1999 was a big year for me. I was 17 years old and heading into my senior year of high school, I was getting a stronger sense of who I was and my interests, one of them being the world of film, and this translated itself into my rudimentary start of written film criticism. I’ve always had a lifelong love for cinema instilled in me from my father. I grew up eagerly watching the latest Siskel & Ebert reviews in my parents’ bed on Saturday mornings. It’s been twenty years since I first began knocking on keyboards to put together some sort of half-shaped analysis on movies. It’s a bit strange to consider that I’ve lived longer writing film reviews than I have before I began writing film reviews on a regular basis.

These humble beginnings were fortunate to be tied to what I consider the greatest year in film. Sure many will rightfully cite the powerhouse of 1939 with your well-regarded classics like The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, amongst others, or 1982 for rarefied genre films like E.T., The Thing, Poltergeist, Blade Runner, Tootsie, Star Trek II, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, or plenty of other years with various bursts of creative high points (say 1974, 1994, 2007).

However, I will argue that 1999 not only had an astonishing number of quality movies, it also changed the movies. No other year had such a varied degree of remarkable movies that dared to be different. We had releases by the likes of *deep breath* Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, David O. Russell, Michael Mann, Kevin Smith, Alexander Payne, Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton, David Lynch, Steven Soderbergh, Doug Liman, Frank Darabont, David Cronenberg, Anthony Minghela, James Mangold, Ang Lee, Oliver Stone, Milos Foreman, John Lasseter, Spike Lee, Luc Besson, Trey Parker, Mike Leigh, Ron Howard, Robert Altman, Laurence Kasdan, Harold Ramis, David Mamet, Norman Jewison, Neil Jordan, Barry Levinson, Atom Egoyan, Sydney Pollack, Roland Joffe, Sidney Lumet, John Sayles, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, and even George Lucas had people excited for maybe the last time; we had Stanley Kubrick’s last film; debuts by Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Brad Bird, Lynn Ramsay, Sam Mendes, Guy Ritchie, Mike Judge, the Polish brothers, Rob Marshall, Kimberly Pierce, Julie Taymor; a breakout from some nobody named M. Night Shyamalan; foreign releases by Hiyao Miyazaki, Tom Tyker, Pedro Almodovar, Takashi Miike; and highly influential zeitgeist-shaking movies like The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, American Pie; and TWO movies apiece directed by Gary Marshall, John McTiernan, and Joel Schumacher. And sure, not every name on that list released an artistically audacious or even good film that year, or had for some time, but has there been any other year with that kind of name recognition at the helm? The year was overflowing with directing talent old and new. You had the old guard cresting, a vital and experimental new guard emerging, and we never looked at apple pies, slow motion, or frogs again the same way. This is even more impressive considering that there were far, far fewer releases in theaters and on home video than we have today. It’s utterly astounding.

In the interest of looking back at this magical year, I will be doing something I might soon regret. I’ll be looking back on my reviews of select 1999 films, both good and bad, during their month of initial release, and I’ll be reflecting on how the movie holds up, what if any cultural impact it has had or its filmmakers, and honestly, I’ll just be reviewing my own critical analysis skills and general taste. I’m sure I’ll be more than embarrassed by portions I wrote way back when I was but a smart-allecky teen who thought his opinions meant something (some things never change I suppose). I’ll be doing this for the reminder of 2019 as I look back month-to-month at where my film criticism career began and how I’ve honed my voice since. This should be worthwhile and not at all embarrassing, right? Enjoy the trip back through time, dear reader.

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-APRIL-

Go (1999) Released: April 9, 1999

The sophomore outing of director Doug Liman, the man who put the swinger in Swingers baby, is far from any slump – no it’s more like an achievement. Liman is a man that knows what he wants and an excellent visual artist. Go is a spinning tour-de-force joyride of energetic fun. The movie is down right infectious. It stays in your system for many days, no weeks, after viewing. Consult your physician for proper treatment.

Born in the shadow of Pulp Fiction with the disjointed narrative structure, interlocking plots, retelling of events through different perspectives, and out-of-place editing, Go is the first movie to deserve having the comparisons to Tarantino’s masterpiece of blood and violence. It’s like a child of Fiction, with teens as the main stars and doing some awfully idiotic things mainly because… they’re teenagers. The story of Go is bursting to the seams with clever and embraceable characters, witty and hilarious dialogue, and enough plot twists to keep any viewer frothing at the mouth for more. Again, consult your physician.

The movie reminds me in a way as a American Graffitti or Fast Times at Ridgemont High for the fresh stable load of young talent displayed. Everyone fits nicely and performs excellently, like Timothy Olyphant’s devilishly charming and dangerous turn as a drug dealer, and Taye Diggs who helped get Stella’s groove back and is now the too cool for words friend of a grocery clerk on their trip to Vegas which turns into a comedy of errors. But the standout amongst all the talent is that little delectable Canadian bundle of joy known as Sarah Polley. Playing one of the chief protagonists, she is fascinating and compelling. She takes the role and shines the brightest in a movie filled with equally bright stars. I look forward to seeing what she does in the future.

Set against the L.A. rave scene Go tells the story circling around a 24-hour period of tantric sex, drug deals, a police sting, a lap dance, gay soap stars, and good ole’ chew-able aspirin. The movie is driven by an awesome soundtrack of techno and rock that seems to act like the narrator of our little tale. Go is brisk, breathless, rigorously hip and smart. Finally an INTELLIGENT teen movie. Too bad not too many teens went to see it at the theaters judging from box office scores. I guess they all wanted to see Ryan Phillipe’s ass one more time in Cruel Intentions. But Go is a fascinating trip you’ll want to take over and over and wish the sun would never come back up. Do not pass Go.

Nate’s Grade: A

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

I’m relieved to report that Go has held up fairly well in the ensuing twenty years. It was labeled as a Tarantino knockoff during its release and it clearly aims to utilize his same sense of narrative switcheroo, irony, and dark comedy. It may actually be the best Pulp Fiction imitator because it takes the tools of Tarantino and claims them for its own purposes, never forgetting that what made that man’s movies so enjoyable wasn’t its sense of attitude or trickery but the characters and clever storytelling. Go, the first film from screenwriting legend John August, is so well structured, not just in how the narrative bends and folds upon itself, revisiting and reshaping our understanding of scenes, but simply within those segments as well. August is masterful at creating a dilemma and then spinning it in new complications, pressing more danger and escalation. Take for instance the film’s best segment, its first, where Ronna (Polley) needs rent money, so she agrees to supply ecstasy for a party, but she doesn’t have enough money, so her friend is left behind at the dealer’s as collateral, then she flushes the ecstasy to avoid a police bust, then she replaces it with over-the-counter duplicates, then she returns them to the dealer to retrieve her friend, all the while we wait for the dreaded moment he realizes he’s been had and goes looking for vengeance. It’s a brilliant chain of cause and effect organically developed. The second sequence in Vegas follows a similar comedy of errors that gets serious by the end but it’s more the consequences of one very stupid, impulsive imbecile. It’s an entertaining sequence because August knows how to keep the surprises coming at a clip but is clearly the weakest and falls prey to some boys-will-be-boys hijinks. By design, the third sequence is more married to Ronna’s segment, which makes it an improvement. The extended awkward home visit with the police officer is cringe-worthy but doesn’t overstay its welcome before transitioning into even darker comedy. The low-stakes conclusion is a funny and satisfying way to end the fun without any ill will.

This was only Liman’s second film and I wish he would go back to something small again. He has such a natural ability to infuse an exciting energy into his pictures, which may be one of the reasons he translated so well to big-budget Hollywood action movies (The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Edge of Tomorrow). Liman keeps things moving and makes great use of August’s characters and scenarios to impart a buoyant sense of fun and frivolity. Even when things get dark and characters lives are on the line, the movie doesn’t alter its tone and energy, letting the viewer know to have faith and things will still keep to its entertainment mission. August made a hell of a debut for himself and it’s a shame that his tightly structured and clever script isn’t given the credit it rightfully deserves. There are lines of dialogue that are hilarious and cutting, there are monologue asides that come from nowhere but are rich and impactful (Victor Sr.’s introduction where he bemoans how incompetence changes expectations and leaves behind ignorance is a stunning addition for a guy who is essentially The Scary Boss), and the characters are immediately engaging with different personalities and perspectives. Take this witty exchange between Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr:

Zack: “All things considered, it didn’t really go as bad as it could have.”

Adam: “A girl is dead, Zack.”

Zack: “I didn’t say it went perfectly.”

The dialogue pops throughout the movie and the actors sing it in lovely cadences. It all culminates in a very entertaining story that keeps your attention with a bevy or surprises. The ensemble is so large that it doesn’t hurt when a clear majority of supporting roles are underwritten or more plot devices than people.

The ensemble is a treat. Polley is a wondrous lead and has the cold stares, attitude, and overchecked confidence on lockdown, enough so that I was thrilled with the way she held a bottle of bleach, the way she looked contemptuously drinking a beer, the way she could invite the viewer into the interior of this clever girl that gets in over her head. Polley seemed destined to be an indie darling and took a separate turn in the mid 2000s as a film director, notable the Oscar-nominated debut, Away From Her. Another immediate standout I even cite in my review is Olyphant, who right away makes such an impression. There’s an unnerving sexual tension to him that helps out later when he reunites with Katie Holmes’ underwritten character. Olyphant would go on to become a major TV star in Deadwood, Justified, and thrilled me with his comedic chops on Netflix’s delightful Santa Clarita Diet. Taye Diggs is effortlessly charming. William Fichtner (Armageddon) finds plenty of laughs walking a narrow line so perfectly. The biggest alum from Go is actually someone who was only onscreen for maybe one minute and that’s Melissa McCarthy, playing an ebullient friend-of-a-friend. Even in that minute though she makes a favorable impression, enough that I remembered her when she was given another one minute of screen time in August’s screenplay for 2000’s Charlie’s Angels.

Another thing I noticed while re-watching Go was how many of the lines rolled off my tongue, how many moments became crystal clear memories, and even tidbits from the commentary track on the DVD all came flooding back shot-by-shot. I don’t remember watching this movie for at least ten years if not more, but I must have watched it plenty in 1999 to leave that much of a foundation to come back to. Part of this review retrospective will become a personal diary, as it’s hard not to reminiscence while thinking back on your initial impressions of films from twenty years ago. I remember being 17, traveling to the theater with my good pal Tim Riley in his family’s Thunderbird, and just feeling good about my life, and that came back to me. It has a special place for me because of my age when I first saw it and how it excited me about storytelling.

Looking back on the review from 1999, I can see what I’m sure will be a trend, namely my forced use of blurb-ready phrases. I don’t think I’ve ever written “tour-de-force” in any review in the last 15 years, but don’t hold me to this. Some of the jokey statements are corny or cringe-inducing, like “consult your physician,” and “delectable Canadian bundle of joy” in reference to Polley. Apparently I was offended that people were seeing Cruel Intentions in abundance rather than Go and felt it needed to be taken down a peg in this review. I’ve noticed in past reviews a regrettable fault I had where I would personalize things that had no reason to be personalized. My early reviews were comparatively brief, usually fewer than 500 words, and this one sticks mostly in general statements, and I like to think I’ve gotten better at explaining my reasoning. I have to say, I’m a little impressed at my teenage self’s occasional turn of phrase, vocabulary use, and critical analysis, in particular: “Born in the shadow of Pulp Fiction with the disjointed narrative structure, interlocking plots, retelling of events through different perspectives, and out-of-place editing, Go is the first movie to deserve having the comparisons to Tarantino’s masterpiece.” That’s a pretty damn good sentence that I’d be happy to have written at age 37 let alone age 17.

Overall, Go is a sprightly comedy with a sharp creative voice and strong characters that has held up mostly well and deserves more consideration. I might not rank it as high on my year-end re-do of a Top Ten but I think it’s still deserving of its initial grade or an A-.

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-MAY-

I got started writing film reviews in June of 1999, so I missed out writing about several big movies beforehand, including The Matrix and the long-awaited, much-hyped Phantom Menace. I suppose I could have gone back and reviewed them later as I did with some other movies I fancied, including some from 1998 that had recently been released on DVD that summer. But I didn’t. I have an idea that my Matrix review would be lots of adjectives expressing the same sentiment of “whoa,” but I’m curious about what my thoughts at the time would have been with the new Star Wars. I can recall a classmate of mine wearing Star Wars shirts for weeks in high anticipation of the new film, and after its release, he proclaimed its greatness even in the face of criticism. I wonder if I would have been one of the deluded fans who worked so hard convincing themselves that the flaws of the film weren’t there, that it wasn’t a disappointment. I barely recall feeling that the movie was fine; I may have even said “good” at the time. The investment in it being a good film was hard to cast aside. Here was a new Star Wars with modern-day special effects that could make the movies even more exciting. In reality, the special effects became a storytelling crutch for George Lucas, who showed more and more disinterest in his own story as he tried to squeeze what he could into three prequels. I wonder if my own review would have given a microcosm to this psychological denial or been something I would have been embarrassed about. In my review for Gladiator a year later I was already using Phantom Menace as a punchline, fair or not.

Something I’ve also discovered as I look back on the 1999 film releases is just how few of them there were. Nowadays a month has potentially hundreds of film releases thanks to the expanded marketplace. There are more ways than ever to get your movie seen, from online streaming to crowdfunding to festivals. In the late 90s, only one of those was a viable option, so self-releasing or boutique releases weren’t much of a reality beyond the established gatekeepers. In general, there was one or two studio releases a week. Wikipedia only cites nine movies getting a theatrical release that month. I’m used to nine releases coming out on a weekly basis. It was a shock to remember that the cinematic landscape was far more pruned back then, which also made my selection for this retrospective more limited. If you didn’t see a movie in the theaters, you went to the video store. That was about it.

Looking back on the month of May 1999, Star Wars was the big name but the pleasant surprise for me was The Mummy, a rollicking action-adventure that got close to the appeal of Raiders of the Lost Ark, established Brendan Frasier as a dashing leading man, and introduced the world to the amazing Rachel Weisz (The Favourite). I remember my grandmother, in her 80s at the time, being so taken with the new Mummy that she requested to see it twice in the theater, which was an astonishing feat for her. She said the old Mummy, the one with Boris Karloff, was so scary at the time, so we bought the 1932 movie and watched it as a family and my grandmother went to sleep. She said she remembered it being scarier. The other notable film for me was The Thirteenth Floor, a solid sci-fi thriller that was about uncovering a hidden virtual reality simulation. It’s easy to see in the wake of the The Matrix how this film became an also-ran. At the time Gretchen Mol had been declared the next “It Girl,” though she never seemed to reach that status in Hollywood. She turned in a terrific performance in 2006’s The Notorious Bettie Page as the title heroine, but it wouldn’t be until HBO’s Boardwalk Empire where she finally got her notoriety.

The next month was when I started writing film reviews and began this writerly journey of mine. I’ll be looking at two films, one bad (Wild Wild West) and one good (South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut).

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–JUNE–

Wild Wild West (1999) Released: June 29, 1999

This movie should have been re-titled “Wild Wild Mess.” After much speculation, the truth finally comes out about the overly hyped Will Smith vehicle: It is the loser of the summer season.

Rehashed from a 1960s series that no one under 30 will remember unless they stay up late watching Nick at Nite, it is full of special effects, headlining stars, and a talented director. So what went so terribly wrong?! The main problem is the story, or more accurately, the absence of one. This movie meanders through the entire plot, characters are thrown in, but there is NO story whatsoever.

Will Smith is a real disappointment. Even though he is such a charismatic actor and has a natural likability, he couldn’t save this disaster in the West. There is so little chemistry between Smith and Kline that it probably would’ve been better if ILM just created a Western Jar Jar for Smith to banter with. The jokes are so lame and unfunny that I slapped myself in the face more often than I laughed.

The beautifully delicious Salma Hayek plays peek-a-boo with the audience as she disappears and then reappears periodically throughout the movie. She has no real purpose except for some T&A and a forced romantic love interest. After playing every possible Shakespearean character, Kenneth Branagh now focuses on being an evil Lt. Dan of the South. His villain is more kooky than dangerous and provides more unintentional laughs than thrills.

This is an incredible lumbering mess that shows what can go wrong when children are not supervised while playing with daddy’s toys. May John Peters’ mechanical spider rot in hell! I want two hours of my life back!

Nate’s Grade: D

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Wild Wild West is the kind of big-budget studio misfire that almost leaves you in awe. How did so many people with so much money manage to make something like this? At any point did they know they were making a bad movie and what was the response? The budget was reportedly around $150 million, which would be the equivalent of $230 million today. For further context, the 2002 Spider-Man budget was $149 million, the 2007 Transformers budget was $147 million, and the other big special effects blockbusters of 1999, The Matrix ($66 million) and The Phantom Menace ($111 million), cost fractions compared to the Triple W. It’s not just that this movie was miscalculated from an artistic standpoint, it was also absurdly expensive, which only magnifies it more as a cautionary tale. So what went so badly?

It must have seemed like a good idea on paper, re-teaming Will Smith with his Men in Black director for another sci-fi-infused buddy comedy. It’s not like the Wild Wild West TV show created an indelible impression with the American public; it was essentially a spy show set during the West, which means the big screen edition could have gone in a myriad of directions, and that may be the problem. The film feels far too scattered and the result of the extensive rewrite process. Scenes feel disconnected to one another and more like orphans from other drafts of the script, stitched together poorly. This also occurs with the wildly varying tone.

The attempt at humor was another big reason for this movie misfiring, and the “comedy” hasn’t aged any better in the ensuring twenty years. Some of the moments of humor are so misguided that they took my breath away. The jokes are generally obvious and mean-spirited. Branagh’s villain, Dr. Arliss Loveless, lost his legs in the Civil War, so every joke at his expense involves not having his legs. Get it, it’s funny because he’s handicapped. There’s one spectacular exchange where Smith and Branagh trade insults about Smith being black and Branagh being legless, and it goes on for like four exchanges (“…will keep you from being a slave to disappointment”). It’s so cringe-worthy. There’s a sequence where an angry mob literally throws a noose around Smith’s character and plans on lynching him unless his quick wits can save him. It’s a scene you would never see in a mainstream movie today, using a lynching as a comedy set piece. Who thought this was a good idea? Then there’s more than a few jokes where the sole punchline is “gay people or trans people are weird.” Kline’s character, Artemis Gordon, has a penchant for dressing like a woman in disguise, which merits Smith’s mockery of how ugly he looks. See it’s funny because he looks like a man in drag. There’s a scene related to this where Kline is bragging about his prototype fake breasts and Smith shows him how to make them feel more real, and there are two cutaway reaction shot jokes about overhearing this exchange out of context. It doesn’t make it better when Smith goes undercover as a woman to seduce Loveless. He also shoots fire from his bra. These scenes aren’t funny but they also feel uncomfortable for where people felt the humor should be targeted.

Even when the jokes are on surer territory they often sputter. Smith’s innate charisma seems to be searching for elusive jokes throughout, looking to save scenes from falling flat. His character’s introduction involves him getting frisky with a lady while skinny dipping in the town’s water tower. First off, that’s just gross. People are going to drink from that water supply. He’s looking out a hole in the tower to spy on a criminal he’s meant to follow. His distraction annoys her so she stuffs a piece of cloth into the hole, and that’s when this moment happens:

Will Smith: “You can’t just go ramming a man’s personal things into some hole like that.”
Woman he’s trying to bone in the water tower: “Oh really?”
Will Smith: “I didn’t mean it quite like that.”

And they play it like it’s coy flirting! Sheesh (Fun fact: the actress in the water tower was recast because of “chemistry issues,” but she wasn’t told she had been replaced until she saw the scene at the L.A. premiere – consider it a blessing). The sex jokes are fairly obvious and as groan-worthy as the more egregiously miscalculated racial humor. It’s a comedy that is trying to be a mass appeal blockbuster while also having jokes about cuckolding and steam-powered dildos. These things happened.

Then there’s Salma Hayek’s character, Rita Escobar, who is so underwritten it hurts. She begins as a saloon girl that doesn’t want to be a brothel girl, gets saved by the boys, and then comes along for the adventure to… simply fret and be a trophy to be won. Her sole purpose in the film is to be the prize that Jim West and Artemis Gordon compete over. Do they know anything more about her than we do? The movie adopts their objectification and also views Hayek as eye candy. I had forgotten about her brief nude scene in the movie, though I remember it leaving an impression on my 17-year-old self at the time. She’s (seemingly) oblivious to her own nudity, a pajama outfit where the bottom flap is exposed. The boys catch on, sputter comically, and then ask her to essentially turn around again so they, and we, can get another look. If only her character mattered or had anything of importance to do onscreen. For half of the movie she’s a damsel needing rescue. The rest of the movie she’s commented upon for being sexy. As I wrote in my review back in 1999, she is simply here for the T&A, all of which gets commented upon repeatedly.

There is a weirdness that pervades the film that you can tell is director Barry Sonnenfeld trying to maintain a sense of interest. These moments attempt to combine the spywork and gadgetry of the spy genre and adjust it into a new time period, and it can prove interesting, like illuminating a man’s eyes to see the final image burned into his brain like a photograph. There are flying blades meant to follow unfortunate men with magnet neck braces. Sonnenfeld can go overboard and over indulge these whimsical impulses to the point that when real, bloody violence happens it feels like a bad cartoon. However, insofar that Wild Wild West has anything of entertainment, it’s because of Sonnenfeld whose career was never quite the same after this high-profile dud. He re-teamed with Smith for two more Men in Black films to diminishing returns, but he never had another high-budget, buzzy film project afterwards. In the twenty years since, Sonnenfeld has only had three non-MIB films, and that includes Nine Lives where a pre-Me-Too-ed Kevin Spacey was turned into a cat to learn important lessons about family. Sonnenfeld’s quirky visual style has translated more successfully into the realm of TV looking to adopt his tone, like Pushing Daisies and Netflix’s Lemony Snicket series.

