Best "American" Films of 1999
Jul 19 '02
The Bottom Line 1999 was a year of gems. Not many of these pictures are perfect, but they're all original and somehow unique.
[I am, once again, waiting for Epinions to give me a place to list my top films of 2001. So while passing the time, I time traveled back to 1999. It was fun.]
Preparing lists for both 2001 and 2000 served to remind me that we've had a couple really awful years for movies. Truly among the worst ever. Then I went back to 1999 and was amused to discover that, oh my goodness, there was several really really good movies made that year. In fact, 1999 was a very strong year for cinema and heralded the arrival of several strong new voices. Six of the directors on this list had made fewer than 4 movies and for two of them, it's their first feature. But beyond the Young Turks, 1999 also saw strong work from several established directors, either returning to familiar ground after long bouts of alienating their audiences (David Cronenberg) or turning to totally new ground after alienating their audiences (David Lynch) or returning to experimental ground after making something more mainstream (Steven Soderbergh). Several of these films are the jewels of my DVD collection, in fact.
As with my 2000 list, I haven't seen enough of the foreign films to actually call this a true "Best of the Best" list. So I've restricted my list to American films. But since I have no idea of what really constitutes an American film, I've decided to pretend that eXistenZ and The Buena Vista Social Club were both American films. They weren't. I understand that. And I apologize. The only film that I actually booted from my list for its foreign-ness was All About My Mother and since that would have become the only film on the list that I haven't seen repeated times, I don't feel bad about excluding it...
***This is the part where I muse on the films that didn't make my list, including meditations on several films that feature highly on other people's lists but didn't make my cut for one reason or another. If you just want to see my Top Ten, feel free to skip ahead. But since I believe that 1999 was one of the better film years of my lifetime, I want to spread some credit around.***
Of the Best Picture nominees from 1999, for example, only American Beauty made my list and even that film only made it by the skin of its teeth. In fact, American Beauty's legacy on the year may end up being more negative and good. Sam Mendes's first film swept through the critics awards pretty much denying access to dozens of smaller more independent projects which normally would have relied on the critics to gain box office and awards momentum down the stretch. Instead, it was all American Beauty all the time.
Each of the other Best Picture nominees that year were severely flawed in one way or another. Frank Darabont's The Green Mile was great looking and manipulative in all the right ways, but under no circumstances was Darabont entitled to take over three hours to tell his story. Based on yet another of Stephen King's underwhelming recent novels, The Green Mile was given far more respect than it deserved. I should also emphasize that Michael Clarke Duncan's Oscar nomination is the Academy's silliest moment since nominating Pat Morita for The Karate Kid. The Sixth Sense was a nice gimmick and nothing more. Period. The fact that millions of Americans enjoyed the movie and went back repeatedly shouldn't be held against the movie, but to give serious consideration to its being the best film of the year? Don't make me laugh. The Cider House Rules was a warm and fuzzy movie made out of a dark and disturbing book. I respect the craft behind the film, but not its intellectual simplicity and just because John Irving adapted his own book doesn't mean that it was a good adaptation. And finally The Insider proved two things: First that Russell Crowe was for real and second that Michael Mann is completely incapable of making a movie which totally satisfies me. I've seen all of his movies and every single one has serious focus problems. None of his films know exactly what story they want to tell and much as I appreciate Mann as a visual stylist, I'm still waiting for him to make a really good movie.
