Best Films Of 1999: Yup, That Just About Covers It
Aug 12 '03
The Bottom Line Erm... see these 10 films. I thought that'd be obvious.
I was right. “You can expect a list for that year sometime in the near future” I wrote in my Best Films Of 2000 list when referring to the quality of films that had hit the cinema’s in 1999. And here we have it, as promised, a rundown of the 10 Best Films Of 1999. I must be psychic or something.
Anyone who read my Worst Films Of 1999 list will also remember that I criticised the last year of the Millennium as being “a total shitheel of a year for films”. And so it was. But as a total paradox, 1999 also saw some of the best films of the 90s released too. So for every piece of total crap (*coughThe Phantom Menacecough*) there was a piece of quality piece of work waiting round the corner to rescue us from cinema hell.
But before we move onto the main list, here’s a little rundown of films that have regularly appeared on other people’s list that haven’t got so much as a look-in here. First off, there’s the unrelentingly unwatchable Martin Scorsese/Nicholas Cage collaboration Bringing Out the Dead in which the massively eyebrowed one returns to New York goes into film school overdrive - speeded-up imagery, spectres emerging from the streets and so on. In fact, he spends so much time with the fancy camera tricks that he forgets that he needed a story to structure them around.
Even more massively overrated was the Oscar nominated The Green Mile, Frank Darabont’s second bash at adapting a Stephen King prison-based story. The story-is-God dedication that transformed The Shawshank Redemption from an enlightening prison drama into a modern classic is much in noticeably missing in this well-meaning but over-long tale of a gentle giant wrongfully imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit. There’s certainly some good stuff here, but at over three hours long you’ll need a lot of patience to get through it all.
Three months ago there’s no doubt that The Matrix would have made this list, but a drastic reappraisal of its true worth following the awful Reloaded has shown it up as the flawed exercise that it is. Pompous philosophising and a stupidly po-faced and over elaborate script turn it into a film that spends more time explaining the plot than actually doing anything. Good fights, but that’s just about it. Same can be said for Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton’s gory and beautiful looking horror film that lacks the script it evidently requires. Nobody does quirky quite like Burton, though.
On the other end of the quirky scale we have Stanley Kubrick’s last ever film Eyes Wide Shut which had so much media hype that it was always going to be a disappointment upon its release. And it was. However, when viewed in the modern day context, the notion that this is an opportunity sorely missed is impossible to shake. It sure looks good, but sweet Christ, it’s boring.
So many lists have placed David O. Russell’s Three Kings at the very peak, and for 70% of the time it probably deserves it. But Russell’s tendency to veer from gritty reality to Tinsletown action fantasy, and a number of unnecessarily graphic bits of human slaughter lose it a little bit of credibility. War films don’t get more intelligent though.
Speaking of intelligent, there’s also M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, a horror film that – gasp – actually heads into the action script first. It’s touching and emotional all right, and it'll will make you jump in all the right places, but you can’t help feel that a lot of the appearances of ghostly apparitions are random at best, save for one or two instances. And any film that lives or dies by a solitary last minute twist is skating on thin ice. Still, it’s a lot better than the vast majority of modern horror films.
For the younger market, there’s Toy Story 2, better and more polished than the original. It’s nothing if not unabashed fun, but once the novelty value of the jaw-dropping visual effects wear off (give it five minutes), what you’re left with a story that is a rehash of the original with knobs on. Damn entertaining though. And last but not least, how can we forget American Pie the teen film that invented pie shagging, reinvented teen nostalgia, and launched nearly a dozen fledgling careers?
One last thing before moving onto the main list. A lot of other entries have put the fabulous Run Lola Run in their 1999 list. I have not. Why? Am I not impressed by its portmanteau structure, frenetic pace and searing techno soundtrack? Pff, don’t be silly. The answer is altogether simpler: Run Lola Run is a 1998 film.
10 South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut
Saddam and Satan as gay lovers. 399 profane words, 128 offensive gestures and 221 acts of violence. Anything but subtle criticisms of American censorship and politics. Some of the catchiest songs ever to grace a films soundtrack. Truly, South Park easily ranks as the biggest guilty pleasure of 1999, while also proving itself to be one of the best movie spin-offs of all time. All it's missing is a talking turd.
9 Election
You have to wonder how many black cats have crossed Alexander Payne's path, how many ladders he's walked under, how many mirrors he's smashed, and how much salt he's spilt. Because 'rotten luck' is the only way you can describe a consistently brilliant career which had, up until About Schmidt been criminally ignored. His anti-teen movie (only his second at the time) is an outstanding picture, developing the John Hughes genre of the 80s into a form that might be capable of turning out films as sharply incisive about American mores as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. And absolutely no one went to see it. You bloody ingrates.
