore the fact that Ruben Carter totally did it.
Ripley is good I like it better then the original Purple Noon. But that film was worth it just to look at Alan Delon.
OMG!! Galaxy Quest, yes!! And, Bowfinger!
LOL, you managed to pick two movies on this list that are definitely better than the ones you listed, all of which are good movies
DAMMIT NO BOWFINGER!??!scrap the list it’s obviously worthless.
The Hurricane wasn’t that good
Is the 90’s considered a great movie decade now, a close second to the 70’s? If so, I’m on board with that. On the other hand, the 90’s is when I entered high school and college and began to form my own tastes in movies and other art forms, so I’m probably biased.
I was working at an art house cinema for a good chunk of the ‘90s, and it certainly felt like a great movie decade.
The new indie cinema in the first part of the decade, and a lot of fine commercial filmmaking in the second half, yeah I’ll put the 90s on par with the 70s. On top of that it’s easy to romanticize it as the last full decade where cinema was seen as superior to television, and the last before franchising completely dominated studios’ release schedules.
Yes, the 90s deserves more credit. The 70s is pretty indisputable as the best decade of films, but I’ve got the 90s right behind it (thanks largely to the rise of independent film), and the 80s in 3rd place due to my love of all the genre fare that exploded around that time.
Yeah, I can be sort of dismissive of the 80s, but it was a hell of a decade for action movies and horror movies.
Also “American Movie” fucking rules, and makes a great double header with “Demon Lover Diary”
American Pie, American Beauty, Office Space, The Green Mile, Galaxy Quest, Arlington Road, Man on the Moon, Notting Hill, 10 Things I Hate About You, Existenz, South Park: BLU, The Messenger: Story of Joan D’Arc, The Big Kahuna, But I’m a Cheerleader…
Arlington Road is way underrated–I’m a bit surprised it hasn’t been rediscovered in the Trump era.10 Things doesn’t entirely work but I think it’s one of the most innovative Shakespeare adaptations on film–I like that it mines Shakespeare’s material for the most interesting bits rather than simply adapting Shrew. I’m not a big fan of Galaxy Quest but I’m surprised that’s not here; it was always an AVC fave.
It’s not as good, but I think 10 Things does for Shakespeare what Clueless does for Jane Austen.
Oh absolutely, and I’d argue that Clueless ultimately inspired the Teen Movie Shakespeare boomlet–even moreso than Romeo + Juliet, which is a very traditional Shakespeare film underneath the MTV trappings.
Oh absolutely, and I’d argue that Clueless ultimately inspired the Teen Movie Shakespeare boomlet–even moreso than Romeo + Juliet, which is a very traditional Shakespeare film underneath the MTV trappings.Agreed. I’d say it’s not even Teen Movie Shakespeare so much as Teen Movie Classic Literature. The two most famous movies of the boomlet are Clueless (Emma) and She’s All That (Pygmalion). I still think Clueless is iconic and way smarter than people give it credit for. It’s too bad it stars an anti-vaxxer and a Trump loon.
10 Things doesn’t entirely work but I think it’s one of the most innovative Shakespeare adaptations on film–I like that it mines Shakespeare’s material for the most interesting bits rather than simply adapting Shrew. I’m not a big fan of Galaxy Quest but I’m surprised that’s not here; it was always an AVC fave.I don’t know. Of all the “classic literature set in a modern high school” movies of the late 90s, this one is one of the few that really doesn’t work and coasts entirely on Heath Ledger’s screen presence. I mean, you CAN’T adapt Shrew, because the misogyny wouldn’t fly today, so it’s just a generic teen romcom. It’s a lot like She’s All That, really.
Personally I think Julia Stiles rather than Ledger is really the presence in 10 Things. 10 Things does take a romcom approach to the source material, but I actually think that’s a good approach, treating the original as farce. Another approach would be to lean into the misogyny to mock/satirize it, which another kinda stealthy adaptation of Shrew, Deliver Us From Eva, did a few years later. In general I’d go the other way: Shrew is a play that could be fruitfully adapted today–I’d like to see someone incorporate the framing material and have someone Trump-ish play the lord.
I saw Arlington Road in the theater in 1999 and surprised it’s remembered 20 years later. It was a decent movie with a big twist (as was the style at the time) but I don’t see it as any sort of big commentary on American-style fascism or anything like that
Nice to see “Man on the Moon” get some love. (I’m not as bothered by its sentimental stretches as others seem to be.)
I went through a period when “Andy and Jim: The Great Beyond” came out on Netflix, and I had to search my mind as to whether Man in the Moon was actually good. So, I watched it again, and well, it wasn’t. The movie strikes me more like a book report on Andy Kaufman, hitting the same notes that those two documentaries that played on Comedy Central five nights a week in the 90s also hit.
Existenz is a good nomination. They address in the intro that they consider But I’m A Cheerleader a 2000 movie.I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything particularly good about The Messenger. Where does it sit on the Luc Besson creep scale? I like Jovovich so am vaguely curious about it.
By all means watch The Messenger.
I’m not sure what the ‘Luc Besson creep’ scale is, having not seen many of his movies, but there is little to no sexuality in this movie, at least of the overt kind. Some of Joan’s visions are given a sort of sensual vibe, maybe erotic if you squint hard enough, but nothing more.
Regarding ‘I Am Messenger’, it’s a movie that, as usual, ruffled quite a few religious feathers, although I as an atheist would argue that it is a very deeply religious movie advocating for an altogether deeper and more meaningful form of faith. (SPOILER ALERT) The movie tells a relatively conventional Joan of Arc story, except for the visions, but at the end it does something incredibly interesting.
Joan has two conversations with ‘God.’
In the first conversation God challenges Joan’s idea that he put a sword in the field as sign for her to become a soldier, asserting, complete with cut-scenes, how there are an infinite number of ways a sword could have ended in the field. This is hands down one of the most audacious scenes in the history of cinema, patently criticizing the idea of people taking everything and their grandmother as a sign from God.
