For 1999 week, our film writers carefully compiled and voted on a list of the 25 best films of the year. But even a list of 25 isn’t long enough to capture everyone’s favorite film from such a seminal year. So we asked our staff and contributors:
What film should’ve made our list of the best movies of 1999?
William Hughes
Here’s a litmus test that crops up in my life every once in a long while: If someone asks me what my favorite movie musical is, and I’m still trying to figure out if we’re on the same page, I tell them Little Shop Of Horrors. But if I think we’re simpatico, I go with my gut: South Park: Bigger, Longer, And Uncut. Anybody surprised that “the South Park guys” would someday go on to pen a hit Broadway musical need only give themselves over to BLAU’s “What Would Brian Boitano Do,” or the Les Mis-spoofing “La Resistance (Medley)”—which, I’d argue, is better, and more inspiring, than 90 percent of the songs from the musical it’s aping. I haven’t been a regular South Park watcher in years, but the movie hits a real sweet spot for me: Vulgar and funny, granting its characters basic arcs that the show often skips over, and offering up a soundtrack that’s one of my favorite cinematic singalongs of all time.
Randall Colburn
Nobody’s translated the work of Stephen King to screen like Frank Darabont, the upstart filmmaker who, after catching King’s eye with a lyrical adaptation of the author’s “The Woman In The Room,” transformed The Shawshank Redemption from little-known novella to beloved cable mainstay. Unlike so many adapters of the horror titan’s work, Darabont possesses both a keen understanding of King’s literary appeal and a shrewd instinct for how he can make it pop onscreen. He demonstrated that not just with Shawshank and his 2007 take on The Mist, but also with 1999’s The Green Mile, an aggressively faithful adaptation that leavens the suffocating sentimentality of King’s death row parable by refusing to neglect its more unsavory elements. Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan shine as the story’s beating hearts, but it’s a fresh-faced Sam Rockwell and a never-better Doug Hutchison who steal the show as a pair of sociopathic monsters on different sides of the law. Does it need to be over three hours? Of course not, but the length speaks to Darabont’s devotion to the source material, a key aspect of why he’s so adored amongst the King faithful. Our current King renaissance likely wouldn’t exist without him.
Gwen Ihnat
I am shocked—shocked—that my illustrious colleagues have failed to identify perfect movie Galaxy Quest in their best films of 1999 list. Both a loving send-up of the Star Trek franchise and offering an inventive take on that particular genre, Galaxy Quest tells the tale of a group of actors who play the crew of an Enterprise-like ship. They are mistaken for actual space explorers by an alien race, who then draft them to help them defeat an evil, warthog-like warrior. The aliens have crafted the ship in the exact same specifications of the TV ship, even the parts that make no sense at all. Not only is this journey a delight for TV sci-fi fans, it’s also surprisingly heart-warming to witness, as the two crews begin to bond and the long-adversarial TV co-stars finds themselves forming into an actual successful team. It’s Tim Allen’s best-ever role as the conceited Shatner character, Sigourney Weaver has never been funnier (“This episode was badly written!”, she yells when faced with the ship’s nonsensical “chompers”), Alan Rickman is typically excellent as a Shakespearean actor forever typecast as a Spock type, and Sam Rockwell plays the red shirt who knows he’s doomed because he’s the red shirt. Seriously, how is this not in the top 25?
Jesse Hassenger
I can’t say I’m surprised by the omission of Star Wars: Episode I-The Phantom Menace, and my thoughts on the prequels are already well-documented. But if I don’t explain why Phantom Menace is one of the best movies of 1999, who will?! One reason I love Star Wars is its combination of meticulous detail and what-the-hell whimsy, which Phantom Menace applies to nearly every scene. Its reintroduction to this universe is both stranger and more formal than the original trilogy—a wonkier, nerdier Star Wars movie than any other, where the charisma of actual humans bumps up against grotesque alien creatures, straight-faced mythology, and George Lucas’ ambivalence toward the written word. During my many rewatches in the wake of its soured reputation, I’ve half-expected it to puncture my fond memories of seeing it with my friends at 18, high on the excitement because I never did proper drugs. But its weird squareness always recaptures me, by both celebrating the possibilities of its nerdy world and critiquing its own myopia. The way that it feels alien from so many more “modern” blockbusters of the past 20 years speaks to me on a primal level.
Roxana Hadadi
1999 was a banner year for high school movies, and the best was 10 Things I Hate About You, Gil Junger’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew that introduced us all to the smart-aleck charm of Heath Ledger and kicked off Julia Stiles’ tenure as a teen queen. Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith’s script crackled with whip-smart feminist energy, transforming the “shrew” Katarina (Stiles) into a Feminine Mystique-reading badass and little sister Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) into a thirsty social climber. The sisters were ’90s archetypes, but 10 Things I Hate About You took notes from Clueless in building a layered high school ecosystem in which reciting slam poetry was just as important as securing a prom date. And if any moment in a ’90s teen comedy stands apart for its verve and joy and secures the film’s legacy, it’s Ledger’s bad boy Patrick Verona belting Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” to Kat, a serenade just corny and sincere enough to be a gesture of love.
Charles Bramesco
The year is 1999, and theater director Julie Taymor is living the high life. Her vibrant stage adaptation of The Lion King has taken the world by storm in the two years since she premiered it, and now Hollywood’s come a-knockin’. The money men made her a deal she couldn’t refuse: They offered a $25 million dollar budget, near-total creative control, and a cast of heavyweight thespians for an adaptation of one of her favorite Shakespearean deep cuts. Titus is the kind of certifiably nutso take on the Bard that only an auteur drunk on her own brilliance could create, an ambitious yet massively flawed hunk of work that reimagines the text as a maximalist mash-up freely cherrypicking anachronisms from across all of human history. Anthony Hopkins leads as the ruthless general, while delectably Oedipal lovers Jessica Lange and Alan Cumming plot his demise, all of them festooned in wild costumes evoking both classical opera and the avant-garde. Though Taymor flopped magnificently with a paltry $2.92 million return-on-investment, you can’t say the producers didn’t get their money’s worth—packing every one of its 162 minutes with opulence and hysteria and mad beauty, it is nothing if not a lot of movie.
Lawrence Garcia
Audiences put off by the decidedly unerotic sex and nudity in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut would’ve done well to stay away from Catherine Breillat’s Romance, released just a couple months later. The French director gained some notoriety for this tale of a schoolteacher (Caroline Ducey) whose lover withholds sex, thus driving her to a series of infidelities. Filled with explicit, unsimulated sex, Sadean bondage scenes, and a turn from no less than Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi (who would go on to act in Breillat’s 2004 feature Anatomy Of Hell), the film has no shortage of shocking, unnerving moments. But it’s no mere provocation, and plays something like Breillat’s pornographic spin on—or perhaps answer to—one of Éric Rohmer’s Moral Tales. At times inscrutable, but always intentionally so, it’s the kind of film that refuses easy categorization and understanding. Ducey and her director succeed in creating a woman whose desires are, in a word, irreducible—which is as it should be.
Noel Murray
Even hardcore cinephiles seem to have forgotten about French writer-director Erick Zonca, and his riveting and moving debut feature The Dreamlife Of Angels (released in France in 1998, and in the U.S. in ’99). It’s still such a wonderful movie: a throwback to ‘60s French New Wave directors like Agnès Varda and François Truffaut, who brought a lightly expressionist approach to the everyday. As Zonca follows two young women who’ve become friends and roommates while working crummy, low-paying wage jobs, the filmmaker toys with the audience’s expectations, gradually revealing that frenetic free spirit Isa (Elodie Bouchez) is more pragmatic and hard-working that the seemingly more grounded Marie (Natacha Regnier). By the end, this picture has become a vivid illustration of how people cope in different ways with a socioeconomic system that makes them feel undervalued and anxious.
Mike D’Angelo
On the one hand, I’m overjoyed that a relatively little-known Iranian drama (which happens to be my own No. 1) placed as high as 6th on our collective list. On the other hand, I’m dismayed that few voters have likely even seen Dariush Mehrjui’s Leila, which is nearly as great and even more obscure. Playing today like a cross between Private Life and The Handmaid’s Tale, this heartbreaking study in good intentions gone awry observes a married couple (Leila Hatami and Ali Mosaffa, future stars of Farhadi’s A Separation and The Past, respectively) whose warm, playful, loving relationship falls apart when they fail to conceive a child. Iranian society considers the solution to this problem quite simple: He should take a second wife. Neither party wants this at all, but their mutual desire to be respectful (plus pressure from his mother) keeps propelling them down that path; everyone is culpable to some degree for what happens, even though nobody is malicious. Sadly, there’s no easy or even palatable way to watch Leila at present (the trailer above offers a sense of just how awful the long-out-of-print DVD looks), so I’m not at all surprised that it failed to make the cut—you’d have to have seen at the time. But once seen, it’s not soon forgotten.
Beatrice Loayza
It came as quite the festival shocker when David Cronenberg’s 1999 Cannes jury passed on presumed front-runner, All About My Mother (No. 16 on our collective list), to grace Rosetta, the follow-up to the Dardenne brothers breakout film La Promesse, with the Palme d’Or in a unanimous vote. In a catalog of relentlessly devastating films, the Dardennes’ story of a young woman living in a caravan park with her mother, a hopeless alcoholic, might very well be their bleakest offering to date. So while it’s certainly not a contender for feel-good movie of the year, it is one of the rawest and most daring ones. A destitute existence is rendered with the visual energy and gravitas of a warzone; and the search for employment takes on a brutal urgency as a jarring reminder of how a simple job at a waffle stand can create the coveted conditions for a normal life. It also features one of the great performances of the late ’90s by Émilie Dequenne as the titular character, who is as cruel and prideful as she is existentially agitated in her (hopeless, or is it hopeful?) striving.
A.A. Dowd
Most of
my favorite movies of 1999 actually made our aggregate list, and one of the few
that didn’t, the Dardenne brothers’ grueling drama of poverty and perseverance Rosetta, is cited above.