It’s hard for Will Smith’s ebullient charm to not have appeal, so he walked away from this mess with his career mildly wounded at best. He says he turned down The Matrix to be in this film, and what a different world we would have with Smith as Neo. Smith began to step away from his “Big Willie” blockbuster roles for more dramatic and idiosyncratic roles, netting two Oscar nominations as well (Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness). Smith has called his movie his biggest career regret and it’s easy to see why. Despite what my initial review reports, I think Kline actually does have an enjoyably combative, smarmy chemistry with Smith. You feel some of his thinly veiled contempt at performing some of the “funny scenes,” which amused me more. All of the actors have rebounded in some way. Branagh has become a Hollywood favorite when it comes to directing studio films across a multitude of genres (Thor, Cinderella, Murder on the Orient Express). He was also nominated for an Oscar for 2011’s My Week with Marilyn. Hayek was nominated for an Oscar in 2002 for Frida and has produced several long-running TV shows like the American version of Jane the Virgin. Ted Levine, who played a Confederate secondary villain with a gramophone ear, delighted for years as the beleaguered police captain on USA’s Monk. Even that woman in the water tower (the second one, the one actually in the film, Garcelle Beauvais) had a robust career, appearing in NYPD Blue for its latter seasons and as the wife to Michael Keaton’s villain in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Looking back over my 1999 review, this may have been the first I ever wrote that appeared in public. At the time Bolt.com was a website catering to teens and attempting to build an online community. I remember when my parents got their first computer in 1998 that signing up for Hotmail asked if you wanted to enroll in certain features, and Bolt.com was one of them (it was either Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL in those early days). This was my first venue for my film reviews and it’s also a place where I met some young and passionate cinephiles to form friendships with, some of whom I still talk with to this day. I became a regular contributor to Bolt.com with my timely film reviews, which only further encouraged me to continue writing them to get published again. I submitted film reviews through 2000, and then they changed their review system, possibly because corporate sponsors became involved. I don’t know if I’d still be doing this without that early platform and the positive response. Much of my original review holds up. I’m a fan of some of my pithy lines like citing Branagh took the gig after “playing every Shakespeare character.” The Jar Jar Binks slam seems like an attempt to just pile on, and I’ve noticed more than a few times descriptions of actresses that highlight their attraction in ways I’d wish to avoid now. Still, the overall points are cogent. The John Peters reference was a sign of my Kevin Smith fandom as this element was a holdover from a defunct Smith-penned Superman film that Peters had been producing. You can watch Smith recount the tale himself on his 2001-2002 college Q&A tour, where you can see me on the DVD as well from the parts filmed at Kent State (I had pink hair at the time).

As the film began, I was wondering if maybe Wild Wild West would surprise me and if we had misjudged it at the time. Nope. As for a current revised grade, I’d probably bump it up into D+ territory. This is a mess of a movie that’s miscalculated in its humor, characterization, story, and tone. This IMDB trivia bon mot says it all:

“After post-production, Warner Brothers had already given up on the movie, considering it the ‘black sheep of the family.’ The movie/concept being so bad that nobody on the staff in the Quality Control Department wanted to work on it. Begrudgingly, they did.”

“Begrudgingly, they did.” Somebody ought to cite that as the new tagline for Wild Wild West.

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South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (1999) Released: June 30, 1999

I’ll start off and say I had fallen out of favor with the show at the time and really wasn’t interested in seeing the movie. But after being dragged along by a group of friends against my will I’m very glad I did.

I don’t fall into hysterics by hearing eight-year-old cartoons use the F-word profusely like many in my theater, but luckily for me there was plenty of wit to go around. The movie is riotously funny and I often found myself at times having to grip the armrest so I wouldn’t tumble out of my seat.

The movie could have been easily re-titled South Park: The Musical with the batch of 14 original songs they have that parody the Disney formula tunes and classic Broadway renditions. The songs are dead-on perfect at parodying their designed targets. The music is so brilliant and catchy that it deserves to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Comedy or Musical score if there is any justice in the film community. Never thought you’d see the words South Park and Oscar in the same sentence did you? Well neither did I.

The movie even plays witness to issues circling our country today like knee-jerk reaction to assess blame, responsible parenting, and blaming Hollywood media. This is a true piece of comic brilliance as they satirize anything and everything and so damn well. There are those that might take offense to some of the racial jokes but take it with a grain of salt because pretty much every person of race, creed, culture, and what not will be a source of humor. After all, that’s what Brian Boitono would do.

Nate’s Grade: A

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

It’s hard to believe that South Park is still on the air twenty years later. It was beyond belief in 1999 that only two years removed from its potty-mouthed cable debut that a South Park movie would be as satirically inspired as Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. People knew Trey Parker and Matt Stone as crass goofballs, but their big screen adventure was an eye-opening and ambitious statement about what these men could accomplish when they put their talents to a bigger project. The other major surprise from the film was just how much of a full-blown musical it was and what an excellent musical too. This is about eleven years before Parker and Stone took Broadway by storm with their record-breaking, delightfully vulgar Book of Mormon (where is that movie, guys? Come on!). The movie is barely 75 minutes long and the soundtrack album is 50 minutes long, so by my estimate a solid half of the movie is people singing. The composition of the songs was impressively assembled, with strong hooks and running melodies and themes that could serve as reprises. Marc Shaiman (the Hairspray musical) helped compose and write several of the tunes with Parker. Each one feels like a clever parody of a particular Broadway show or style or musician, and part of my fun this time watching was determining what each song’s artistic influences were supposed to be (“Oh that’s the Sondheim homage, that’s the Disney princess song, that’s the Les Miz ensemble mash-up…”). The songs are stupidly good entertainment.

The South Park movie has aged well as far as its music and satire but the comedy? Less so. At the time the film came out, I had kind of veered away from South Park as a series. I recall eagerly watching its debut because it was the naughty show that was boundary-pushing. I remember laughing along with my 16-year-old friends about the profane adventures of Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny. So much of the humor seemed predicated on shock value, and as any child in the age of the Internet can attest, that wears off in due time with continued exposure. After a while the TV show just didn’t seem funny anymore. It seemed to pick up another life when it first went topical, satirizing the Elian Gonzalez debate in April 2000, and from there on out, with future scandals, it became a waiting game to see what South Park would say. I’m sure if you reviewed those episodes they haven’t held up at all, victims of the cultural currency of being topical. But those episodes continued a re-framing of South Park as more than what people thought it was destined to be, and the 1999 movie was the biggest declaration.

Many of the sillier jokes are still enjoyable but it feels like the humor of watching children use inappropriate language has become another artifact of the past. It gets old fast. I feel like the gratuitous nature of the vulgarity and profanity in the movie is almost the point. Parker and Stone genuinely felt they were going to be canceled at the time and so they put their efforts into a big proof of what they could be capable of if the content shackles had been loosened. The excessiveness is almost the point, which serves as a meta commentary of how people viewed the show, which in hindsight has never been as dumb as people protested and never as smart as people contended. The show-within-a-show, Terrence and Phillip, is indicative of the kind of show its critics felt South Park was, so it’s only fitting that the Canadian fart-enthusiast comic duo would serve as the focal point for a war between the United States and Canada. The blaming of media and Hollywood as scapegoats for behavioral issues was a constant presence in the 1990s, and especially in the wake of the Columbine school massacre in April 1999, a mere two months before the opening of Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. Politicians were quick to blame violent video games, Marilyn Manson, The Matrix, and other media byproducts rather than easy access to guns, mental illness, bullying, and other culprits we concentrate on today in the sadly common occurrence of mass shootings. With the movie, Parker and Stone blew up the hypocrites and incompetence.

The MPAA, the secretive organization that rates movie releases, was a thorn in Parker and Stone’s side and an easy target for ridicule. In the insightful 2006 documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated, Parker and Stone credit the MPAA with actually making the final movie better and dirtier. They purposely put in content they knew would run afoul with the MPAA with the intent of removing it as a compromise in order to keep the stuff they really wanted, and it worked. Not only that, the suggestions and re-edits allowed Parker and Stone to slip even more things in knowing the specious MPAA guidelines. For example, when Saddam Hussein has a photo realistic penis in his hand, it would be unacceptable for an R-rating unless it was after revealed as a toy. They go through this joke twice, to note what an irritating douche Hussein was in his toxic relationship to Satan but also as a means of tweaking the MPAA morality gatekeepers with their own arbitrary regulations. The myopic perspective is typified in the character of Kyle’s mom, Sheila Broflovski, a person always looking for someone or something else to blame rather than look inward at her own lapses in parenting (that is if there is even a problem worthy of concern). Her zealous crusade to make the world safe for kids creates a lot of unexpected and bloody collateral damage, but she’s so blinded by her sense of self-righteousness that it doesn’t matter. You could apply this to any number of topics and it could still feel apt because this kind of person hasn’t gone away.

From a structural standpoint, this super-sized edition of South Park handles a number of character arcs well, establishing clear setups and payoffs that tie into the larger story. It feels like the universe of the show grew much larger and more ambitious. The boys were rewarded for their accomplishment. “Blame Canada” was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song and was performed by Robin Williams onstage. It lost out to the Phil Collins’ song from Disney’s Tarzan, a decision even more baffling when you take into account the other nominees that year were Aimee Mann for her “Save Me” track from Magnolia and the poignant Sarah McLaughlin song from Toy Story 2. The fact that all three of those songs lost out to a cheesy and forgettable Phil Collins song is downright absurd.

Going back over my review in 1999, this was actually my first official film review. I had written up a few others for a friend of mine months before when she had asked for my take on movies, but this was the start of a twenty-years-and-counting hobby that has, frankly, made me a better writer and consumer of movies. I think my 17-year-old self was trying to sound a little too above it all in the opening, distancing myself from liking South Park any longer, but it works to sell my love for the eventual movie. I remember going to a packed theater with my friend Kevin Lowe and others at the time. I was resistant about going out and seeing it, partially because of my rising indifference to the show, but also because, if I remember correctly, an ex-girlfriend of mine was also going to be in our viewing party. That’s a whole other story. I’m very happy I went and I remember the theater rolling with laughter. It was a much-needed and appreciated escape.

Overall I’d say while the comedy might not be as funny but the satire is still strong and the music is still outstanding. I’d grade the movie either in the A or A- range.

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–JULY–

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Released: July 16, 1999 

There’s a certain awe one has to this film. It’s Stanley Kubrick’s last movie, took over two years in development, has the big name star couple, and no one knows ANYTHING about it. All I can say is that Eyes Wide Shut the movie is a challenging and engaging work from a titan of a director that will sorely be missed.

The first movie from Kubrick in over a decade comes sweeping in and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The steady cinematography is gorgeous, coupled with the dream like lighting that seem glowing about on the frames. The story captured my attention and drew me in quickly as I was enthralled. It’s all about the tale of a husband and wife with sexual inadequacies, fantasies, delusions, and jealousy. It’s about the trust in a marriage, and how sex can be used not only as an intimate showing of feelings but as a weapon and as a tool. Journey with Tommy Cruise as he ventures through the city exploring all the different characters and how sex has influenced, controlled, or manipulated their lives.

The movie is adult, yes, but not pornographic. Those who argue it’s expensive porn don’t know what they’re saying. Though there are probably more butt shots of Kidman then necessary the movie never becomes exploitative or gratuitous. The sex here is portrayed more like a Victorian era arrangement instead of the hard-core stuff of today. In fact the sex is far more creepy than erotic. The actors all contribute nicely to the ensemble, even though Nicole Kidman is the slowest talker in the world here. But I couldn’t wait to see what she’d say next; she had me. The movie as well had me mostly.

The movie will certainly not go over well with audiences planning to see a Basic Instinct sequel in this. I blame the poor marketing that made it into something it was far from: a sexy and steamy adult thriller with TONS o’ nudity. So when people file in and find out it’s a two and a half hour art movie with depth, symbolism, and layers they are no doubt disappointed. Especially those who show up in raincoats. The movie is a fitting final work to Kubrick’s collection. Rest in peace Stanley.

Nate’s Grade: B

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

It’s also hard to believe that cinema legend Stanley Kubrick has been dead for twenty years. The mercurial filmmaker only had about a dozen films to his name but they were so influential, so different, and so ambitious and challenging that the Kubrick name is held in the most rarefied of terms. For teenage me in the late 90s, I was exploring my own burgeoning taste in film by taking a deep dive into the works of Kubrick. I remember sitting in a class my junior year and some other student said to me, dismissively joking, “I bet you’re one of those kids whose favorite movie is, like, A Clockwork Orange.” But at the time it totally was! His prototypical hipster jab was correct. Well it’s not my favorite film, per se, but definitely a movie that had captured my attention and made me reconsider what movies could achieve. It was one of my earliest DVD purchases and I recall loaning it out to several high school friends to also expand their horizons. Even when he was doing studio work, like 1960’s rousing epic Spartacus, he was still operating at a level that was astonishing. Paths of Glory to me is still the greatest anti-war film ever made. The Shining is still my favorite horror movie to this day, and I don’t care what Stephen King says how it radically veers from his source material because those changes were improvements. An axe is an improvement over a croquet mallet. No living hedge monsters is an improvement. No last-minute redemption is an improvement. There’s a reason nobody talks in awed reverence about the mid 90s Shining miniseries that allowed King a redo on his own terms. The ratio of masterpieces or near-masterpieces for Kubrick’s filmography is so high that it puts him in a class almost all his own (Hitchcock directed over 40, Spielberg over 30). He’s a man who rejected the familiar and challenged audiences as well as himself and did so until his death on March 7, 1999.

The speculation behind his final film Eyes Wide Shut was rabid in the late 1990s. He hadn’t made a film for over a decade, 1987’s Full Metal Jacket (brilliant first half of military boot camp and a relatively good second half at war). He had developed a Holocaust drama about a family evading capture called The Aryan Papers, based on the book Wartime Lies, but before he went into production, Spielberg released eventual Best Picture-winner Schindler’s List. Kubrick felt the projects were too similar and scrapped his Holocaust drama. He had been circling the source material for Eyes Wide Shut, the 1926 novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, for several decades, shifting his view of the project over that time from a comedy to a drama. He latched onto having a real-life couple for the leads, at one point targeting Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. But Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman won the lead roles and Kubrick put them through an emotional grinder. They filmed for over a year straight and spent so much time in London filming that their children developed British accents. Cruise was stressed so much over the filming that he developed an ulcer and never told his director.

It’s important to remember the anticipation of this film because it was cloaked in mystery. The Internet had been around, as well as industry speculation, but it was easier to keep movie details under wraps in that age, and nobody knew what this movie was going to be about. There was speculation that Cruise and Kidman would play married therapists who each start sleeping with their clients (that’s actually not a bad idea, I mean… as a film). Nobody knew what this movie was about, and the promotional and preliminary buzz was on how sexy as movie it was going to be, how Kubrick was fighting with the MPAA, how Warner Brothers inserted digital figures to obscure portions of an orgy to secure the safer R-rating. After his death, the movie took on an even bigger profile and became a waiting statement to close out the man’s career, at least for an army of eager arts essayists waiting to place a final period on the famous Kubrick film legacy.

What of the actual film? That’s a harder discussion to have now that the rose-colored glasses of post-Kubrick assessment has passed (Scorsese rated Eyes Wide Shut as his #5 film of the 1990s). It certainly has latter-day Kubrick trademarks, like the slow Steadicam tracking shots, character breakdowns, and unhurried pacing. This movie is a whopping 159 minutes; its vignette-heavy structure mitigates this to some degree but it’s hard not to watch certain portions and grow impatient. Scenes just sort of glide at their own pace, contributing to the overall movie feeling partially like a dream. The Christmas decorations and lighting kept at the edges of the frames also contribute to this feeling, giving the film a glowing halo, almost reminiscent of Saved by the Bell episodes when they wanted to immediately communicate visually that what was unfolding was a dream or fantasy (yes, that’s right, I just compared Saved by the Bell with Stanley Kubrick). The movie seems intended to feel like a walking dream, where Cruise’s character, Dr. William Harford can stumble into all sorts of sexual fantasies through one long New York City stroll. Even the production design helps achieve this feeling, as the New York streets have an in-authenticity to them, as they were studio sets because Kubrick is notoriously averse to travel and flying. From the dream-like establishment, it gives the movie a lot of artistic leeway, allowing characters to behave in exaggerated and contradictory manners, as well as certain coincidental peculiarities. Dr. Harford flashes his medical license at like half a dozen people, stating “I’m a doctor,” as if it’s meant to convey the same legitimacy as showing a police badge. But it works. Every freaking time.

If I had to gather a theme, I would posit that it’s about the deception of appearances. Dr. Harford doesn’t believe his wife Alice (Kidman) could have the same sexual appetites as a man. She blows his mind and his conception of their relationship when she recounts, with the assistance of some marijuana, that there was a Navy man she bumped into once, and the feeling of desire was so immediate, so overwhelming, that she could have lost herself in it and given away everything she had known, including her husband and child, to pursue that urge. In just a fleeting moment, a relationship can be over. She says she was relieved when this Navy officer was gone, as the potential temptation too had safely vanished. This is the moment that sets Harford off, stewing in rising jealousy and potentially the opportunity to “get back at her,” whatever that may mean. He goes from location to location, visiting an enchanted group of strangers, eventually winding up at a private costumed orgy for the elite that provokes portentous danger and alarm.

At each turn, there is more than what he sees. An acquaintance declares her unrequited love for Harford after he visits, and he’s baffled at her affections, saying they hardly know one another. The kindly hooker Domino (Vinessa Shaw, 3:10 to Yuma) that Harford almost sleeps with ends up being the bigger danger than the rich scary orgy participants. It’s revealed late from her roommate that Domino just learned she was HIV-positive, which then serves as a wake-up call for Harford. The costume shop owner (Rade Sherbedgia, Snatch) aghast at grown men fooling around with his underage daughter (Leele Sobieski, Joyride) the next day becomes a would-be pimp, assuring Harford that if he wants anything, “anything at all” as he nods at his daughter, he needs simply ask. Then there’s the big headline-grabbing masked orgy, the real lasting image of Eyes Wide Shut. I’ve never attended an orgy of any sort (yet), but I have to think this one goes out of its way in the name of performative ceremony. The incantations, the carnival masks, the secret codes and rituals. It all seems like a living urban legend, and when Harford is found out and threatened, it feels like he’s captured the wrath of some very powerful people who will do anything to keep their secrets. That’s the Hollywood movie version of those events. In this film’s reality, it’s just a bunch of rich people who were scared an outsider discovered their naked masquerade. Upon my re-watch, I must have been watching the copy of the film without those added digital figures, because I couldn’t see them anywhere at the orgy, and yes my eyes survived, MPAA. Even the orgy, built up with such anticipatory hype, seems destined not to live up to expectations. The naked servant woman who sacrificed herself to save Harford that night is just an unrelated death.

As themes go, it’s not exactly deep or too provocative, and I think that’s a snappy summation of Eyes Wide Shut as a whole on this twenty-year re-watch. It’s interesting for several reasons throughout, from the performances to the vignette nature of new characters popping up and the narrative starting over setting up this next little world. I feel like some of its lessons are not exactly as challenging today as they might have been back then (women have sexual appetites too?!). The concluding dialogue hits the dream imagery very hard to the point of self-parody. The husband and wife have a conversation noting what they have learned from this crazy night, and he says, “No dream is ever just a dream,” hinting at untold desires, and she says, “The important thing is we’re awake now, and hopefully for a long time,” talking about their awareness of one another’s drives. I mean I can keep going but it’s poetically pretentious and overwrought. That could be most people’s summary of the film and they might not be wrong.

The acting overall is good, with Kidman as the standout, even though as I stated in my initial 1999 review she is the…. slowest… talker. It’s like she’s on Quaaludes or some sedative. When she started smoking pot, I said to myself, “Oh no, she’s going to talk even slower.” Cruise is perfectly acceptable but he’s much more a blank slate meant to serve as the entry point for the audience. He’s inquisitive when we need to learn and confrontational when called for, but the character is more a useful cypher. He has the annoying habit of repeating people’s statements and questions over and over, like he’s practicing a new language and noting the words. Kubrick put the couple through some pretty heinous preparations to get the performances he sought. He directed each separately and swore them not to tell the other what he had said; he attended intense couples sessions where they bared their collective insecurities; he even filmed the Alice dream sequences with the Navy man, the jealous fantasy that haunts Cruise, over the course of six days, a variety of sexual positions, and had Kidman never divulge to her husband what had taken place. Then there’s his demanding shooting style, taking upwards of 100 takes in order to get the performance he desired. It would not surprise me in the slightest if, after all this, Kubrick and his ways contributed to the dissolution of their 11-year marriage (they divorced in 2001).