In the second conversation, a bit more subtle, but no less important, God pries apart Joan’s motivations and excuses, demonstrating with earlier cut scenes from the movie that she is not as naive and pure as she claims to be, and that she very much did enjoy the violence and the carnage of war, as well as feminine adoration from her fellow soldiers (‘Those who love me, follow me.’) In fact, her blackouts throughout the movie were almost a psychological defense mechanism of sorts.
Though denied a priestly confession, she achieves lasting peace by confessing to God, i.e. Dustin Hoffman, Himself.
I believe the intense negative reaction to be very similar to that of Dany’s ‘heel turn’. People REALLY don’t like their heroines (in this case a saint, no less) being put under a moral spotlight. But the movie is absolutely brilliant.
I don’t think you watched The Messenger. Dustin Hoffman plays Christ not God. You also do not know its title.
Existenz is a good nomination. Really interesting, out there scifi, but mainstream by Cronenberg standards. Glad to see it’s remembered.I thought the Mila Jovavich Joan of Arc movie was terrible
My top 10 would be something like:
1) Fight Club
2) Matrix
3) Sixth Sense
4) Eyes Wide Shut
5) Office Space
6) The Big Kahuna
7) American Beauty
8) Galaxy Guest
9) American Pie
10) Man on the Moon
Galaxy Quest deserves more respect, it almost perfectly achieves what it set out to do.
I remember that when it was released, we were completely surprised by how perfectly executed it was. It reminded me a bit of the little 80s movie THE LAST STARFIGTER, but I’m not sure how many others even saw tht movie.
My top ten:
1. Magnolia
2. Go
3. The Sixth Sense
4. The Talented Mr. Ripley
5. The Blair Witch Project
6. Boys Don’t Cry
7. The Iron Giant
8. The Straight Story
9. Titus
10. Trick
Thank you for bring up “Go,” one of my favorite films of all time
THE BIG KAHUNA came out on April 28th, 2000, so it was ineligible for this list.
American Pie was and remains very charming and entertaining, but not quite “best of” in a competitive year. American Beauty was bullshit in 1999 and it’s even more bullshit today. The Green Mile is also treacly nonsense with one of King’s most glaring “magical negro” characters ever (and that’s saying a lot!)But, man, I’m with you on “Galaxy Quest.” That’s a top fiver for sure.
Thought I don’t agree with your list, as previously stated, if nothing else, it proves the epic talent and versatility of Sam Rockwell, who was just beginning to make a name for himself.“Green Mile” and “Galaxy Quest” in the same year? Daaamn.
Green Mile was bad though. I promise
That Office Space was left out is mind-boggling. Is there a bigger cultural touchstone for the time?
That Office Space was left out is mind-boggling. Is there a bigger cultural touchstone for the time?Agreed. Classic movie. I wonder if the problem is that middle-class workers complaining about their stable-ish desk jobs in the tech industry didn’t age well, considering? Or the ending not making a bit of sense, and that whole thing where white-collar people assume blue-collar work is noble and authentic REALLY didn’t age well, and also was dumb since Jennifer Aniston had a blue-collar job throughout the whole movie and the movie showed her job had the same corporate and co-worker bullshit as working at Initech? But then the movie immediately forgets that for some reason?Anyway, of all the “middle-class suburbia is killing my soul, man” movies of the late 90s, this is by far the only good one. Holds up.
Hm, I’m not sure I agree with any of that. lol What didn’t age well about middle class people complaining about their jobs? Wait I do agree that the ending didn’t make a ton of sense. Just because the building burned down doesn’t mean that the company still wouldn’t notice that it was missing $250,000, or whatever it was. I don’t think they were claiming that blue collar work was noble and authentic? I think that’s obvious from the fact that, as you said, Jennifer Aniston’s waitressing job was portrayed as anything but. The point was that he found something that was noble and authentic *for him,* and he was happier for it. Michael and Samir were happier going back to stable tech jobs, and that was fine too.
Right, I don’t think he fantasized about blue collar work being authentic or noble, just more fulfilling than pushing paper around all day. I can relate to that.
Exactly, and he wouldn’t have wanted to work at Tchotchky’s. That wouldn’t have been fulfilling for him because he’d have to talk to people all day and wear pieces of flair. But he found a job where he could basically do his work and “be left alone all day,” which is exactly what he said he wanted. And hell, I’d take that too, except doing construction in Dallas is probably hot as hell and maybe I’d die.
Totally right. He worked a white collar office job because that’s what he just kinda wound up doing. If you compare Peter with some of his coworkers (Samir and Michael, the “case of the Mondays” lady) you can tell he has a misery related to work they don’t.
Right, Michael and Samir hate the Mondays lady and all that as well, but they value job security and wage security and feel having someone say that to you every Monday is a fair trade-off for those things. Plus Michael, at least, has some actual interest in the coding work as he apparently programs bank robbing codes as a hobby. Peter doesn’t think it’s a fair trade off, so he takes a little less job security, maybe slightly less pay for a little more happiness. Every office job has a Mondays lady and the annoying extreme fajitas waiter—the person who just really fucking loves it (screw those people, seriously)—but most of us are Michaels and Samirs, but some days we’re all Peter.
Totally right. He worked a white collar office job because that’s what he just kinda wound up doing. If you compare Peter with some of his coworkers (Samir and Michael, the “case of the Mondays” lady) you can tell he has a misery related to work they don’t.I see what you’re saying, except how he contrasted Lawrence with the Michael and Samir. Lawrence was surprised Peter just couldn’t tell his boss he’s not coming in on weekends. Because being a construction worker is some kind of paradise free from the Mondays lady and the perky waiter and bad bosses. If the movie framed it as “Peter, personally, didn’t like programming” that would be one thing, but it seemed more to me like “Remember when men were men and work was meaningful and not full of dumb corporate nonsense?”
