Christopher OwensHard to believe it’s now 22 years since 1999.
 

Anyone who was born in January of that year will now be wrapping up university courses, taking their first steps on the corporate ladder and will not have been asked for ID when buying booze for a long time, certainly in Ireland.

I was 13 in 1999 which, in hindsight, turned out to be the perfect age to witness the paranoia re Y2K, the over-optimism about how the 21st century would turn out, worrying that the murder of Eamon Collins would signal another year of turmoil for the post-GFA era North, and a little piece of software called Napster which would drastically alter music (and how we consume it) forever.

It was also a year in which I began to take the medium of film much more seriously. And with the films coming out that year, the timing was impeccable. Fight Club πŸŽ₯The Matrix πŸŽ₯ Run Lola Run πŸŽ₯ The Blair Witch Project πŸŽ₯ Eyes Wide Shut πŸŽ₯ Election πŸŽ₯ Boys Don’t Cry among others. And this carried over into the following year with The Insider πŸŽ₯ Being John Malkovich  πŸŽ₯ Angela’s Ashes πŸŽ₯ Magnolia πŸŽ₯ Three Kings πŸŽ₯ and American Beauty (all of which had been released in the US the following year).

That’s quite an impressive list, and it’s not hard to think of it as being an incredibly special time. One where, seemingly, interesting and quirky movies were coming out once a month. When reviewing The Insider for Empire magazine, Adam Smith concluded his review with the following:

With 2000 already having delivered American Beauty and Magnolia, it appears that someone accidentally knocked the quality switch to "on" in the Hollywood machine. Let's hope no one notices.

He wasn’t the only one to articulate this recognition of living in a special time, but his phrasing was the most optimistic. The mid 90’s had largely belonged to indie movies while the Hollywood blockbusters from that period were bloated indulgences too in love with CGI to have much in the way of character Independence Day πŸŽ₯ Armageddon  πŸŽ₯ Batman and Robin while we also saw a desperate attempt at regurgitating a franchise, Blues Brothers 2000, and a pointless remake, Psycho. In many ways, it’s still the same today.

However, a series of coincidences and perfectly timed events gave us a year in which, according to author Brian Raftery:

…the surest way to feel that static-energy zap of possibility was to walk into a movie theatre in 1999…Many of these films … would break the laws of narrative, form, and even bullet-time-bending physics … Yet for all their audacity, the movies of 1999 were also sneakily personal, luring viewer with promises of high-end thrills or movie star grandeur – only to turn the focus back on the audience, forcing them to consider all sorts of questions about identity and destiny: Who am I? Who else could I be … As exhilarating as it was to walk into a theatre that year, it felt even better to float on out, alive with a sense of potential, the end credits hinting at a new start. Maybe something amazing was awaiting us on the other side of 1999. 

And, as he goes through each seminal movie released that year, it becomes clear just how correct that assessment is. The Blair Witch Project helped to redefine the indie horror by showing how an online marketing campaign can outdo the traditional Hollywood publicity machine. Election πŸŽ₯ Rushmore πŸŽ₯ The Virgin Suicides showed us teenagers as precocious fuckers as opposed to either full on nerds or high school “jocks” (as the Americans say). Three Kings made us aware of the realities of violence. And American Beauty was … well … not a million miles away from Office Space in terms of detecting a kind of bored, uninspired malaise in American suburbia pre-September 11th.

Reading Raftery’s takes on these films, I couldn’t help but finding myself in agreement with him. At the time, it seemed these films were about my generation and that adults had become too complacent. In an example of this generation divide, I recall going to see The Matrix in the cinema while my parents and two younger brothers went to see Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace at the same time. When the film ended, that mix of existentialist angst a 13-year-old feels and the idea that the reality we currently experience might not be all it seems was too potent for me to discard. Compared to my parents reminiscing nostalgically about the old Star Wars movies, and my younger brothers alternating between lightsaber battles and Jar Jar Binks impressions, I felt forward thinking and cutting edge.

Unfortunately, outside events (such as the shooting at Columbine High School) also found their way into the conversation around movies. Ironically, as Raftery points out, it brought into sharp relief the various escapist teen comedies/dramas that had just been released πŸŽ₯ American Pie πŸŽ₯ She’s All That πŸŽ₯ Varsity Blues πŸŽ₯ 10 Things I Hate About You making them big hits.

Possibly the most notorious film released in 1999, Fight Club was famously described by Portadown born Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard as:

…an inadmissible assault on personal decency. And on society itself…Like Hitler, its characters elevate the halbstarken, the ‘middle children of history’, the underclass of outsiders who feel alienated and unvalued, and form them into disciplined cells, giving them a purpose in life which is to inflict panic and anarchy on the community.

Like The Matrix in my case, it became a dividing line between those who felt swallowed up by the tame, consumerist lifestyle that had been a key part of the American dream since the 1950’s, and those who genuinely believed Francis Fukuyama’s idea that mature democracies would never go to war, hence the so called “end of history.”