But as we mentioned in the intro to the feature, ’99 is such a bottomless pit
of first-rate films that there’s no shortage of alternatives we could have
highlighted instead. Here’s one I wouldn’t have minded seeing on the list, even
if I didn’t vote for it: Run Lola Run. Tom Tykwer’s
propulsive techno crime caper is like a pinball machine brought to life, firing
a fire-haired Franka Potente—in her big breakout role—through the machine of
fate, her character literally sprinting through three feverish variations on the same ticking-clock scenario. It’s not the deepest of
sensation-junkie entertainments, but that’s part of what I found (and, honestly,
still find) seductive about the movie: It’s all movement, kinetic from front to
back. As a teenager, it helped open my eyes to the possibility that
foreign-language movies could be as exciting (and excitedly shallow!) as
American blockbusters. Now, I look at it and just think: Why can’t this be what people mean when they talk about “reboot cinema?”
Vikram Murthi
It’s easy to overlook Olivier Assayas’ Late August, Early September. For one, it’s preceded by the director’s twin ’90s masterpieces: the coming-of-age film Cold Water and the meta industry satire Irma Vep. Plus, Assayas’ post-New Wave peer Arnaud Desplechin released a similar, more successful ensemble comedy-drama two years earlier, My Sex Life… Or How I Got Into An Argument, also starring Mathieu Amalric. Nevertheless, Late August, Early September pleasantly captures the headspace of an ahead-of-schedule midlife crisis, one that crystallizes all the regrets, failures, and low-burn chaos that pervades an unplanned life. As their friend’s terminal illness comes to a head, Assayas’ four subjects deal with their own impending mortality by deferring grief and throwing themselves into their professional/personal milieus. Relationships fall apart and then reform; professional obligations are met but don’t satisfy; emotions are openly discussed but aren’t handled. The substance might lie in the mundane, but Assayas’ urgent direction and the stellar performances (not just Amalric, but also Virginie Ledoyen, Jeanne Balibar, and a young Mia Hansen-Løve) elevate the material to potent existential heights.
Alex McLevy
While I understand why people consider David Cronenberg’s Existenz to be on the airier side of his oeuvre, the blackly comic nature of his foray into virtual-reality gaming has always made it an endlessly engaging exercise for me, a Rorschach test of the director’s own fascinations and fetishes. And let’s be honest, it’s one of Cronenberg’s most overtly meta and self-referential films, with the intra-film game dealing with the nature of characters, roles, bodies, and (as always) the overwhelming fascination with the border between the organic, inorganic, and what we’re willing to subject ourselves to as sentient piles of flesh and blood. One of the biggest criticisms the movie gets—that its subject matter is essentially a game no one would ever want to actually play—seems to miss the point, which is that Cronenberg is here digging at the question of why so many of us spend such large portions of our time doing things we don’t actually want to do. (For confirmation, look no further than the film’s grossest scene.) And honestly, in a world of MMORPGs that involve millions of people performing hours of tedious side-quest labor for intangible rewards, it’s looking awfully prescient. Plus, the game pods are some of the most unsettling examples of jiggling, wiggling organic matter to be shoved into bodies since The Blob.
Katie Rife
1999 was a good year for documentaries, even though only one—American Movie—made our final list. I’m not surprised that my favorite of the bunch, Hands On A Hard Body: The Documentary, didn’t make the cut, simply because the film flew under the radar just about everywhere (except for Austin, Texas, where it played for a solid year in theaters). Filmed in 1995, the doc didn’t play in New York City until February 1999, and even today you have to go to the movie’s website to get a copy. And that’s too bad, because as an example of how to make a documentary about a quirky subject without condescension, it stands easily next to Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap, And Out Of Control. The subject is an annual contest that was held for decades at Jack Long Nissan in Longview, Texas, whose rules are as such: Contestants gather around a new pickup truck (the “hard body”), place one gloved hand on it, and whoever can hang in there the longest without collapsing or falling asleep gets to drive it home. (Food and bathroom breaks come at one and six-hour intervals.) Director/editor S.R. Binder’s affection for his subjects is obvious, and the people attracted to this days-long exercise in endurance are as fascinating—and, sometimes, as desperate—as you might imagine. But the breakout star of the piece is Benny, a former winner who’s back to test his mettle once more and whose experience has given him a Zen attitude towards Texans’ near-religious devotion to their trucks. As Benny puts it in the opening of the film, “it’s a human drama thang.”
Nick Wanserski
The problem is that Mystery Men came out too early. Superhero films had not yet so thoroughly saturated our pop culture consciousness that this bizarre, loving riff on the genre could find a sufficient foothold in the public imagination. Which is a damn shame, because though the movie is sometimes clunky and sometimes aimless, it still presents one of the most colorful and unique superhero worlds set to film. Very loosely based off of the comic by Bob Burden (creator, most famously, of the surrealist superhero Flaming Carrot) Mystery Men follows a team of struggling D-listers who have to save the city after accidentally murdering its most famous champion, the corporate logo-festooned Captain Amazing. Filled with an amazing cast of character actor weirdos, it’s not quite accurate to call the movie a parody. While it pokes fun at plenty of superhero tropes, at its essence, it’s still a movie about good people who try to do good. After all, with great power—be it with shoveling, cutlery throwing, or flatulence—comes great responsibility.
305 Comments
Office Space
Hey Peter, check out the best movies of 1999 list that doesn’t have Office Space!
How did they miss it twice?!
Ravenous is probably on my all-time top 5 list.My absolute least-favorite movie of all time also came out in 1999. Such is my hatred for this film that my son, who was born 11 years later, is well-versed in my animosity towards it. Fuck you, Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones, that is not even how Double Jeopardy works.
Ravenous is fucking incredible and I’m ashamed for forgetting it in all these discussions.
Counterpoint: the way Tommy Lee Jones delivers the line “Fucking idiot” is the greatest moment in cinema history.
In one of the most spectacular misunderstandings of Double Jeopardy, on one of these reddit videos about the stupidest defendants there was one guy who chose to defend himself and bragged to the jury about all his recent drug activities, but then confidently asserted that he couldn’t be convicted for these crimes because he had already been convicted for (different instances of) these same crimes a while back.
Probably the fault of this movie. It really is a stain on our society.
I’m late to these posts, but YES, to both points!Ravenous is tremendous and incredibly unique, and I hate Double Jeopardy with a fiery passion that I reserve for very few movies I dislike.
GOOD GOD, HASSENGER!
Give it up!
I enjoyed The Phantom Menace when I saw it at 18 as well. But I don’t even think it took me the rest of the day to realize it wasn’t a good film.
I was 10 when Phantom Menace came out and I loved it; although admittedly I was in the target demographic. And as bad as it is, it still feels like a Star Wars movie in a way the Disneyfield sequels don’t.
The best thing Disney has done with Star Wars is the Phineas and Ferb special.
I was a couple of years older, and my affliction was so strong that I deluded myself into thinking it was good and went back to watch in theaters 3 times, until in a moment of sadness and resignation in the darkness of the cinema, I muttered that the movie actually sucked and walked out. I get all of the points that this blurb makes, but as a counterpoint, I would say just watch any 15 minutes of the movie (aside from the strong opening sequence and the scenes that Darth Maul isn’t in). It’s viscerally bad.
the scenes that Darth Maul isn’t inAKA 90% of the movie. Right up there with Boba Fett as two of the most overhyped characters of all time. Darth Maul merchandise was everywhere and he only got a few minutes of screentime.
I still don’t get the love for Boba Fett. Dude was a tool for the Empire, then had one of the most pathetic deaths possible in that universe.
Same here. People must really love that helmet and jetpack.
The helmet is really cool.
“I bet she gives great helmet.”
Because most of the lines he got in both the movies he was in was giving lip to Darth Vader. He also wasn’t a tool for the Empire. He was a bounty hunter who double dipped by catching Han for Jabba and helping set a trap for Luke for the Empire.
And he looked cool as fuck! It’s easy. Dude is a cool looking motherfucker.
I love the idea of an alternate reality where Dengar became the Star Wars bounty hunter everyone thought was super awesome.
He took their money and did their bidding. He’s a tool.
So? He looked cool. He had a cool action figure. Looked 1000x cooler than the other bounty hunters (weird big guy, pile of rags, c3po with bug eyes, tall stick). Y’all really overthinking this shit.
Also, he wasn’t afraid of Vader at all. While everyone else was walking on eggshells and kowtowing to the Lord of the Sith, Fett was all, “hey, what about my damn money?!”
It goes beyond that. Darth Maul is the ONLY iconic thing in the prequels that wasn’t also in the first three films (Yoda, Darth Vader, etc.). The first three films had dozens of iconic characters, side characters, spaceships, guns, robots, cantina monsters, etc. The prequels had Darth Maul and maybe the female Jedi. Nobody gives a shit about the Tatooine podracers. Quin Jon-Il is boring. Jar Jar Binks is irritating. I can barely remember anything about the spaceships. This is my pet theory about why the prequels sucked. Most of the stuff that was memorable about it was garbage (i.e. Hayden Christensen’s mullet/rat-tail combo). The rest wasn’t memorable at all. The first three films had a shit-ton—a lot of which got swept up into the recent films—from the Millennium Falcon to Chewbacca’s crossbow to Hammerhead.
The starship designs are terrible and unmemorable. So generic.
But Boba Fett was also cagey as hell. He’s hanging out on their Star Destroyer, the Millennium Falcon “disappears”, he knows exactly what Han pulled. Does he tell anybody? Nope. He just quietly gets into position to follow them to make goddamn sure he gets the credit for the bounty.
He took their money because that’s what he does! He takes money, finds/kills people. Do… Do I need to explain the concept of bounty hunting?
Personally, I thought his death was fitting. Not so much for Boba Fett but for Han, who kills his personal nemesis entirely by accident.
“Boba Fett? Where?”*Yakety-sax plays*
Sigh. It never ceases to amaze me how many people fundamentally don’t get Boba Fett’s death.You don’t give a “badass” a badass death. You give a badass a comically humiliating death.