Samir and Michael, at the very least, seem resigned to their fates. They’re trying to make it work within the system, and don’t seem to viscerally hate their work the way Peter does. I think the simple “blue collar work is more noble than white collar work” framing is off, in any case.
Hm, I’m not sure I agree with any of that. lol What didn’t age well about middle class people complaining about their jobs? Wait I do agree that the ending didn’t make a ton of sense. Just because the building burned down doesn’t mean that the company still wouldn’t notice that it was missing $250,000, or whatever it was.Because these days office jobs with salaries and benefits don’t really exist, period. Peter would be on short-term contract, desperately trying to find his next job, going to community college to upgrade his skills, driving an Uber to make ends meet and he, Lawrence, Samir, Michael, and the Mondays lady would be sharing his cheap row house.
I have an office job with a salary and benefits. Lots of people I know have office jobs with salaries and benefits. I assure you my job exists, period. I also don’t drive Uber. Or Lyft. I own a house.
Office Space is a great time capsule of the “end of history” feeling of the 90s. The economy is great! 9/11 hasn’t happened yet! We’re only sort of at war in the Middle East! The only thing we have to deal with is the crushing ennui of office work! Imagine showing it to a Gen Z kid who’s only known the hell of post-9/11, post 2008 crash America. I’m lucky and privileged enough to be a white collar office worker who has the luxury of still connecting with it somewhat, but it’s kinda weird to look at it with 2019 eyes.
Office Space is a great time capsule of the “end of history” feeling of the 90s. The economy is great! 9/11 hasn’t happened yet! We’re only sort of at war in the Middle East! The only thing we have to deal with is the crushing ennui of office work! Imagine showing it to a Gen Z kid who’s only known the hell of post-9/11, post 2008 crash America. I’m lucky and privileged enough to be a white collar office worker who has the luxury of still connecting with it somewhat, but it’s kinda weird to look at it with 2019 eyes.Except I think it’s showing the beginning of how shitty everything would get. Peter, Michael, and Samir lose their jobs because it’s cheaper to outsource them. Peter has to work weekends. No one thinks of worker protections. Sure, the stuff about TPS reports and smarmy bosses isn’t a big deal to a modern audience, but an entire office of educated, white-collar professionals working in a stable, responsible, STEM, unglamourous job, having to spend most of it doing corporate bullshit because their work isn’t really needed? We’re seeing the end result of that now. The beginning of the end of the idea of a stable secure job as long as you made the right decisions and put in the work. Remember when Peter complains about doing this forever and Samir says he’d love that kind of security? He DOESN’T get that kind of security. The jump to conclusions mat guy? THAT’S the future. That’s now. Trying desperately to create some kind of viral meme and parlay that into content creation and hope someone with money gives it ironic attention, while desperately monetizing every dumb thought you have to try and create a brand.
It’s certainly a cultural touch stone but I don’t think it’s a great movie or anything. And what it was trying to do was way outdone by the UK version of “The Office” which came out two years later
It is a great movie, though. That’s, like, a fact.
Yeah, I’d argue Office Space and American Beauty/Pie are more influential long term than some of the entries here.
Yeah, I’d argue Office Space and American Beauty/Pie are more influential long term than some of the entries here.Really? I’d go the opposite. American Beauty was almost immediately seen as wildly overpraised. American Pie introduced slang in the culture that’s still used today, but has it had any imitators? Did it launch sex/grossout comedies or do anything anyone tried to copy?
Influential maybe but not better
The Big Kahuna is certainly a deep cut. Don’t get me wrong—I love(d) it (Spacey has made me hesitant to rewatch it). It was a great character-driven story with moments of insight and emotion I wasn’t expecting. Plus, Spacey *was* hilarious. However, I think you and I are the only people to see that movie.
You know what’s the most messed up thing? Watching Dany DeVito’s speech right after you’ve ‘acquired some character’ and seeing every single letter of that speech apply directly to your life.
Of those I would probably only pick SP:BLU over some of the films listed here.
I like some of those movies, but Office Space and South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut are the only ones on that list that would rate on a “best of” list. Most of the rest, even the ones I like, were concepts too ambitious for the talent behind them, or sank into maudlin pap at some point, or… hell, The Green Mile is all maudlin pap.
Office Space and Galaxy Quest are the two big ones there for me. American Beauty, American Pie, and 10 Things to an extent as well. There’s a great deal of excellence and cultural relevance in all of them.I hated, HATED Being John Malkovich. The concept is interesting enough, but the execution felt haphazard and problematic at best. It didn’t hit the notes for me, and after the first half hour I just waited for it to end because it bored me silly. That it’s number 1 here, while the aforementioned films are missing, makes the list a misfire to me.
But I’m a Cheerleader and Office Space for sure. The Green Mile had some great performances.
Love the vote for Galaxy Quest!I would have liked to see The Sixth Sense for the win. 😉
THE BIG KAHUNA came out on April 28th, 2000, so it was ineligible for this list, AND they already said BUT I’M A CHEERLEADER counts as a 2000 release. And, with the exceptions of OFFICE SPACE and GALAXY QUEST all those other films are bad-to-awful.
no 10 things i hate about you?
Wow, that was one great frickin’ year for films!
My absolute favorite out of the whole bunch of favorites from that year was ‘After Life’ (the literal translation of the Japanese title is ‘Its A Wonderful Life’). There have been a long string of bureaucratic afterlife films and TV shows since that film, many of which American audiences are unaware of. Most notably the Grim Reaper bureaucrat in “Guardian: The Great and Lonely God” and most recently the staff of the afterlife hotel in currently-airing “Hotel Del Luna”, both Korean cable dramas.