Three other interesting and bizarre facts relating to Eyes Wide Shut: 1) The woman at the orgy who volunteers as tribute to save Harford, she had her lines dubbed by an “American” actress, and it was only revealed in 2019 that this actress was none other than THE Cate Blanchett. Why was this a twenty-year secret, especially as Blanchett’s star rose? 2) The piano player that first introduces Harford to the concept of the masked orgies, Nick Nightingale, is played by Todd Field, who would go on to write and direct In the Bedroom and Little Children, and who frankly needs to make more movies because my God those two are amazing. 3) Eyes Wide Shut is partially responsible for Hugh Jackman being Wolverine in the X-Men films. How? Well, dear reader, the production on Eyes Wide Shut went wildly over its target dates, which affected the next projects for Kidman and Cruise, which happened to be Mission: Impossible II. That sequel’s production went longer than expected with delays and because of that Dougray Scott, the originally cast Wolverine, was unable to join the X-Men, and so in stepped Jackman. You fanboys should be thanking Stanley Kubrick’s ghost for being so mean to Tom Cruise.

Looking back on my original 1999 review, it’s actually pretty solid all around. What feels most gratuitous about the film isn’t its nudity but the pacing. I feel like I too was caught in the swirl after the man’s death and tried to make it sound more important than it was ultimately. Eyes Wide Shut won’t be found in anyone’s top five Kubrick list. I don’t think it quite has the layers that my 17-year-old self was looking for to make it feel like a “fitting final film” for a man that helped define what cinema could accomplish for decades. I saw this movie in the theater with my father beside me, which should have been more awkward than it was considering the ornate orgy. Thinking back, I’ve seen several movies heavy with sex and nudity or crude humor with my father sitting right beside me and curiously I’ve never felt too uncomfortable (Species, Lost Highway, American Beauty, Scary Movie, Unfaithful, Team America, both The Girl with the Dragon Tattoos, The Wolf of Wall Street). This even carries on to this day, having recently watched 2019’s Midsommar which has some heavy, older full-frontal nudity (for the record, my father loved the movie). Maybe I’ve just been able to see the movie content as a reflection of art and not feel too weird when people get naked. Or maybe I’ve just been watching these movies long enough. I think my father must have been elated when I hit my teenage years because he had an excuse to go see all these movies he’s been wanting to see now regardless of rating. Anyway, Kubrick’s last-last movie was a collaboration with Spielberg, 2001’s A.I., something they had developed for years. That movie is notorious for a tacked-on happy ending that many, including me at the time, credited/blamed on Spielberg, saying Kubrick surely would have ended at the more downbeat point 15-20 minutes prior. Not so. Apparently, it was always Kubrick’s intent. Even that grouchy, mercurial, belligerent man could love a big happy ending like the rest of us. Eyes Wide Shut isn’t quite that but it has enough going for it that it’s a minor curiosity all gussied up in artifice. I initially rated it an A but brought that grade down to a B, and that seems appropriate.

So long, Stanley. Thanks for helping to make me love movies even more.

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The Blair Witch Project (1999) Released: July 30, 1999

Who’s afraid of the big bad witch? Well apparently a nation of audiences and studio heads. I’ve heard all kinds of horror stories from people lying in the corners of theaters until the movie was over, to people running out screaming, to the distribution of barf bags by theaters (of course it might be due to the hand held camera and motion sickness). Well after all the hype I finally ventured out to see it after some failed attempts at evening shows that managed to be sold out. I’ll say right now that I was never very afraid. Of course there may have been some effect being that I saw it around three in the afternoon.

But I did come away with a great appreciation for what these kids have done. They themselves with a mere $100,000 budget have practically reinvented horror and given it a complete turn from where the Kevin Williamson post-irony pseudo hip teen slasher films were leading us. And I for one couldn’t be happier. The anticipation of the unknown is far more frightening than being slowly chased by a man in a rain slicker. That’s exactly what Blair Witch offers. It’s no typical horror flick, it lets you create the fear in your head and let you drive yourself mad with it. The tension is slowly building and building as the trio get even more lost, paranoid, and frightened. It really is a truly innovative effort and done so realistically that people still swear to their hearts it’s all true. I think more credit should go to the actors then the directors for how effectively real the movie was. When they’re not yelling profanity all the time they do manage to come off as very believable and we see how they are all slowly breaking down internally like a case study. Just remember people, money doesn’t equal scares.

Nate’s Grade: B

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

In 1999, there were two movies that immediately, forcefully became phenomenons and prominent members of the cultural zeitgeist, inspiring numerous imitations and parodies. The Matrix was the first and revolutionized action cinema and special effects, and the second was The Blair Witch Project, the little indie that could. At the time more attention was given to the big-budget Haunting remake with Liam Neeson and Catherine Zeta-Jones, not some Sundance indie where a bunch of nobodies film themselves getting lost in the woods. It was experimental in more ways than one, including its novel use of viral marketing. Blair Witch was the first film that made a splash thanks to Internet marketing, with a website promoting the film as a real documentary and the actors as real missing people. Some people were so thoroughly convinced that the movie was real I can recall having weirdly pointed arguments with acquaintances and strangers online over this dispute. They swore up and down it was real. I would point out that these “missing people” were just seen on MTV’s TRL very much alive and promoting the movie that week. It didn’t matter because the lore and legend of the marketing had worked its witchy spell.

The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first movie to utilize a found footage aesthetic but it made the biggest impact of them all (Cannibal Holocaust came out in 1980, and even 1998’s The Last Broadcast had a similar premise about a group of lost documentary filmmakers looking for the mythical “Jersey devil” in the woods). It introduced mass audiences to a different kind of horror movie, relying heavily upon the imagination of the viewer and the verisimilitude it carefully constructed. There was a mystery factor not just to what was happening onscreen to the three people but to the entire nature of the production, creating a narrative to make sense of their disappearance. With every moment you were supposedly watching the last moments of real missing people. It took actors Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams eight days to film. It took writer/directors Daniel Myrick and Edwardo Sanchez eight months to edit their results.

I remember overly enthusiastic blurbs saying Blair Witch will do for the woods what Jaws did for the ocean. That statement is a bit too happy to be studio-friendly catnip, but the success of the movie, as most horror films, comes down to whether or not it’s actually scary. I find The Blair Witch Project, then just as now, to be a more admirable exercise than a scary one. It has an unnerving quality as you feel the desperation of the characters as they get more and more lost, as well as their response to the spooky shenanigans. As I stated in my original 1999 review, I think more credit should deservingly go to the actors than the directors. First, it was the actors who shot every single moment in this movie. All of those memorable lines and images, most notably the close-up confessional of Donahue’s teary red eyes, was because of these actors. They were given notes and direction from their directors from afar, but they stayed in character and improvised all of their lines, and those factors go a long way to making the final product feel more “real.” Interestingly, there was supposed to be a moment where you saw the actual Blair Witch. When the characters run out into the woods screaming, Heather shrieks, “What is THAT?!” and Joshua was supposed to pan over to see a man in the distance dressed in a white gown… but he forgot and kept running. Oops. Well now it’s canon. The directors deserve admitted credit for picking the right people for the job and for constructing the boundaries of a play space for them to experiment with. But this movie isn’t a success because of the writing but because of the sense of realism, which was accomplished from the gung-ho actors.

Thanks to the record-breaking success of Blair Witch (a reported $60,000 budget that earned over $250 million at the box-office) there was a rush of parodies and imitators. Even I remember filming a hasty parody. The found footage concept became a familiar narrative formula, which only exploded further in 2008-2009 with the one-two punch of commercial hits Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity. While today it seems found footage movies have cooled, in truth we’re only waiting for the next big hit to rejuvenate the sub-genre again. It’s because the found footage aesthetic relies on cleverness, which can often benefit from being cheap as well. With the democratization of film, thanks to greater access to affordable digital equipment and platforms, the found footage aesthetic has become a mainstay because it’s immediate, it’s personalized, and it’s inexpensive. It also further taps into a cultural desire for self-documentation, the thing that Heather’s character in Blair Witch declares is the “only thing [she] has left.” While re-watching Blair Witch, I kept asking myself why people would be filming everything they are filming, but the movie was just ahead of its time, pointing toward an audience that is assembling their own found footage record of their existence with daily posts, retweets, videos, and the like (including likes). We’re curating our time on Earth as if we’re our own editing team from the future.

It’s little surprise that the cast and crew associated with Blair Witch struggled to find continued success. Donahue said she received death threats after the movie (also a sign it was ahead of its time with toxic and misogynistic fan culture) and had trouble finding acting work after. She appeared in 2000’s Boys and Girls with Freddie Prinze Jr., Claire Forlani, and Jason Biggs (oh man, just writing those names feels like a time machine) and hasn’t been credited with anything since 2008. Williams has managed a few credits after, including a recent episode of the TV series F.B.I., but has mostly stuck to the occasional short or TV appearance. Leonard has easily had the most robust career. He was a supporting figure in smaller studio films like Men of Honor and Deuce’s Wild before really striking it as a mumblecore pro, rising to renewed notoriety from the likes of Lynn Shelton (Humpday) and the Duplass brothers (Togetherness). He was recently seen as the creepy ex-boyfriend in Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, which, borrowing from the Blair Witch, was filmed entirely on an iPhone to give it a more immediate sense of rough reality. He also married Alison Pill (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The Newsroom) in 2015 and good for him. The Blair Witch directors parted ways in the early 2000s after a failed Fox horror series, FreakyLinks. Both would go on to write and direct several direct-to-video genre titles, though Myrick was more prolific before 2008 and Sanchez more so after with genre television.

Blair Witch’s runaway success naturally meant its studio couldn’t leave it alone and a sequel was commissioned, directed by Joe Berlinger, best known for the startling Paradise Lost films. It seemed like an interesting match, attaching an award-winning documentary filmmaker to a series purporting to be a disturbing documentary. However, the found footage aspect that made Blair Witch famous was dropped within minutes of 2000’s Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2. Apparently, there was substantial creative meddling from the studio execs and reshoots and re-edits, delivering a movie that veers back to the old, hackneyed staples of horror iconography. The franchise died one year after exploding. In 2016, producers tried reviving it again with a reboot that followed Heather’s younger brother gathering a team to go into the woods to find her. It was made by Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, the team responsible for the enjoyable genre riffs You’re Next and The Guest, but even they couldn’t restart this dormant franchise. At least their movie returned the found footage conceit. Is the film franchise cursed? Even the studio that got rich from Blair Witch was eventually sold to Lions Gate in 2004.

Looking back at my original 1999 review, I was already trying to measure the movie in comparison to the massive hype. I remember two previous times I had tried to see Blair Witch with friends, including opening weekend where we had to see Watergate comedy Dick instead (I probably was too harsh on that film as a result in my review). At the time, horror was drenched in irony and meta-recognition, thanks to Kevin Williamson and Scream. It felt refreshing to get something that wasn’t just a braless woman running from a masked killer. I think Blair Witch is more interesting than scary, and at a scant 77 minutes before credits, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. In my review I graded it a B and I think that’s fair considering its technical merits

There are so many ways this could have gone wrong but all the elements worked together, from the right casting to the right approach to the right edits. It was like capturing magic itself, which is what the best movies feel like when they work. The impact of The Blair Witch Project cannot be understated when it comes to horror, found footage, viral marketing, and DIY filmmaking. You can also blame the movie for the 1000 films of “people lost in the woods” horror. Also The Bare Wench Project. So, you know, there’s that too.

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–AUGUST–

The Sixth Sense (1999) Released: August 6, 1999

August is mostly thought of as a time of dead water for summer movies. But now I think it should be regarded as the best month for film this whole mediocre summer, and The Sixth Sense is one of the main reasons. Though the title kinda sucks.

In a summer low on genuine chills here’s one movie that offers honest-to-God-grip-the-armrest-chills. It’s very moody when it needs to be and creepy when it never has to be but is anyway and constantly moving. The Sixth Sense also offers audiences something they haven’t seen this summer: real characters with depth. The characters leap from the screen and are slowly established as complicated, rounded, and very thoughtful people. Now that’s something that took me for surprise.

Bruce Willis achieves his quiet mode and teams up yet again with another child (a la Mercury Rising). Willis’ acting is solemn and just enough to drive his character through his quest. You haven’t seen Bruce Willis show this much emotion since he walked over glass in Die Hard! But the story of The Sixth Sense is a little tyke that comes from out of nowhere and redefines child acting. To say Haley Joel Osment carries the film is an understatement – he throws it on his back and runs a 4.3 with it. If Anna Paquin can win an Oscar for babysitting a piano then this kid deserves one too. This is the greatest child actor I’ve seen in years and I begin to wonder why Lucas chose his miscast young Anakin.

The best thing The Sixth Sense has is intelligence. It rewards those who stood up and paid attention with a knock-out terrific ending that wraps everything up you questioned before. And you will rerun things in your mind over and over when you leave the theater. My only complaint, and it is small, is that the direction could be tighter at times. But for everything The Sixth Sense has to offer I will gladly wait in line for seconds. The best summer chiller and one of the best movies of the year. The title still sucks though.

Nate’s Grade: A

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

The Sixth Sense wasn’t writer/director M. Night Shyamalan’s film debut but it might as well have been considering the seismic impact it left behind. He released a movie in 1998 called Wide Awake with Rosie O’Donnell about a boy looking for God, though it was shot in 1995, and there’s even one earlier movie, 1992’s Praying with Anger, his coming-of-age Indian transplant NYU film project at the age of 22. Before that fateful weekend, Shyamalan was a name nobody had heard of, and afterwards he became a wunderkind, heir apparent to Steven Spielberg and New Hollywood, and then eventual pariah, punchline, and comeback kid. It all was launched with The Sixth Sense, which really and truly benefited from essentially coming out of nowhere. Bruce Willis was an A-lister and the movie had a buzzy concept but it was easy to lose track of this smaller ghost story between the breathes of summer explosions. With that lack of expectations, it really felt like audiences had discovered something special, something new, something… unexpected. The twist ending became the talk of the summer and my go-to example for twist endings (I have since discovered that enough time has passed and contemporary teenagers have rarely watched the movie, meaning this “everybody knows” example of a twist ending has fallen back into an age-bracket of ignorance). What was really surprising was simply how freaking good the movie was, and twenty years later it still is upon my re-watch.

It’s challenging to separate one’s holdover feelings of the future Shyamalan when evaluating this big breakthrough because it’s such a major statement. The complete control Shyamalan exhibits in the film, from a writing and directing standpoint, is thrilling and impressive. The scenes are allowed to breathe and gestate, naturally expanding and finding their intended direction, and it feels so wonderfully natural. That is huge considering that hiding in plain sight was that dynamite twist ending that Willis had been dead from the opening scene onward. The fact that all the pieces would add up on reviewing, where the clues we didn’t realize added up to a different equation, and it doesn’t detract from the drama at the center of the action, a distraught and disturbed little boy willing to confront his unique gifts, is just incredible screenwriting. Yes, there are some lingering questions to make everything work, something I’ll go into later, but watching this level of execution, on multiple levels, without faltering is just inspiring. Shyamalan also wasn’t afraid to make his scenes unsettling without being redundant or gratuitous. I initially dinged the direction of the movie in my original review and I’d like to take that back. The direction isn’t showy visually but serves the greater story in smaller, smarter ways. A long take following Cole (Haley Joes Osment)’s mother (Toni Collette) in the kitchen only for her to turn around and have every single drawer and cabinet open is a wonderful little jump scare without feeling cheap. Shyamalan holds off on even unveiling his “I see dead people” twist until halfway through the movie, which is admirable restraint. Afterwards, it allows him to open up even more tools in his toolbox to spook an audience, because now we too can see the specters haunting Cole. Shyamalan has given us the signs (no pun intended) and rules for his ghost story, and now the second half he lets us dwell with them and squirm as we anticipate the encounters.

I’m still impressed how well The Sixth Sense works on many levels, from a creepy ghost story, to a splendid mystery, to a character-driven drama about our response to trauma. None of these elements come in competition with the next; they complement and better inform, and that’s what’s so remarkably rare about what Shyamalan was able to pull off here. He never quite attained that same screenwriting feat even with enjoyable movies after The Sixth Sense. This was peak Shyamalan before his style become codified into a too-recognizable formula.

The acting in this movie was terrific and both Osment and Collette were nominated for Oscars (still Collette’s only nomination of her career). That’s not the kind of thing that generally happens to summer ghost stories starring Bruce Willis, but that’s the kind of attention that Shyamalan placed on crafting three-dimensional characters and finding the perfect conduits. Osment was the biggest revelation of the movie, instantly launching to the top of the child actor pack where his name alone could open a movie, at least for a period of time. His performance was so assured, so free of transparent acting tics that child stars usually cling to, and what’s more there was a genuine sense of heaviness with his performance, a child trying to navigate the scary forces that only he seems destined to see and resigned to the fact that life might not improve. It’s a powerful performance and he brings out the best in Collette, playing a widow who is at her wits end trying to care for her child, keep her family afloat, but also someone struggling to understand her little boy who refuses to let her in on his mounting worries. Collette’s one-to-one with her son in a traffic jam, where she finally understands her boy and accepts his “gift” is the emotional climax of the movie in my eyes. It’s a family healing through love. The rest, the twist ending, is just icing on a sumptuously composed cake. The characters are what mattered the most.

Let’s get back to that much ballyhooed twist. I had a girlfriend that had a supernatural ability to sniff out twist endings, even better than my own abilities I must admit. She recalled how she watched The Sixth Sense and as soon as the screen flashed to “one year later” she went, “Oh, he’s dead. He’s a ghost.” I feel like she was in the minority on this one, though after the opening weekend the twist became a marketing selling point, to not give it away, and thus the viewing experience was altered. Now you knew there was a twist coming and part of your brain was reserved for a Sherlock-level search for clues to this eventual reversal. To see The Sixth Sense without that knowledge was its own reward. However, there are some facets of this twist that bear further scrutiny. Cole says that he sees ghosts that don’t know they are ghosts, who see what they want to see, and this is used as a catch-all explanation. The problem is when you start to think about Willis’ character in the ensuring year since his death. Did he never interact with another human being? Did he never wonder why Cole’s mother wasn’t responding to him when he was in her presence? For that matter how did the boy ever get referred to him? I can understand not seeing a table in front of a door, but not seeing every single human being collectively ignore your presence and never respond to your interactions? And it’s here you can argue, “Well does that stuff really matter? We needed the illusion to be held for the power of the twist,” and I would heartily agree. We are selectively given Willi’s perspective and the missing gaps are essential to preserving the nature of the twist, despite Willis being super ignorant.

Osment would go on to lead a few more films like Pay It Forward, A.I., and Secondhand Lions, but it seems like that age-old killer of child actors would ultimately strike yet again — puberty. He took some time off and has been acting regularly for the last five years, from Tusk to the Entourage movie to Amazon’s series, The Boys. Collette has been acting steadily and appearing in numerous movies testing her ever-expanding range, including last year’s Hereditary. Olivia Williams, playing Willis’ wife, has also acted steadily in the ensuing twenty years. In 1999, she had only been acting in movies for a handful of years but quickly earned attention in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and in Kevin Costner’s The Postman. Willis was one of the bigger stars of the 1990s and held that entrenched star power for about another ten years before he seemed to stop caring, taking on whatever direct-to-DVD role he could shoot over a weekend and make use of a double to film the rest of his scenes. It’s rare for Willis to seem like he even tries anymore, though his later appearances in Shyamalan movies (Unbreakable, Glass) prove he can still be capable of something worthwhile when he puts forth the effort. Another actor that developed a career after The Sixth Sense was The O.C.’s Mischa Barton, who played the ghost of the young girl poisoned by her mother. It was also a strong debut for Donnie Wahlberg, the older brother to Mark, as the disturbed former patient of Willis’ that ends up murdering him. Wahlberg was turning to acting and would later star in a couple Saw sequels, a misbegotten Dreamcatcher adaptation, and over 200 episodes of TV’s Blue Bloods, a show I don’t know a single person who watches.

The biggest alum of this movie was, naturally, Shyamalan himself. His follow-up in 2000, Unbreakable, was a moody psychological thriller that was ahead of its time, bringing a grounded reality to superhero films. He became a one-man industry, a genre unto himself that could be positioned and marketed as a cinematic event. His next film was even bigger, 2002’s Signs, and was the first to start to show the signs (no pun intended) of Shyamalan’s twist-first problematic writing. Then it got worse and worse, from The Village to Lady in Water to The Happening to The Last Airbender, and then perhaps at its lowest, 2013’s After Earth. The man who was touted as an heir apparent to none other than Spielberg had expended his capital and become a joke. His name wasn’t even being used in the marketing for After Earth. At that point, the name had become a liability. Then a funny thing happened when Shyamalan went smaller with Blumhouse, first with 2015’s The Visit and then the surprise Unbreakable sequel, 2017’s taut thriller Split. He hit that stride in his career where he was in the redemptive arc, and we could look forward to a new Shyamalan joint again now that he had stripped down his writing to the creative restraints of a lower budget. I enjoyed Glass as a ballsy capper to his 19-year Unbreakable trilogy.

Looking back over my review, the basic points are the same. I don’t recall why I was so irritated with the summer of 1999 movies considering that there were several films I even reviewed for this retrospective that were good to great. August has also become a noteworthy release month, though the final weeks can still come across as a wasteland of studio films fizzling and smaller indie not quite catching on (which is happening as I write this currently, during those “dog days of summer”). I do enjoy the Anna Paquin line from the review. Even as a smart-alecky 17-year-old budding film critic, I could turn a phrase. I’m still not a super fan of the title but I’ve watched more than my fair share of mediocre titles that it seems like a pittance. I would still grade the movie a solid A.

The Sixth Sense is a movie with so much to unpack because of its instantaneous success. Few movies come out of relative nowhere, get nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture, gross over $670 million dollars worldwide, launch its creative force as a genre filmmaker with the freedom to tell his stories on a grand stage, and remind you of the impact of the movies.