At least it’s now canon that he survived TPM, got some fancy robot legs, teamed up with his brother Savage Oppress *Pauses for inevitable snickering* to kill Palpatine, failed, and then in the year 2 BBY he died on Tattoine at the hands of Obi Wan.
Yeah. Unfortunately, a retcon a decade later doesn’t make his appearance in The Phantom Menace any less lame.
It was a mistake to kill Darth Maul off, especially because I still don’t understand why he just stood there swinging his lightsaber and rather then just kill Obi Wan. At least he got a better death in Rebels.
I’m with you. My friends and I waited in line, rotating holding our spot around work schedules at our crappy service jobs to get opening night tickets. It was THE event for us. Afterwards, we talked ourselves into believing it was good for several weeks. We just couldn’t wrap our heads around the fact that it’s a bad, BAD movie. Bad writing, bad directing, and just terrible acting from people we know are good actors. There’s maybe, maybe eight to ten minutes of that movie that isn’t complete garbage. Tellingly, it’s eight to ten minutes when no one really speaks.
I think by the time Episode 2 came out in 2002, there wasn’t near the interest and attention paid to it after the disappointment of The Phantom Menace. That could be why most people don’t realize Attack of the Clones is much, much worse. Just intolerable to sit through. And that’s even factoring in that it’s got a lot less Jar-Jar.
I can understand why you’d say that, but I enjoyed the stuff with Obi Wan hunting down the clones more than anything in the first movie. That said, I haven’t seen any of them in at least a decade, so my memory is fuzzy at best.
My friend’s daughter loved the Padme/Annakin scenes. It was then that my friend realized that Lucas had written a love story for six year-old girls.
It’s true. Six-year-old girls notoriously hate sand.
Aw man. Is my five year old going to change that dramatically next summer? She loves sand. Poor kid. They grow up so fast.
By 10, she’ll be murdering younglings. Where does the time go?
The strange thing is, that heavily, heavily mocked little sand speech probably could’ve worked. It’s an actual, honest-to-god character beat in a trilogy completely devoid of character.
Maybe possibly if there were more setup and better delivery.
Doing a little Obi-Wan plays Jedi detective was a really good idea in a sea of garbage.
Attack of the Clones took one of the coolest sounding backstories (“we fought together in the Clone Wars,” which sounds like an epic, galaxy-spanning campaign) and turned it into single-location skirmish.
Yoda’s gravitas when delivering the “begun, the Clone Wars have,” line makes me want to puke.
It doesn’t even make any fucking sense to call them The Clone Wars. They’d be, like, the Separatist Trade Wars, or something. Who names a war after their own troops? Wars are named for where they were, what they were about, or who they were against.
(In my head-cannon TPM rewrite clones are the cannon fodder on both sides).
Canon fodder.
Well, no. That battle in AOTC was not the entirety of the Clone Wars. Besides, Star Wars has never been about the “wars.” It’s been about whatever the protagonists are doing while wars are going on in the background.
Attack of the Clones is bad but entertaining. Phantom Menace is bad and BORING. Attack of the Clones wins hands down.
I remember just getting more and more deflated as I sat through it in the theater. The differential from the absolute thrill of the opening blasts of Williams’ score to the end credits was like Everest to the Dead Sea. I think it’s fair to say I’ve never been more disappointed in a movie.
I had that same excitement hearing the fanfare at the beginning and seeing that blue text before the score kicked in. The rest of the movie had me confused. I felt like that guy on the beach at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan who was just lumbering around looking for his arm. I remember walking out of the theater and making it all the way to my car before a ‘What the hell did I just watch?!’ hit me.
TPM has the makings of a good story and it was a big leap forward for CGI. But somebody other than Lucas should have done a few more drafts to overhaul the plot.
Oddly, the Avalon Hill board game from Phantom Menace showed me just how epic the final battle is. You’ve got four distinct elements that all matter as the Resistance tries to capture the throne room before the Droid army overruns the plucky but outmatched gungans.A lot of the dialog sucked. Anankin was cast too young. Too much Jar Jar. The movie that exists in my head is better than the movie that actually exists.
Yeah, I’m going to throw cold water on all of this “reevaluation of Phantom Menace”, that movie is a tire fire of awfulness. It’s a bad, bad, BAD movie. I rewatched it with my nephew recently and, yup, still just BAD. There’s maybe, MAYBE seven minutes of salvagable film in it’s entire running time. Tellingly, no one speaks in those seven minutes.
Seriously. I’m a (semi-)prequel defender, but it does not belong anywhere near this list.
One thing I do agree with is that it’s a shame other filmmakers and studios fucked up their blockbusters so much that Disney eventually steamrolled everyone. We could stand to do with a little more weirdness and wonkiness in our four-quadrant entertainment, but Episode I was unfortunately so fucking bad that it was only a matter of time before Disney’s focus-tested, quippy-and-amusing-but-never-rising-above-a-B-minus formula swallowed every other studio alive.
I should say that despite (or in concert with, really) my love of the prequels and their wonkiness, I also love the newer Star Wars movies, particularly the episode installments so far, particularly Episode 8 (the “Story” ones are fine, but those are the ones that feel tinkered-with and safety-engineered to me). I have plenty of misgivings about Disney as a corporate monolith, and generally I’d agree that they tend to favor quality control with some pretty strict limits on how interesting their movies can be (at least in terms of their live-action or pseudo-live-action stuff) but The Last Jedi also stands with Nolan’s Batman movies and Fury Road as one of my favorite blockbuster-level genre movies of the past decade-plus.
I’m with you on 8. I especially don’t understand the angst over Luke’s storyline – everything that happens with him makes perfect sense.
Rogue One, the movie where all the main character die at the end, feels “safety-engineered”? Okay, sure. Last Jedi was damn good, though.Anyway, I also saw Phantom Menace in the theater when I was 18. Skipped school to do it. Had this whole countdown going. I was stoked. Then I watched it, and … ugh. I saw it four times in the theater that summer, and a couple of times since, including just a few months ago, and it hasn’t gotten better. It has some interesting ideas that might have inspired a better, different movie. The effects hold up, and it has a couple of cool looking scenes, but overall, nah. Maybe in the hands of a more skilled director, one who didn’t coax career-worst performances from basically all of his very talented actors, it could have been good. And cut the midichlorians and do something, anything different with Jar-Jar. But it is, as it exists, not a good movie, and does not belong on any “best of” list.
I admire the boldness of the Rogue One ending, and generally like the movie—the characters, the look of it, lots of great sequences—but yeah, it absolutely feels engineered, only it’s being calibrated to appeal to older fans who want to enjoy fan service and maybe not admit that they’re being fan-serviced at the same time, rather than the more broad fan-appeal of Force Awakens (which for whatever reason feels less calculated to me, maybe because Abrams is such a casting genius that his new characters pop even when they’re clearly patterned after old ones). Rogue One is Star Wars for the adult fans from 1999 who wished Phantom Menace had been more like Matrix or T2. And I think there’s room for that in Star Wars if you’re doing spinoffs and side stories! But I do think Rogue One feels like it’s assembled from bits of a movie that wants to feel very different from Star Wars and bits of a movie that wants to reassure an older audience that this is the REAL prequel they wanted.
For me, Jyn Erso’s inconsistent characterization is what leaves it feeling calculated, like Disney didn’t trust audiences to root for a jaded hero. So her loner edge comes and goes without reason. And her inspiring speech before the final assault belongs to someone else.
They give her an inspiring speech AND they somehow nixed “I rebel” from the final cut! Which kinda says it all right there.
I think her character shift makes sense, it all hinges on that message from her father. She believed she was abandoned by everyone and her father was a traitor who worked for the Empire. Until then she’s all jaded anger, but having that moment of reconnection changed her.
But yeah, that inspirational speech really should’ve belonged to Mon Mothma.
Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s a solid film.
I get you, I was just saying that “her loner edge comes and goes without reason” isn’t really accurate. She plays the hell out of her emotional response to her father’s message to her, and from then on she’s fully on-board with blowing the Death Star up at any cost. Maybe stacking a big escape sequence DIRECTLY afterward buried the moment, and maybe the 180 degree shift from mercurial loner to HERO OF THE REBELLION is abrupt and a hard sell, but it’s not without reason.
Exactly. It’s called a character arc. Her edge doesn’t “come and go.” It comes and then it goes. People who don’t get Jyn really weren’t paying attention. She has the exact same character arc, it’s just executed in a different (and admittedly less cheer-worthy way.) And also happens earlier in the film’s run time.But I thought her speech was fantastic.
Whoops. Meant to say “she has the same character arc as Han Solo.”
Agreed with the first part, but, as much as I would have liked her to have a little more to do, Mon Mothma is not the hero of the movie.
True, but it still made the leader of the Rebellion seem awfully meek and ineffectual to just sit there while the whole thing fell apart. It’s possible to justify her keeping quiet and I get why it was Jyn for movie reasons (she’s the main character, so she gets the big speech), but it still didn’t quite sit right. It’s kinda like if, in A New Hope, Luke gave the big Death Star plans briefing.
Disagree with your analogy. Rogue One is always Jyn’s show. She’s the one with the character arc, she’s the one with the personal connection to plans, she’s the one who was present for the destruction of Scarif, she’s the one who knows the stakes better and for whom the stakes are actually personal.The Death Star briefing is just…plot data. Jyn’s speech is thematic. It belongs to the hero who has gone on the film’s emotional journey.
See, I think of all the expanded Star Wars movies, Rogue One is the only one that actually makes the Star Wars galaxy feel larger and more epic rather than smaller. Having characters with no real connection to our classic heroes certainly helps, but their disposability also helps make the Empire fucking scary in a way it just can’t be when your main characters have iron-clad plot armor. It also recontextualizes A New Hope as basically a side-quest in a larger narrative that wouldn’t even make it into the Ken Burns documentary of “The War Against The Galactic Empire”.
It absolutely has some fairly unnecessary fan-service, but that’s forgivable, and not even in a corporate-mandated way. Hell, if you’re a movie director and have even the slightest excuse for having a scene where Darth Vader kicks the living shit out of a bunch of guys, you’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t make that happen.