I think 99 was recognized as a murderer’s row of masterpieces pretty early on—I think if anything , opinion on some of the films have cooled a little bit because ‘99’s overall theme of post-cold war malaise felt like whining by the late 2000’s, and because a lot of masterpieces are a very white male approach to masterpieces (and in turn catnip for the protypical “film bro”).
I’m a little astounded the “Blair Witch Project” made the list at all, never mind the top 10. “Eyes Wide Shut”, I get, it has a strong fanbase among hardcore film buffs, but I always thought BW was immediately backlashed.
Speaking of which, “American Beauty” doesn’t make the cut. Not that I’m personally aghast at this, but considering the last two Best Picture winners winners were given a “Yeah, I know, it’s still really tight” is quite the snub.
My friend and I take notes on movies and text them to each other because we are twelve year olds in the bodies of middle aged men. Here are my thoughts on Eyes Wide Shut when I rewatched it for the first time in decades a few months ago: Overall, I think it ends up being a more thoughtful and human movie than
it seems to be at the beginning. All the stuff about masks and suppressed
desire with the heavy handed symbolism kind of fades away and you end up
reasonably concerned about this one relationship and its survival. The move
from stiffness to total freakiness to something resembling realism (even
admitting the freakiness was a charade) mirrors the evolution of a relationship
that clearly needed some confrontation and shaking up. The movie feels more
natural as it goes along, so it’s a stylistic journey that parallels the
journey of the characters. All in all, it’s not a perfect movie. But if it’s
pretentious titty schlock, it’s pretentious titty schlock with very, very high
standards.
I love Eyes Wide Shut. It’s a long, convoluted, sordid, borderline incoherent movie about how two parents need to take a minute and fuck each other. I love the weirdness, I love the idea that Tom Cruise’s character is so ineffectual he can’t cheat successfully, I love the impeccable production design (of course he has a bar cart that’s a miniature version of his rich friend’s bar cart). I love how it views sexuality as inexplicable and dangerous yet essential. There’s nothing quite like it.
Love that you love, happy you’re happy.
I’m so happy that I’m going to skip the mask-orgy this Christmas!
Office Space? Galaxy Quest? Dogma? Detroit Rock City? South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut? Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me? The Green Mile?Did you even look at a list?I would give you props for Perfect Blue, except that came out in 1997.I’m also going to throw Pirates of Silicon Valley in here for sentimentality.
Yes, how could they have left off the widely acclaimed masterpiece Detroit Rock City?
It’s a hell of a lot better than fucking Eyes Wide Shut.
My wife saw Detroit Rock City with some friends in high school, and they got so bored they ran around the (empty) theater throwing glitter at each other. I would watch a movie about that.
I remember an interview with Gene Simmons where he blamed KISS fans for not coming out to see the film. Like he legitimately thought the KISS brand alone should’ve made it a box office success.
You think you’re mad now, wait until you see a new list 10 years from now about how 2008 was the greatest year for film ever.One of the tragic downsides of getting old is a) watching the nostalgia-driven locus of “best era ever” move further and further away from your own, and b) realizing that what you had considered the “best era ever” is becoming increasingly less relevant every passing moment.All we are is dust in the wind, dude.
Yep. I looked over this list and realized I’d only seen a handful of these movies, most of the few I had seen I didn’t enjoy, and the bulk of them I’d never even heard of. (Not even the Scorsese one. Seriously, I didn’t even recognize the title.) Based on a combination of different taste and my own apparently enormous ignorance, it’s gonna be impossible to convince me 1999 ranks anywhere in the Top 20 years for film, let alone #1.
1999 has been considered a great movie year for ages now. It’s not a new thing. Also, it’s not 2008, 2007 is the year that will be looked at in 2027. “No Country”, “THere will be blood”, “Zodiac”, “Juno”, “The assasination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford”, “Superbad”, etc.
How many ages? Enough so that people were pre-ranking it as the greatest back in the 80s? ‘Cause that’d be cool.
“this Y2K thing is gonna make some great movies in 1999 you wait and see” – Roger Ebert, 1991.
Would you say this list blows dogs for quarters, man?
Holy shit, I was totally about to use that quote. I fuckin’ love Detroit Rock City!
Dogma? No not Dogma.
Austin Powers 2? Sorry, you’ve lost all credibility. Like, for the rest of your life.
Dude, this list has fucking Eyes Wide Shut, Three Kings, and The Blair Witch Project. AP2 was worlds better than all of those.
It’s not remotely better than even “Eyes Wide Shut”. It’s a lazy POS. but, hey, at least it’s not Austin Powers 3. (just kidding, I knew well enough to bail and not bother with Austin powers 3.)
“Basil, Vanessa was a fembot!”“Yes, we knew all along.”Fuck off, Mike Myers.
You do understand that it’s a farcical parody, right?
And that’s supposed to make the moment less insultingly idiotic?Austin drinking liquid shit was also a bad fucking idea.
Roger Ebert held up that scene as an example of how ridiculous the MPAA is. “You can have someone drinking shit but you can’t have them saying ‘shit.'”
As someone who watched the original Austin Powers thinking “these gags are funny, but they’d be funnier if they went on twice as long, with the characters explaining them to me,” I loved Austin Powers 2. I laughed at the tent-silhouette gag, and otherwise I sat there, a fifteen year old boy, dumbfounded that they made dick jokes unfunny.
The one montage of dick euphemisms was kinda clever, but the rest of the movie was exactly as you described!
Exactly this
“I would give you props for Perfect Blue, except that came out in 1997.”
So we’re going buy film festival premieres now? It had its general release in Japan in 1998 and its US theatrical release in August of 1999.
Congratulations on seeing the one screening it at the Fantasia Festival in Montreal in 1997, but that was a weird way to brag about it.
I was actually just going by IMDB, but I do have a copy on VHS that I got before 1999.
