1999 - possibly one of the best years in movies?

[The NZA]

i've seen numerous retrospectives on this, and factors why this was: art house stuff being done by smaller studios propped by larger ones to fund them, etc

still, what a lineup...saw a handful of these in theaters at the time, but many of them on DVD/etc after.  what about y'all?

 

 

Fight Club

The Matrix

American Beauty

Run Lola Run

Go

Boys Don't Cry

The Sixth Sense

Three Kings

Election

Being John Malkovich

Magnolia

The Blair Witch Project

Office Space

The Iron Giant

Eyes Wide Shut

South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut

The Talented Mr. Ripley

 

1999: The Year That Changed Movies

 

 

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From "The Matrix" and "The Blair Witch Project" to "American Beauty" and "The Sixth Sense", the last year of the millennium was transformative for Hollywood

ew.com

 

You can stop waiting for the future of movies. It's already here. Someday, 1999 will be etched on a microchip as the first real year of 21st-century filmmaking. The year when all the old, boring rules about cinema started to crumble. The year when a new generation of directors—weaned on cyberspace and Cops, Pac-Man and Public Enemy—snatched the flickering torch from the aging rebels of the 1970s. The year when the whole concept of "making a movie" got turned on its head.
Skeptical? Consider the evidence: The whirling cyberdelic Xanadu of The Matrix. The relentless, rapid-fire overload of Fight Club. The muddy hyperrealism of The Blair Witch Project. The freak show of Being John Malkovich. The way time itself gets fractured and tossed around in The Limeyand Go and Run Lola Run. The spooky necro-poetry of American Beauty and The Sixth Sense. The bratty iconoclasm of Dogma. The San Fernando Valley sprawl of this winter's Magnolia. Were you prone to theatrical pronouncements, you might say that not since the annus mirabilis of The Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, and Stagecoach has Hollywood brought so many narrative innovations screaming into the mainstream. "It's like 1939," marvels director Alexander Payne, whose dark satire Election represents yet another escape from the fuddy-duddy format. "There's a bumper crop of movies that, even if they're not perfect, are interesting and intelligent."

And fearless. If Hollywood's old guard tends to kneel before the Ten Commandments of screenwriting ("Thou shalt insert a plot point on page 27"), the new guard behaves with blissful sacrilege—even when it comes to the laws of physics. In these new films there's no such thing as death. (Lola takes a bullet to the heart 30 minutes into Run Lola Run, but that barely slows down her kinetic dash through the streets of Berlin.) Time doesn't move in a straight line. (The Limey casually skips and flutters between days and decades.) And why get hung up on logic? If you want John Malkovich to slide down a slimy tunnel into the cerebral cortex of John Malkovich, what's stopping you?

 

Nothing. Like Keanu Reeves' hero in The Matrix (aptly named Neo), members of this new breed—backed by stars like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, and Cameron Diaz—are wondering whether the rules that have governed the silver screen for nearly a century amount to little more than an illusion. "Hollywood narrative film is in its death throes right now and people are looking for something else," declares R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe, who produced Being John Malkovich. Which doesn't mean the studios are going to cease and desist from giving us Random Hearts and Runaway Bride—flicks like those often make money—but only that Random Hearts and Runaway Bride are starting to look as clueless and wheezy as a Bing Crosby movie in the year of Bonnie and Clyde.

"Everybody knows that we're hitting the limits of traditional filmmaking because it's becoming so perfectionistic," says Tom Tykwer, the German director of Run Lola Run. "You are seeing films that are so perfect you don't even connect to them anymore. A film like Malkovich is an invitation to do something completely different. Even The Matrix, because it still serves all of our traditional desires in cinema, but it plays with your mind in a very strange way. Ten years ago, I don't think people would have even been ready for it."

 

 

 

 

1999: The Last Great Year in Movies

 

 

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Fight Club. Being John Malkovich. The Matrix. Magnolia. The Blair Witch Project. They predicted a revolution in film that never happened.

www.esquire.com

 

We are in many ways worse off now than we were 15 years ago as a culture. We seem to have run out of original ideas. On the list of top-grossing 1999 films in the U.S., there isn't a single superhero film, and most of the films are from original scripts, not established source material. The Matrix, which created "bullet time" special effects, influenced films like Inception, and rebooted existential sci-fi films, was made from a completely original script, not a comic book. The Sixth Sense, the second-highest grossing film of 1999, was an authentic concept that gave a new life to twist endings.

Of all the filmmakers who made ripples in the Class of '99, only Malkovich's Spike Jonze still really makes avant-garde-ish films. Her won him a Best Screenplay Oscar this year for its spot-on depiction of how lonely our lives have become. That's not to say there's been a complete dearth of originality in the past decade, but most films, at least studio films, don't speak to our current state like the films of 1999 did.

Then there's The Blair Witch Project, which turns 15 this month. Witchwasn't the first film to use found footage as a storytelling device, but it was the first one to take it mainstream. Is Blair Witch a great film? No, but it made us quail in fear simply because no one had seen anything like it at the time (and those pre-True Detective devil traps are pretty freaky). Of all the found-footage genre films — yes, this is now a subgenre of horror, thanks to Blair Witch's incredible profit — it is by far the best. Back in 1999, a movie with a webpage was a new gambit. No one knew what to make of it: Was it a documentary? Or was it a fictional film? Those who saw it in the theater were met with wobbly handheld cameras that made the audience so nauseous, some of them hurled in the aisles. Today, through YouTube clips and smartphones, we've become desensitized to those herky-jerky nuances. Another ingenious thing about the film: The so-called "witch" never reveals itself. It may have been one of the first moments in modern horror cinema when the villain never appears. At all. The movie fked with our minds so much, many of us really did think Y2K's purported end-of-the-world threat would manifest and kill us. With the help of Witch, camcorder sales spiked over 800 percent from 1998 to 2000, and now filmmakers could make films on a shoestring budget and edit their movies on a laptop.

 

 

[Keth]

I was literally talking to my coworkers 2 days ago about this. Absolutely insane year for movies without even realizing it. I always thought most of these were even earlier.