That stuff is all cool, and I agree, it’s both interesting and chilling to find out about these cool characters who have no formal connection to the other major characters because they all die before IV starts! But the actual experience of watching the movie, while enjoyable, doesn’t feel quite as propulsive or fully formed as I’d like. I mean, it’s a solid B/B+ from me. I just like all of the Episodes more.
It’s a little choppy, especially at the start, but I think part of that is because it’s the first (only) Star Wars story to tell the story from different perspectives from the start, and Star Wars doesn’t bounce around like that. Every other Star Wars movie follows one character and branches out from there.
I hate the prequels with all my heart and soul. I do like Eps 7 and 8, but I also find them deeply flawed for different reasons. One is a JJ Abrams problem. He loves setting up cool-seeming mysteries with no actual answer, figuring he’ll come up with those later. (Luke abandoning his friends with no explanation still doesn’t work, though they worked hard to make it somewhat plausible. And Rey’s parentage, while I really liked the whole “they were nobodies” anti-climax to that, obviously drove people nuts). That’s just fucking insane when you’ve been given the keys to Star Wars. Star Wars Ep 8 is okay, but everything not with Luke and Rey is just a fucking slog. It’s fine to have a darker tone but it still needs to be fun to watch. Plus, they introduced galaxy-breaking technology (the whole “tracking through hyperspace” bit). That’s just a bad idea. Hyperspace was an incredibly useful plot device, you get into hyperspace and you’ve escaped, period. End of scene. Now they’ve got to incorporate that tracking ability in every Star Wars movie they make from now on, or alternately just kind of forget that it exists in this universe.
I also just don’t like Finn or Poe. They both suck for completely different reasons. Plus, ugh, Mary Poppins Leia. I don’t understand how dozens or hundreds of people watched that sequence and every one of them said, “Yeah, that’s awesome, we should totally keep that and put it in front of millions of eyeballs.”
I don’t understand how hundreds of people bitch on the internet about a scene where Leia saves herself from the vacuum of space by using the force to fucking fly. It was god damned awesome and anyone who disagrees is a fucking anhedonic cry baby who should never get anything cool in their lives ever again, because they’ll just ruin it.
The idea is cool, but the scene itself looked ridiculous. Which was weird for a movie that, with all its flaws, was generally gorgeous.
I don’t know exactly what it was that made it silly instead of transcendent, but “Leia Poppins” gets close.
I absolutely, fundamentally cannot wrap my head around this argument. I mean, I can often see the logic or a point behind so many things I disagree with, but this one is I find utterly perplexing. It’s not remotely silly and the internet’s coinage of a reductive nickname for the scene doesn’t make it so.It’s spectacular. I literally was holding my breath. All I can do is offer a weak “agree to disagree”, while wondering what is broken in the soul of the person who doesn’t see how great it is. And shake my head sadly that they missed out on something cool.
Agree completely. Jyn basically creates the Rebellion through sheer force of her own courage. She inspires those bickering ninnies to actually stand up and become the heroes they were meant to be.It makes the Rebellion feel like a real, breathing, albeit flawed organization, not just background noise for Luke, Leia and Han. It makes the war and the actions of the Alliance more real, more visceral and more impactful. It’s the only subsequent SW movie that actually improves the original trilogy instead of diminishing or demeaning it.
Well, less inspires them than drags the bickering ninnies into a war kicking and screaming, (they ignored her big speech, after all) but I get your point. And yes, it also made the Rebel Alliance feel desperately fragile, less a hearty band of plucky warriors than a lot of terrified people staring down certain destruction. You feel the weight and absurd odds against the success of the rebellion in a way that was never there before.
Something else the movie did was flesh out on the VERY FIRST thing we saw in the first Star Wars movie.
“It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.”
Scarif was that first victory. It’s different than you’d imagine from that opening crawl, but not so different that it feels like it’s a cheat. The idea that they took the first two paragraphs of that crawl and turned it into a very good movie I still find incredibly cool.
I agree that perhaps the Alliance is a smidge TOO ineffectual, but that just makes what Jyn does matter more. But I liken it to “1776″ (and the real-life events it was inspired from) – a bunch of self-serving, squabbling jerks who come together for a brief moment to do the right thing. I also find it a wee bit strange that the movie implies the Alliance had basically done absolutely zip before the movie began other than “gather” forces without implementing a single major campaign or mission.Even Vader reacts with surprise at the very notion of “an Imperial facility openly attacked.”While Rogue One is a fairly seamless prequel to the OT, it makes bits of ANH not quite fit, like the Empire’s urgency to destroy the Alliance as well as the opinion expressed by some of the Imperials that the Alliance is “more dangerous than you realize.”
I also find it a wee bit strange that the movie implies the Alliance had basically done absolutely zip before the movie began other than “gather” forces without implementing a single major campaign or mission.That matches the opening crawl to A New Hope that says that the Alliance had just won their first victory against the Empire. Of course that begs the question of what the fuck they’ve been doing for 20 years, but it’s easy enough to see them doing a bunch of stuff out on the fringes, hit-and-runs, guerrilla attacks, harassing transport convoys, stuff like that. It’s not a stretch to imagine them engaging the Imperial fleet from time to time but quickly withdrawing. Enough, at least, that the fleet commander (or whoever he was) recognized that they could be a threat even though they had never really launched a true campaign.
Also, at the time there was still a hint of a democracy, since the Imperial Senate hadn’t yet been disbanded. Obviously it wasn’t going to happen, but you can sorta kinda see how some of those Alliance members would, until the Death Star, believe that there was some sort of negotiated peace to be had.
I think you make some interesting points and, as much as I am not an Abrams fan, he does have a great eye for casting.But, come on, Force Awakens is so shamelessly reverse-engineered from the template of A New Hope that it’s downright embarrassing. It absolutely begs for you to love it. “Hey, you like spunky orphans on a desert planet? This one’s even spunkier! You guys like cute droids, well, you’re in luck, we have the most cloying droid of all time! Hey, remember how cool the Death Star is! Imagine if it was even bigger!”Uuuuuuuuugh.
I did not care for the MEGA DEATHSTAR bullshit, and I do think it was made with a touch too much reverence for the specific experience of Star Wars in 1977. But I find Rey, Finn, and Poe so delightful that it becomes fun to watch for the minor variations. (And Finn really doesn’t have an easy analogy in the first film, so I found his character especially fresh.) And like a lot of great sequels, LAST JEDI makes its predecessor feel better than it probably is in retrospect.
There’s so much about TFA that doesn’t work, but I agree that Finn definitely feels like the movie’s freshest addition and he’s easily the entire franchise’s most emotionally accessible character aside from ANH Luke himself.I loved Boyega’s performance, though he had crackling chemistry with all the other leads. I would have loved to have seen a movie that had him and Han just dicking around together, like Han dicked around with Luke in the original. They were a blast together.As for the other two….I won’t open up the can of worms about why Rey doesn’t work as a character. And Poe…isn’t even a character at all. He has absolutely negative depth and was supposed to die a third of the way through the movie. Being a “great pilot” isn’t a character. Smiling a lot (even if your Oscar Isaac) isn’t a character, either.What those two DO have, of course, are absolutely delightful, winning performances, which paper over many (but not all) of the script’s numerous deficiencies
Rogue One is the best Star Wars movie since the original prequel and it’s not particularly close in my mind.
I will never, ever understand obsessively forwarding the technology to create really the first life-like CG characters that feel real and physically in the space of the movie, and then ruin it all by making them all act and talk like obnoxious Looney Tunes cartoon characters.
The Last Jedi has great principals (Rey, Luke, Kylo) and a satisfying resolution for those characters; but the rest of that movie’s story is a shitshow. Jar Jars all the way down. On repeated viewings, The Phantom Menace holds up better, and is probably the better film. I suppose it depends on whether you’re willing to ignore the terrible acting direction of TPM versus the implausibly stupid and unnecessary story turns of TLJ.
What about the fact that a handful of characters (esp. Watto) are, like, legit racist caricatures
I have mixed feelings about that stuff, for sure. I don’t think it was intentional; I think it’s more Lucas processing his love of old serials without necessarily stopping to think about how imitating some of those aspects, even with alien faces, would come across. Which doesn’t excuse it. It’s more pronounced with the Nemoidians, who do make me cringe a little now. Watto is a character I kind of love (follow me on Twitter for way too much Watto content), and I do tend to think that the unconscious stereotyping in that part wouldn’t really come across to anyone unfamiliar with those stereotypes in the first place—that is, it’s abstracted enough (and his character is specific enough) that it’s more unfortunate than actively harmful. And because I love the character (even though he’s not a good guy), it’s hard for me to think of him as a caricature. Not being a Jewish or Arab person, though, it’s not really my place to make that call. It exists.
God damn it, I was going to tell you that you shouldn’t get paid to write about movies, then I read this and agreed completely, and now I have to head over to your twitter account…
Part of the problem, I think, is that in the originals he didn’t have a problem with aliens not speaking English. Then for the prequels he and his team tried to make heavily accented English feel alien on alien faces and it’s almost inevitable that it’s going to land on “racist as shit” one way or another.
“The Last Jedi” is definitely great. “Phantom Menace” and “Force Awakens” are not.
I actually liked The Last Jedi more than The Force Awakens, but that wasn’t a hard bar to clear. I like you appreciate the prequels more than most, however the special editions can go DIAF.
Jesse Hassenger literally believes that The Resident Evil films are better video game movies than Detective Pikachu.He seems like a guy who would vote for John Delaney.
Gonna screenshot this for next time I see a “these AVC movie reviews are too policitized!!!” comment.
He prefers Jill Sandwiches over Jelly Doughnuts.
Well I haven’t seen the Resident Evil films, but I also know Detective Picachu is not a particularly good movie.
I’d vote for Dana Delany
Good thinking, McLevy! eXistenZ is really great and I wish it had gotten more love. It’s a favorite among my siblings and we watched it repeatedly. Really fun work by JJL, Jude Law, and Willem Dafoe (with bonus Sarah Polley appearances). And it’s an incredibly visceral viewing experience.