36 Year Old White Man Likes South Park, Office Space, Anime. News at 11. I’m just guessing.
Calm down, spazz, and learn to express yourself in something other than a dentist-drill-like whine of plaintive rhetorical questions
Austin Powers was influential in only showing us a future dominated by mediocre sequels that relied on the same jokes repetitively shoved down our throats. Detroit Rock City was entertaining at the time, I would not though put it in the top 20 of the year.I do agree on Galaxy Quest, an underrated treasure of a film. Office Space and South Park I would also sub into the list somewhere.
Pirates of Silicon Valley was fantastic.
No it wasn’t
Dogma is pretty underrated. Probably ages better than most of Kevin Smith’s other stuff. And Rickman/Rock/Hayek were great in the supporting cast.
Thank you for naming Dogma in your list.
Anyone know where one can watch After Life? The DVD is sadly out of print and I can’t find it on any streaming service.
I think if you’ve at least tried to purchase it legitimately you can try looking for the torrent of it. Depends on your moral stance on pirating I guess.
::RETRACTED::
This list is immediately illegitimate for the absence of “She’s All That.”
Some real revisionist history on this list. Eyes Wide Shut and Bringing Out The Dead are films that would be long lost if another director’s name was attached to them. Both were not well loved at the time, and I don’t think time has fixed their flaws at all. Both promise more than they deliver. But critics have a way of going back to lost movies from big (or at least well remembered) directors and reviving them. It’s like seeing Heaven’s Gate on a best of 1980 movie list. Watch the film 72 times and you’ll find some genius, so much that you forget how bad it was on viewing #1.
The Talented Mr. Ripley is a fairly flawed movie loved by some critics, only a very shallow survey of mind-share would place it anywhere near the top. Being John Malkovich is the ultimate 1999 critic’s movie. If the goal is what do critics love most, I suppose it’s a good choice for a critic, but it’s not a film that plays nearly as well with general audiences, for good reason.
I personally don’t love American Beauty, but to not place it on shows the same kind of shallow mind-share. If you wanted to dump a popular movie for holding up poorly, The Blair Witch project would probably get the boot first.
I get that other films I don’t really care for belong on the list as I can understand other reactions. (Election I felt was filled with unrelatable characters acting towards the needs of the plot, Three Kings I didn’t feel anything for whatever reason, Perfect Blue to me felt like it was unreasonably using sexual violence to manipulate).
Anyway, the main point is this feels like the work of a small group of people who have similar points of view rather than a great review of 1999.
Here’s, to me, the notable films that didn’t make it on:South Park: Bigger, Longer, and UncutGoMr. DeathOctober SkyCrazy how hard critical re-evaluation has come down on American Beauty, which upon initial released was hailed as a sea change for film by critics.
No love for the South Park movie?
Criterion really needs to get on the stick and put out The Limey on Blu-ray.
9. The Blair Witch Project………..no.
Fuck, I love Princess Mononoke. It is such a lovely, heart-wrenching movie and the art direction is, of course, unimpeachable. I think it is Miyazaki’s finest story and certainly one that is still prescient today. I encourage everyone to see it if they haven’t.
Absolutely. I don’t know that I can ever truly pick a favorite Miyazaki, as they all affect me deeply in some way, and all seem to have their own unique moods, but Mononoke blew my mind absolutely the first time I saw it. It was the first time I’d ever seen an animated film address characters with such complexity (the heroine is obsessed with revenge, the hero is mostly just trying to survive, and the villain isn’t one — she’s a layered antagonist), and it was so beautiful I just wanted to live in it. A true masterpiece.
I am disappointed at the lack of similar comments here. Mononoke is fabulous. One could make an argument for it being the best of this bunch. That’s no slight to the other films, simply an expression of Miyazaki’s brilliance.But as you allude to, the lack of comments likely is an artifact of people having not seen it, which is a shame.
Seen 18 out of the 25 listed, including Princess Mononoke, which is not bad for me. I do remember as these movies were released, one by one, thinking it was a big year for quality and/or entertaining movies.
Where the hell is Star Wars?
ctrl+F “phantom menace”0 resultsblasphemy!
I’m sending this comment to the Kinja labs to see if it’s possible for me to star it multiple times.
Oh
Finally someone gets it!
Wow, I haven’t thought about American Movie since I was in high school. That was great. I still pronounce it “coe-ven” sometimes in tribute.
All of the Wachowskis’ work deals with themes of identity, but The Matrix makes explicit the techno-utopian ideal of the mind—and the internet!—as vehicles for transcending the limitations of the human body. Uh… What?Techno-utopian? It’s a vision of the world where technology has dominated humanity to the extent that they are now completely oblivious, powerless slaves. The Internet and the mind are not vehicles for transcending the limitations of the human body, they are a web that keeps humanity docile in a simulation. The goal of the protagonists is to end that simulation so people can return to reality.I’ve no idea how anyone can misread the movie that badly when it’s blatant. If you want to make an argument that the films anticipate the Wachowskis’ coming out, fair enough. Then you’d say “the Matrix is actually the ideological and imposed gender norms attempting to keep people in their place, a motley crew of androgynous and sensitive rebels in fetish gear seek to liberate people from the norms they believe to be ironclad and real.”I like The Matrix passingly, I’m not a huge fan or even like the sequels, but come on. Techno-utopia indeed.
Neo is a hacker who gets godlike powers, so it’s somewhat utopian for him.
You could say it’s techno-dystopian with a Truffautian “No such thing as an anti-war movie” flair.
His godlike powers are only used to put an end to the Matrix and he seems to have zero ambivalence about this. If someone told me I could have Kung Fu and flying but be trapped in a program controlled by machines so they can harvest humanity’s energy for eternity with no genuine progress or advancement, I’d probably be like “naw.”
Per the simulation argument, you are probably already in a matrix, but that’s the only “reality” you care for. The reason I don’t want to be a battery is because human beings are horribly inefficient batteries and would be quickly thrown out to be replaced by something more sensible 🙂
Agreed. While there are noticeable queer elements to the Matrix films – especially during the 2nd’s infamous Zion rave scene – this segment smacks of wilful misinterpretation.