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The Iron Giant (1999) Released: August 6, 1999

There is a magic that animation has that a regular film can never capture. It can delve into our imaginations and conjure up emotions and laughter that regular celluloid can rarely get a firm grip on. So why has every animated film this decade fallen under a strict formula that bogs down the quality of the efforts? Now comes a movie like The Iron Giant, which restores faith in all that is good with cinema.

The Iron Giant is reminiscent of E.T. but has a distinct voice of its own. The main question might be, “Is it enjoyable for people other than kids who can’t touch the floor with their feet?” I can answer that question easily: Yes! Adults, teenagers and children will have just as much fun with this picture together. It is a movie for all ages and for all time.

The animation is strikingly brilliant and deserves an ovation of its own. Never have I seen voice-over-to-mouth animations done so fluidly. The sight of the giant itself is awe-inspiring but never terrifying. The movie also perfectly captures the innocence, patriotism, and Cold War hysteria that defined American living in the ’50s.

But the truly biggest thing The Iron Giant has to offer is magic and heart. The characters are all well-developed, and the audience is made to feel great attachment to each one. The script for the feature is right on, and never is a scene wasted. And the tale is very touching as it heads toward its climax. I don’t mind admitting my eyes were quite moist toward the end.

The Iron Giant breaks the common mold of animated flicks. There are no cuddly animals and slapstick sidekicks, no dopey forced love interests, no one-dimensional villain, and thank God, no Grammy wannabe songs breaking up the drama. The Iron Giant sends out a strong message and breaks free of a Disney-controlled industry. I dare say this is the greatest animated film of this entire decade, by far. I urge everyone to go out and experience some of the magic and warmth that is The Iron Giant. This is destined to become a classic, mark my words.

Nate’s Grade: A+

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Simply put, we are blessed to exist in a time with The Iron Giant. This movie is a gift. I knew it the first moment I saw it twenty years ago and I’ve known it every viewing since. Brad Bird’s directorial debut was a stunner, able to melt the chilliest of heart and tap into something so universal and powerful and applicable. Watching The Iron Giant again filled my heart with happiness; it was literally minutes in and I just felt like I was floating, I was so happy. Rare is any movie that can continually give you that kind of emotional nourishment, but this is one of those movies and, in my estimation, the greatest animated film of all time. It is a perfect movie.

Seriously, there are no flaws to this movie. I’m naturally a sucker for “a boy and his dog” tales and what little kid wouldn’t want their own giant robot from space as a new pet/best friend? It’s a dream come true but it’s also a big responsibility and involves plenty of hiding, from our protagonist’s mother, to the townspeople, to the government agents looking for signs that the Soviets might have a next-level weapon. Bird’s amazing movie manages to tap into so many aspects of life with precision, whether he’s lambasting Cold War paranoia, emphasizing physical comedy, or teaching moral lessons about choice and identity, it all works. That’s an understatement. It doesn’t just work, it sings, it sings so well that it fills you with glee. Even upon dozens of re-watches, I will like clockwork tear up and, by the end especially, be red-faced from sobbing. However it’s not just sad tears, there are plenty of happy tears to go around, because Bird’s movie (Let’s not forget to credit the screenplay by Tim McCanlines from Bird’s story, based upon Ted Hughes’ book, The Iron Man) has a beautiful bonding relationship between our little boy, Hogarth (voiced by Eli Marienthal), and the titular Iron Giant. The movie’s screenplay is so elegantly simple, with each sequence naturally braiding into the next, so that not a moment is wasted. It’s proof that with an excellent storyteller that an emotionally involving tale can be had and in such a short amount of time. This movie isn’t even 80 full minutes! I paused it when the credits began and it was still only 79 minutes long. It can be done, folks. You can emotionally wreck an audience in a way that doesn’t have to feel like exploitation. I was amazed that another classic like Fargo tells its story in only 90 minutes, and The Iron Giant sees that number and says it can manage with even less.

Bird’s movie is a gorgeous love letter to classic sci-fi comics and television and movies, which tapped into a social fear of the unknown and calamitous future that technology could bear. This can be done in comedy, like the bad sci-fi movie Hogarth stays up late to watch, but it can also relate to the central message of the movie, choosing who you will be rather than having others choose for you. The Giant is a mystery, his origins a mystery, but he’s packed with overwhelming firepower, so one might assume his originators had invasion designs. The dichotomy is encapsulated when Hogarth shares his comics collection with the Giant, and the metal man looks at another metallic giant ferocious destroying the city named Atomo. Our gentle spirited mechanical man is more interested in being Superman, a helpful alien figure not interested in conquering but in helping others. When he and Hogarth play pretend, he insists on playing as Superman, and in the end this designation provides the Giant a sense of peace as he ultimately makes the final sacrifice to save thousands of innocent people below. Even just typing that last sentence brought tears to my eyes, that’s how emotionally invested I am with the film. The Giant rejects being a “gun” with the sole designation of hurting others. He doesn’t want to cause pain and suffering. He wants friends. He wants to help. “I am not a gun,” he informs. We can all be capable of destruction but that doesn’t have to be our lone definition. Even though the inclusion of guns will (no pun intended) trigger certain audiences, the lesson is wonderful. “You are who you choose to be,” Hogarth tells the Giant. And he chooses to be a hero to the end.

I miss traditional hand-drawn animation. There’s a classical beauty to it and the character expressions in particular are so delightful, able to show great nuance through small variations in their faces. Bird’s movie emphasizes a lot of expressions through how characters hold their teeth. It’s little things you don’t see as often in CGI animated films, and I miss it. The Giant himself was a 3D animation made to look like traditional 2D animation, and it’s dazzling. The level of expression and communication given to this creature is brilliant. The design follows that elegant simplicity the rest of the movie exudes while still managing to be effortlessly expressive. Something else I noticed on my recent re-watch is just how fluid Bird’s camera is. In hand-drawn animation, there are fewer in-camera moves than the expansive 360-degree realm of CGI animation. It’s just part of the process. Yet The Iron Giant moves away from that staid concept of how a 2D animated film should look and brings a renewed visual energy with camerawork. The lighting styles can also be breath-taking, especially early on with visuals like Hogarth’s mother (voiced by Jennifer Aniston) addressing her son between beaming car headlights.

The Iron Giant didn’t do great business at the box-office upon its initial release but became a video and DVD staple. The Cartoon Network had an ongoing tradition where they ran the film on a loop during Thanksgiving so that families could at any point indulge over the day. Bird moved onto Pixar afterwards and found the highest levels of success with The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles 2, racking up two Oscars as well for his efforts. He got so popular that he transitioned into the realm of live-action directing and helmed the franchise-rejuvenating Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol in 2011. He’s in the senior brain trust of Pixar and is revered for his storytelling prowess. The vocal cast was mostly filled with smaller character actors with the exception of Aniston (We’re the Millers), Harry Connick Jr. (New in Town) as the beatnik artists who becomes an ally for Hogarth and the Giant, and Vin Diesel (The Fate of the Furious) as the voice of the Giant. That casting floored me, though after two Guardians of the Galaxy movies it feels less confounding. He’s great at giving the Giant an endearing sense of innocence and wonder. When the Giant is beside himself trying to make sense of what he believes is the death of Hogarth, I cannot hold back my empathy. He is in pain, and Diesel gives life to this character to make his growing emotions feel all the more real and rewarding. Say what you will about his monotone grumble but he slays as the Giant.

In my original review I made a lot of veiled and not-so-veiled references to a decade of formulaic animation thanks to the popularity of the Disney model, which itself eventually petered out in the early 2000s. The Iron Giant was such a welcomed escape, something so different and mature and magical and honest that even then I knew it was destined for classic status, and I don’t want to brag or anything, but it’s completely upheld that prediction. It’s also amazing to think that two instant classics, The Sixth Sense and The Iron Giant, were released on the exact same frigging day of the year. That seems like a remarkable coincidence. I would say that The Iron Giant  maintains its A+ laurels and has only gotten better with age. This is one of those movies that makes you realize how powerful and transporting filmmaking can be when a collection of artists are working in tandem on something truly magical.

This is a perfect movie. It was in 1999. It is in 2019. It will be in 2039. It will be always.

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–SEPTEMBER–

American Beauty (1999) Released: September 17, 1999

American Beauty balances between dark comedy and moving drama not only well but tremendously on target. It’s a slice of life showing the dark side of a faceless and cold suburban life. The deterioration of a family and the escape of one man as he realizes the trivial nature of the things that get in the way of seizing life. American Beauty is not a rose for everyone but it’s one standing out from the pack screaming to be picked.

Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, the husband and father of our story’s family. Life has been sucked dry from his system and he’s lost interest in everything he holds around him. Annette Benning plays Carolyn Burnham, mother and wife. She breathes the mantra, “To be successful one must present an image of success at all times.” like she was beating a Bible until it bled. She’s a woman whom image is everything, and looking good is all that matters. She has become so detached from her family and life that she has actually lost her humanity in the hunt for success while waving her cheerful smile as a mask that eludes to the superficial inside. Carolyn is a woman who refuses to let herself fail or have weakness, and those around her to make her seem weak.

Thora Birch, of Alaska and Now and Then fame, is Jane, the estranged daughter to Spacey and Benning. She feels alienated from her parents, and despises them from easily seeing through each. Thora discovers new ways to feel contempt for her parents with each day. She is a repressed child who is looking for an outlet of understanding and help. Enter pot dealing creepy new neighbor Ricky (Wes Bentley). He sees true beauty where no one could and is the escape and shoulder that young Thora has needed all her life from her neglectful parents. Wes videotapes everything in an effort to keep the memories of beauty alive to venture back and relive the moments. He shares his prized image with Thora one day, that of a plastic bag inflating and deflating with the autumn breeze as it swirls around almost balletic dancing. The image is mesmerizingly hypnotic and you understand that Wes is a character who looks beneath the surface and most likely the most noble in the entire movie.

Mena Suvari switches from sweet choirgirl from American Pie to ditzy teen vamp. She is a person who feels such insecurity for herself that the only happiness she can arrive is from being wanted by other people. She must have acceptance in some form or another, and “ordinary” to her is a worse word than “ugly.” She acts like a teen nympho but in the end reveals that she is really an innocent young girl desperately wanting to be liked and wanted.

There are other characters that round out the cast; a brief appearance with Scott Bakula who makes a quantum leap into a gay neighbor, Allison Janney as the mother to Wes and the silent hollow image of a wife she has become to socially hide her husband’s secret, Chris Cooper again as an abusive father who’s maliciously homophobic but hiding a devastating secret deep within, and even Peter Gallagher with the biggest eyebrows you’ve ever seen as a suave real estate mogul that knows how to cater to Carolyn’s thematic problems.

The basis of the story hinges on Lester’s reawakening. He is a man going through the motions of life like a walking dead man. A man who tells people that even he wouldn’t remember himself. Lester is an unhappy cog until viewing his daughter’s friend Angela (Suvari) at a high school basketball game. At first glimpse she becomes the intense object of his desire and obsession, and his focus on life centers around this young gal. But with that moment Lester’s life is broken, and his eyes are opened for the first time in a very long time. He sees the trite redundancy with the day-to-day grind of ordinary suburbanite life. Lester breaks free and does what he wishes, he is a free man. Free of his job, his nagging wife, free of all worries and fears.

As far as Oscar races go, all others don’t even bother filling out an application for an invitation – Spacey has Best Actor locked. He might as well start clearing a space on his shelf next to the one he got for The Usual Suspects. Spacey is so wonderfully wry and self degrading that he transforms into an actually likeable almost laid back hero for the audience. They know his tragic fate and feel good when he gets the most he can with each day and not letting himself be pushed around anymore. Benning is also delightful and wickedly hilarious in her materially overzealous soccer mom. Birch is excellent showing the pains of alienation and showing that despite what her character thinks she is really the last person on earth who needs a boob job. Director Sam Mendes’ first feature after touring the theater circuit shows his devotion to characters and actors with subdued symbolism layered between every frame of film. I say Oscars should go all around and this movie deserves a good swapping of gold statuettes.

I could go on talking about the depth and characters for hours but I’ll just stop here and say that you won’t see a more engaging, compelling, and brutally honest and sadly funny film in the entire year of 1999. One of the best films not only of this year but of the entire decade.

Nate’s Grade: A

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

This was a movie I had been anticipating from the moment I even started thinking about re-watching the films of 1999. I have some serious history with this movie. I can recall vividly, even to this day, feeling pinned to my seat in awe as the credits unrolled to Elliott Smith’s tender cover of “Because.” I couldn’t move because the movie had had a profound effect on me. I remember walking out and just feeling like I was on a different plane because of this artistic experience, that this is what movies could be like. Even at the age of 17, I had seen older masterpieces of cinema, movies that were artistically daring and emotionally devastating, but this was a particular movie that hit me so personally at a specific time in my life that it felt like it had been made directly for me, to nudge me forward in my own storytelling tastes and ambitions. I was so taken with this film that the hour it became available on Pay-Per-View (remember that, anybody?), I recorded it on a VHS tape (remember those as well?). It had a fixed place on my favorite movies list, and I moved ahead, thankful for its impact, but many years later I became afraid to go back to it and watch. I resisted it as I got older and into my later 20s, chiefly because I was afraid it would suffer with new eyes and not be that magical, semi-transcendent experience I had in my youth as I first laid eyes upon this eventual Best Picture Oscar winner. What if… it wasn’t as good? What would that mean for me? It’s something most people experience when they look upon children’s TV and movies with the perspectives of adulthood and you shake your head and go, “Wow, that definitely wasn’t good but I guess I was a dumb kid.” I didn’t want that. Not with one of the few movies that I felt like I had a deep personal connection with.

Around 2011, I finally purchased American Beauty on Bluray for my collection and worked up the nerve to see if it held up, and I remember enjoying it, though finding some new criticisms in particular with the portrayal of Benning’s character among the ensemble, but I came to the conclusion that the art doesn’t change. It’s the frame that changes. I am a different person at 37 than I was when I was at 17 and watching this movie for the first time. I have had different life experiences and personal growth and so I’m coming at this movie with a new perspective, and maybe everything won’t work for me like it did before, but maybe I’ll discover new connections and maybe new layers of meaning and significance. It’s not really an Earth-shattering insight that a piece of art is unchanging and depends upon the projections and interpretations of its audience. I felt the same hesitancy as I approached watching American Beauty again for the first time in eight or so years. This time it was with the knowledge that certain aspects of the movie will never be viewed the same in the wake of Spacey’s harassment and assaults coming to light as well as the entire Me Too movement bringing attention to predatory behavior, which, you know, is kind of central here.

Let’s address the predator in the room here. I have always enjoyed Kevin Spacey as an actor. I still do. As a human being, he certainly falls short of the mark we’d like to set for being a moral and upstanding human being who respects the boundaries and rights of others. He’s gross but his unveiling as a predator makes me sad, not just for his victims and the people he’s harmed, but for the ripple effects throughout his long career, tainting the movies (I don’t at all want to make it seem like this peripheral consequence is even on the same level as the pain he’s caused his victims). You cannot watch American Beauty, post-Me Too, and not be thinking of this throughout. Even in 1999, it was already walking a fine line to make Lester Burnham a likeable character who, you know, just happened to obsessively lust after an underage girl. It’s okay, some audience members would rationalize, because she’s mature for her age, because he’s the hero of the movie and fighting back against forces trying to keep him down, because ultimately he doesn’t actually go through with it. Characters don’t have to adhere to a socially acceptable moral code to still be empathetic, or complex, or relatable. However, his behavior definitely becomes less romanticized in the ensuring two decades of scrutiny.

Now, I would argue that the movie ultimately wants to end in this same destination, that Lester realizes that Angela Hayes is just a little girl after all and not the sexpot of his wanton fantasies, the fixture that has revitalized him. When they do get intimate, Sam Mendes makes a point of featuring angles where she is below and he is above towering over her, and you feel her shrinking beneath him. When she’s literally exposed (the teen nudity I feel is more artistically justifiable) and comes clean about her lack of experience, that’s when the illusion is broken, and Lester realizes she’s just a scared, confused little girl and his entire pursuit has been wrong from the start. He is shortly punished afterward with a gunshot to the back of the head, if you want to make some causal cosmic connection. I feel like the movie does not condone the journey of a man lusting after an underage girl for his self-actualization, but it’s a fair criticism that it takes until the end for this clarity. Up until that point, Suvari is seen as surreal temptress of supernatural power. The visions Lester has with her are definitely intended to denote an erotic charge, and that makes it even more uncomfortable upon re-watch, because early on it does feel like the movie, at least subconsciously, is setting up the audience to endorse this statutory chase. Moments that were played as comedy twenty years ago, like his stammering and awkward staring around Angela, now play even more uncomfortable, the humor becoming more strained. Should we be celebrating this like the movie, at least most of it, wants us to? I can understand how many people would view this movie with a different lens and find little to no interest in revisiting it. Times change. The art stays the same. And that’s how life goes.

I do think the movie still has many incredible attributes, and damn if Spacey isn’t great in this. Yes, he’s a creep of a person, playing a man who seems even more of a creep by today’s standards, but he’s still terrific in the part. There’s a small moment late in the movie when Angela is telling him about his daughter and how in love she is, and it’s that small moment, the way he takes in the news, the same news his daughter would be mortified to tell her own father, and you can watch him subtly go through a mixture of emotions, finally landing on a poignant recognition of youth as well as his own pride that she’s going after what matters for her. His genuine happiness in that small moment, the processing that leads him to warmly smile, eyes glassy, and say, “Good for her,” still gets me. I saw it and said, “Here’s your Oscar, Mr. Spacey.” Spacey is able to navigate the tone needed to make this middle-aged crisis feel even close to a man shaking free from the ennui of his ordinary life. The 90s was filled with movies about the malaise of suburbia, the idea of the cookie-cutter existence sapping out some essential element of humanity. It’s practically quaint to watch these films now considering the near constant turmoil we now reside in. Regardless, I’m not certain another actor might have succeeded in this difficult (also problematic) position like Spacey did and still does. It’s a legitimately great performance.

The entire acting ensemble is generally flawless. It has two eventual Oscar winners as a married couple (Chris Cooper, Allison Janney). The kids were all great, even if one-by-one their profiles fell away. Wes Bentley (The Hunger Games) and his pretentious, intense weirdo neighbor would be satirized later, but he was ahead of his time as a figure furiously documenting his existence and looking for the hidden meaning. His monologue about the dancing bag can be silly if you concentrate on the literal reality of a kid being so profoundly moved by a dumb bag floating in the wind, but the literal contents of “the most beautiful thing he’s ever recorded” are beside the fact. It could be anything, and that’s the point, that life is filled with hidden beauty waiting for us to catch it with the right mindset, like a code. His monologue is still moving and inspiring, and Bentley delivers it with skill that it can give you chills. Suvari (American Pie) was tasked with being seen as many different versions of her self depending upon whose lens was in focus. It’s all too easy to just be one-note but she finds room at the edges to provide depth to what is very much a foil.

But this movie was also paramount for igniting my crush on Thora Birch, which is something I held onto for years and years after, even naming one of my annual movie awards after her for the most attractive woman that year in film (I should probably rename it or rethink it). Oh was I madly attracted to Thora Birch at the time. I even purchased 2001’s The Hole on DVD because it had a Goth Thora Birch (and a young Kiera Knightley). Thora was pretty, she was talented, and then she simply faded away from the spotlight, the victim of an overzealous father/manager who burned every new opportunity afforded her. She’s done a handful of straight-to-DVD horror and crime thrillers (Dark Corners, Train, Winter of Frozen Dreams) as well as some Lifetime dramas (Pregnancy Pact, Homeless to Harvard), and a rom-com with Chris Klein (The Competition), but otherwise a woman who had been working since she was a child has steadily been cast aside and it makes me sad. American Beauty and Ghost World are a fabulous one-two punch for anyone’s acting resume. The scuttlebutt at the time of Beauty’s release was Birch’s unexpected nude scene. She was sixteen years old at the time of filming and needed her parents’ permission (both mom and dad are former adult film actors and did not have a problem with the nudity given the context of the scene). Even now the moment plays very sincerely and tastefully, with Jane opening herself up to this neighbor boy and making herself vulnerable. At the time, when I was 17, I was like, “Cool,” but now the adult me thinks, “Well, couldn’t this same meaning have been felt by showing her removing her clothes but the camera was Ricky’s point of view and he zoomed onto her face because that’s what mattered more to him?”

I feel bad for Benning because her materialistic go-getter is the closest thing to a cartoon the movie has. She definitely isn’t afforded the same level of consideration as everyone else, and it’s a shame. Benning is still great but I wish screenwriter Alan Ball (future creator of HBO series Six Feet Under and True Blood) had given her a few more passes to provide some moments to give her added depth. There’s one moment that stands out as a tease of what could have been, when Carolyn is trying to talk to her daughter about how inappropriate Lester was at the dinner table, and Jane isn’t siding with her, and she slaps her own daughter. In the second of shock, Carolyn adds, “I didn’t even have a house. We grew up in a duplex,” and then storms out. There’s something there and I wish Ball had kept pulling. As presented, Carolyn can be a materialistic harpy that serves as what Lester is trying to escape, both her as a person, though he does make a slight effort to reconnect with her like the old days, and as a diseased way of thinking (“It’s just stuff. And it’s become more important to you than living.”).