That was the first Cronenberg I saw, so I wonder if my opinion of it is inflated relative to someone who’d already seen Videodrome.
I saw Videodrome first and didn’t really get into it, but I liked eXistenZ quite a lot when I saw it later.
What do you think is the best year for movies since 1999?
2007 has to be up there (and I think of 2002 as kind of an echo-boom year from 1999 as a lot of the top-flight directors from 1999 did follow-ups in ‘02, PLUS you’ve got a top-level Spielberg AND a top-level Spike Lee).
Yeah, you wouldn’t be alone in calling out 2007 as a magnificent year in film. I was going to list out some examples, but the list would never end, so here’s one list:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls031221117/?sort=user_rating,desc&st_dt=&mode=detail&page=1
Holy cow. 2007 was AMAZING!
2007 is, among other things, the Year of the Chucks: I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry AND Good Luck Chuck in one magnificent span.
I never thought if it, but 2007 is a pretty solid choice if only just for Ratatouille, No Country For Old Men and Pan’s Labyrinth
2007 has some supremely undeniable movies. But actually recent years have proven to contain some contenders. Just a brief scrolling through 2013-2017 has told me we’re secretly in a pretty exciting time for cinema, despite the superhero dominance.
2007 actually might have more depth than 1999 to be honest.
2004 / 2005 straddles a period where some of may favourite movies ever were released (and some movies which I loved dearly for a long time and now feel embarrassed by).
Edit: aaand looking into it there was way too much shit in 2005 to justify rating it as a ‘good year for movies’
2011 is also a big one. Lots of notable and daring films from around the world. The Tree of Life, Margaret, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, A Separation, Melancholia, Meek’s Curtoff, Drive, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Take Shelter, House of Pleasures and many more.
2013
Funny enough, the next year, 2000, was a pretty good movie year as well. And, so was 2001. Though, I think the easy answer is 2007.
I’m biased towards 2007 because I worked in a move theater that year, and saw nearly everything. But 2006 (Children of Men, Casino Roayle, The Departed, Borat, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Prestige, Little Miss Sunshine, Inside Man, United 93, The Queen) is another strong contender for me.
Titus and Run, Lola, Run are excellent choices. I love both of those weird-ass movies. And on the more mainstream side, Galaxy Quest and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut are both great as well. I had to be talked into seeing Galaxy Quest and I’m glad I listened to whatever that guy’s name was.
Some of my favorite 1999 films that didn’t make either list include, Go, Dogma, Arlington Road, and of course the film that everyone loves to hate, American Beauty. I know it’s a popular punching bag, but the last time I saw American Beauty a few years ago, I still loved it. Though the Spacey #MeToo revelations would likely make it a tough watch at this point.
I liked American Beauty, but it felt like a tame retelling of Todd Solondz’ Happiness.
I still haven’t seen Happiness. Though I know a lot about it. I’ll probably check it out if it ever gets added to a streaming service or I work my way down far enough on my watchlist and my local library has it.
Jesse’s tombstone is going to have Jar Jar’s climactic speech inscribed on it.
“Wesa goin’ home!”?
“My give up. My give up.”
I was surprisingly affected (is it effected here?) by the JJ appearance in the Aftermath trilogy. Granted, I’m a sucker for all things nostalgia.
Did The Virgin Suicides not make anyone’s list? Damn. Though I guess it wasn’t widely released until 2000, it was at Cannes in 1999.I’m also going to throw out a shoutout for Bowfinger, which is still one of my all-time favorite comedies and possibly the last truly hilarious Eddie Murphy movie.
I was legit torn between Phantom Menace and Bowfinger as they were the two highest-ranked titles on my ballot that didn’t make it. I’d go further say it might be Murphy’s best movie.And yeah, Virgin Suicides is a 2000 release. As is Ghost Dog. As is But I’m a Cheerleader. I know it’s just a result of IMDB using premiere year instead of commercial release year, but as someone who was paying attention to releases around that time, it is BONKERS to me that people think of Virgin Suicides as a ’99. It’s not like it came out in January 2000 after playing a bunch of festivals. It played like two festivals in 1999 and didn’t really come out until the summer of 2000!
I mean, it’s a Sofia Coppola movie soundtracked by Air. That’s pretty darn 90s to me.
But why does Sofia Coppola seem ’90s to you?? NONE OF HER MOVIES (as a director) came out in the ’90s!!! Because the first one came out in 2000 and the rest came out after that!!!(I’m sorry, I’m a relentless pedant about this; it probably has something to do with my encroaching age. As many things do.)
If I had to put my Thinking Hat on about it, I’d say that Sofia’s movies, while not made in the 90s, carry over a lot of the decade’s style, whether in the soundtrack (Air, the shoegazepalooza of [i]Lost in Translation[/i]’s score) or in its spirit ([i]Marie Antoinette[/i] in particular feels very late-90s-classic-reimagination, even though it’s not really reimagining any work of fiction).But really, it’s just a vibe. -shrugs-
Yeah, everyone pointed out to me that you guys mentioned it in the body of the story. Totally on me for skipping to the list!I’m glad that someone else appreciates Bowfinger though. Most people I try to talk about it with have never even heard of it, which seems crazy. It’s so funny!
Happy premise number two: There is no giant foot trying to squash me.
I like Bowfinger as much as the next guy, but let’s not get crazy here. Trading Places alone wipes out the argument for it as his best movie.
Eddie Murphy’s best movie’s IMHO are Coming to America and Trading Places, which has become incredibly relevant in today’s age especially given that the son of real-life Mortimer Duke, Fred Trump, is now the President.
Jfc you passed up an opportunity to push bowfinger over forcing your phantom menace apologistics on us again? For shame.
My thinking was:1. Phantom Menace was the highest-ranking title on my ballot that didn’t make the main list.2. It’s possible that someone else will step in and mention Bowfinger and very unlikely anyone will mention TPM. (And if Bowfinger seems like a longshot, Mystery Men, a movie I love but didn’t even put on my Top 15, got a shout-out from Nick, so it was possible!)
IIRC, AVC’s own LaToya Ferguson (who might not have received the question as I think it went to the film folks and the full-timers) is a big Bowfinger champion so I imagine she laments the lack of it on the list.
Stop being so reasonable, hassenger!
You chose so very, very wrong.
They said in the main piece that they classified years by American release and specifically mentioned Virgin Suicides as a 2000 film.
You’re right in your reasoning for why it wasn’t included. They specifically mentioned in the main list that it would be a candidate for the 2000 list because they’re going by US release date.
Bowfinger was the last truly good Eddie Murphy period. Aside from Dreamgirls, he hasn’t done a damn thing meaningful since then.
I somehow know multiple people who are really into Pluto Nash.
Are these inmates who escaped from an insane asylum?
This was covered yesterday. Yes, they consider The Virgin Suicides a 2000 movie. Also, it sucked hard.
I am still a big fan of Payback with Mel Gibson about a relentless man in pursuit of revenge. It’s basically a remake of Point Blank and does capture the original’s noirish amorality.
Payback is an enjoyably mean-spirited little movie.
I really didn’t like it, because I’m too nice.
Both Point Blank and Payback are based on the book.. The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald Westlake) which is a corner stone series of crime fiction for it’s era. I wish someone would to one of those HBO series covering the first run of the books.. I get the impression that a lot of writers, directors and actors would line up to play in the Stark sandbox.
I’ve been reading a bunch of Parker novels this summer. I started with Lemons Never Lie (not a true Parker novel, but stars his sidekick Grofield), recently tore through Butcher’s Moon and am now just about done with Slayground. Good stuff!
I have read all but the 2 final Parker books and all 4 of the books. I have yet to find one that I didn’t like. I do recommend picking up Dead Skip by Joe Gores which crosses over with Plunder Squad.. and it is a solid book as well. Also the Parker graphic novels are very good.
You’re reading Slayground and Butcher’s Moon in the wrong order, but that’s okay. Both are outstanding.
Take your time. I plowed through all of those books over the course of a couple of months and was really bummed when I ran out.
When you’re done with Parker, head over to the Dortmunder series. It’s basically a funnier version of the Parker novels where Parker himself has been turned into a sad sack defeatist loser (who’s nevertheless just as good as Parker at planning heists). The plots are damn near identical but the tone is a hell of a lot funnier. Apparently Westlake started writing a Parker novel, but the story just got too funny for Parker so he created Dortmunder as Parker’s comedic counterpart.
The question is: Who do you cast as Parker? Mel Gibson is too pretty, and most actors would be afraid to play Parker the way he should be played — humorless, amoral, and utterly pitiless. My vote would be Michael Shannon.
Shannon is a good call.. right now if it was HBO or Amazon I would cast James Ransone from The Wire and It: pt 2 as Parker. Maybe have some fun and have him do a Dortmunder season while they are at it.
Side note. #11 on the AV Club best of list.. The Limey is very much a Parker/ The Hunter/ Point Blank inspired film
Terrence Stamp would have made a great (British) Parker. Danny Trejo would have made an excellent (Latino) Parker. Both are probably too old now.
I’d love to see Dortmunder done right on screen. It never has been, despite many attempts. (He’s got to be brilliant but weirdly unlucky.) The best was probably The Hot Rock, but Robert Redford was just way too good-looking and charming to play hapless.In 2015, Noah Hawley (“Fargo”) signed a deal with FX to adapt Dortmunder for a series (or maybe a TV movie). That seemed incredibly promising, but it never went anywhere.
Yeah, Jesus, Robert Redford as Dortmunder has got to win some kind of prize for the most wildly miscast role in history. Dortmunder is just such a sad sack defeatist loser, in spite of his intelligence. He’s described a hangdog with “limp, lifeless, hair-colored hair.” How anybody read that and said, “AH Robert Redford would be perfect!” is beyond me.
Richard Stark was the inspiration for George Stark in Stephen King’s “The Dark Half”, the story about a retired-and-buried pen name that comes to life in the form of an obsessive straight razor-wielding psychopath, ostensibly the kind of person that would write that kind of fiction.I’ve been kind of scared of Donald Westlake ever since.