The year was also full of great performances in films that didn't live up the acting. Take away Denzel Washington and The Hurricane isn't just a bad movie, it's an insult. The story of Ruben Carter is good enough that pointless factual fudging wasn't necessary. I didn't need "Hurricane" to get robbed for the middleweight championship by racist judges (in a fight that history shows he got demolished in) and I sure didn't need Dan Hedaya skulking around as a fictional bad guy. Denzel was remarkable, but the movie was so bad that the Academy voters can be forgiven for snubbing him. Had the movie been just a bit better, maybe he would have won. Look at Hilary Swank. Two years removed from Beverly Hills 90210 she won an Oscar for Boys Don't Cry. The film itself did little for me, honestly, but her performance was great. Ditto with Chloe Sevigny in the same film. Sean Penn and Samantha Morton elevated the so-so Woody Allen effort Sweet and Lowdown, while Julianne Moore, Ralph Fiennes, and Stephen Rea kept End of the Affair from wallowing too much in its rainy London settings. Julia Roberts stretched her acting muscles by perfectly playing a famous movie star in Notting Hill, while for a brief moment Eddie Murphy returned to form in Bofinger. The cast of Magnolia also deserve some credit, as does Paul Thomas Anderson, whose idea of a small intimate character drama is a three hour film that alternates between infuriating and masterful. And the same can be said of the cast of Robert Alman's Cookie's Fortune, which was a great piece of Southern Gothic storytelling, but ended up being too slight to make my list.
A platoon of animated films were basically the last films left off my list. I truly enjoyed South Park, Tarzan, The Iron Giant, and Toy Story 2, but darned if I'm going to try stating a preference between those movies. So they can all be my honorary #11.
***AND NOW ON TO MY TOP 10***
10)American Beauty(dir. Sam Mendes)
I believe I pretty well summarized my feelings about American Beauty in my review of Sam Mendes's second film Road to Perdition. Basically, I saw the movie and was blown away. Then the very next day, I saw the film that is now the #1 film on this list (no cheating). Today, I've seen both films at least a half-dozen times and I'm pretty sure I've got them in the right order in my mind. Basically, American Beauty comes to the startling revelation that while the suburbs are superficially beautiful, a deeper darker sickness and dissatisfaction is brewing. If Sinclair Lewis, John Cheever, and dozens of writers and filmmakers hadn't gotten there first, I'd probably be really impressed with Alan Ball's script for exposing the dark underbelly to me. American Beauty was successful because of its facile streak of irony and because it was so generalized as to make everybody in American feel that it spoke the truth. And it did. It just spoke a truth that had been articulated several hundred times previously.
Why, then, you might be inclined to inquire, does American Beauty make my list at all? Why do I ignore its problematic portrayal of race, gender, and sexuality and put it among the ten best films of the year? Because the things about it that work, work very very well. I can't say enough about Conrad Hall's cinematography or about the film's art direction and although Mendes had never directed before, he'd obviously studied a lot of great films, because he's got a natural eye. And he has a natural way with actors. Kevin Spacey and Annette Benning are old pros, so their great work is expected, but its Mendes's work with his young cast that's especially strong. Wes Bentley, Mena Suvari, and Thora Birch are the very picture of teenage discontent. Basically, if people didn't keep telling me that American Beauty was, like, the best film ever, I'm sure I'd like it a lot more.
9.Being John Malkovich (dir. Spike Jonze)
There are one joke premises and then there are one joke premises. Sure, "Arnold Schwarznegger gets pregnant" is a great one joke premise, but the makers of Junior had no actual movie to go with it while "Arnold Schwarznegger and Danny DeVito are twins" is a great one joke premise, with just enough depth to make Twins into a decent movie. But both of those films pale, in the creativity department, when compared to Charlie Kaufman's concept for Being John Malkovich. The story of a puppeteer who discovers a portal behind a filing cabinet that just happens to lead directly into the mind of John Malkovich is wafer thin and runs out of ideas nearly halfway through. But holy cow, what a concept!!!! And how on earth did they convince John Malkovich to go along with the joke? Or John Cusack and Cameron Diaz to "go ugly"? I've never been convinced that Being John Malkovich philosophically lives up to its set-up, but I can't see the movie without giggling wildly throughout. Kaufman's follow-up script Human Nature showed the danger, though, of his wildly creative breed of screenwriting, going wildly overboard to the point of becoming first unappealing and finally dull. This suggests to me how important music video genius Spike Jonze was to making this film as successful as it is. Despite a tendency towards the flamboyant in his music videos, Jonze's task here is basically making Kaufman's concept seem as plausible and mundane as possible, while keeping the movie moving. All of the actors are strong, but Malkovich is actually more than a good sport and he never got the credit he deserved for acting, rather than just being himself in this absurdist world. His challenge was actually greater than that faced by more actors, since he had to play a character based on himself that had no connection to how he may actually be in reality. Kaufman made a character and called the character John Malkovich because it seemed like a great idea. Malkovich the actor, though, is playing a character. Get it? The movie is worth seeing for the promotional video explaining why Cusack's office is on the 7 and 1/2 floor. Regardless of what Roger Ebert says, Being John Malkovich is hardly "endlessly inventive," but it certainly provides more than your RDA of creativity.