Raftery also uses the book to argue that some of the cultural battles that the woke are misinterpreting at the moment were touched upon in this period, such as Boys Don’t Cry dealing with the case of Brandon Teena while ‘The Best Man’ and ‘The Wood’ both feature black casts and were written and directed by black auteurs, Malcolm D. Lee and Rick Famuyiwa. While things have moved on since those days - a straight woman playing a trans man wouldn’t fly in some circles these days - it is important to remember the early steps taken by those who came before you.

Will we see another year like it? Raftery concludes the book by surveying the movie landscape and finds it coming up short compared to TV, even noting that some of the movers and shakers who made their mark in 1999 now find themselves in TV roles more than movies nowadays. However, Raftery points out that these circumstances aren’t a million miles away from the ones we saw in the mid-90’s.

Obviously, this was written long before Covid-19 which has really done a number on cinemas as well as helped to boost the various streaming services already available and, arguably, alter the notion of what a film could be. The perfect example is Zack Snyder’s four hour cut of Justice League, but don’t forget the likes of Wonder Woman 1984 and Disney’s remake of Mulan. All three were premiered on HBO Max and Disney + respectively, bypassing the cinemas.

While this doesn’t necessarily have much of an impact on the content of the movies, it does remove the incredibly special tradition of sitting in a cinema with strangers, all experiencing the film at the same time. Everyone has their own tale about going to see a notable film and remembering how the audience reacted to a particular moment, be it Darth Vader’s revelation in The Empire Strikes Back, that twist in The Crying Game or hearing collective jaws dropping during the sketch sequence in Titanic. Will this be a thing of the past? I hope not, but I can see the cinema becoming more of a niche event, like going to an arcade.

By setting out to document a unique time in cinema, Raftery may very well have written the eulogy for cinema, and the late 90’s, as a whole.

Brian Raftery, 2020, Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. Simon & Schuster Publishing. ISBN-13: 978-1501175398

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist. 

Best. Movie. Year. Ever

Christopher OwensHard to believe it’s now 22 years since 1999.
 

Anyone who was born in January of that year will now be wrapping up university courses, taking their first steps on the corporate ladder and will not have been asked for ID when buying booze for a long time, certainly in Ireland.

I was 13 in 1999 which, in hindsight, turned out to be the perfect age to witness the paranoia re Y2K, the over-optimism about how the 21st century would turn out, worrying that the murder of Eamon Collins would signal another year of turmoil for the post-GFA era North, and a little piece of software called Napster which would drastically alter music (and how we consume it) forever.

It was also a year in which I began to take the medium of film much more seriously. And with the films coming out that year, the timing was impeccable. Fight Club πŸŽ₯The Matrix πŸŽ₯ Run Lola Run πŸŽ₯ The Blair Witch Project πŸŽ₯ Eyes Wide Shut πŸŽ₯ Election πŸŽ₯ Boys Don’t Cry among others. And this carried over into the following year with The Insider πŸŽ₯ Being John Malkovich  πŸŽ₯ Angela’s Ashes πŸŽ₯ Magnolia πŸŽ₯ Three Kings πŸŽ₯ and American Beauty (all of which had been released in the US the following year).

That’s quite an impressive list, and it’s not hard to think of it as being an incredibly special time. One where, seemingly, interesting and quirky movies were coming out once a month. When reviewing The Insider for Empire magazine, Adam Smith concluded his review with the following:

With 2000 already having delivered American Beauty and Magnolia, it appears that someone accidentally knocked the quality switch to "on" in the Hollywood machine. Let's hope no one notices.

He wasn’t the only one to articulate this recognition of living in a special time, but his phrasing was the most optimistic. The mid 90’s had largely belonged to indie movies while the Hollywood blockbusters from that period were bloated indulgences too in love with CGI to have much in the way of character Independence Day πŸŽ₯ Armageddon  πŸŽ₯ Batman and Robin while we also saw a desperate attempt at regurgitating a franchise, Blues Brothers 2000, and a pointless remake, Psycho. In many ways, it’s still the same today.

However, a series of coincidences and perfectly timed events gave us a year in which, according to author Brian Raftery:

…the surest way to feel that static-energy zap of possibility was to walk into a movie theatre in 1999…Many of these films … would break the laws of narrative, form, and even bullet-time-bending physics … Yet for all their audacity, the movies of 1999 were also sneakily personal, luring viewer with promises of high-end thrills or movie star grandeur – only to turn the focus back on the audience, forcing them to consider all sorts of questions about identity and destiny: Who am I? Who else could I be … As exhilarating as it was to walk into a theatre that year, it felt even better to float on out, alive with a sense of potential, the end credits hinting at a new start. Maybe something amazing was awaiting us on the other side of 1999. 