If Westlake scares you I can suggest the few books by Tucker Coe as being Westlake like..
More than just that, Richard Stark was also the inspiration for King’s pseudonym, Richard Bachman.
People have been trying to do Richard Stark’s Parker for decades and they always fuck it up (most recently with the Jason Statham Parker movie). Payback is about as close as they ever got.
Fun fact, Richard Stark, pen name of Donald Westlake, is the inspiration for both Richard Bachman, pen name of Stephen King, and George Stark, pen name of Thad Beaumont in the King novel “The Dark Half”.
Point Blank and The Outfit are solid takes on the Stark Books.. but yes mostly the film versions aren’t that good… or detour from core of the books too much.
God I love this movie, and it’s one of those rare movies that I continually rewatch over time. “Do you see me reaching for my fucking wallet?” It seemed to understand what took the rest of us another decade to discover—that Mel Gibson is an asshole. I know there’s a lot of deservedly negative attitudes towards Dragged Across Concrete, but that movie capitalizes on Gibson in a similar way, and almost feels like a bookend to this movie. It’s not my job to forgive Mel Gibson (I wouldn’t if it were), and I don’t think he should, can, or has been fully re-embraced by Hollywood, but fuck if he isn’t extremely good at allowing the monster inside him to power a gripping performance. /puts on flame-retardant gear/
I love this movie. You could see everyone was having so much damn fun making it. James Coburn delivered some hilarious lines. “He’s shooting at my alligator luggage and putting holes in my suits! That’s just mean, man!”
I just put this quote up too.I know it was Gibson’s movie, but Coburn just stole the scene.
This is such an darkly fun movie fronted by such an unrepentant putz.He shot a suitcase. He’s putting holes in my suits and alligator luggage. Hey man! That’s just mean.
I wanted Max Payne to be like this
I got the chance at 17 to intern at Warner Bros.’ NYC corporate office the summer of 1999. The only perks after a summer of entering regional box office stats was that the interns got to see two WB properties on their opening nights at the multiplex inside the old Virgin megastore in Times Square.The first movie was South Park which killed with the late teens and early 20’s crowd.The second was Wild Wild West.
UGH how shockingly misguided is Wild Wild West?! It’s bad in the absolute worst way a movie can be bad – it’s fucking BORING.
It takes the Men in Black formula but just gets the ratios all wrong – too much fascination with the gadgets, too little work in making the world tangible and Kline and Smith can’t recreate the chemistry of Jones and Smith. Both Fiorentino and Hayek suffer from underwritten lead female roles as well.
This is a much better analysis than my “fucking boring” comment. Haha
Add in a producer who absolutely has to have that gigantic mechanical spider regardless of how little sense it makes and you’ve got a train wreck that’s surprisingly boring to watch.
I saw Mystery Men there! I was in New York in ‘99 ( first time I’d been in the states) and ended up going to see it ( as back then there was still at least a 6 month plus delay in movies heading across the Atlantic. In fact it was quicker to buy a Region 1 DVD online than wait for the film to eventually hit cinemas ).Thats where I found out US audiences are much louder and more vocal than UK/Irish ones.
I see 3 omissions from the main list and this supplement. First is the elephant in the room: American Beauty. I know that KS has tainted the film for most, but I still watch it at least once a year to get into a good headspace. It’s better than sitting in my car and repeating “I will not be a victim”Second is Drop Dead Gorgeous. With all the retroactive praise it’s been getting lately I’m surprised that it was omitted from the list. I saw it soon after it came out on video, and still laugh my ass off. Third, and most glaring (to me) is Go. Still one of my all time favorites, I saw it on opening night with no expectations and was blown away. I still watch it on occasion, but more than anything it just became part of my lexicon. I call Tim olyphant “Todd the good drug dealer” anytime I see him.
GO is terrific and there may be some words on American Beauty later this week….
‘American Beauty’ reminds me of Newt Gingrich. Specifically someone’s description of him as “What the uneducated imagine an intellectual sounds like.”
Ooh, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a great pick. I’ve been meaning to rewatch that since I saw it pop up on Hulu.
I loved Go and I still quote Timothy Olyphant “…bottom right-hand corner, just waiting to suck” anytime Family Circus is mentioned.
I feel like American was aging poorly even before we knew what a creep Spacey was. His performance generally holds up. What doesn’t work for me is Alan Ball’s writing. I first saw this with my friends when we were 17 and 18, and we all thought it was brilliant. I stand by that reaction, as I feel it’s a smart movie for people who have not seen a smart movie yet.
I think you’re bang-on: Alan Ball’s shallow script is the fatal flaw. Everything else is awesome.
When “everything is awesome” in a movie except the script…you have yourself a bad movie.
It’s not cool to like American Beauty (and probably never was), but I still think it’s a strong work from Sam Mendes, and I could relate to some of what was going on in the film. It’s also got some great photography, and music.
In 1999 it was very cool to like “American Beauty.” Or it was required. Can’t quite recall which.
Other things The Phantom Menace applies to nearly every scene:Too much green screen.
Bad comic relief. I’m not just talking about Jar Jar.
A non-sensical script that really shoehorns in that awful back-story. Did we need midichlorians? We did not.
A total lack of checks and balances on George Lucas’ worst impulses.
Jake Lloyd “acting.”But I downloaded the first trailer over dial-up (took hours) and watched it about 1000 times and this poster was great:
The best part about that poster is that we weren’t yet tainted by Jake LLoyd’s performance, or how he was directed. They needed a kid like the one in Looper, and shame on Lucas for compromising that narrative arc just so he could have a gee-whiz stand-in for the kinds in the audience. I get that he wanted a movie for kids, but he could have balanced a little bit (and chopping Darth Maul in half undercuts that argument).
I remember watching some of Jake Lloyd’s screen test at some point and he was totally believable. He was like seven or eight and he nailed it. And then Lucas’ quixotic direction turned him into a caricature, along with every other good actor in the cast (except arguably McGregor and McDiarmid). Not his fault.
McGregor was still bad. He tried, man, I mean he tried. But there was just nothing he could do.
In TPM he was given nothing to do. For almost the entire 2nd act of the movie he just hangs out on the spaceship.
I will never understand that. The one character that has built-in audience investment and he’s on “watch the car” duty for a third of the movie.
We spend the entire movie with a character who ends up dying and barely registers in the rest of the trilogy.
I mean, I sorta, kinda get it. Lucas wants to build up our investment in Qui-Gon so that his death has an impact.
Still, one of the things that make the movie so, so awful is that Lucas steadfastly refuses to do basic “screenwriting 101″ things, like establish his characters. Aside from Padawan/Master (and for the record, I fucking hate the word Padawan. They didn’t need it, “apprentice” is just fine, thank you) what is the relationship between Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan? It bounces all over the place from scene to scene. Then Lucas steadfastly refused any sort of character for Padme in favor of that blindingly stupid, “oh, Padme is really the QUEEN!” moment in the third act. Which . . . why? 20 years later and I still can’t figure out if that was supposed to be a surprise to anyone at home or on-screen. Like so much in that movie it’s just another random thing tossed into the mix that doesn’t serve a purpose.
The language in Phantom Menace is alot like the original Star Wars screenplay with stuff like the Jedi Bendhu and other stuff like that. I remember the 1st 15 minutes of TPM I was thinking, am I watching something in a foreign language.
Well, yeah, and if someone had filmed the original Star Wars screenplay it would’ve had all the cultural impact of Laserblast; completely forgotten until MST3K dug it up 20 years later.
I guess on the otherside of it is he could have had us invested in Quigon but not at the expense of Obiwan. Make Obiwan the main character and keep the Quigon relationship if he wanted too.
He could have easily given them both something to do. A lot of the movie is just garbage filler anyway (there’s always a bigger fish), replace it with something that does something. Demonstrate character, develop relationships, create or resolve tension, just something that has an impact besides being cool CG and filling out the run-time.
I don’t blame Jake lloyd though. He’s friggin 10. It’s Lucas and his co-conspirators who should have known better.
They should have at least had 13 or 14 year old and let him age into the part.
Putting a major franchise on the shoulders of a 10 year old who would only be in one movie was a disastrously stupid idea.
Yup. It’s an old adage of screenwriting that you start your story “as late as possible.” There is literally nothing of value to showing Darth Vader as a nine year old boy. The kid has zero arc, there is nothing truly dramatic about his story. He’s a bit player in his own saga who accomplishes nothing (that isn’t an accident) and doesn’t grow or learn or go on anything approaching a meaningful journey.They should have started with Anakin as a teenager or young man and cut out the utterly pointless kiddie business entirely.
They should have at least had 13 or 14 year old and let him age into the part.Yeah, but that could’ve gone wrong, too. You never know if a 13 year old is going to end up 5 feet or 7 feet, and Anakin needed to be tall as an adult. Plus, a lot of time needed to pass between movies (even if your lead isn’t 10 years old) and they couldn’t wait that long between releases. But they always could’ve pulled a page from the playbook of every High School movie ever and gotten a 19 or 20 year old and fake that he’s 15.
Anakin was 10. Jake Lloyd was only 8.
That’s straight up child abuse. Poor kid.
It’s totally on Lucas. The simple fact is, Lloyd gave exactly the performance he was asked to give. Lucas is infamous for not providing a lot of help to the actors with their performance, since he doesn’t feel qualified to critique their performance, and he just assumes that they know what they’re doing. This is actually one aspect of directing where J.J. Abrams stands as a head-and-shoulders improvement over Lucas, because Abrams clearly takes a lot of time to work with his actors and really get them into the right headspace to act a scene. You can’t watch Daisy Ridley’s performance, for example, and not feel that she and Abrams worked over and over to get the acting just right.Well, if you’re scripting a movie around a ten-year old, you have to realize that it requires that Abrams-level commitment, because they’re ten. Professional actor or not, a ten-year old actor is not going to know what the hell they’re doing beyond “hit this mark, say this line, give this facial expression”. It’s up to the director to take those beats, and build a convincing characterization out of it. And if you don’t have the skills to do that, then you either shouldn’t take the project, or you should re-write your script.George Lucas patently did not have the directing chops to direct a ten-year old. And he did not change his script or hand it to an actor’s director who could have given the necessary direction. Lloyd was not at fault for the performance; you can clearly see he’s doing everything he’s asked to do. It’s Lucas who left him dangling, same as he left everyone else dangling. Which is why so many of the performances feel so lifeless and inert in that film.