The movies aren’t anti technology, though. The humans aren’t Luddites, they just use technology in a more humanist way than the machines. And existence in the Matrix (where you have leather dusters and magical powers) is absolutely better than reality in the ugly, grey world. It’s a paradox that the movies can’t navigate, and it’s part of what makes the sequels so unsatisfying.
The Matrix is a “dystopia” where the hero leaves a depressing, hellish existence to re-enter the same world as a super-powered god who can kill any opponent without a hint of remorse and with the full moral support of the movie, effectively transferred to the audience
1999 is a legendary year, so it’s pretty impossible to take legitimate umbrage with this list, but if you all weren’t cowards, Princess Mononoke would at least be in the top five—especially since it’s Miyazaki’s best film.
Fuck American Movie is good. It’s both heart-warming and utterly heart-breaking.
Wow. This article is, essentially, my life in the year 1999-2000.I remember leaving our crumbling old smalltown movie theatre, stunned, after Matrix and Blair Witch. The latter, of course, a packed theatre and audibly different reactions, followed by a dark walk home through windy trees; the former entered into with zero expectations (I don’t know if I had even saw a trailer).My pal Brendan and I went to see Fight Club. There were three other people in the theatre. Then, moments before it started, a family of five walked in —- two parents and three boys likely aged 8-13. They whisked off at the first Marla sex scene. We laughed. Looking back, though, the previews and ads didn’t quite give off what the movie was. It was rated R of course, so that’s on the parents… but one reason for its theatrical failure has to be a sense of “what the fuck is this movie about?”I left home abruptly at the start of 2000 and moved a province away to live with friends. Found a job at a video store. The DVD section had just been launched. Just! A tiny corner of the store. Most of the movies in this article were new releases at the store for the year I worked there, trailers looping endlessly on our preview tapes. The Fight Club DVD was a gamechanger; two discs, piles of special features, when the handful of other flicks we had basically had a trailer if renters were lucky. We received boxes of pink promotional soap with FIGHT CLUB carved into it a la the posters. I kept a bar for years. Bringing Out The Dead and Three Kings —- fantastic films. Never did watch Talented Mr. Ripley or Boys Don’t Cry —- I wasn’t emotionally or mentally mature enough to grasp them. I recall the trailer for American Movie, just never watched it. Being John Malkovich and Magnolia were trips. Mononoke was almost a religious experience and my introduction to Miyazaki. I covered my room in free movie posters from many of these flicks, along with stuff like the wrestling doc BEYOND THE MAT. I watched a LOT of movies that year lol. Problem with free rentals, I’d take piles home and never get around to watching them. Now, of course, the problem is infinite choice… =)Moving out at 18, finding my way, a revolving door of roommates, dumb young adult drama, and these movies, this particular era of media, backdropping one of my most formative periods. Damn.
“Improvising in the woods for several days, the three lead actors inevitably start to turn on each other, achieving levels of frustration and resentment that would be nearly impossible for amateurs to fake.”
I love that, 20 years later, people still don’t understand that these people WERE ACTING.
Mima isn’t much of a character in Perfect Blue. Things just sort of happen around her while she’s carried forward by the currents of her profession.I watched Iron Giant not too long ago and didn’t care for it. It really seems much more like a Disney cartoon than a Warner Brothers one, although I suppose that’s because WB specialized in animated shorts rather than features.Viewing The Matrix in that particular metaphorical lens doesn’t make sense to me, because basically EVERY HUMAN is supposed to be inside it. There are no “cis” people in the analogy, which is admittedly a typically unvoiced implication of a conception of trans identity which has grown more recently. Supposedly there was a version of the script in which one of the supporting characters would be male inside the Matrix but female outside it (or the other way around), but in the film we’ve actually got that’s absent.
Didn’t care for the Iron Giant? No star for you. You’ve made me sad.
Iron Giant seems to start slow, and I haven’t gotten through the whole thing yet.
After you finish you can watch this “What’s the Difference?” comparing it to its inspiration in the 1968 children’s book “The Iron Man”:
Bringing Out the Dead is a really dreadful movie, probably my least favorite Scorsese film and my least favorite Schrader script (that I’ve seen). I remember thinking it was mean-spirited, pretty much the opposite of the compassionate reading the AV Club has. huh. The repeated use of Van Morrison’s “tb sheets” is about the only thing going for it.
Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam is a flat-out masterpiece that absolutely nobody has mentioned so far. Top five: 1. Election2. Talented Mr. Ripley3. Sixth Sense4. Galaxy Quest5. Summer of Sam
Run Lola Run hit the U.S. in summer of 1999 as well.
That was a great movie summer.
1999 was the year I discovered Blue Velvet and dove deep into cinema. Beyond that older film, 1999 was a great year at the movies. I didn’t realize how many all time classics were released.
It’s come down to a battle between The Matrix and Office Space for #1. My lists seem to be more heavily weighted by cultural significance than film-craft, I suppose.
10 Things is the movie where boys bullied girls into liking them by making the girl hate herself? Right? Office Space is clearly a top five of the year movie.
may have peaked in ’99, which now gets regularly cited alongside 1939 and 1974 whenever someone raises the question of which single year, exactly, is Hollywood’s greatest. Please cite where this has happened.
I’m sorry but GALAXY QUEST, y’all. I put it in my top 10 movies of 2000-2010 because I saw it January 2 (came out 12/25/99). Sure, plenty of people are going to say “but what about this movie” but I would argue Galaxy Quest has endured more successfully than Topsy Turvey (which, incidentally, I loved, but I don’t watch twice a year – haven’t since I saw it!).