It’s stunning that this was Mendes’ first film and it won him a Best Director Oscar. His collaboration with cinematographers (first Conrad Hall, then Roger Deakins) has been absolutely magical, and Mendes has made some of the most gorgeously composed movies of the last two decades. He made a leap from arthouse to blockbusters with two James Bond movies, 2012’s Skyfall and 2015’s Spectre. His next film, a World War I epic titled 1917, looks equally as gorgeous and spectacular. But I would be remiss if I didn’t also cite the most un-Sam Mendes movie of his career, 2009’s heartwarming, delightfully offbeat romantic drama Away We Go following Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski as expecting parents. Mendes seems like the kind of director who could succeed in any cinematic genre. His attention to detail, setting, and performance is stellar. The other technical elements are just as sterling today, from the highly memorable and personable score by Thomas Newman, to the exquisite use of light and color by Hall, the evocative imagery with the rose petals, and the select and judicious editing choices (more on that below). American Beauty is a movie that seems to simply be thrumming on every level with absurdly talented artistry.

The original version of Ball’s Oscar-winning screenplay involved a courtroom case happening simultaneously, with the majority of the film serving as flashbacks over what really happened before Lester Burnham was murdered. In the script, which is available online, you can read how Jane and Ricky are framed for Lester’s murder and sent to prison. This is why the movie opens with the ominous recording of Jane requesting her new boyfriend kill her father. It sets in motion the film’s guessing game over who the real killer would be, but wisely the movie forgets to really emphasize this narrative mystery for the more immediate drama. They even filmed these scenes but have never released them as part of the special features on a DVD. I’m glad they eventually realized that having the kids sent to jail might take away some of the film’s inspiration about seeing the beauty in the everyday if there’s a tragic miscarriage of justice to go along with that.

Reading over my original review, this was the first movie that I felt compelled to approach close to 1000 words to explain my opinion. It was my longest review for over a year, and now I typically average 1200-1600 words a review (Word tells me this re-review is already climbing 2500). I had so much to say because it affected me so much. It was a movie that excelled at drama, comedy, satire, and still had a thriving heart below the surface. My review breaks down much of the character dynamics and it’s fun to see some of the analytics I would bring more regularly to my reviews early here. It’s like this movie tapped a different, more mature part of my brain for a critical analysis. I almost want to watch the movie again to better finalize my feelings, but it’s a relief that American Beauty is still a great movie, even with the pall of Spacey hanging over the whole proceedings. I’ll be back, movie. This time it won’t take me as long.

Fun fact: it’s Christina Hendricks’ (Mad Men, Drive, Toy Story 4) hand on the poster. She began as a hand model. Strangely enough, just like the Cate Blanchett reveal this year for Eyes Wide Shut, it’s another twenty-year anniversary revelation.

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Double Jeopardy (1999) Released: September 24, 1999

“I can shoot you in the middle of Mardi Gras and they can’t touch me.” Well actually Ms. Judd, they can. You see the rule of double jeopardy is not to be tried for the same crime and same occurrence. Both have to happen for the rule of double jeopardy to succeed. If a thief stole a jewel and was sent to prison then once released stole the same jewel; can he be tried again for the same crime? Of course he can! And so can you my dear Ashley.

Moving on now that that logistic bump in the road has been covered. Double Jeopardy has all the pieces of a thriller but somehow they never cohesively form to make any semblance of a truly exciting and tense caper. The elements are there but it’s just not working. The setups occur but the payoffs seem to be very unrewarding. The biggest problem is all of the film’s plot lines and twists were displayed prominently in the trailer and commercials, so the entire audience is five steps ahead of the characters. Tommy Lee Jones surmises the same role he’s had for the entire decade of the hard-boiled detective on the hunt for a man. Double Jeopardy is essentially no more than The Fugitive 3. And what kind of prison does Ashley go to where they let inmates cut their own hair with sharp scissors unsupervised?

The booming starlet Ashley Judd plays our wrongly convicted and vengeful heroine most effectively. But what man in their right mind would trade Ashley for Annabeth Gish? Ashley has this enticingly warm aura around her and a smile that will merely melt your heart. This woman was made for pictures; her face is etched in beauty and has twinkles reminiscent of the elegant early days of cinema. This is a beautiful woman that deserves to be on the big screen… and she can act too.

Double Jeopardy is at its heart a standard and rather ordinary thriller. It does nothing to rise above mediocrity, but is at a level of contentment with where it’s at. You may not bite your nails much with tension but you’ll become better acquainted with your watch.

Nate’s Grade: C

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

This is an example of one of those high-concept thrillers that aren’t so high-concept upon clear retrospect, but you ignore it thanks to the star power involved. It seemed like the 1990s was ripe with these sorts of James Patterson-esque murder thrillers, escapist beach reads turned into easily digestible popcorn fare, and Ashley Judd was riding them to a new level of fame. She broke out in a big way in the late 90s thanks to Kiss the Girls, a mediocre serial killer thriller with Morgan Freeman, and then became an above-the-title A-lister with the success of Double Jeopardy, which grossed over $115 million domestically (it was the fifteenth highest-grossing movie that year, between Notting Hill and the James Bond entry for 1999). Did you remember this movie being as popular and successful as it was? Does anyone remember anything about this movie other than maybe the premise? That’s the thing about Double Jeopardy, it’s so easily forgettable, so easily disposable, which is the accumulative effect of those beach reads-turned-movies. It’s a quick bang of violent, twisty, pulpy entertainment that doesn’t have any lingering impact other than a momentary rush. There’s nothing wrong with these stories and conversely these movies. I love these kinds of movies too. It’s just that Double Jeopardy is not one of the better examples.

The issue with the premise is that it only becomes high-concept until Judd’s wrongfully convicted wife Libby is proven right, that her husband Nick (Bruce Greenwood) is still alive and well and responsible for framing her for his reported murder. Fortunately, it occurs as the Act One break so the audience isn’t left twisting in the wind for too long. After that revelation she becomes a one-woman wrecking crew seeking her vengeance. But we already know she’s right, and we can assume everyone else eventually will realize this as well, so it undercuts any mystery. It just becomes a revenge thriller on the flimsy legal premise that because Libby has already been convicted of killing her hubby then she can’t be held accountable for re-killing him. From her release, the movie becomes one long waiting game for her to either kill Nick or for her to decide that vengeance is not becoming and worth losing her soul and son over. We root for Libby and for justice, but any victory is mitigated because Nick is a bland heel to root against and because we haven’t experienced much in the way of Libby’s wrongful suffering. She’s spends a grand total of eleven minutes of screen time in prison (covering six years of time). Nick’s scheme is also lousy because he fakes his death to only become a well-known socialite in New Orleans, complete with fake Southern accent. That’s not how you do things, idiot. You are supposed to keep a low profile. It would only be a matter of time to find him out.  It caps the interest level because it feels too much like the film is biding its time until an obvious choice of endings.

Let’s pick apart the movie’s hook, namely that Ms. Judd is free to go murder her assumed non-living husband thanks to the U.S. legal system. In my original review, I efficiently punctured this incorrect ethical thinking. If the film’s flimsy double jeopardy reading were held up in courts that means that once you’re convicted of one crime you basically get a free pass at continuing that crime as long as the victim is the same. Think how nefarious this would be for, say, domestic abuse. Besides, Libby could be charged with other criminal acts as well. I can recall back in 1999 trying to explain this very notion to a classmate of mine in our AP Government class and her consistent dismissal that the movie’s logic was sound. In the context of an escapist thriller, legal machinations don’t have to be one hundred percent authentic, but when your high-concept strains credulity, and that concept is your movie, then you’re in trouble.

So, with that being said, the fun of the movie is going to be watching Judd on her march for answers and vengeance, and Tommy Lee Jones as her beleaguered parole officer trying to doggedly chase after her and throw obstacles in her path. The best scenes of the movie are when Judd and Jones are sharing the screen together and it’s basically a chase movie reminiscent of The Fugitive (they paid Jones $10 million for his role, which shows they really knew what they wanted). My favorite moment in the movie is when Jones handcuffs Judd to a car’s steering wheel that’s traveling on a ferry. He leaves her and Judd, in her ingenuity, starts the car and shifts it back and forth, ramming the cars off the ferry until she too can plunge into the waters in the vehicle. Jones pops back in at the last moment and they take the plunge together. It’s the films best escape sequence and one that doesn’t make the characters look like complete morons. There is one other great scene where, fresh out of the joint, Libby is using a library computer for research. A helpful young man becomes leering and pushy for romance, and Libby mentions that she just recently was released from prison (not jail) and for the crime of killing her husband. It’s a very funny moment to watch the power dynamic shift so suddenly and this boy starting to fret over who he’s exactly propositioning.

I admit I had no memory of this movie being R-rated, so early on when Judd is engaged in a sex scene and actually goes naked, I was taken aback. The actress has done nudity before but it was a bit of a shock to the system. I wasn’t expecting a higher level of mature content. This mostly translates later into a higher frequency of F-bombs and the occasional splash of blood. Ho hum.

Judd would try and recapture her Jeopardy success with a string of similar crime thrillers (Twisted, High Crimes, Eye of the Beholder) that never seemed to catch fire with the public. She’s since transitioned into more TV work (Twin Peaks, Berlin Station) but I want to highlight one of her most under-looked films. In 2006, Judd starred in Bug with Michael Shannon, and she’s absolutely terrific in the movie. Like really really terrific. If you ever wondered whether Judd had genuine acting talent, watch this movie, directed by William Friedkin in an adaptation of Tracy Letts’ (Killer Joe) disturbing play about co-dependency and paranoia. It’s well worth watching and Judd was fully deserving of Oscar attention. Alas, it’s back to playing moms and wives killed off in the opening scenes of action movies (see: Olympus Has Fallen). Jones (Men in Black III) was playing to type and has had a steady career afterwards, directing three movies, the last one being 2014’s The Homesman (my father’s favorite movie of that year, for what it’s worth). Greenwood has likewise had a steady career as a character actor in small films and big blockbusters. Libby’s young son was played by Spencer Treat Clark, who would go on to bigger roles in Gladiator and Unbreakable in 2000. The strangest member of the Double Jeopardy team is its director, Bruce Beresford, the same director of Oscar-winning dramas Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies. Huh. Everybody needs a paycheck.

I won’t go into further detail on my original review from 1999 considering I pulled out a central criticism as a main point to revisit with this re-review (I’ll hold the same grade of C). It is standard, it is ordinary, and it has some fleeting moments of entertainment but Double Jeopardy is no more than a disposable lazy afternoon movie you can walk around your home while wiling away the time. But it could’ve been better.

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–OCTOBER–

Fight Club (1999) Released: October 15, 1999

Fight Club is a movie that will kick you in your teeth. It’s the adaptation of a sort of anarchist handbook by David Fincher, the man who gave us the grisly masterpiece Se7en. Fincher’s latest re-teaming with Brad Pitt is a disturbingly gritty tale of politics and violence.

Ed Norton plays our un-billed narrator through the harrowing tale of fascist propaganda and anti-social behavior. Norton dwells in a world of cubicles and consumerism. He meets Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden on a flight and the two instantly connect. Norton moves in with Pitt into something resembling the Munster’s house once his own apartment has exploded. Pitt and Norton find the therapeutic realization through fighting. These fights grow larger and build up into clubs where all the guys are fighting to get in to get their head slammed on concrete. These clubs start turning into neo-fascist soldiers of fortune as they try to ambitiously grow and destroy the reality of consumerism. It kind of spins out from there and never returns back.

David Fincher’s direction is ultra slick and highly stylized. He is one of the most lavish and intriguing visual artists of this decade. He really knows how to pump out excitement and vivid hypnotism from striking images and tones strewn apart every inch of letter-boxed form. Norton has the same commanding presence and magnetic performance that he flashed so brilliantly in last year’s American History X. Norton is the one that runs the emotional gambit and shows just how it should be done. Brad Pitt takes on a role none have seen (Does anyone remember Pitt splicing porn images into children’s films with Legends of the Fall?) and once again proves there’s a calculating and superb actor behind the pretty face. Helena Bonham Carter goes leaping against type to play the bumbling Goth love interest with such charm and humor. And Meat Loaf will really surprise as a pathetic breast enhanced friend to Norton.

Fight Club speaks to a world where men feel they have been robbed of what has historically defined them; a world with Oprah, The English Patient, and self-help groups telling them to cry, be kind, rewind. All of the social consciousness has made some men feel less like their upright ancestors. So Fight Club‘s proposition is that to freely express your emotions you need to either be pummeled into ground round or be the one doing the pummeling. The notion is a tad laughable. Fight Club is a flick with so much on its mind to say that it brisks from topic to topic sometimes not dwelling as much as it could. The twist ending is unnecessary and is something that truly comes out from left field.

Fight Club has been criticized for its promotion of violence, but if anyone actually sees the film the violence is gruesomely repellent. No kid is going to walk out of this and think it would be cool to start a Fight Club in their local suburb. The movie is an interesting mirror to our always-on-the brink commercial society, and its push toward a kinder gentler civilization and its effects on the male psyche. Despite some oddities at the end and some fascistic rhetoric, Fight Club is an exciting blend of suspense, action, and dark humor. Go ahead and break the first rule of Fight Club – tell your friends about the adrenaline kick this movie is.

Nate’s Grade: A

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Fight Club was a movie destined to be misapplied. At the time of its release in 1999, you had a spate of critics and media figures bemoaning its violence but especially its machismo that they felt was advocating a new form of reactionary fascism. However, Fight Club was always going to be one of those movies that would rattle an audience and could lead to a plethora of conclusions depending upon the projections of the viewer. It had wince-inducing violence but its ideas and concepts were even harder hitting, and that made some people very very afraid. Re-watching the film 20 years later, it’s interesting to see how prophetic the film ended up becoming as far as predicting the rise of an alt-right built upon gravely fragile men lashing out over their sense that the larger culture, and certain fore-bearers of this, were inhibiting their alpha masculinity. I watch Fight Club and I don’t see an endorsement of this worldview, I see a satirizing, a condemnation. We’re not meant to celebrate the terrorism and group think of the eventual mob; we’re meant to worry how a political movement could metastasize from its original counter-cultural intent thanks to drafting off the winds of latent male anger, loneliness, and misogyny. The very men that are chanting Tyler Durden’s dogma are the kinds of dangerous loners we have been seeing more and more in recent years. Tyler says that a generation of men are coming to terms that they cannot live up to the promises that a consumer culture has been singing for them, and this has made them very angry. It’s an unfortunate irony that a core audience that has fallen for Fight Club doesn’t seem to realize the movie is making fun of them. It’s the same thing that occurred with Mike Judge’s seminal 90s toon, Beavis and Butthead; the core audience didn’t quite comprehend they were the butt of the joke (pun intended).

While it didn’t do much business immediately at the box-office, a cult following arose around the movie. I attended college in the early 2000s and every young man probably had the movie on his DVD shelf. I even recall my freshman hall organizing a weekly movie rotation and Fight Club being one of the earliest selections (in between our must-watch hall meets for MTV’s Jackass, a series that still gives me some nostalgic enjoyment and matches well as a companion to the self-pummeling man children of Fincher’s film). Apparently in the 1990s, the world was building quite an animus for suburban malaise and corporate culture sapping the life out of everyday Americans who were looking for whatever escape route to feel alive again (see also that year American Beauty). Tyler Durden calls his generation of men a lost generation who grew up without any larger war or existential crisis to define them, so that lack of tumult, the very prosperity and stability, is what the men of Fight Club ultimately rebel against. I’ve touched on this in some of my other re-reviews, but it seems quaint to see what the larger culture was railing against in an age before terrorism, wars in the Middle East, economic recessions, and Donald Trump. It’s difficult to place your brain back in a position where consumer culture is as big a threat to the psyche of a generation of men than, say, the rise of anti-democratic impulses worldwide.

That doesn’t mean the film doesn’t have teeth to its satire. Fight Club can feel at times like it was built with the scraps of a thousand ideas meant to offend and provoke. It’s far more than watching a gang of men pummel each other in an amateur fighting pit. Our main character poses at support groups. Our romantic interest is quirk personified and says lines like, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school,” in between asking for breast cancer check-ups and selling strangers clothes she steals from laundromats. There’s the late-night theft of human fat to make soap and sell back to the rich and elite (“We were selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.”). There’s splicing frames of pornography into children’s movies. There’s a terrorist plot centered around explosive soap. There’s still a radical charge that comes from watching the movie but it’s also hard to ignore the feeling that the story is trying so hard to be edgy and inflammatory. If anyone has ever read more from author Chuck Palahniuk, this is indicative of his general writing. It can be quite good but man does it feel like a shotgun blast of macabre, weird, jittery ideas hanging onto a distaff plot. But that’s almost a fine summation of Fight Club as well, a movie that sucks up ideas, questions, and bizarre anecdotes like a neutron star, building its own orbit around the collected, unruly detritus. There are so many ideas and pithy lines that it’s hard not to find something to latch onto and enjoy, especially if your sense of humor runs on the darker side and you like your films adventurous and prankish.

I’m going to sharply disagree with my 17-year-old self in my original review and say that the twist ending is very essential to the film and its overall themes. Maybe I was still coming down from a similar revelation from The Sixth Sense months prior, but my negativity against the twist ending that Tyler Durden and our unnamed Narrator are the same person seems foolish. It’s by no means out of left field and Fincher and his screenwriter Jim Uhls offer so many clever clues. Since the movie is about confronting the limitations of self and images of masculinity, it makes sense to have our protagonist envision a spiritual guru to shepherd him on his journey. Also like The Sixth Sense, the twist provides new layers of meaning, interpretation, and re-watchability. Once known, it certainly presents the Marla Singer character in a far more sympathetic light. While it might not have the gob-smacking power of Shyamalan’s film, it’s still a very strongly teased and developed twist with a definite thematic purpose that only shows how skilled the storytellers are.

That’s my major take-away twenty years later, that Uhls as a screenwriter deserved more work. While there have been rumors of uncredited rewrites by Pitt and Norton and Seven scribe Andrew Kevin Walker, I’m going to credit Uhls for taking the novel and brilliantly condensing it into an accessible vehicle that still thrums with spiky personality and purpose. The omnipresent narration is handled so well and the pacing is like a freight train. I’m amazed at how Uhls is able to establish a world of unconventional characters and their goals so assuredly in the First Act, using montage to effectively establish routines, disruptions, and needs. This screenwriting feat is even more impressive when taking into account the sleight-of-hand with the twist ending that wouldn’t be known until the very end. Fincher is a master of style and mood and makes the movie a visual marvel, but just as thrilling and remarkable is Uhls’ screenplay. I’m genuinely saddened that Uhls was unable to collect many more credits in Hollywood.

Pitt has only grown in acclaim and box-office clout in the twenty years since. He’s taken a very interesting career path of working with idiosyncratic directors that challenge him, from the Coens (Burn After Reading) to Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) to Inartu (Babel) to Malick (Tree of Life) to Andrew Dominick (Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Killing Them Softly). He even has an Academy Award for producing the Best Picture-winning 12 Years a Slave and has also produced Best Picture nominees The Big Short, Selma, Vice, Moneyball, and other winners, Moonlight and The Departed. He’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world even into his 50s and his popularity has not diminished. The same cannot be said about Edward Norton who was billed early as one of the finest actors of his generation thanks to intense and dedicated performances in Primal Fear and American History X. His A-list projects became fewer and far between, some might say due to the level of “creative involvement” he would take in his projects and personal rewrites, and he was recast as Bruce Banner a.k.a. the Incredible Hulk when Marvel was readying for The Avengers. He’s still a fabulous actor and I’m looking forward to his decades-in-the-making adaptation of Motherless Brooklyn, a book I read back in college. I find it hard to believe in my original review that I said Helena Bonham Carter was going “against type” as a bumbling Gothic love interest. Maybe I was simply used to seeing her in period costumes and couldn’t make the jump. This kooky Gothic aesthetic would, of course, become a career staple, especially after she married Tim Burton and essentially became contractually obligated to appear in all of his movies (see: any Burton movie from 2001-2014). This was also an early film performance for future Oscar winner Jared Leto.

From the grimy technical plaudits to the anarchist brio, the movie belongs to David Fincher and his supreme command of visual storytelling. Originally Peter Jackson was offered the directing role but he was already to deep into his Lord of the Rings pre-production. Then it was offered to Bryan Singer (who never read the book when sent to him), Danny Boyle, and finally Fincher. It’s hard to imagine anyone else directing the movie, and that’s a common refrain with any Fincher movie (with the possible exception of 2008’s Benjamin Button with Pitt). The man has such a signature style that resonates with every frame of his movies. The mood, the style, the precision and the execution, the cool and meticulous nature, it’s all become the stuff of salivating YouTube video essayists. It’s a shame that Fincher isn’t cranking out a movie every couple of years (his last was 2014’s Gone Girl, which could be viewed as a depraved companion piece to Fight Club’s emasculated and aggrieved howls).

Even 20 years later, Fight Club can still be a radical kick to the senses. Some things haven’t aged as well but other things have aged phenomenally well. There’s a little something for everyone with this movie, and I think I’ll hold strong with my original A-grade. Some of its ideas and slogans have become commoditized (it coined the negative insult “snowflake,” so thanks; it even became a beat-em-up video game for the Playstation 2), which is as much a lasting sign of unexpected cultural satire as anything else presented in the movie — any revolution eventually becomes consumer culture on a long enough timeline.

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Bats (1999) Released: October 22, 1999

It’s almost reassuring to see a film like Bats arrive at your multiplex. It means that in an industry fueled by big names and big effects that a cheesy B-movie can still make it through production like the legions that spooked so many naive baby boomers. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves now. It is, after all, a B-movie.