8)Straight Story (dir. David Lynch)
An old man drives across a couple states on his lawnmower in order to apologize to his estranged brother. Period. Halfway through the movie, he doesn't become Balthazar Getty. There are no dwarfs. He doesn't choose to drive on "laughing gas" and he has no perplexing sexual fetishes. Actually, as great a one job premise is Being John Malkovich had, the pitch for Straight Story may be even more surreal: David Lynch directs a "G"-rated movie for Disney. See, *that's* scary. Or else its lyrical, quiet, and beautiful. One or the other. If you know Lynch's style, you'll recognize that every framing and camera angle and movement can be only his. At any point, Straight Story seems capable of veering off into Lynch-land, but the director wisely resists temptations. As the title suggests, he plays this movie entirely straight and irony-free. Imagine that! Richard Farnsworth gives a career capping performance here, proving that when Farnsworth committed suicide soon after the Oscars, we lost a true treasure. Straight Story does justice to the Midwest and its vast expanses while proving heartwarming at every turn. Points to cinematographer Freddie Francis here. As small stories of determination go, it gets no better than this. Every single scene plays like a different unassuming short story and, like the best of short story collections, every adds up in the end. It's episodic, but it's also a grand adventure. Or at least its as grand an adventure as you can have if you're a tired old man on a mower. You've gotta be impressed by David Lynch for deciding that he could make a movie like this, and then for going out and doing it and doing it well.
7)The Buena Vista Social Club (dir. Wim Wenders)
Taken to one extremely restrictive end of its definition, a "documentary" need serve as no more than a historical document, making visible and available what, to most people, would never be accessible. The Cuban musicians who made up the Buena Vista Social Club played a concert in New York City that I didn't get to go to and that probably you missed as well. If it does nothing else, The Buena Vista Social Club is a filmed record of one of the most amazing performances you could ever hope to see and the film's soundtrack is, in this case, a complimentary text. The musicians on display in this film were unknown to probably 99.5% of all Americans before its release, but now, Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Ruben Gonzalez, and the rest of the Club are loved and appreciated by those who know fine music. And had The Buena Vista Social Club merely been a rockumentary of a sort, it would have done its job and everybody would have been happy. But Wim Wenders takes his audience to Cuba, a place that has been shrouded in mystery for most Americans. We have this image of Cuba that begins with Fidel Castro and ends with Elian Gonzalez and that basically suggests that Cuba is a backwards Communist land that the government rules with an iron fist and where people are desperate to leave. Wenders doesn't change that image, so much as he humanizes it and suggests that Cuba's poverty is at least in part caused by American policies towards the island nation, policies that are woefully out of touch with the times. The Cuba we see here is full of creative individuals who love their homeland and have been nurtured by it and whose horizons are limited in large part by American policies, rather than Cuban policies. It's not that the film comes out in favor of the Cuban government, but it certainly is sympathetic toward the common Cuban people, the ordinary people who couldn't give a hang about Communism who suffer because of the United States's refusal to normalize relations with Cuba. Sorry, I'm getting off on a political tangent here, but Wim Wenders's film is smart enough that even if you pay no attention to the underlying messages, it's a lot of fun, but it just opens itself up to deeper readings.