Eyes Wide Shut is a mess of a movie. If that movie was made by anyone other than Stanley Kubrick, we’d all agree that it’s a massive stink bomb. But since it’s Kubrick’s last film, we’ll all have to pretend that there’s more to it than what it really is–a boring muddle about an insecure one-dimensional character.
Mystery Men! That movie was at least 15 years ahead of its time. Still arguably the best superhero satire ever. Smart and funny with a dream cast. I’m still amazed it got made.
Damn, no Phantom Menace :((((
You assume too much.
“There’s always a bigger Best Movie of 1999.”
I really like October Sky.
It’s interesting seeing Eyes Wide Shut actually get some recognition after 20 years. I felt like I was apologizing every time I told people that I liked it after it came out. Wonder what changed…
Blair Witch is a supremely overrated movie that benefited from possibly the best marketing campaign of all time.
Sure, but that just makes it a decent horror movie, in fact, better than pretty much every other U.S.-made horror movie in theaters across that entire year.It was a forward-thinking year in terms of crap within that genre, really: offensively bad remakes of older, much better horror movies. The Blair Witch Project was so strikingly original in comparison to that shit-heap, it’s easy to see why it was received like manna from heaven.
Its not one of those films you watch multiple times to appreciate the cinematic technique, dialog and direction, that’s for sure, but for animal brain autonomic fear response on first viewing it was pretty darned effective.
I grew up in a very rural area. I didn’t find it the least bit frightening, only frustrating and annoying.
“Those noises are just deer!”
“If you’re lost, just follow the stupid stream! It’ll lead to civilization eventually, even if just back to the road!”
lol
I’ve never been in any legit wilderness area not in a city, near a highway, or near a campground and I’ll say that movie freaked me out. I’m sure it doesn’t hold up to a rewatch. Still, that last shot is one of my favorite movie “things”.
Thank you thank you thank you for mentioning Bringing out the Dead. It’s been one of my favorites since seeing it in theaters. It’s an underrated Scorsese flick, an underrated Cage flick, just underrated in general. It is the kind of movie that stirs up optimism in me and then smashes it to bits only to try to piece it back together again. And Ving Rhames, Marc Anthony, and Tome Sizemore all give great and/or hilarious performances (raising IB Banging from the dead is likely the best scene in the movie, imo).Also! It has one of the best soundtracks I’ve ever heard. TB Sheets by Van Morrison, Janie Jones by the Clash, What’s the Frequency, Kenneth by REM and more. I could listen to it on loop, it’s so good.
Bringing Out the Dead is pretty good, yeah, one of Cage’s funniest roles.
The mom in Iron Giant is hot.
That’s an awkward thing for a grown-up to think or say or write
I’m an awkward person.
She was voiced by Jennifer Aniston, so you may be on to something here.
sure is
I am wondering if I should watch I Heart Huckabees. Flirting With Disaster and We Three Kings were both terrible, yet this director is revered. American Hustle was OK, but seemed derivative of other works.
I think if you hate those other two and are eh on American Hustle, Huckabees will probably not turn you around on him–unless your complaint about the others is that they’re too mainstream/accessible and not insane enough. I like Huckabees pretty well but it’s probably his most alienating movie (apart from his first, which I still haven’t seen but kind of assume is the most alienating based on what I know about its plot).
I remember watching Huckabees and thinking “wait a second, is Wahlberg, like…actually killing it? And not just being well-cast or well-directed?”
I definitely not think either was to weird. I thought they were boring. If Huckabees is out there, then I might like it more.
It’s not a good film. But the soundtrack has a permanent space on my playlist.
American Movie is good… it has a good taste.
I never understood the supposed influence if bullet time. Other than a few direct lifts like Charlie’s Angels, it’s just slow motion. People had done slow motion effects before.
Slow motion is slow motion – you’re still filming a series of moments in time, you’re just not showing them as fast. Bullet time is where you take a whole lot of still pictures from a whole lot of cameras at different angles *at the exact same time*, and then show those in sequence so it looks like you’re moving through a totally frozen world. They have nothing in common either in how they’re done or in how they look.
To me, it just looks like some Jhn Woo shit. I did not realize that the Wachowski’s did anything different. I’ll have to think about that,the next time I watch.
There are some regular slo-mo shots in the movie too, plus some stuff that’s just CGI, and probably people sometimes call those “bullet time” too because, like, it has bullets in the shot, and it’s messing with time. So that’s confusing. But what the term is for is the stuff where everything actually freezes for a couple seconds while the “camera” “travels” around the scene— even though in reality it’s a lot of little cameras that don’t move; it’s physically impossible to do with a single camera. It was invented a while before The Matrix, but hadn’t been used in feature films or in fight scenes till then.
Ohhh. OK. Now I know what people mean by that phrase. I assumed they meant the shots with the bullets.
What an absolutely stacked year. Being it was the year I went from high school to my first year of film school, a great many of these had a huge impact on me. There was a dangerous period in college where if I flipped past the pay-per-view preview channel and saw the trailer for Magnolia, I had to throw the on DVD and lose the next three hours of my day. That last shot is perfection.
Thanks for making the correct top pick.
No The Mummy? To Hell with all of you.The lack of Bowfinger is also disheartening.
I admire your gumption. 🙂
Bowfinger is probably still my favorite all-around satire of Hollywood.
Fight Club at #15. lulz…
It’s not high art but American Pie is a definitive slice (see what I did there) of 1999.
Wow what a great year! “Being John Malkovich” is still hilarious but had an awfully dark ending : “look away , look away , look away.” . I found it highly disturbing
Magnolia and eyes wide shut are trash. Comparing Boys don’t cry to current trans politics /community is highly unfair. Deadnaming wasn’t even a term then. I don’t recall any trans actors /actresses from that time period. You’re comparing an LGBT film made 20 yrs ago, try doing the same from 1979 – 99 and see how it goes. I was in my 20s in the 90s and I don’t recall some of these films. Iron giant way too low.