Bats tries to be the winged mammal version of The Brids except not nearly as good. The “story” is of a mad scientist who genetically creates a race of super bats. Why? Well maybe the real question you should ask yourself is why not? Unfortunately, the bats get released into a small sleepy town in Texas. The officials catch on, the populace refuses to believe, then… oh what does it matter?! You’ll be able to predict the rest faster than you can tie your shoelaces. Create a plot in your head to fill the void of this one. In my version of Bats space aliens came down and there was an intergalactic civil war between bat-people and humanity’s only source of hope in a band of four teenage girls each with amazing powers. This is what happens when you have to fend for yourself for entertainment.

What should be the most interesting part of Bats turns out to be the absolute lamest: the bats themselves. Were they created in some lab or did they just hibernate out of Fraggle Rock with a thirst for blood? They resemble small dogs with wings in all the amounts of quick-cut closeup shots to hide the fact that they didn’t have the budget to film more than six bats at one time. I don’t know if they’re supposed to come off as frightening or not, but mass hysteria from Muppets just doesn’t seem too overwhelming to me.

If Bats were played for camp value it might be a moderately redeemable sense of dumb fun like Deep Blue Sea was earlier this year. Instead the bat wranglers try playing it for scares and skewed laughs, but the scales sure don’t come out even upon viewing. The flick really is laugh-out-loud bad like when one of the characters actually sells out humanity to help the bats, or the distraught and reckless teenagers getting their comeuppance for staying out after curfew like in so many other bad B-monster movies. This movie won’t be appearing on anyone’s resume list in the near future. I think even the Key Grips were ashamed to have had any hand in this. You can’t help but feel Bats missed its window of opportunity for success around the time film went to color. The only screaming you’ll be hearing anywhere in the vicinity of Bats is from people just realizing they spent seven dollars on this thing.

Nate’s Grade: D

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

When I was selecting movies to come back to for this twenty-year retrospective, I knew there were going to be major names that had to be on it, but I also wanted to see if I could find a few forgotten movies and discover whether time has done them any favors. Of all the many film titles on this list, it is without question that Bats is the least remembered. It was a cheesy B-movie about killer bats. Loud Diamond Phillips was the lead actor. It was the first release by a new distribution company, Destination Films, that shut down three years later after releasing other questionable movies like Eye of the Beholder and Whipped. The director helmed Carnosaur 2, The Hitcher 2, and Joyride 2. The only truly shocking thing about Bats is that the writer is John Logan, who would go on to write Gladiator, The Aviator, Sweeney Todd, Rango, Skyfall, and create the TV series, Penny Dreadful. As I said in my initial review, it’s not going to be a movie that anybody puts at the top of their resume, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun in its own way, whether as a campy B-movie throwback or in a derisive, so-bad-it’s-good manner.

I love genre movies. They’re great fun and when done right can be immensely satisfying and thrilling. I don’t look at genre movies as some bottom-feeding assignment for a writer. My writing partner Ben Bailey and I have been hired to script several genre movies (horror, action, sci-fi), and we come at them as fans, wanting to do good for other fans and include the kind of things we’d love in a movie. Just because it’s a genre movie/assignment doesn’t mean anybody should be lazy. When we write these scripts, our real goal is to have somebody read, and hopefully eventually watch, and say, “Wow, that was way better than I thought it would be.”

My perspective dealing with producers and different gatekeepers along the industry hierarchy has made me even more aware how little power writers have with their stories. You can have a script everyone universally loves, and then it gets changed for unknown reasons. You can have a story that makes perfect sense, and then somebody with power wants to put their stamp on it, and they introduce an out-of-place element that begins to crumble what was built. You can have a script that works completely, and then it needs drastic retooling to chase whatever is hot in the market. Such is the capricious work experiences of a screenwriter working within the system. Because of all that, I will never blame a writer in total if a movie sucks (caveats include if the writer is also the director). Chances are, there were a dozen un-credited writers, each trying to earn a future residual by changing important story data and dialogue to grab credit. It’s amazing good stories even sneak through a system designed to smother them. I think it was my 2001 review for Tomb Raider where I first articulated up my Rule of Five with screenplays: if there are five or more credited screenwriters, then there was no actual finished screenplay.

So what was anyone expecting from a killer bats movie? Not even before fifteen minutes has elapsed, we already have the mad scientist explain his responsibility thusly:

“Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m a scientist. It’s what we do.”

There are shootouts with the bats, which will go back and forth from being a blurry cloud to creatures levitating in place like something from Birdemic. How does one get into a shootout with bats? There’s another sequence where a character is hiding behind a convenience store aisle and we see a closeup of the bat crawling along, stalking her, like it’s Jurassic Park. It’s a creature the size of your shoe. The town-wide hysteria around the 40-minute mark is so overblown that it amused me greatly. We had cars careening into other cars, igniting ludicrous explosions. We had bats literally pick up a guy and throw him through a plate-glass window. We had citizens firing wildly in the air. We had a good Samaritan government official run outside to try and “take on the bats” physically harassing the sheriff. The military is sent in to combat the bats with a literal airstrike. Against bats. A military airstrike against bats. The third act involves preparing a house with nets and traps for an all-out bat assault. And there’s a montage of them constructing these home securities to opera. Maybe I was too unfair to Bats twenty years ago, for this is a ridiculous movie where the hero legitimately says, “Why don’t we just bomb the sonsofbitches?”

I’m thinking that director Louis Morneau wanted Bats to be a modern The Birds but it reminds me more of those kinds of cheesy 1950s sci-fi/horror movies that would spook generations of teenagers. There’s a slight nostalgic charm to the whole enterprise, as if it’s an aerial version of any sort of killer swarm movie where spiders, or bees, or ants, or piranhas are on the loose and terrorizing mankind. It makes it hard for me to hate the movie even as it makes one bad decision after another. It probably was a mistake featuring so many tight close-ups on the practical bat puppets, unless you happen to have an innate fear of bats. It was a strange choice to suddenly have certain angles start bending, as if it’s trying to communicate some bat perspective, except it’s just camera angles and not POV shots. Was it just a 90s cool thing? The bat stalking sequences, even their very sound effects, are modeled so strongly after Jurassic Park. Why is anyone even trying to take out a nocturnal creature during the night anyway? It becomes like a space horror movie in the final stretch as the characters go underground to nuke the bats. I think at least one million was spent on the fiery climactic explosion.

According to IMDB, Bats has one of the fastest productions I can recall. It was bought and the director was hired in May 1999. The filming lasted through June and July. Post-production went through August and September. And then on October 22, 1999, the finished movie debuted on over 2500 screens nationwide. It went from nothing to wide release in only six months. That’s astounding, and it honestly makes me want to take everything a little easier on the movie.

The criticisms in my original review are still valid if a bit overinflated. It’s predictable, it’s goofy, the bat effects can be less than impressive, and the story deficits are all there. This is still not a good movie but, unlike my 17-year-old self, I think there is a certain enjoyment to be had. It’s not quite squarely in the so-bad-it’s-good sweet spot but it wouldn’t be out of place as something you would see today from boutique, lower-budget genre releases by The Asylum. These existed throughout the 90s but they’ve become even more accessible today. I’m glad I re-watched Bats because there is a degree of fun to be had, even if you might not feel too proud about it afterward. I’d raise the grade from a D+ to a C- and say while 1999 had plenty to avant garde, groundbreaking, and seminal movies, it also had room for dumb stuff like Bats.

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–NOVEMBER–

Dogma (1999) Released: November 12, 1999

In a time where simply having faith in anything, let alone religion, is scoffed at, Kevin Smith daringly and passionately expresses his personal search for answers and understanding. But while the zealots decree Dogma as blasphemy, what they truly miss is the biggest commercial for faith and God that American audiences have seen in decades of cinema.

The story of the religious epic causing all the hubbub begins with a pair of fallen angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon) spurned from the pearly gates of Heaven and banished to Wisconsin. One discovers a re-dedication of a church imploring a little used Catholic practice of plenary indulgence allowing whoever to enter through the church’s arches to have their slate cleaned of all sin. The two seize this opportunity of a dogmatic loophole to sneak back into heaven. The only slight problem is that by doing so they reverse a decree of God and disprove the Almighty’s infallibility, and thus will wipe out all of existence. The voice of God (Alan Rickman) recruits a lapsed Catholic named Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) for a Holy Crusade to halt the scheming angel’s plans for the good of the universe. Along the way she is aided by two unlikely prophets (the dynamic duo of Jay and Silent Bob), an racially discredited 13th Apostle (Chris Rock), and a shapely strip-teasing muse (Salma Hayek) as they engage with demons, seraphims, angles, and all sorts of celestial “who’s who” to stop the end of existence.

Smith’s direction has taken strides since the point-and-click days of his earlier works; however, there’s still an awkward flatness to his framing and action. Fiorentino plays the role of a grounded character well. Rickman as the bitter Brit shows why he can still take anyone toe-to-toe for acting chops. Affleck and Damon have terrific chemistry together and play off one another for great comedy. Jason Mewes has never been funnier as the terminally stoned and foul-mouthed Jay. Rock shows he can restrain his abrasive personality. Salma shows… well she shows she can dance. Jason Lee as an air conditioning-adoring demon and George Carlin as a used car salesman type Catholic Cardinal are so commanding in their presence and excellent in their performances that it’s a sin most of their scenes were cut during editing. Even Alanis Morrisette works as a humanly childish God. She’s given no lines but expresses great feeling and humor anyway.

Dogma is rambunctiously hilarious and a never-ending joyride of fun as it jumps from jokes about demons made of excrement to “Buddy Christs” to insightful and sensitive thoughts on religion. Rarely does it bore even with the large plot it must always keep in successive movement. The only drawback Dogma suffers from is the amount of religious points it desires to make. The characters will reach a subject, chat, then directly move on to the next. The sporadic nature can easily keep an audience’s head spinning, but is brought back down to gentle rest from Smith’s divine wit and sharp writing. Some of the opus’ many characters appear for only brief stretches as Hollywood’s A-list battle for valid screen time among each other.

Smith is not one to shy away from controversy, or his quota of sexual innuendos and profanity. But the protestors for this film attacking its vulgarity are beyond missing the point; Dogma is reaching people the church hasn’t and can’t. It may be an audacious tweaker of a flick, but ultimately, it’s bringing up religion into open debate and discussion among the masses where there was none before. And isn’t that in itself glorifying some type of achievement?

It would do well for the opponents of Dogma to venture into a darkened theater sometime to see the movie and realize it is a humorous affirmation of faith and beliefs. The story of a crisis of faith is relatable to a society too jaded and cynical. Smith’s wrestle with theology is the public’s gain, and his halo only glows a little brighter for having the courage to do so.

Nate’s Grade: A-

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

I have been a Kevin Smith fan since my first viewing of Clerks early in my high school career when my pal Tim Riley loaned me the movie on VHS. At that point, the Independent Film Channel was being offered as a regular cable channel and it, along with the expansion of the Internet, became a gateway for exposing us to more daring, more eclectic, and more ambitious indie cinema of past and present. It was a sort of film school, and one artist that spoke to our teenage, geek-fueled sensibilities was Smith, a writer that could take vulgarity and make it sound like Shakespeare. I remember writing a research paper on Kevin Smith at the end of my sophomore year (which I got a B- on, thanks a lot Mrs. Linn – actually, thank you, you were an excellent and supportive teacher, and I hope you’re well). I regularly checked the News Askew site for the latest on Smith’s next, a script he wrote even before Clerks and had been waiting to bring to life for years, a script that happened to check many boxes of personal appeal. It dealt with supernatural religious figures, intellectual debates, the end of the world, plus potty humor. I anticipated Dogma like no movie in my life. I devoured every production update, every behind-the-scenes picture, and I even bought the score soundtrack before the movie ever came out, subjecting my senior year art class to listening to it, and boy were they perplexed by the Mooby’s theme track. I found solidarity in the fandom of View Askew and Kevin Smith. Wearing my Jay and Silent Bob T-shirt felt like I was making a statement; I don’t know what but a statement. I cannot overstate how much influence Kevin Smith had on me as a burgeoning student of film as well as a budding writer of comedy. I’ve seen the man in person three times, two for traveling road shows for his films (2011’s Red State and 2019’s Jay and Silent Bob Reboot), and once at Kent State in October 2001 for a college Q&A tour that would eventually be compiled onto the first of Smith’s many DVDs showcasing his oratory prowess at speaking engagements. You can see me at several points as the kid with pink hair (it had faded from my bright Run Lola Run red).

Dogma was beset by controversy early into its production, notably from William Donahue and the Catholic League who railed against the film as an attack on Catholicism. Never mind that Kevin Smith was himself a practicing Catholic. The button-pushing, provocative nature of the script eventually made Disney force its indie arm Miramax to sell the movie, and producer Harvey Weinstein personally bought the film and arranged a wide release through a smaller, up-and-coming Canadian distribution company, Lions Gate (before Saw, before Tyler Perry, before The Hunger Games). Smith even picketed his own movie upon its opening in New Jersey and got on the local news as an alias. The extra publicity lead to many people wanting to see what the fuss was about, which seems like the opposite intent of a boycott. Donahue later asked Miramax to watch a copy of Dogma to understand what exactly they were protesting. Flash forward to 2017, Weinstein has been disgraced when he finally pays for a lifetime of abusive and predatory behavior, and the Weinstein Company assets are sold off to various buyers. One asset that was not sold was Dogma, placing it in a strange legal purgatory. As of this writing, Weinstein himself officially owns the rights to Dogma, which is why it’s not available for streaming on any platform, why the (out of print) special edition DVD is currently starting at $75 on Amazon, and why you can watch the movie in its entirety on YouTube for free. Somewhere William Donahue is laughing.

Whenever art fans religious controversy, the natural question is whether it’s worthy of all the noise. With Martin Scorsese’s 1987 masterpiece The Last Temptation of Christ, people were so incensed about a Jesus choosing a mortal life, one where he fathered children, that there were bomb threats, vandalism, arson, and one guy in New York literally drove a bus into a theater. In 1994, Priest stirred hostility for having the temerity to follow a priest dealing with yearnings of repressed homosexuality. Both movies were sincere dramas but Dogma was one of the first comedies since 1979’s Life of Brian that mixed the sanctimony of religion with irreverence.

Dogma’s biggest asset is its sheer volume of ideas and interesting characters. You can easily tell Smith was going through a crisis of faith and questioning long-held beliefs and through a creative outlet was able to explore all sorts of ideas about the nature of faith and belief. The very premise is extremely clever, using church doctrinal loopholes for a pair of fallen angles to sneak back into heaven and thus unmaking all of existence. There certainly hasn’t been a movie close to Dogma since its release. There are so many characters with so many view points and all they want to do, besides avoid the end of the world, is gab it up. The movie becomes quite formulaic from scene to scene, where we’re introduced to a new character who has a point they elaborate upon, and then there’s cause to escape. Repeat until Act Three. As long as you’re entertained by the mixture of the profane and the sacred, with conversations about the nature of man’s relationship to God, the perversion of beliefs, and historical revisionism with Biblical text intertwined with stoner jokes and a giant poop monster, then you should be fine with the extended, talky pit stops. It’s less a road movie than it is a traveling lecture, with different characters swapping out to adopt the moniker of learned professor. Some of Smith’s ideas seem a little dated, such as viewing God as a woman, or the idea that Mary and Joseph had sexual relations. It doesn’t deter the enjoyment of what manages to be a most unexpected Sunday school lesson.

The intellectual heft of the movie carries Dogma to better compensate any deficits in Smith as a visual stylist as well as some of the strained humor. Smith would be the first to criticize his directing skills and has always placed more emphasis on his written word. I wish the Smith that made Red State could go back and shoot Dogma. Visually speaking, it’s so flat and unappealing, making little use of its widescreen format for dynamic shot compositions. Even with a different DP (Robert Yeoman, a favorite of Wes Anderson) it doesn’t make much of a difference. The sequence filmed on the train can be occasionally painful to watch over how it’s shot. Fortunately, Smith gives a bevy of A-list actors juicy parts, so when the focus is on the performance, the stagnate visual presentation becomes secondary. I will also say that the humor has not aged well in the ensuing twenty years. There are still jokes that make me laugh, but upon this recent re-watch, it felt like more humor was forced, trying to break up the seriousness of the theological debates with some obvious sex joke served best with an off-screen drum rimshot. Jay’s nagging insistence on Bethany having sex with him doesn’t feel the same in a post-Me Too era, and the gay panic jokes of the 90s and early 2000s have fared even worse. It’s not quite to the level where Dogma feels like two movies inartfully crammed together, but the comedy feels strained especially as the running time is breezing through scenes with barely time to breathe.

The actors have fun with their material and give good to great performances. Damon (The Martian) and Affleck (Argo) are a naturally engaging duo with a wonderful chummy chemistry. Damon is more the prankster of the two but eventually Affleck is the one who gets the dark turn. It’s not quite earned but it certainly allows the actor to show new glimmers of intensity. Both actors have enjoyed long careers of success and Affleck has become an Oscar-winning director himself in the ensuing years. Rock (Nurse Betty), Carlin (Jersey Girl), Hayek (The Hitman’s Bodyguard), and Lee (TV’s My Name is Earl) are all playing within their comfort zones and deliver performances that amuse when needed. Lee’s signature vocal styling in his barroom scene was what the Pixar animators used as test animation to see if Lee would be the right fit for the villain of 2004’s The Incredibles. This was before Rickman (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) established a late career resurgence as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise, and it’s just a joy to watch him on screen, even if he seems a little too pissy in his big entrance scene with Bethany. His dramatic moment explaining having to tell a child Jesus what lies in store is still poignant and beautifully handled. Mewes (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) is at the top of his game and there are things I laugh at simply because of his specific and unique line delivery and less so the content (“GEEaaaaRR?”). Sadly, the lone sore spot comes with the lead performance from Fiorentino (Men in Black) who just seems bored throughout the whole movie and unhappy to be there. Yes, her character is suffering a loss of faith and feels rudderless, but Fiorentino feels like the only person not having fun. Smith has stated that she was very difficult to work with on set and wouldn’t talk to him, the director, by the end of the production, and he wishes he had cast co-star Janeane Garofalo instead as Bethany. Fiorentino has only acted in one project since 2002. Perhaps she’s moved on from film acting or perhaps the offers just stopped.

Smith has tried stepping out of his “dick and fart jokes” directorial zone, but every time he seems to retreat back to his View Askew universe. He supposedly closed the book on that world after 2001, and then after his father/daughter drama Jersey Girl under-performed, the next project was Clerks II in 2006. After Zack and Miri Make a Porno under-performed, Smith tried his hand as a genre horror filmmaker with varying results. Red State is mostly great, Tusk has its moments before it falls apart, but Yoga Hosers is just plain awful. It felt strange and depressing to watch the man voluntarily erase what made him unique to become a serviceable genre filmmaker. Smith even briefly retired, started a thriving podcast network, and became a staple director for the CW superhero TV shows. After his near death in 2018 via massive heart attack, Smith has been devoted to being a healthier version of himself. He’s lost a lot of weight and has jumped back into the View Askew universe once more, with Reboot and a planned Clerks III. It feels like Smith has accepted who he is as a filmmaker and is content to continue making more and more projects for that slowly diminishing fanbase. I recently got to see Reboot with Smith in the audience, and he’s still the same gifted oral storyteller I remember back at Kent State in 2001 wiling away five hours of stories. The movie, on the other hand, was less consistently engaging, falling back on references and nostalgia too often. Smith has always been ahead of the curve with his fanbase, from developing his own website, cultivating a fanbase through direct interaction, starting a merchandising line, building an inter-connected universe of movies, embracing podcasts, and circumventing Hollywood gatekeepers to bring his movies to his fans. I don’t know what’s next for the man (besides, artistically, more of the same) but I know he’ll be ahead of the curve on what other filmmakers will be doing years from now.

Looking back on my original review in 1999, I was coming at the movie with my biases intact and ready to defend the movie from its detractors and against cries of blasphemy. It’s not exactly the most faith-affirming movie “in decades” like I proclaimed so defensively. I spent so many words reliving the controversy, the plot, and the provocative particulars. It’s so easy to just list the ideas or crazy moments from the movie rather than dwelling on the cohesion or effect. I’m a little surprised my 17-year-old self even found some points of criticism, including the rushed pacing that I noticed independently as a 37-year-old as well (go me). I cringe at certain points where it feels like my biases got a hold of me and I became a less-than-articulate cheerleader for the movie, like when I wrote it was “rambunctiously hilarious and a never-ending joyride of fun.” The fun ends when the movie ends. That’s how movies work. Looking back on the film now, I would lower my initial grade from an A- to maybe even as low as a B. The ideas and creativity win out over the pacing, staid direction, and contrived humor. I still consider myself to be a Kevin Smith fan and will see any movie he decides to give his efforts. However, having branched out further in my tastes, I’m more a fan of Smith the storyteller than filmmaker. I’ll always hold his movies as special considering his influence on me as a writer as well as a fan of cinema. I can still remember watching that Clerks VHS oh so long ago and feel like I was watching something dangerous and radical. It was exciting, impressively verbose, and the beginning of a renewed love affair with the medium.

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The World is Not Enough (1999) Released: November 19, 1999

James Bond is a symbol in our popular society. He represents charm, bravery, male chauvinism, and the essence of cool. So why is this dying image seeming more like a dinosaur than a hero? The World Is Not Enough, the latest installment into the longest running franchise in movie history, exhibits more of commercial feeling than an actual movie. This Thanksgiving fixin’ is overly stuffed with useless gadgets, double entendres, messy explosions, outlandish cartoon escapes, and even wooden performances. But it all doesn’t matter because it’s a James Bond movie and we know what we’re getting and we want it! But why does this helping seem less filling than those of the past?