6)Fight Club (dir. David Fincher)
The high placement of Fight Club on this list suggests just how highly I sometimes value style over substance. Because frankly, ideologically, Fight Club bores me to tears. Chuck Palahnuik's book, which I read a year and a half before the movie came out, is full of glibbly superficial observations about society and our decline of moral values and for some reason people have been suckered into thinking that there's something original about his thinking. The same thing happened in the Eighties (and then again recently) with Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. And the same thing has been happening for generations with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Each of these works basically just provides intellectual cultural masturbation as it relates to society at large without an ounce of productive thought. There. I said it. And I feel much better. There are these long stretches of Fight Club that just horrify me because they're mostly just Brad Pitt babbling meaninglessly. However, thanks to the wonders of the DVD and the specifically excellent DVD that Fincher helped create, I can focus on the occasional moments of visionary brilliance in Fight Club, while ignoring the other stuff. However I feel about the narrative or message of the film, I can't deny its total technical mastery. For David Fincher, this is still a good way down from Seven, but it's a vast improvement over the moody goof of The Game (I *love* the first forty-five minutes of The Game, but the rest of the movie angers me so much that I throw out the cinematic baby with the cinematic bathwater, if you know what I mean). Like so many films on this list, Fight Club is full of cheeky post-modern fun, a film made by a man who loves movies that shows the knowledge of a limited lifetime of watching films and a willingness to break most of the established rules. Special effects, subliminal cuts, a Dust Brothers score, penguins, and Meatloaf with man-breasts? Who could ask for anything more. Throw in Brad Pitt's fine work and Ed Norton's typically superior performance and you have a film that rewards repeat viewings and especially rewards my fast forward button. The parts of Fight Club that I watch repeatedly are classic, the rest of the movie? Well, I don't need to see it anymore.
5)The Limey (dir. Steven Soderbergh)
The Limey is, for me, the equivalent of Fight Club after I edit out the pretentious parts. It's a lean, mean, cinematic game played by a filmmaker with seemingly endless resources. The plot of The Limey as written by Lem Dobbs and then thrown in a blender by Soderbergh, is beyond simple. A Brit (Terence Stamp) gets out of jail and comes to America to get revenge on the record executive (Peter Fonda) he blames for the death of his daught. Nothing more than that. No subplots, few extra characters, and only tangential characters. The Brit, Wilson, is a force of nature, driven only by one thing and he won't stop til he gets his revenge. And if that was all there was to it, The Limey would have run all of fifteen minutes and nobody would have made it, much less seen it. But Soderbergh and editor Sarah Flack and cinematographer Ed Lachman have created a crime thriller that's all about fractured perception and pop style. The film runs out of sequence, mix-matches sound and images, and fails to in any way distinguish between reality and conjecture as it hops through time. Terence Stamp gives a performance that ranks with his career best and Peter Fonda shows that his work on Ulee's Gold was no fluke. And is there such a thing as a bad acting from Luis Guzman? Answer? No. The Limey is so much fun to watch and piece together and to figure out that you can almost totally forget that it has no substance, only love of the medium.
4)eXistenZ (dir. David Cronenberg)
Between 1998 and 1999 there were at least three new films that were about virtual worlds and synthetic reality and the possibility that people might not be able to tell the real world from the fake worlds. There was Alex Proyas's Dark City, the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix, and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. All three were actually perfectly decent movies, but two of the three were total bombs, while the other became a massive franchise. And if I had to choose two of the three to take with me to a desert island? I would leave Keanu Reaves behind each and every time. The Matrix is flashy and exciting, but visually, I prefer Dark City, while intellectually, I prefer Cronenberg's film.
Based on his first original screenplay since Videodrome, eXistenZ is, essentially yet another Cronenberg essay on one of this favorite themes — the merging of the human body with cold synthetic technology and the possibility that the mechanized world and the biological word are rapidly bleeding into each other. Only Cronenberg would conceive of virtual reality where the transport mechanism was a "biopod," made of real human parts, that plugs into a portal at the base of the user's spinal cord. It's not some elaborate machine that's taking the characters into alternate realities, but a living organism, capable of getting poisoned or sick and of transmitting those viruses to the human host. In addition, eXistenZ has a trick ending that works OK the first time you see the movie, but then enriches the entire film on every subsequent viewing. Everything in the film stands on its own, even without the surprise ending (take that, The Sixth Sense), but even if you didn't notice it all the way through, the seeds for the ending are constantly being planted. Also, unlike less mature "surprise ending" films (The Usual Suspects, Fight Club, The Sixth Sense), Cronenberg doesn't run a clip reel at the end to show you how he fooled you. He just assumed that the audience is smart enough to put the pieces together, or else he hoped they'd pay to see the movie again. Whatever. eXistenZ is relatively tame by Cronenberg standards, but still contains a number of appealingly gross moments. All hail Cronenberg.