Professional actor or not, a ten-year old actor is not going to know what the hell they’re doing beyond “hit this mark, say this line, give this facial expression”.
Um, excuse me
No one in the movie is more lifeless than Portman. She’s sooooo stiff it’s embarrassing. At least Jake Lloyd brings some pep to his scenes. At least he’s not asleep.
I recall a bit in the ‘making of’ for TPM where another kid is giving an audition for Anakin. He actually manages to sell the “Are you an angel?” line and make it sound believable. Everyone else in the room turns to Lucas afterwards and tells him “we need to pick this kid”. George disagrees and says something to the effect of “we’ll need more attempts with Jake but he’ll eventually get the performance we want”. Of course – Lucas being Lucas he never bothered to properly coach Lloyd during filming and hence why we wound up with wooden Anakin.
Bad casting is rarely the actor’s fault
Building off of a concept I first heard from a John Hodgman story about rewriting Episode 1 as a form of grief therapy, Anakin should have for sure been introduced older. Closer to his Episode 2 age. What I would have liked is if he were still enslaved, but working on an indentured moisture factory farm in a parallel to Luke. While Anakin was still a good kid, his life was tougher and more meager, requiring for him to use his anger to defend himself from the other adolescents on the farm. So visually, it would parallel A New Hope, while thematically showing the contrast between Luke and Anakin’s upbringing and why it would make sense for Anakin to give in to the Dark Side.
That also would have made it more realistic when we hear that Anakin is too old. I know they are just doing that to draw parallels with Yoda saying it about Luke in ESB, but it still makes the Jedi look like a cult that kidnaps babies.
Which they basically are in the PT. There are, what, six -year-olds in the Jedi Temple in AOTC? The kids Anakin kills in ROTS are similarly youthful. It’s creepy as fuck.
I always thought Anakin would work better as, not enslaved, but a homeless, orphaned, teenage petty thief in a reasonably large Tattooine city. He’d be introduced to our heroes after stealing from them and Obi-Wan has to chase him down (which could’ve been a pretty fun chase scene). Make him the charming rascal with some deep seated anger issues. Ya know, someone we actually like. Plus, introducing him a little older eliminates the creep factor of wondering if Natalie Portman is supposed to be flirting with a 10 year old.
God, that movie was bad.
“A total lack of checks and balances on George Lucas’ worst impulses.”I think that’s the alpha and omega of the issue. First, he’d convinced himself that the original Star Wars trilogy were kids’ movies, when in reality they were solidly PG action films that appealed to kids. But on top of that he obviously threw every half-baked idea that popped into his head onto the screen.
Not to mention that Lucas had also surrounded himself with yes-men so no one could point out the half-bakedness of said ideas.
Right, even being a movie aimed at kids doesn’t mean it needs to be mind-bogglingly stupid and annoying. Also, believing you have to have a 10 year old in your big action Sci-Fi movie to appeal to 10 year olds is the mark a fundamental misunderstanding of childhood. I had absolutely zero problems pretending to be Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Tron, Superman, Batman, etc. etc. when I was a kid. They didn’t need to be my age to appeal to me, they just needed to be awesome.
That’s fundamental issue with the Prequels, there is alot of good ideas in there that are half baked mixed in with the same kind of garbage that Lucas’ original Star wars script contained that his friends convinced him to clarify or excise.
Phantom Menace used tons of miniatures. I can’t stand the movie, but I just watched it a few months back, and the effects hold up really well. The rest of the movie is as bad as I remembered. And yeah, George Lucas was most of the problem with the movie.
I think the VFX hold up pretty good with the exception of the Gungan battle. It’s also the only prequel that seems to not be restrained by a 10×10 green screen room.
It does look good, for what they did. I just don’t think they did enough with the sets. There should’ve been a palpable sense of history and age to the Naboo palace stuff and the Jedi temple and the Senate. As it is it’s just kind of . . . there. The Jedi temple, council room, whatever, is just kind of a room with some chairs and windows. It was a huge wasted opportunity.
I called it the Jedi boardroom. Add a big wooden table and I’ve been in dozens of those.
It’s not bad in the way that so much else is, it’s just kind of, meh. A thousand generations of Jedi have protected the Republic . . . is this temple a thousand years old? Is it a brand new addition? Is it sorta new, like maybe only a couple hundred years old? The design should tell us something aside from these guys all sit in a circle.
Just because there are miniatures doesn’t mean the FX hold up well. The CGI has a consistently faux sheen to it. The only time it (kinda) works are when there are no “real” elements in the scene, like when the CGI gungans are fighting CGI droids.
Never has a great trailer and poster so over-hyped a product that turned out to be so disappointing.The sad reality is that the parts of TPM that are legitimately good, the opening sequence, the best-ever light saber duels, get completely overwhelmed by the sewage. If only Lucas had the self-awareness to make improvements on that sump-pump of a script.
I remember taping that Phantom Menace trailer off of ET. I must have watched it 20 times. It was amazing, however watching it now tainted by the knowledge of what I’m seeing it doesn’t have the same excitement.
That poster was the ONLY good thing about having a 10 year old Anakin.
No no no, not ‘Romance’. Catherine Briellat was using her notoriety as a ‘woman film maker’ to serve up vulgar trash labelled as ‘art’. This film made the 2003 film ‘the brown bunny’ look like high art in comparison. Briellat went on to make even more vulgar pointless trash films. Her work reminds me of the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography – no redeeming social value.
If you want sexual and perverse and transgressive but not in a gross French way, look for the 1999 Korean film ‘Lies’, which I had mentioned in the ‘favorite 1999 comments section.
I haven’t seen any of her early work, but Bluebeard is great and Sleeping Beauty and The Last Mistress were both good too.
I’m proud to have seen this in theatres. The entire auditorium collectively gasped the first time Caroline Ducey took a cock into her mouth. Never going to see the movie again.
>his 2007 take on The MistEveryone is entitled to their opinion, no matter how wrong it may be.
I like The Mist with the exception of that horrifically (and unnecessarily) bleak ending. Even King’s novella had a more hopeful ending than that.
I think King has said that Darabont’s ending is better. It’s also arguably more hopeful than King’s!
The last word of the novella is literally “hope.” It’s also the last word of the novella “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” And in both adaptations, as good as they may be, that ending emotion (hope) is bungled.
The Shawshank Redemption should end on the bus (as the novella does), with Red’s excited feeling of hope lingering in the air. Showing us his reunion with Andy quickly deflates that emotion, cheapening it with an easy payoff.
With The Mist, Darabont went the other way, stomping out that hope with cheap, cynical cruelty.
It would seem that hope is not a concept Darabont understands very well. Either that, or it’s an emotion he’s not all that interested in exploring.
Hartford and hope. Not words commonly associated with one another.
Apparently the Shawshank film did originally end with the bus trundling into the distance but test audiences wanted the full payoff.
Thats a real ” wouldn’t it be funny if…” black comedy ending that should have just been a DVD feature.
Of all the movies on both of these ‘Best of ‘99’ articles, the one I return to most often is Galaxy Quest. Maybe not the ‘best’ (although I could make that argument if I were in the mood), but absolutely my favorite. BTW Sam Rockwell’s character’s name is Guy Fleegman and I didn’t even have to look that up.
The fact that his name is just “Guy” is only one of at least 50 perfect jokes in that film.
Can we also give a huge shoutout to Tony Shalhoub? He’s not just excellent in this movie, he makes everything he’s in better.
Rockwell’s “ Oh ..Oh that’s not right” delivery is one of my favourite thing in the movie. ( well that and “ can you form some sort of rudimentary lathe?”)
It is shocking the number of times my family have managed to make that lathe quote since the movie came out.
that one and Ten Things are on our “Wanna watch this again?” “Really? Already??…. sure :)” list
“By Grabthar’s Hammer…what a savings.”
Seriously, y’all. Where the heck is Office Space? Is there gonna be a special feature on it on Friday or something?
yeah, I’m gonna need you to come in Saturday and write that article.
Not right now, Lumbergh, I’m kinda busy. You know what, in fact I’m gonna have to ask you to just go ahead and come back later…
https://film.avclub.com/a-20-year-case-of-the-mondays-what-s-the-legacy-of-off-1832722764
Ah yes, I remember this. I’ll take it. Link to it somewhere this week. lol I feel it should get a mention in 1999 week somewhere, but I’m glad it got its due.
One of the best elements of Galaxy Quest that I think deserves mention is Justin Long as the leader of a group of hardcore fans of the show who help their heroes out halfway through the movie. I love the part where he gives his parents a complicated explanation of where he’s going and what he’s about to do, and they shrug and say, “at least he’s outside.”
And his mom was Susan from Seinfeld. Just happy to see her alive, really.
“Happy to see her alive”? In 1999? Seinfeld had only been off the air for a year.Had she been in “Galaxy Quest” right now, that sentiment would feel more appropriate. Especially since her last credited acting gig was 9 years ago and since Jason Alexander threw her under a bus a few years ago, saying she was killed off basically for not being funny enough.She’s now teaching ukulele lessons. So I hope everyone’s happy!
Patrick Stewart was particularly fond of Justin Long’s character.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest
Boy you guys here must really have it out for Office Space, don’t you? Didn’t make anyone’s list.
The omission of Galaxy Quest, especially in an AV Club article, is particularly tough. I get that 1999 is one of the best years ever for movies, but that movie very easily could have been a fat turd but by some miracle is basically flawless beginning to end. The delicate line it walks satirizing but clearly revering multiple topics—Star Trek, fan devotion (in the case of the human fans), fan obsession taken a bit too far (in the case of the alien fans), washed up actors and being typecast, Hollywood’s gender issues … it so casually does all of that and more that you hardly even notice, and might be why despite a growing following and respect, it still floats just under the radar. And it’s still the best Star Trek movie ever made … to me at least!
