1999 Year-End Round-Up
1999 has passed us by and it was quite a year. Finally, mainstream films started to deviate from the traditional Act One - Act Two - Act Three storyline. Ideas leaned more and more towards the bizarre. Among the inevitable Hollywood triteness, specks of undeniable originality popped up more and more. No matter what anyone says about the relative quality of 1999 movies, they will be remembered as the ones that set the standard for 21st century filmmaking. Here are the highlights of the year that was.
These films got edged off my top ten list but they should not be forgotten. I especially appreciated the movies marked with an asterisk.
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
8MM
Run Lola Run*
Cookie's Fortune
The Sixth Sense*
eXistenZ
The Winslow Boy*
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
The Red Violin*
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
Eyes Wide Shut*
Bowfinger*
Men Cry Bullets
Being John Malkovich*
Last Night*
Felicia's Journey
Stuart Little
The Cider House Rules
Underrated
Last year's Cinderella bunch: the grossly underappreciated.
Bicentennial Man
Light it Up
Three To Tango
Blue Streak
The 13th Warrior
The Muse
The Haunting
Overrated
The Thomas Crown Affair
The Dinner Game
Mumford
Happy, Texas
Fight Club
The Insider
Princess Mononoke
The Hurricane
Bottom of the Barrel
I try to be a positive person, so I'm only making a bottom five, but here it is.
5. The Hurricane: A formulaic, undigestable piece of second-rate throwaway melodrama with one of our top performers wasting his talents in the lead performance. Denzel Washington stars as Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a legendary prizefighter unjustly convicted of murder. The move goes through all the conventions of the genre but forgets all the fun.
4. Inspector Gadget: The kiddie flick at its most banal. Matthew Broderick plays the title character, a police officer equipped with all kinds of nifty crimefighting gizmos. It's James Bond for the under-10 crowd, except it sucks.
3. Wing Commander: I am not the least bit surprised to see the year's sole movie based on a video game place so high on my bottom five. No plot to speak of but enough idiotic shoot-em-ups to bore a person to death.
2. Zombie! vs. Mardi Gras: A mind-numbingly, intentionally bad pseudo-horror spoof that is possibly the most unprofessional professional movie I've ever seen. But of course, it's meant that way. A spot on this list should be an honor for the filmmakers.
1. Drive Me Crazy: My pick for the worst movie of the year is a teen comedy. Now, regular readers of this site know that I have nothing against teen comedies. I enjoy a good portion of them. But this one is not only artistically horrible, it's morally corrupt as well. It's a conformist movie. The year's most turgid creation.
So here, finally, are my picks for the best movies of the year. I'm sure many will disagree with more than half of these choices. Have fun disagreeing.
10. The Matrix: I've been championing this wildly inventive, smart and exhilirating sci-fi adventure ever since it came out. Having seen it three times now, I still say it's one of the year's best and certainly the year's most viscerally exciting.
9. Three Kings: One of the only films about the Gulf War to ever hit the screen, this is the best war movie in the past few years. That's especially impressive considering it's only half of a war movie: it doesn't have any of the big battles that made the other ones so famous. David O'Russell's comedy/tragedy is intelligent, scathing and funny; a contemporary masterpiece.
8. The Straight Story: Yes, it's a David Lynch G-rated movie. The surprise of that has worn off, but the film's impact hasn't. It's a poignant, engaging tale of an elderly man -- alright, an old geezer -- who travels some 500 miles on a tractor lawn mower to see his sick brother. It's not only good, wholesome entertainment, it's also art.
7. Arlington Road: The year's best action movie, with great performances, a brainy plot and an ending rivaling the famous twist in The Sixth Sense.
6. The Talented Mr. Ripley: Anthony Minghella adapts the famous Patricia Highsmith novel into a lyrical thriller about one man's startling obsession with deception that leads him to kill. This is my favorite kind of movie, one that gradually builds quiet, subtle suspense.
5. Sleepy Hollow: Easily my most controversial choice. The reason it's so high on my list is that it's the most gorgeous movie I've ever seen; truly a work of art. If the plot has holes, I didn't notice. I was completely transfixed by the movie's stunning look and feel.
4. Toy Story 2: I'm giving the next person who calls this a "kiddie movie" a black eye. Fact of the matter is, it's more profound and touching than almost any given "adult" movie out there. If only more live-action filmmakers had the guts, ambition and vision of CGI-maven John Lasseter.
3. Magnolia: Three-and-a-half hours of pure, unadulterated emotion and I still can't shake it out of my mind. Young director Paul Thomas Anderson has given us a multilayered tapestry of brilliant characters and themes. It doesn't have a concrete story but no matter: the various characters' conflicts take on a more interesting air when not bound by a conventional plotline. And the ending, well...
2. Cradle Will Rock: Tim Robbins paints an impressively vivid picture of the Great Depression with his fact-based drama focusing on the Federal Theater Program of the 30s. Much like Magnolia, it doesn't have a conventional storyline but it succeeds on the strength of its characters and historical relevancy.
1. American Beauty: This movie has been interperted a great many ways since it came out. The amazing thing is that I can see truth in all of them. This devastatingly powerful portrayal of a suburban family undergoing a monumental personal crisis is the best film of the year.
©2000 Eugene Novikov