The Bond films of recent are seeming to take a cue from the Batman flicks by thinking two are better than one. Does anyone remember fondly the days when one Pussy Galore was enough for the world? With TWINE we get double stacked with Bond girls, and this has to be the weakest crop of exotic babes yet. Sophie Marceau comes off as an arrogant whiny drama-queen twirling her pretty fingers in that bear rug Brosnan credits as a chest. She spends virtually the entire running time preening around wrapped up in a bed sheet or underneath it. Connect the dots to Denise Richards who is a nuclear scientist in her day time but a cover girl in her free time. The only thing nuclear about Denise Richards are the two reasons standing in front of her that she was hired for. How convenient that the finale takes place underwater and her with only a T-shirt. Is MGM this desperate for the money of teenage males?

The most depressing aspect of the Bond films of late are the hysterically preposterous and cheesy villains. In TWINE we get a scary Robert Carlyle who has a bullet lodged in his brain and allows him to withstand all pain. Great, but all he does in the flick is hold a hot rock and punch his hand through a table. If you’re going to give a villain an eccentric trait you have to play to that trait to give the dubious baddie some semblance of an advantage in a dire situation. The possibilities could have been great for Robbie but he’s utterly wasted and so is the idea.

Usually in a standard Bond flick there is at least that one “Wow” scene where you gasp as your breath is taken. that one stunt or sequence that mystifies you with excitement. There was never a “Wow” moment with TWINE but the action held its own and kept from succumbing into tedium.

TWINE may not be the best Bond but it sure as hell is better than Tomorrow Never Dies. Its finale may be anti-climactic and cramp but the action in this outing is regularly up to speed. It may not have the best actresses… but… but they look pretty when wet. All in all James Bond is a satisfying figure to have grace the screen every few years to revisit the same escapist domain of earlier follies. Let’s just pray they tinker with the system before we get another Tomorrow Never Dies, or worse, another Timothy Dalton. Stay with us Pierce Brosnan; the world needs you.

Nate’s Grade: C+

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

I’ve said it before in several of my James Bond film reviews, if we’re being honest, half of the 007 movies are garbage. The long-running franchise gets a pass often for its misses because of the sterling reputation of its hits as well as its penchant for recasting, which serves as a limited form of rebooting the series without losing the DNA of what made it popular for decades. At its finest, the Bond franchise has been reliably escapist entertainment, and the newest incarnation under Daniel Craig has become grittier, more grounded, and highly successful. The World is Not Enough was the highest-grossing Bond movie of the twentieth century, which is a somewhat misleading record considering the nature of inflation. 2012’s Skyfall made a billion dollars and had been Sony’s highest-grossing movie of all time until 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home. It’s a franchise now for girls, guns, and gadgets, brimming with testosterone, larger-than-life villains, death-defying stunt work, and killer puns. When Bond re-entered the 90s from an unsuccessful 80s experiment with Timothy Dalton wherein the longtime producers tried to mirror the 80s action of the era, he was seen as something of a leftover, best articulated by Judi Dench’s version of M with Brosnan’s first film, 1995’s Goldeneye: “I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms, though wasted on me, obviously appealed to that young woman I sent out to evaluate you.” And that was 1995.

I’m actually going to utter words I had not been anticipating, namely that The World is Not Enough is actually a better movie than I had given it credit for back in 1999 and it plays to the strengths of the franchise while also highlighting some of its worst tendencies. That’s right, 17-year-old me was too harsh on this film and a bit too eager for cringe-worthy comments about Denise Richards and her appeal to a younger male demographic. The World is Not Enough is not the best Brosnan Bond, that honor still goes to the delightfully bombastic Goldeneye, but it is an above average spy thriller that has some terrific stunts, a clear design with action in mind, and perhaps even most surprising, some real dramatic conflicts to engage between explosions.

The general premise of TWINE (I’m following suit from my original review and refusing to spell out the full title with every iteration) is one of trauma and resource exploitation. Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) is still mentally recovering from being kidnapped by a terrorist, held for ransom, and having to do what she could for survival. Her time for healing is cut short when she’s thrust into a position of leadership after the murder of her father. Now she’s expected to be a leading voice for her country as neighboring nations angle for their own deals with a new oil pipeline where there will be clear winners and losers. Stop right there. That is a dramatically loaded starting point for a character and worthy of a play exploring the turmoil and pressure. She’s recovering from trauma and forced into a spotlight she would rather avoid and has to deal with a nest of vipers that all want to help her country but have their own political agendas. It feels like a disservice to dub Marceau as a “Bond girl” because our working interpretation of that term is so limited, the gorgeous woman who is meant to be bedded and then dead (ed). They can be helpful companions for the action but they’re always slotted into secondary roles. With Elektra King, TWINE has produced a complex character deserving of increased attention, and the movie provides that through a number of scenes acknowledging her plight with focus. Yes, by the end, she becomes another typical villain as the movie abandons its dramatic earnings to run straight ahead into its action climax. It’s this character that sticks out to me most.

Another satisfying aspect of TWINE is its action and stunt work. The director is Michael Apted, a man best known for Oscar-winning biopics like Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist and the 7 Up documentaries chronicling the diverse lives of a handful of British citizens. He does not seem like the first, second, or even eleventh name one would pull to helm a Bond movie (fun fact: the Bond producers were thinking of hiring Peter Jackson to direct a 007 entry but changed their minds after seeing The Frighteners). Apted acquits himself well in this world and it’s clear early on in the pre-title sequence. The shot arrangements have a pleasing composition but also play into action heroics easily, communicating the essential information clearly. The stunts are impressive because this is also an era where almost everything is practical. A speedboat chase involves actually careening speedboats. A hot air balloon chase has real people dangling from wires. This continues through the rest of the movie with some genuinely exciting and memorable set pieces, like a helicopter with a crane of spinning saw blades that plays like a monster, or a concluding submarine vertical set where the characters must climb Poseidon Adventure-style. That final set piece deserves a little more attention. The villain is trying to activate the nuclear core and is in a sealed compartment. Bond has to exit the sub in order to enter it, but he needs his assistant, Dr. Christmas Jones (Denise Richards), to hit a button to open the compartment. The problem is that the sub is filling with water and she has to dive further and further to have access to this life-saving button, putting them both in jeopardy for this mini-goal. That is excellent action scene construction and a small lesson how to make your action matter.

Unfortunately, TWINE does also feature some of the weaknesses of the franchise. As I cited in my review, having a villain where a bullet lodged in his brain stops him from feeling pain is a fine starting point, but if you don’t do anything with that then what was the point? It’s a wasted affectation for an otherwise forgettable and ultimately disposable baddie. There needed to be more unique situations to take advantage of this ability but the film could also have benefited by exploring it as a disability as well. Much like the widely regarded 2018 God of War rehash, having a character unable to feel anything can rob them of their sense of being human. There’s equal opportunity to provide better motivation and personalizing it but instead the filmmakers go with something grandiose and stale, the madman who wishes to financially profit from chaos. Richards (Starship Troopers, Wild Things) is also a symbol of every complaint critics have levied against the notion of Bond girls. Just because they throw a “doctor” in her name and say she’s a nuclear scientist doesn’t alter any of the way the film portrays her. She can spout some science jargon and exposition when needed but by the end she’s another woman to be bedded. She’s dressed like Lara Croft for the entire movie and spends the climax in a wet T-shirt. And then there’s the ending, which deserves its own paragraph for how truly awful it is.

It’s custom for James Bond to unload double entendres and for the Bond girls to have sexually suggestive names (Pussy Galore, anyone?), but the ending of TWINE may be one of the most cringe-worthy, groan-inducing moments I can recall in film. Bond and Ms. Jones are celebrating their victory and the suits back at MI6 are checking in via heat-seeking satellite. It looks like Bond’s body is lying down and his heat register is getting redder, hotter, and then a woman’s legs appear from the sides, implying he is either a Hindu god or engaging in sexual congress. The suits nearly pop their monocles and cannot believe they have just spied Bond doing what he is doing, never mind his long history of love-‘em-and-leave-‘em promiscuity. Then we cut back to Bond atop Dr. Christmas Jones, post-coitus, and he says what may go down in history as the worst line of dialogue ever uttered in a Bond movie (so far): “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.” If you did not physically recoil reading that, something is dead inside you.

Brosnan would only serve as 007 for one more movie, the ludicrously bombastic Die Another Day in 2002, where we literally had invisible cars, melting ice hotels, killer satellite lasers, and race-swapping Face/Off style body swaps. The franchise rebooted in 2006 with Casino Royale, itself a reboot, and Daniel Craig in the well-fitted suit and Craig has served as Bond for the next 14 years, twice as long as Brosnan’s tenure. The Bond producers originally had wanted Brosnan to take over after Roger Moore left the franchise in the mid 80s but Brosnan could not get out of his TV contract for Remington Steele, which lead to Dalton getting the gig. Brosnan’s version of the character played closer to author Ian Fleming’s source, an icy yet suave pretty boy. Brosnan always had an air of detachment to the character like he was long settled into the part. Some have criticized this approach but I think it works and especially well for his movies. TWINE ends up being the second best Brosnan Bond, which I guess is a back-handed compliment considering Tomorrow Never Dies and Die Another Day are not terribly good. However, maybe if I re-watched Tomorrow I might find it to be better than I recall, like TWINE.

Marceau (Braveheart) was an in-demand French actress in the 90s and has transitioned to writing and directing. She does, as I stated in my initial review, traipse around covered only in bed sheets for long stretches. There’s actually a mistake in the film where you can briefly see her nude, an image that was used in the film’s trailer but the editors censored her exposed breast. Richards made her name from sexpot roles in the 90s and then became Mrs. Charlie Sheen and an eventual reality show star. She stars in many direct-to-DVD projects and is currently on a soap opera as well. This was the last performance of Desmond Llewelyn as the gadget creator Q, who had previously appeared in every James Bond outing. They even introduced his replacement, John Cleese, just in time. Another holdover was Dench, who starred in all four Brosnans and the first three Craigs.

I would elevate my initial grade from a C+ to a solid B, thanks to its dramatic development and the quality of its stunts and action construction. The title track by Garbage, a quintessential 90s indie rock band, is pretty mundane but there have been few winners in the newer era of Bond title songs (Jack White and Alicia Keys?). I don’t care what the Academy says, both Adele’s “Skyfall” and Sam Smith’s “Writing’s on the Wall” are boring. The World is Not Enough is a satisfying mid-range Bond movie that has aged fairly well, with the exception of certain elements, namely the portrayal of Dr. Christmas Jones. When I started this re-watch article, I didn’t think the movie that would improve the most was a James Bond caper. Thus is the lasting and inescapable power of 1999, the greatest year in movie history.

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–DECEMBER–

Man on the Moon (1999) Released: December 22, 1999

After many years, the big screen biopic of one of comedy’s greatest figures of recent finally emerges to the awaiting public. Many never knew what to make of Kaufman or what he was attempting to do, and the movie displays this attitude to its core.

First things first, there is no Jim Carrey in this picture, only Andy. Carrey’s performance is pitch-perfect and swarming and enthralling that he becomes the glue of an otherwise sticky movie. Carrey IS Andy Kaufman, it’s like seeing dear Andy alive and well back on screen still terrorizing the easily duped. It almost brought a tear to my eye. Carrey takes the sheep skin and pulls off an incredible career-best performance that demands attention come award time.

But without Carrey’s masterful performance Man on the Moon is not worth venturing out of the home for. The movie never delves beneath the surface to discover who the true Andy Kaufman was or why he did the things he did. And if the point is that there was no true Kaufman but merely a stage character then fine, but did we need a movie? Without any inner depth the flick becomes a shapeless reassembling of TV stints and clips Andy pulled. If I wanted to see this I’d watch Comedy Central at odd hours of the night.

Courtney Love pops her head in late into the running time to establish herself as the love interest, but her character like everyone else, is never fleshed out. Love just becomes a hollow foil to Kaufman’s antics in some vain attempt to add heart to the madness. The most lingering problem is that of the relationship between Kaufman friend and co-conspirator Bob Zmuda never being shown beyond communal frat brothers. Man on the Moon gives the reigns of the picture to Carrey, and rightfully so, but then seems to believe Carrey as Kaufman is the only substantial character in the story.

Man on the Moon is for the most part an entertaining retelling of the rise and fall of Kaufman, and his indifference all the way. Director Milos Foreman and his two Larry Flint scribes try their hand at uncovering the man behind the curtain but stumble along the way. Maybe this is the film Kaufman would have wished, one that doesn’t answer any questions or is forced to entertain its patrons. But me thinks that the Hollywood version of Andy stays true to his stubborn nature but trips its feet towing the mystery that was one of comedy’s most peculiar influences.

Nate’s Grade: C+

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

There wasn’t an actor I was a bigger fan of than Jim Carrey in the 90s. To be fair, it was hard not to be when you were a teenager and, shortly after Ace Ventura’s release in 1994, every single person in your friend group, and at your school, had every rubber-faced, silly-voiced catch-phrase memorized. There may have been a part in my life where I had the entire Ventura movie memorized. I saw every Carrey movie in theaters and sought out anything relating to the man. I even cut out news articles and reviews of his movies and pinned them to a bulletin board in my room. My friend Tim Riley and I had discussions over whether The Cable Guy was underrated and suffered because of it being different (I think time has been kind to this one-time misfire). I saw The Truman Show in 1998 because of Jim Carrey and thought it was a near masterpiece of a movie, and one I wish Carrey had been less himself in. That was the actor’s first mainstream dramatic effort, taking the path of other famous funny people who try and stretch those dramatic muscles to prove their acting bonafides (Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Carell, Mo’Nique, Eddie Murphy, Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Jack Black). Carrey does have some solid dramatic ability, as best evidenced in 2004’s classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but he was still holding onto those funnyman mugging instincts. With Man on the Moon, Carrey got to play a great professional hero of his, an inspiration, and a comedy legend pushing the boundaries of what was considered funny. I wasn’t charmed by the movie twenty years ago, and upon re-watch, I think I enjoyed it more, though for different reasons.

This is one of those deep dives into the fabled Great Men of History who also just happen to be great assholes, and people just excuse their boorish behavior because of their talent. If the movie came out today, I don’t think Kaufman would be as revered in retrospect. However, Kaufman was also a man who was clearly ahead of his time. Had he emerged in the age of the Internet and YouTube, his meta anti-comedy would have most definitely found a welcoming audience that would worship him. Kaufman was more a performance artist than a comedian, a man who didn’t want people to laugh in any traditional sense but gave them weird and often uncomfortable experiences. The guy once read the entire Great Gatsby to a paying audience. If I had been in attendance, I would have hated it in the moment, but years later, I could always say, “Oh man, you’ll never believe what I got to be part of.” Kaufman wanted to challenge the audience but his pranks and provocations were absent something that ultimately lead to him wearing out his welcome. He refused to let other people in on the joke. Practical jokes and pranks, a popular medium online and still on TV after decades, need the catharsis of the release, of letting their targets in on the joke, of absolving the tension and returning things back to a resemblance of the status quo. Without this necessary step, it can feel mean-spirited for its own sake. Andy was happy to be the villain, best personified during his misogynist wrestling phase where he denigrated women and challenged them to pin him. Andy enjoyed inciting a crowd, riling them up, pushing buttons, but because he never pulled back, it was ultimately his downfall in an industry that still had powerful gatekeepers and limited opportunities for bigger spotlights.

If Kaufman wanted the freedom to continue doing the experimental comedy with the budget and resources of those with power, he was going to have to accept some form of compromise and ultimately he couldn’t. His brand of anti-comedy was too conceptual for a mass audience, and Kaufman was fine with that, but he still wanted the platform that came with popularity, so his time in the spotlight was always going to be limited when people finally had enough. This leads to a great question that even Man on the Moon cannot answer, and that’s whether or not there ever was a real Andy Kaufman. When his game is elaborate fiction, it’s hard to know if anything is ever genuine. His own family members, upon hearing the news of his shocking lung cancer diagnosis, still hold onto some belief that it’s all one cruel joke. Lynn (Courtney Love) says there is no real Andy Kaufman, and after watching the movie it’s difficult to see the person beneath the performer. It’s as if they have inseparably melded into a weird new organism. I think in many ways that makes it hard to write a biopic about a person who was mostly surface-level provocations. That means much of the movie does become recreations of Kaufman’s biggest stunts and pranks with occasional asides of supporting characters either shaking their head trying to understand or making excuses for Kaufman. “It’s funny but a different kind of funny.” Half an hour of the movie is about the wrestling stunts alone and it can get pretty repetitive.

Because of that, the depth of the movie is going to be an issue and ultimately does hold back the overall entertainment. However, the movie takes a turn toward the very end that seems to finally breakthrough Andy’s ironic veneer and make him realize the downside of his routines. Late into the movie Kaufman flies to the Philippines for a desperate medical cure. He’s been weakened by chemotherapy, trying homeopathic remedies, and looking for any miracle he can find. He waits his turn and watches a healer reach into a man’s chest, blood spilling, and release the cancer from his body. Kaufman then lays down and, as the healer prepares to repeat the process, Andy sees the healer has a blood bag concealed in his hand. It’s all an illusion. Andy laughs to himself, the man who made a living of pulling jokes on others, and here, at his lowest, the joke is on him, and he can’t help but laugh. The movie even dissolves directly from this moment to him in his coffin. Earlier, Kaufman said he saw his purpose as pointing out the illusion of reality, but I think in this final moment on screen alive, maybe he comes to regret this approach. There is a definite downside to only living in the realm of ironic quotations for every action in one’s life.

Man on the Moon was a re-teaming of the director of The People vs. Larry Flynt, the screenwriters, the supporting actress, and at one point almost the supporting actor. Director Milos Forman (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) reportedly couldn’t decide between Carrey or Edward Norton as the lead actor, so he let the studio decide. This was a no-brainer for a studio, especially one that was eager to gain some of Moon’s $82 million-dollar budget back. That is an astonishingly high number for an awards-bait movie that doesn’t involve some kind of war. It seems only fitting that a movie highlighting the life of a man who wasn’t appreciated during his time would also… not be appreciated during its time. It was a box-office disappointment and I think it’s for the many reasons that I cited above as well as my original review in 1999. It’s fun to watch Carrey’s commitment to the role and it feels like a better fit for him than other dramatic turns, like 2001’s The Majestic or 2007’s The Number 23. Carrey still had his mainstream magic for several more years, anchoring big hits like The Grinch and Bruce Almighty, but by the mid 2000s his appeal was waning and Carrey-comedy vehicles just weren’t launching any longer (Fun with Dick and Jane, Yes Man, Mr. Popper’s Penguins). He returned to familiar territory with a Dumb and Dumber sequel in 2014 and the response was muted. He had a lead TV role on Showtime’s Kidding with his avant-garde Eternal Sunshine director, Michel Gondry in 2018. Carrey seems to have settled into a different kind of role, taking more supporting parts in smaller movies (Kick-Ass 2, The Bad Batch) and focusing on his painting. The most interesting Carrey project in a decade came out in 2017 and it was a feature-length documentary composed entirely of the behind-the-scenes footage on the making of Man on the Moon and Carrey’s Method-driven acting techniques that drove others crazy. He insisted on being Andy on and off camera to disappear into the character. The more and more I read about Method acting, the more dismissive I get. I think Robert Pattinson said it best that actors only ever seem to use Method acting as an excuse for behaving badly. Nobody ever gets everyone gifts and is overly nice and says, “It’s part of my Method acting process.”

Many of those related to Man on the Moon sputtered immediately afterwards and some seem to have been cursed by the project’s disappointment. Love showed real promise as a dramatic actress after Larry Flynt, but she stopped acting in movies after 2002 with Trapped and only returned in 2015 to television with reoccurring spots on Empire and Sons of Anarchy. Forman already had several Oscars on his mantle and the expectation was Man on the Moon would be the kind of film that could earn him another. It never materialized, and Forman only directed one other movie after, 2006’s Goya’s Ghosts before he died years later in 2018. The screenwriters, Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, also had their post-Moon downturn, with their only directorial effort, 2000’s Screwed bombing big time. The writing team became known for biopics, from 1994’s masterful Ed Wood to 2014’s Big Eyes and 2019’s Dolemite is My Name, though they will be best known today for developing the enthralling and award-winning TV mini-series The People vs. O.J. Simpson. The only person on a direct rise was Paul Giamatti, who earned an Oscar nomination in 2005 after starring in numerous undervalued indie gems.

As a movie, Man on the Moon gives you a little added context for a rather inscrutable prankster. My original review had some solid points but I think the larger themes of meta-humor and self-sabotage, as well as the nobility of sincerity, were lost on me as a 17-year-old, or some of these themes had yet to fully bloom until after Internet culture became the dominant pop culture. I think I would raise my rating from the initial C+ to a B- but there definitely is a limit how far any movie can go into the life of Andy Kaufman when he kept himself as an enigma. He was ahead of his time and would have been celebrated by a contingent of die-hard fans, but his bad behavior also wouldn’t have been readily excused in today’s cultural climate as well. Andy Kaufman may have been a genius. He may have been an asshole. He may have been both. We may never really know.

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The Green Mile (1999) Released: December 10, 1999

A prison in the heart of the deep South during the era of the Great Depression is not usually the locale you’d find a somber tale of earnest discovery and passionate awareness to the follies of life. Yet here arrives the long anticipated The Green Mile, the second in tag-team efforts from director Frank Darabont and novelist Stephen King in their own genre creation of nostalgic feel-good prison flicks. All the swelling hype could manage to make the movie seem overbearing, but if you’ve got a free afternoon and a butt made of steel then try The Green Mile.