“Your penmanship is atrocious!”
The Virgin SuicidesGirl, InterruptedFight ClubElectionThe Sixth SenseAmerican BeautyMagnoliaEyes Wide ShutAll About My MotherThe Iron Giant
At least half of those are on the original list.
One year off would’ve had Dark City on this list.
Um, excuse me? THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH?!?
This can’t possibly be the only Bond where a female character is named for a singular payoff joke?
Diamonds Are Forever:Plenty O’Toole [Lana Wood]: “I’m Plenty!”Bond [Connery]: looks her up and down “You certainly are!”
“Yoush certainly aresh”
The Man With the Golden Gun, regarding Mary Goodnight:M: Bond? Bond, are you there? Goodnight?Bond: She’s just coming, sir.M: Goodnight? Goodnight? Goodnight!Bond:Good night, sir.
I guess it wasn’t enough for them.
Much like the best of list proper, hot damn this list captures a zeitgeist in my young life. It more so drifts into 2000 when all of these were on video. South park: songs I sing along with to this day, a hilarious movie, and fond memories of the first watch —- my friend and I woke up his mom. We couldn’t fucking contain our laughter at Cartman’s megaphone line early on. Fuuuuuuuck. Galaxy quest is the best star Trek movie in the past 20 years. “BY GRABTHAR’S HAMMER, YOU WILL BE AVENGED!”. A goddamn delight. Run Lola Run. Pumping techno soundtrack. German curse words. An incredibly sexy, hot, red haired girl in tank top and cargo pants. And a well made movie. It embodies the late nineties and is a perfect circle of my 18-20 year old interests, style, and feel (see also: hackers). Man oh man. A period of time carved into my soul, many of these movies powerfully full of memory and nostalgia. 🙂
Oh yeah, a lot of these movies were in heavy DVD rotation for me circa 2001-03.
That annual contest in Longview had to be stopped after one year when one of the contestants lost it (after losing it) and shot himself.
Except Mystery Men is a comedy that isn’t funny. So…
Hey guys, swap out Phantom Menace for Office Space and this is a pretty good list!
I am actually shocked 10 Things I Hate About You didn’t make your list. It’s possibly the best “teen” move ever made and it stands up surprising well even in today’s climate, I imagine it will continue to. Unlike some of the other movies of that period which all have at least one or two deep cringe factor to them. I say this as a person who never liked Julia Stiles in anything else, but found her pitch perfect there.
Not seeing a lot of Varsity Blues content in this so-called 1999 Week. That movie was a 10. A F$%&ing 10!
Galaxy Quest and SP:BL&U are definitely omissions that should’ve cracked it. But I’d also like to throw October Sky into the ring. I know it’s pretty typical Hollywood schmaltz, but I remember the direction to be solid, the acting great, and as far as these sort of inspirational films go, it feels more genuine than most I’ve seen. Personal preference, of course.
October Sky is beautiful, particularly tickles my “I love all space-related things” bone.
Wow, no love for the Adam Sandler/Jon Stewart megahit Big Daddy?
I don’t even need to look at the list to know it’s useless: Roxana Hadadi and Ten Things aren’t on the list, therefore the list is defective. I won’t argue a top billing, or even top 3, but it’s absolutely in the top 10, and probably even 5.
Well, Roxana is on the list; you might figure that out from looking at it. She wrote two excellent blurbs on Fight Club and The Sixth Sense, just two of the many 1999 movies that are much better than Ten Things I Hate About You!
I have to agree with your last statement. I am also beyond perplexed how it overcame literally anything else from 1999. Also where the fuck is The Matrix? Smh
The Matrix is over on the actual list. This is just the Q&A about movies individual people would have liked to see on the main list. So it’s not like any of these Q&A movies were outvoted by anything. They’re just a bunch of individual choices.
Sixth Sense is ok on the list, altho not better than Ten Things, but Fight Club didn’t deserve the list.
Drop Dead Gorgeous. Fits into drama, horror, comedy, and documentary roles.
My, I thought the list you compiled was pretty good (I’m sketchy with what film came out when).However, upon reading this I can see what an almighty bish you made of the whole affair. Missing 10 Things and Galaxy Quest and South Park is so negligent it verges on treasonous.
Bowfinger though, arguably the last , actually funny movie Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin made. It definitely deserves a place on the list , even for just Murphy’s road crossing scene..
I showed this to my roommate a few months back — he’d never seen it — and we had to pause it for a few minutes at this point because he could not stop laughing.It’s so good.
Star Wars Episode I…Really?
REALLY
There’s always that one guy and in this case it’s Jesse.
eXistenZ
The best thing that can be said of ‘Titus’ is it combines Anthony Hopkins and Shakespeare. Plus it WASN’T done by Kenneth Branagh, thank God. Three years earlier Branagh had done a grossly ill-conceived version of Hamlet that makes the 1990 Mel Gibson Hamlet seem scholarly by comparison
Mr. Death is probably my favorite Errol Morris film, so of course it’s ignored.
Point William Hughes. Whatever you have against it, you have to rank the South Park movie.
Always nice to see someone sticking up for The Phantom Menace.
“Sadly, there’s no easy or even palatable way to watch Leila at present (the trailer above offers a sense of just how awful the long-out-of-print DVD looks), so I’m not at all surprised that it failed to make the cut—you’d have to have seen at the time.”Leila is available on DVD from Netflix.
I can’t believe that no one has brought up Being John Malkovich! So much awesome in that movie. John Cusak, Cameron Diaz and Katherine Keener are all amazing and play completely different roles than they are known for. The concept is just ridiculous and completely off the wall, especially the decision to make John Malkovich the Macguffin of the story. I mean, they could have just created a fictional character and had Malkovich play him, but no, it’s Malkovich playing a version of himself. You have to give him a ton of credit for going along for the full ride.So much absurdity and surrealism. The 5-and-a-half floor of the Mertin-Flemmer building. The A-list actor deciding to become a puppeteer and everyone just going along with it. The chimp’s flashback scene. And, of course, Malkovich going into his own head and seeing “things man should never see”.The ending is one of the most satisfying, fitting, and meloncholy movie endings I’ve ever seen. It’s really a shame that Spike Jonez and Charlie Kaufman have not done anything nearly as amazing in the decades since. I can’t believe that AV Club overlooked such a unique and fantastic movie.
it’s no. 1 on the best 25 films of 1999 list that ran yesterday. this is the list of movies critics who contributed to the list wish had made the top 25.
No Iron Giant, no Matrix, no Sixth Sense, but 10 Things I Hate About You???? what the fuck is this list.
The list of runners-up. The actual list is on a different page and contains those three movies. It says this in the introduction at the top of the page.
Yeah, I can’t read.
the list of movies that the critics who contributed to the top 25 list, which ran yesterday, wished had made it. you know, the top 25 list that has the iron giant, the matrix, and the sixth sense on it, and that we linked to in the opening paragraph of this list.
Seriously, man. Pay attention!
To quote myself, ‘No The Mummy? To hell with all of you.’.
Props to Mystery Men, a bizarre, expensive and endlessly quotable movie before its time. I also have seen Hands on a Hardbody! It’s great. Glad to see South Park, Galaxy Quest and Run Lola Run here.I agree that American Beauty hasn’t aged well; I really liked it when it came out, and have probably watched it half a dozen times in the last twenty years and have liked it a little less each time.I’m kind of surprised we keep overlooking Man on the Moon, though.
Allison Janney was in American Beauty, 10 Things I Hate About You, and a personal favorite Drop Dead Gorgeous. She had a good 1999.
Seriously!? Office Space didn’t make the official list AND no one mentions it for an honorable mention!? What the hell!?
Yeah, Galaxy Quest’s omission from the main list is pretty inexcusable.Mystery Men isn’t fit to wash Galaxy Quest’s jumpsuit.
I’ll never get over the scene in The Green Mile where that guard doesn’t wet the sponge or whatever during one of the executions. Totally infuriating. Such a good movie. A lot of people really like Galaxy Quest so maybe I’ll watch that some day. But yea, the lack of Office Space is a surprise. (Not that I mind. It’s just ok to me.) But, Titus looks amazing. That stuff is right up my alley, so I don’t know how I missed it.
With the list proper out of the way, it is fun to look at some of the best outliers or guilty pleasures from ‘99- some of which I’ve watched a lot more than the films I consider “superior” to them. Here’s my ten:
HM: American Pie
10) 10 Things I Hate About You. I love how popular this has become.
9) Sleepy Hollow. I’m nostalgic for this Tim Burton again
8) The Phantom Menace. I like the politics. and Darth Maul is worth it.
7) Girl, Interrupted. Jolie was crazy cakes. Loved her.
6) Tarzan. Really well-told, and the animation is so fluid
5) Cruel Intentions. SMG’s dark turn was delicious. And that kiss…
4) The Mummy. Still one of the most fun action-adventures I’ve seen.
3) American Beauty. Spoke to me then, speaks to me now.
2) South Park. Legitimately hilarious, and the first PERFECT tv adaptation.
1) Arlington Road. I couldn’t stop telling people they need to see what happens!
Four movies from 1999 have a special place in my heart.
The Matrix for having the audacity to reinvigorate mythology filmmaking and making Hong Kong action cool.
Toy Story 2 for being Toy Story 2.
Office Space for twenty years of ongoing quotability.
The South Park Movie for being among my top five comedies of all time.
glad to see some love for mystery men, galaxy quest, and existenz, three of my favorites from that year.
Ravenous needs more love.
How could 10 things be missed off the original list!?
The Matrix? Fight Club? American Beauty? Being John Malkovich? Aren’t these all from 99?And definitely Office Space!
Any list that misses The Green Mile and American Beauty isn’t a very good list. Also, Fight Club is bullshit. The reason it’s misunderstood is because it monumentally botches it’s 3rd act. If you’re going to criticize toxic masculinity, you better be clear or concise, else you become a monument to the very thing you’re attacking. That is why Fight Club is a huge failure.