3)Election (dir. Alexander Payne)
Intelligent satire just isn't easy to do. Election was certainly the best film of its kind to be released in 1999 and the gulf between Election and the next best pure satire of the year (Andrew Fleming's underrated Dick) is pretty huge. Election was mismarketed, and underseen, and largely ignored when awards season came around (except for Payne and Jim Taylor's script and the few groups aware enough to notice Reese Witherspoon). And lots of people just didn't find Election funny. Poor them. I laughed from frame one til the end. I laughed when things were light and bubbly and I laughed when the movie became darker and more profoundly sad. Because really, Election isn't a happy movie. Matthew Broderick's Jim McAllister is one of cinema's great tragic-comic characters, a man whose life is totally destroyed by his obsession over a mundane high school election. And as the bubbly Machiavelli who pushes him over the edge, Reese Witherspoon's timing and tone were totally flawless. That Witherspoon's horrible Legally Blond grossed nearly ten times what Election made is just sad. Sure, both movies showed Witherspoon to be the funniest lady of her generation, but, to put it as simply as possible, one was smart and one was stupid. Election marks a major step forward for Payne, from the intelligent, but uneven Citizen Ruth. Payne and Taylor aren't just satirists, they're pragmatic satirists. They love and hate all of their characters equally and never take sides. Every character is unappealing and unsympathetic. And I love that.
[You'll have to forgive me here, but I'm running out of steam on this review. At a certain point I may come back to flesh out these last few films, but until then, you'll just have to take my word that they're all great.]
2)The Talented Mr. Ripley (dir. Anthony Minghella)
One of the best modern examples of "prestige" filmmaking, which was somehow nearly ignored by the Academy. Based on Patricia Highsmith's novel of psychological suspense, which had already spawned on very strong film adaptation (Rene Clement's Purple Noon starring Alain Delon), The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of those times when a great director rounds up a great crew and gets a great cast and everybody does great work. It should be so simple. Every performance, from Matt Damon's Ripley through Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, James Rebhorn and Cate Blanchett is perfect. Gabriel Yared's score is beautiful as is John Seale's photography of perfectly realized Italian locations. The Talented Mr. Ripley is romantic, thrilling, and complicated and it keeps getting better in my mind and every time I see it. Minghella's jazz style is a great interpretation of Highsmith's book.
1)Three Kings (dir. David O. Russell)
I already pretty well covered my appreciation of this film when I ranked it as the 10th best film of the decade. And when all is said and done, it may be even better than that. For all of the smart dialogue, the cheeky soundtrack, Thomas Newton Sigel's stylish cinematography, and Russell's willing-to-try-anything direction, Three Kings keeps getting better for me because of how much it respects both its characters and the issues that are behind America's foreign policy. Three Kings makes it clear that America has a right and a responsibility to intervene in world affairs, but it questions the reasons for which we tend to wage war. It's a film in favor of helping the downtrodden, but opposed to American cultural imperialism. It's tougher than most people thought at the time and smarter than most people gave it credit for being. It's well-edited and well acted by the entire cast. Every time I watch it I get something new out of it.
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That's a theme for all of the film on my list of the best "American" Films of 1999. They're all fun films on their surface and each one goes deeper than that. They all have technical flair and intelligence and they all get better the more you watch them. Well, except for American Beauty. But for now, I'm happy with these 10 films, since they're all films I enjoy, which was more than I could say for my list of the best films of 2000 and it's more than I can say for my hopefully soon-to-come list of the best films of 2001.
Thank you for your time and patience. And now, you can feel free to critique all of the technical flaws of this document. My Best of 2000 list was full of flaws and I suspect this one will be as well...
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