Darabont seems like the perfect visual interpreter to King’s epic narrative spinning of good, evil, and all that fall between. The movie moves at the pace of molasses and clocks in at over three hours in length. Not exactly audience friendly fodder but one and all will be grateful for the decisions taken to build character development and tension instead of blindly rushing through.

Tom Hanks plays a prison guard on the Death Row block of a Southern penitentiary. Despite the bleak and grim surroundings his humanity still shines through. He escorts and oversees the final moments of many men’s remaining breaths along the final walk of green linoleum tile to the electric chair. Enter one mysterious morn John Coffey (Michael Clark Duncan), a towering giant that seems to break all the rules each of the guards on cell block E has come to realize through their years. Coffey has been convicted of the rape and murder of two little girls, but as Hanks soon learns things aren’t always what they seem. The 7-foot miracle worker displays scenes of empathetic healing like to Christ himself. Hanks views are turned and his eyes open, and that’s just the beginning of the heartstrings being pulled. To release any more of the plot would be a crime punishable by Ole’ Sparky himself in the Green Mile.

The pacing is smooth and wrings out every droplet of mystery and drama needed. The Green Mile‘s comprehensive fable quality transcends the period just like The Shawshank Redemption did as well prior. Mile should be expected to be a front-runner for Oscars when balloting begins.

The ensemble acting is magnificently eclectic and truly inspiring. Hanks’ name is so synonymous with Oscar that he might as well shave his head and paint his body gold because come nomination time this man’s name is going straight to the ballot. Other stars give thoughtfully deep and refreshing performances guaranteed to turn a few heads. Duncan’s gentle child-like giant is serene and a benevolently touching figure of innocence and warmth. But one can not forget the presence of a very special rodent by the name of Mr. Jingles that deserves billing above the credits itself for the quality performance it puts on.

The Green Mile is a sad, touching, and rather powerful movie that speaks to the viewer’s emotions and gladly earns every one of them. In the end The Green Mile is nothing beyond a long yarn of a fairy tale but one told so exceptionally, one performed so extraordinarily, and one directed so deftly that you’ll gladly journey down that mile with ease.

Nate’s Grade: B

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

Stephen King film adaptations are, notoriously, a mixed bag. When you happen to be one of the most popular and prolific novelists of the modern age, spitting out multiple books a year even, there are going to be more than a few misses in the movie department. There are plenty of topics covered over the course of five decades of movies, from vampires to intergalactic shape-shifting demons to killer cars, killer books, killer cemeteries, killer killers and anything once could imagine. I recall a Family Guy non-sequitur where King was in a meeting and clearly grasping for a new idea, grabbing a nearby lamp and pitching a haunted lamp story. “Are you just making this up? Do you have any idea at all?” asked the agent. King stood still and then the agent followed up by sighing and defeatedly saying, “Fine. I’ll take it.” The versatility of King is too often undervalued. He’s a natural storyteller who can just as easily hop genres, and some of his most affecting film works have been the ones with the most serious material, where the monsters aren’t ghouls and demons but the pains of growing up, finding your place, and seeking redemption. Stand by Me is a coming-of-age classic and 1994’s prison drama Shawshank Redemption is so well regarded that it served as the top-rated film on IMDB for years. For a while there, the odds had it that if you randomly turned on TNT it would be playing. It was the debut for Frank Darabont as a feature film director and it was nominated for seven Oscars. His follow-up seemed like a slam dunk, re-teaming with another King story set in a prison, and this one had even more Academy-friendly elements and netted four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. 1999 was a sensational year full of artistically daring, experimental, and challenging movies, and The Green Mile feels almost square in comparison.

This is a pretty engaging movie but one that doesn’t exactly challenge the viewer because everything is so cut-and-dry, black-and-white, and clearly categorized for consumption. I can understand that for many this form of storytelling will feel like cinematic comfort food, following a well-worn formula to deliver what an audience wants by the conclusion. By no means am I saying that The Green Mile is a badly written story, first from King and then translated by Darabont. The structure is sound and all of the various pieces come together, albeit over the course of a very lengthy three hours. Even moments that feel like they’re being dragged out, like the introduction of the special mouse found in the prison, will play a larger role. The way the different characters, their personal competing goals, and the way that recriminations bounce and build are all studiously plotted and well developed. It’s all there on paper, if you will. It’s easy to watch and nod along, content with the competent storytelling on display. However, at three hours in length, the movie’s self-indulgences can feel overstayed for what you get. I think after an hour and John Coffey’s first miracle, there probably isn’t a moment in The Green Mile that feels particularly surprising. With the warden mentioning a sick wife, you know she’ll eventually be healed by the gentle giant behind bars. With the inclusion of a wild unrepentant prisoner on the block, you know he’s going to go too far and instigate something. You know when somebody emphasizes how important it is for a sponge to be wet when applied to an electric chair head apparatus that it’s definitely going to appear later without. Again, this is a measure of providing clearly defined setups and then delivering payoffs, so the audience is naturally anticipating what you’ve already shown will be important. That’s good plotting.

Where the movie needs to add more is the substance attached to those plot points, namely characterization and theme. The characterization follows that same cut-and-dry designation. The sniveling privileged employee who uses his connections as protection to bully others never learns anything. The kind-hearted to a fault John Coffey is played so innocently, so full of extreme sincerity, that he almost comes across like a child in a very grown man’s body. The bad are bad, and the good are good, and there’s less ambiguity and more confirmation of these startling differences. I suppose there’s a lesson in the prejudices hurled against Coffey and the assumption of menace with his size as well as his race. This is tempered by the fact that the movie presents a scenario where Coffey is discovered with the dead girls in his arms, bloodied, and him wailing and unable to explain. Why would these townsfolk believe anybody else was guilty? Given the setting, there are naturally going to be racist attitudes and conclusions, but this scenario looks guilty even absent those. Except any ambiguity is erased upon our first meeting of Coffey. He’s kind to the point of self-sacrifice. He’s a messianic figure and that’s even before he demonstrates magic healing. There is nothing complicated about this man and there is nothing complicated about the drama relating to him. He’s more a plot tool to heal the ailing and suffer for their sins. The biggest mystery comes from trying to understand the incongruity of this man committing such heinous crimes. Halfway through, that mystery is solved in a tidy manner, and now the last part just becomes waiting for the final execution. It’s sad and moving but also fully manipulative. It’s like putting a puppy on death row and everyone shaking their head at the cruel injustice of the judicial system.

While engrossing and fairly entertaining, The Green Mile is a simple story that takes its sweet time. This is just as much an asset as a detriment. It’s an older time period, an older kind of story, and a Southern location, and the movie lulls you into its slower-paced rhythms. You may grow restless at points but you might also credit Darabont for staying true to his vision and providing enough time for his story to breathe, for moments to linger, and for the important story pieces to be established and cemented for an audience. This is a movie with no real hurry to get going. It simultaneously feels self-assured and ambitious and self-indulgent and dawdling. The last 30 minutes of the movie likely could have been consolidated; we get a final meal, a final request, a final appeal, so much so that it feels like we’re dragging out Coffey’s execution. It feels like Darabont and company are milking the tragedy into overkill. A little restraint could have achieved the same results as well as trim down the overall languid running time.

In the ensuing twenty years, Darabont helmed one more King adaptation, The Mist, and then proceeded to develop for television one of the most successful shows of all time, The Walking Dead. He was pushed out during its second season (and it’s never been as good) and tried his hand at starting other series like Mob City. He hasn’t directed any TV series since 2013 and any movies since 2007. In recent years, it feels like his special kinship as chief adapter of King yarns has been usurped by Mike Flanagan (Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep). Hanks has remained one of the most beloved actors for most of his adult life and has been working steadily. Michael Clarke Duncan (The Island) was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (losing to Michael Caine) and settled into a life of playing heavies and deep-voiced father figures. He tragically died in 2012 and was, curiously enough, dating Apprentice and, curiously enough, former White House assistant, Omarosa. Sam Rockwell has certainly broken out into a consummate performer, earning his own Oscar in 2017 for Three Billboards. Patricia Clarkson (Pieces of April) was 19 years younger than her onscreen husband, James Cromwell (Babe). Perhaps the most bizarre career turn belongs to Dough Hutchison. He was superb as the slimy, cowardly Percy, a man who enjoyed asserting his power to bully and punish others on cell block E. Hutchison appeared steadily on TV and then married Courtney Stodden, a 16-year-old girl he met through his own acting class (he was 34 years older).

Looking back at my original review for The Green Mile, I wince repeatedly. It feels like I was trying too hard to be cute with my language. “To release any more of the plot would be a crime punishable by Ole’ Sparky himself on the Green Mile,” makes me feel pain just reading it. I get eager to make awards pronouncements and I should have learned, even to this day, to cool down on these because they’re very typically wrong. The Green Mile was by no means the front-runner of the Oscars, nor did Hanks get nominated for Best Actor. Yet, an older Academy, like one from the early 90s, would have likely cherished it with several awards. It’s an old-fashioned movie that feels a little out of step with its times and square with the many artistically audacious movies of 1999. That out-of-time feeling can work toward its benefit as the slower pace leads to a more authentic vision being enacted for audiences more attuned to longer movies in binge culture. I think my initial grade of a B is still a fair assessment for the movie’s accomplishments.

Even in 1999, there was room for sentimental weepies for dudes. Other movies have gotten more attention over the years, more acclaim and resonance in the modern pop-culture atmosphere, but there’s still a genuine pleasure of watching a simple story well told, and even with its limitations, The Green Mile is still a simple story and well told and there will always be room for those kinds of movies no matter the era.

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Magnolia (1999) Released: December 17, 1999

Absa-fucking-brilliant.

Nate’s Grade: A

 

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WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

As you can see from my “review” above, I’ve not delivered much in the way of my thoughts on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia for twenty years. I knew this was a movie I had to revisit and a review that I finally needed to formulate. Ever since I first laid eyes on 1997’s groovy and grungy Boogie Nights, I was a PTA fan. I still consider Nights to be one of my favorite films of all time and the level of artistic spectacle, ambition, and characterization is so sharp, so in-your-face, so mesmerizing and devastating, that it’s no surprise that the majority of the actors from that film would eagerly agree to take part in Anderson’s big follow-up venture, which feels like a kitchen sink drama where just about every human in the greater Los Angeles area code is included. It’s a sprawling movie, ungainly and attention-seeking, messy, and I absolutely love it. The three-hour running time can feel self-indulgent but it’s the kind of self-indulgence I excuse because it relates directly to the ambition of the storyteller and scope of their project. Even Anderson himself has recently remarked that Magnolia is in desperate need of judicious editing and that he would have significantly trimmed or eliminated certain characters and their stories. To this I say – don’t you dare! This movie is the length it needs to be to tell its complicated mosaic of late twentieth century life with a cast of a dozen characters all getting their due. I don’t want a slimmer Magnolia because it would take away the majesty and magic, the awe-inducing power of watching a filmmaker operate on a level few others will ever be able to perform. I want every luxurious second of artistic indulgence and ambition in this movie to remain standing. Even twenty years later, I was just as ready and able to fall under the spell of Anderson’s L.A. opera.

I think that’s almost the best way to describe Magnolia, like a modern-day opera because it plays out at such epic levels of heightened human emotion and irony. Characters even make reference to moments feeling like a movie, which works in commenting on tropes like the “deathbed reconciliation” without pulling the viewer out of the reality of the drama. There’s a narrator opening and closing the movie, drawing attention to the nature of coincidence and how strange occurrences happen far more often than people register. The little connections are all around us waiting to be made visible, and at its core the film is about pairs and two men’s lives, Phillip Baker Hall’s famous TV game show host Jimmy Gator and Jason Robards’ TV producer, Earl Partridge. Both men are dying from cancer, both have children they have wronged that want nothing to do with them (Melora Walters as Claudia Wilson Gator, Tom Cruise as Frank Mackey), and both men are seeking to attempt to make amends. From here, Anderson’s world spirals out, each new connection adding further layers and contemplation. We have the pairing of contestants from Jimmy Gator’s TV show, old and new; “Quiz Kid” Donnie Smith (William H. Macy) struggling as an adult, and Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), being pushed around by his selfish fame-chasing father. There are good men serving as caregivers for those in need, notably Officer Jim Kurring (John C. Reilly) and hospice nurse Phil Parma (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). There are the suffering wives, Linda Partridge (Julianne Moore) feeling unworthy, and Rose Gator (Melinda Dillon) feeling perhaps like she doesn’t fully know her husband. There are other assorted smaller supporting roles but these are the axes our world revolves around.

I’m amazed how much of this movie has stuck with me over the years. I know I’ve quoted Donnie Smith’s personal lament in several reviews, his earnest plea for finding a connection in the universe that is said so plainly, so openly: “I have lots of love to give. I just don’t know where to put it.” I remember the ending shot on Melora Walters’ smiling face and the triumph that it felt like. Ultimately, Magnolia is about the desire for human connection and the level of forgiveness we’re capable of. Every character onscreen is hurting, whether openly and obviously or through a mask affixed to them through years of trauma and/or repression. Frank Mackey is the best summary of this. His career is built upon profiting from the resentment of emasculated men angry with women for rejecting their advances and perceived worth. He’s one of those pickup artists who coaches fragile men on the secret to hypnotizing women into being their sex slaves; his course includes section titles like “Come up with a tragic backstory” and, “How to fake like you are a good and caring person.” Sure, it’s not the most subtle delivery for subtext, but in the ensuing two decades the rise of a certain hostile Internet subculture of misogyny has made this pied piper of male entitlement even more socially relevant and intriguing. Cruise is utterly spellbinding as the leader of his movement trying to force those long-sought connections. He radiates contempt that it might make you shiver. He flat-out deserved the Oscar that year. His deathbed reunion with his bad dad even meets its emotional catharsis on its own terms, with Frank crying but still berating his father and telling him how much he hates him. Even when the old man eventually opens his eyes, seeing his son’s return one last time before the breath of life evaporates, Anderson doesn’t overplay the scene. Their eyes are fixed on one another but no words are said, and ultimately that’s all that we require. It’s there. A final connection.

This desire for human connection is also represented through the burgeoning romance between Officer Kurring and Claudia Gator. He’s so good-hearted and square and she’s such a self-destructive and doubtful mess that you can’t help but push them together. Anderson knows this, lingering on their interactions, which are more awkward but promising like real life rather than the more movie moments of romantic comedies. When Jim hangs outside after leaving, hesitating about going back, you can sense Anderson compelling this budding connection. They each have their troubles but there’s something there, and watching a nice guy (a rejection of Frank Mackey’s dogma) making breakthroughs with sheer kindness is admirable. Their first date is so heartfelt it almost made me wince. She’s convinced things will go bad unless they tear down whatever barriers prospective couples construct for protection. She insists they should be completely honest. She opens up to him with her vulnerability. She doesn’t think she’s worthy of love, let alone from a decent and good person. He shares his embarrassments and inadequacy, and they kiss in one of those swooning moments where the camera just pushes in, a movie-movie moment these two have found for themselves. This relationship is the heart of the movie, and no deluge of irony and narrative rug-pulling will displace the fact that, at its heart, this big sprawling movie comes down to the simple, relatable, and almost quaint blossoming of romantic possibility between two different souls who find a needed and reciprocated kinship in one another.

Anderson’s artistic ambition takes my breath away. The way his camera is roving, hunting for the people in this world, actively communicating the urgency and messiness. But things can slow down too when needed and scenes are allowed to breathe and achieve their full potential. This is another reason I would be loathe for any sort of re-cut. The way he incorporates singer-songwriter Aimee Mann’s music is better than most actual movie musicals. The way the lyrics for “Wise Up” perfectly match the specific characters as we check in on them one-by-one singing aloud to the tune, a uniform connection between them, the music of life underneath the words, is stirring. Jon Brion’s musical score is often percolating behind the scenes, adding graceful notes of melancholy and swelling uplift.

And then there’s the out-of-nowhere ending where frogs fall from the sky. It’s so wonderfully unexpected that I remember my father sitting beside me in 1999 and just cackling, his face beaming with excitement from watching a movie that had him completely. It’s one of those magical movie moments that I think I’ll always remember, especially in an audacious year of cinematic highs with so many instant classic zeitgeist-defining moments. Roger Ebert called it a “scene of transcendent wonder.” I enjoy that the rain of frogs works on a few levels, tapping into the history of Biblical plagues, like an act by a vengeful, or loving, God to mankind to shape up. I enjoy how, when Rose finds her daughter in this moment of chaos, Anderson’s camera quickly zooms onto a painting in Claudia’s apartment with the small text at the bottom reading, “But it did happen.” This works on a few levels: what we’re seeing is literally happening, and has happened anecdotally when tornadoes cross over lakes and ponds, but it also works on a deeper level. Rose has abandoned her husband after he could not admit he molested their daughter. By embracing in the end (end times?), it’s the mother’s acceptance of her daughter’s trauma from the hands of the man she had loved. But it did happen. These kinds of subtext threads are everywhere, ready for tugging, ready for more analysis and connections to be made. I am thankful that New Line Cinema gave Anderson final cut for his uncompromising vision. At the conclusion of this look back, I’m of the opinion that Magnolia and The Iron Giant should have won all the 1999 Oscars.

The acting in this movie is simply awe-inspiring. Every actor gets their time in the spotlight, their moment to showcase their talent. There’s one moment where Hall is addressing the game show audience and seems to get lost in the moment, falling victim to his depleting senses from the cancer eating away at him, and the camera just holds on him as he carries on. It’s a moment of pronounced vulnerability and, upon watching it this recent time, I burst out in tears. Hall is marvelous. Reilly is so earnest it makes me hurt. There are so many little perfectly developed scenes and moments. The confrontation with Marcie. Donnie Smith professing his unrequited love to a braces-wearing bartender and his sad inability to function as an adult. Frank Mackey turning on his interviewer (April Grace) when she digs too close to his phony persona (“I’m quietly judging you”). Alfred Molina beside himself at the gall of Donnie. Rose Gator’s heartbreaking, “You should know better.” Earl’s haunting monologue about the power of regret and realizing things too late. Luis Guzman as, apparently credited, himself on the game show panel. There’s not a bad actor in the whole movie. Moore’s performances will likely earn the most eyebrow-raising because of how unrestrained she is but that’s part of her character. Linda has a drug history, perhaps some mental issues, and she’s confronting her own guilt that she married Earl to get his money and now that his time is near she can’t live with herself. She can’t handle the myriad of emotions crashing inside her and I don’t blame her. That’s another aspect I find so refreshing with all of Anderson’s movies, past and present — he has no condescension for his characters. They can be the most broken people but he still views them as people worthy of affection and our time.

Magnolia did not receive the critical or commercial success of Boogie Nights. On the fascinating behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD, Anderson can be seen role-playing with his then-girlfriend Fiona Apple over the different receptions of his two movies. “You’re no Boogie Nights, Magnolia,” he says with a self-deprecating yet somewhat defeated smile. Anderson would continue making idiosyncratic movies that continued to set him apart and earn even more critical plaudits. He was nominated for Best Director for 2007’s There Will Be Blood and 2017’s Phantom Thread. In total, nine actors have been nominated for Oscars in PTA films, and Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for Blood. I do lament that Anderson’s movies have increasingly become less convergent with my tastes. He’s drifted away from his plot-heavy tales and moved toward more plot-light stories anchored around significant leads. Phantom Thread was the first PTA film I’ve enjoyed without reservation since 2002’s beguiling Adam Sandler-deconstruction experiment, Punch-Drunk Love. Anderson married actress Maya Rudolph and they have two children. Her care-taking of him while he was sick became his inspiration for Phantom Thread. The actors in Magnolia have met great personal success with several eventual Oscar winners (Moore, Hoffman) and nominees (Reilly, Felicity Huffman). Several actors have since passed, notably Robards in 2000 and Hoffman in 2014 and magician-turned-actor Ricky Jay in 2018. Each actor is missed.

I don’t really have an older review to compare to but my single summary blurb seems appropriate still twenty years later. This is a masterpiece. It’s a transporting and bold finale to a year of audacious cinema pushing the bounds of what movies could accomplish.

 

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CONCLUSIONS

I’ve expounded on 16 movies over the course of 37,000 words, and I’ve only come to the conclusion that 1999 may be an even better year in film than I originally believed. Every movie on my re-watch, with the exception of Wild Wild West and Dogma, was viewed on par or better than when it was released. I even raised my grades for the pans, The World is Not Enough and Bats. Even the movies I put on this to-do list that I thought would be a counter balance to the good turned out better than I anticipated. There simply was something magical about this year in cinema and going back and watching these movies, with an older set of eyes, only made me appreciate them more and see more depth to a barrage of movies that initially blew my 17-year-old self away. I really enjoyed going back to these movies and going back to my old reviews, the first from my career as a critic. I was really expecting to cringe more from my early critical analysis, and there are definitely moments that achieve this, but I was overall more impressed by my younger self. I may continue doing this twenty-year re-watch into 2020, looking back at maybe a 2000 movie every month or every other month. Not every writer has an archive of twenty years of reviews to go back to, so I might as well make use of this resource.

Thank you for reading this far and I hope you’ve gotten something out of this verbose trip back down memory lane with me. I’m going to go on record and officially declare 1999 the greatest year for movies… ever. Movies make me happy like few other things in this world, and I look forward to being able to share my passion for this amazing, life-changing year of film with friends for years and years to come.