And, as he goes through each seminal movie released that year, it becomes clear just how correct that assessment is. The Blair Witch Project helped to redefine the indie horror by showing how an online marketing campaign can outdo the traditional Hollywood publicity machine. Election πŸŽ₯ Rushmore πŸŽ₯ The Virgin Suicides showed us teenagers as precocious fuckers as opposed to either full on nerds or high school “jocks” (as the Americans say). Three Kings made us aware of the realities of violence. And American Beauty was … well … not a million miles away from Office Space in terms of detecting a kind of bored, uninspired malaise in American suburbia pre-September 11th.

Reading Raftery’s takes on these films, I couldn’t help but finding myself in agreement with him. At the time, it seemed these films were about my generation and that adults had become too complacent. In an example of this generation divide, I recall going to see The Matrix in the cinema while my parents and two younger brothers went to see Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace at the same time. When the film ended, that mix of existentialist angst a 13-year-old feels and the idea that the reality we currently experience might not be all it seems was too potent for me to discard. Compared to my parents reminiscing nostalgically about the old Star Wars movies, and my younger brothers alternating between lightsaber battles and Jar Jar Binks impressions, I felt forward thinking and cutting edge.

Unfortunately, outside events (such as the shooting at Columbine High School) also found their way into the conversation around movies. Ironically, as Raftery points out, it brought into sharp relief the various escapist teen comedies/dramas that had just been released πŸŽ₯ American Pie πŸŽ₯ She’s All That πŸŽ₯ Varsity Blues πŸŽ₯ 10 Things I Hate About You making them big hits.

Possibly the most notorious film released in 1999, Fight Club was famously described by Portadown born Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard as:

…an inadmissible assault on personal decency. And on society itself…Like Hitler, its characters elevate the halbstarken, the ‘middle children of history’, the underclass of outsiders who feel alienated and unvalued, and form them into disciplined cells, giving them a purpose in life which is to inflict panic and anarchy on the community.

Like The Matrix in my case, it became a dividing line between those who felt swallowed up by the tame, consumerist lifestyle that had been a key part of the American dream since the 1950’s, and those who genuinely believed Francis Fukuyama’s idea that mature democracies would never go to war, hence the so called “end of history.”

Raftery also uses the book to argue that some of the cultural battles that the woke are misinterpreting at the moment were touched upon in this period, such as Boys Don’t Cry dealing with the case of Brandon Teena while ‘The Best Man’ and ‘The Wood’ both feature black casts and were written and directed by black auteurs, Malcolm D. Lee and Rick Famuyiwa. While things have moved on since those days - a straight woman playing a trans man wouldn’t fly in some circles these days - it is important to remember the early steps taken by those who came before you.

Will we see another year like it? Raftery concludes the book by surveying the movie landscape and finds it coming up short compared to TV, even noting that some of the movers and shakers who made their mark in 1999 now find themselves in TV roles more than movies nowadays. However, Raftery points out that these circumstances aren’t a million miles away from the ones we saw in the mid-90’s.

Obviously, this was written long before Covid-19 which has really done a number on cinemas as well as helped to boost the various streaming services already available and, arguably, alter the notion of what a film could be. The perfect example is Zack Snyder’s four hour cut of Justice League, but don’t forget the likes of Wonder Woman 1984 and Disney’s remake of Mulan. All three were premiered on HBO Max and Disney + respectively, bypassing the cinemas.

While this doesn’t necessarily have much of an impact on the content of the movies, it does remove the incredibly special tradition of sitting in a cinema with strangers, all experiencing the film at the same time. Everyone has their own tale about going to see a notable film and remembering how the audience reacted to a particular moment, be it Darth Vader’s revelation in The Empire Strikes Back, that twist in The Crying Game or hearing collective jaws dropping during the sketch sequence in Titanic. Will this be a thing of the past? I hope not, but I can see the cinema becoming more of a niche event, like going to an arcade.

By setting out to document a unique time in cinema, Raftery may very well have written the eulogy for cinema, and the late 90’s, as a whole.

Brian Raftery, 2020, Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. Simon & Schuster Publishing. ISBN-13: 978-1501175398

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist. 

5 comments:

  1. A lot of films here Christopher. It complements Gary Robertson's piece where he took us into the horror genre. I liked Fight Club and Eyes Wide Shut. Very rarely watch a movie now - it is usually box sets.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nah '95 was my favourite. Casino, Braveheart, Apollo 13, Heat, Usual Suspects, plus Pulp Fiction was released at the end of '94 and Trainspotting at the start of '96. A splendid wee run, never equalled in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Heat would be one of my all time favourites. Usual Suspects, my favourite film ever.

      Delete
  3. I watched Heat again last year, forgot how fuckin' good it was, but I'm like you and prefer box sets now. Last new film I watched was The Irishman.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think the Irishman was the last one I watched as well. I loved it.

      Delete