8 The Insider
Effectively remodelling the 㣪s conspiracy thriller genre for the 21st century Michael Mann's based-on-fact movie is a devastating picture of corporate America at its most venal and corrupt, and at its heart are a pair of powerhouse performances, most notably from a pre head-up-own-sphincter Russell Crowe.
7 Magnolia
Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful tapestry of shaggy dog tales is a delightful, whimsical and often moving film, packing every celluloid inch with assured quality. It also features the finest ensemble cast assembled for decades with Philip Seymour Hoffman and William H. Macy’s fantastic performances only eclipsed by Tom Cruise (robbed of his deserved Oscar by - God no - Michael Caine - as the epitome of vulgar evil, sex guru Frank T. J. Mackey. The best Robert Altman film the guy never made.
6 Go!
Another classic teen movie, and another criminally ignored offering, Doug Liman's "Pulp Fiction for the kids" continues and improves his reputation delivering a charming, witty look at a group of kids for whom just sitting down and doing nothing is simply not an option.
Like Tarantino, screenwriter John August drives his script like a dodgem car, plotlines are set off, crashed into each other and then reversed. Gags are set up and then neatly forgotten about until the most unexpected payoff moments giving the whole movie a restless, manic and utterly affable energy. The ensemble cast is excellent; with Katie Holmes stand out as Claire, a bored (and massively shaggable) checkout girl who attempts her first drug deal.
5 Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Okay, so it's nothing more than a rehash of the original with more money, quirkier cameos and greater confidence thrown at it, but Mike Myers's wonky toothed spy caper is sensible enough to invest in the strongest aspects. That is, we get to see more of the show-stealing Dr. Evil, a camp Blofeld-alike who always was far funnier than Powers in the first place. An effortlessly inviting film that you won't be able to stop laughing with, despite yourself
4 The Blair Witch Project
"We want innovative films,” cried film lovers everywhere. "We want an original, heart-rendering ghost story that does away with all of the traits of the genre, turns its cheek on crummy CGI, and gives a stern two-fingers to providing a happy pay off. We want a cracking plot, decent acting, and to be forced to believe that there really is something out there to get us". Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez provide us with all this and more, and what do you lot do? You whinge a lot and turn your back on one of the most important films of the late 20th Century.
The Blair Witch is the kind of film that experimental cinema was invented for, a ruthless thought provoking piece of work that dabbles in matters of the occult and shows you the nasty consequences. Okay, you can whine all you want about "camera movements that made me ill" (oh boo-frickin-hoo), "it was too hyped up" (stop reading so many magazines then) not being able to understand what's going on (if you'd just watch the damn thing and quit yer sniping them you would, moron) and not being scared by it (go back to your crappy Hollywood slashers if that's your attitude), but at the end of the day one fact still remains: Had The Blair Witch been released in cinemas with absolutely no hype you would have lapped it up. And you know it.
3 Being John Malkovich
Incredible as it may seem, but the one and only criticism about Spike Jonze's audacious and literal headscrew of a movie is that it is too original. Taking an idea which could have been stretched beyond breaking point or simply fallen flat in the wrong hands, Jonze turns it into one of the most startling pictures to grace the screen in a long time, a film which manages to be hysterically funny and achingly poignant, while making the possibility of living life as a pompous movie star seem like the most attractive prospect in the world.
Far from the one joke concept the title would have you believe, Charlie Kaufman’s topsy turvy script is an absolute winner, playing up the absurdity of the situation and sustaining the joke with a steady stream of new twists, while touching on various moral issues (the desire of an everday Joe to live their life through celebrities) that resonate long in the mind.
2 Fight Club
Don't talk about Fight Club, they said. How, I ask, is that possible? How can you not talk about one of the most ambitious and anti-corporate films America has ever had the balls to produce, a film far more intelligent and tormented than its basic set up hints at. Neo-nazi? Pro-violence? A clarion call for dissolute thritysomething males everywhere to clobber one another in car parks? None of the above. Fight Club is a shock tactic, super-black comedy, asking us to question our very value system and then flip it the bird. Crisis has never been so much fun.
1 American Beauty
Undoubtedly, one of the last truly great films of the 20th Century, a classic feel-good movie better than anything starring James Stewart, and a powerful deconstruction of the nuclear family.
Curiously, American Beauty plays along the same lines as the more testosterone-heavy Fight Club; Both films revolve around the subject of male empowerment and self-discovery, with mid-life as coma where the only answer is a Zen-themed search for 'whatever makes you happy', and both share a super-charged fire-me-if-you-dare sequences and quasi-profound diatribes against household goods. Where Beauty surpasses the Brad/Ed battery pack, however, is in its devotion to humanity and, ultimately, love as the prizes so frustratingly out of reach.
Okay, so the ending message that life is so goddamn wonderful so appreciate it and everything around you is a little too saccharine, even by Hollywood standards, but nevertheless if you aren't smiling by the end credits then someone must have sewn your lips together.
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