Based on these comments, I’m not sure if 1999 was such a great year for film if there’s so little agreement on any of the offerings discussed. Maybe it was the greatest year for anticipated films that ultimately disappointed. 1999 definitely pales next to 1979 – the year of Apocalypse Now, All That Jazz, Alien, Life of Brian, The Muppet Movie, Breaking Away, The Jerk, Mad Max, The Great Santini, The Brood, The In-Laws …
Me: Reads list, doesn’t see The Mummy, unleashes plague of locusts from mouth.
I just do not associate all these movies as being the same age. I would swear the ambulance one was aty least 10 years newer than most of them.
How come nobody shows Being John Malkovich anymore? I haven’t seen it in over a decade.
Satoshi Kon died far too young.
Ugh, I have never seen experienced a communal feeling of disappointment and dread as being in the theater at the end of Eyes Wide Shut. It was a packed house and nobody said a thing as we as we all quickly shuffled out the theater. One by one, as we reached the door, you could hear sighs and voices of frustration. *That* is not the audience response to a number 2 film of the year and this revisionist bs by a select number of critics is starting to annoy me. Lol
My favorite movies of 1999 were Existenz and Barton Fink, but oh well.
I was 16 when the Matrix came out. It was incredibly popular, and for some reason I never got around to seeing it. Now I feel like I’m too late to the party.
That’s one of those fims, like Wizard of Oz, where even if you haven’t seen it you’ve ‘seen’ it because there are so many pop culture references out of that film. If you do watch it it’ll probably seem familiar to you.
There are a lot of movies like that. Another I’ve never watched is Back to the Future. I feel like I’ve seen it.
It’s a great kids’ film
You were doing well in the Iron Giant write-up until you came back to this common pratfall in writing about animation. Just call it an animated film. It’s not that hard.
Ah, I just realized the sexiest, most transgressive ‘legitimate’ film I’ve ever seen was produced in 1999.
That was the Korean film “Lies” (not to be confused with so many other films by the same name).
That film is the darkly humorous tale, shot in cinéma vérité style, of a schoolgirl who decides to lose her virginity to a random older man she meets online. The relationship grows increasingly perverse with the introduction of S&M until, at the end of the film, the heroine shows up to a airport hotel room in full Goth carrying a wooden club (Yikes!). The title ‘Lies’ is explained at very end when the older man’s wife discovers a new tattoo on his inner thigh.
This film was what the Spader film‘Secretary’ and ‘50 Shades’ could have been if they only had the balls to do it. Its a wild, perverse unnerving ride.
No. 1: After Life is my favorite Koreeda movie to this day, and it’s lovely to see it get some praise. He’s continued to do great work, and Marborosi is something worth talking about (though I personally don’t like it), so I feel like After Life never gets talked about and I’m pleased to see it here.Anyway: it’s funny to see Boys Don’t Cry and Perfect Blue right next to each other. They’re both still relevant in sad, probably expected ways, but while the latter’s depiction of women in the entertainment industry is still sharp for Japan and here, it’s villain is almost a potboiler trope—the has been, overweight weirdo and so on. I’m mean the movie is partly about cliches, but that doesn’t land well now if it ever did.
Stabbing a policeman is not a “shameful incident”, Mike.
Great list! Great year! I’d also include:American BeautyThe Emperor and the AssassinLimboCradle Will RockLiberty HeightsThe War ZoneSleepy HollowThe Minus ManOffice SpaceGirl, Interrupted
The Insider was my pick for the best movie of 1999, bar none, and I still feel that way.
WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE
A lot of that blurb about Boys Don’t Cry is ridiculously unfair, and I expected, and was prepared for that. I also expected and prepared for movies I absolutely cannot stand (Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Being John Malkovich) to dominate the top 5. Three Kings sneaking in there (Wahlberg sucks in it to me) is a mild annoyance, too. But maybe I’ll give them another chance. I only saw them once in my teens, and would probably have a better appreciation for them today.
Anyway, taking only the AVC-approved movies listed here, my favorite 10 would rank like this:HM: The Iron Giant
10) Election
9) Toy Story 2
8) Princess Mononoke
7) The Talented Mr. Ripley
6) The Sixth Sense
5) The Matrix
4) Boys Don’t Cry
3) The Blair Witch Project
2) Fight Club
1) Perfect Blue. I didn’t know anime could be this. Transcends the genre.
Perfect Blue is a masterpiece that countless other films have stolen from (Aronofsky most shamelessly), and the fact that it was Kon’s first feature is insane to me. I still think it’s one of the most finely crafted fractured reality horror films of all time.
I find Eye’s Wide Shut to just be terminally boring. Can’t understand the seeming new found love of this movie. Malkovich is a good choice for #1, Matrix could also be there for its influence (although personally I rank Magnolia #1. I unabashadly love it. Long but kinetic so you often don’t have time to get bored. It just keeps moving, and i find it compulsively watchable…the opposite of Eyes Wide Shut to me.) . I’d argue Three Kings is way too low as well, but overall good list at least in terms of what is presented, even if I can’t agree with the overall rankings in the end.
Looking back… “Fight Club”, “The Matrix” and “Toy Story 2″, for me.
Haven’t finished the rest of the list, but I’m so happy to see love for Bringing Out the Dead and All About My Mother. I feel like both of these unfortunately tend to get ignored when discussing their respective director’s works.
Hey look. The AV Club ate up all the irrelevant “1999″ articles that The Ringer did over the last two weeks and puked them back up even more irrelevantly.
Bringing Out The Dead is so sadly forgotten by so many. I expect it was a major influence in Joker. Sizemore was a perfect casting choice.
It really is a NEW YORK CITY flick that worked really well with what was going on there at the time… Giuliani as Mayor, etc…I doubt people who weren’t aware of the city in a personal way would get the same appreciation out of this that people who lived in NY then would, but It’s still a brilliant film.