NEW YORK, NY.- One thing to love about time is how liberating it can be. I, for instance, am at liberty to look at the Top 10 movies for the weekend of Aug. 20, 1999 — when “The Sixth Sense,” in its third week out, began its monopoly of the chart — and declare “The Thomas Crown Affair” the best of the lot.
What could be going on here? Am I actually saying that a Pierce Brosnan-Rene Russo remake of the old Steve McQueen-Faye Dunaway love heist, from 1968, was always superior to M. Night Shyamalan’s where’d-that-come-from supernatural smash? Or have 25 years ripened one and grayed the other? Hadn’t “The Blair Witch Project” opened in July yet was still very much a thing? (It had, yet it was, down at No. 5.) Only one of the 10 movies was a sequel. In the mix were Julia Roberts, at her commercial peak, in “Runaway Bride” (No. 4, after opening in July) and Steve Martin and a gonzo Eddie Murphy, holding at second, in “Bowfinger.”
So why I am hugging the remake?
For one thing, that’s the kind of year 1999 was: a lot of everything. It’s almost a reflex now, to claim it was just about the greatest class of movies there ever was. Brian Raftery called his breathlessly chummy history of 1999 “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.” But I’ve always sought clarification on “greatest,” because this had never been a year of easily triumphant or consensus work. Try 1939, ’68 or ’89 for wonders of the world. “Great,” in 1999, denotes range, volume, abundance, deluge. It’s quality capturing quantity: a megalopolis skyline as opposed to a mountain range.
Twenty-five years later, 1999 is known for being the year of Shyamalan’s movie, of “Blair Witch” and “American Beauty,” which came out in September and went on, somehow, to win the best picture Oscar. The year is remembered for “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” and “The Matrix,” which had opened in March and by August was winding down its initial colonization of the cultural imagination. It was known for existential identity crackups, and a pervasive itch of anomie, that you could sense in “Office Space,” “Election,” “Dick” and “Fight Club,” which weren’t hits, but also in “American Pie,” which very much was. So Raftery’s breathless tone seems right. It was the last most-exciting period for American moviegoing. It was the last most-exciting time to write about the movies.
In the spring of 1999, Barbara Shulgasser-Parker stepped down from her film critic’s post at the San Francisco Examiner, which then chose me to fill her shoes. I was 23. I wore board shorts and flip-flops to the office. My T-shirts were from Urban Outfitters. I had studied film in college and, when the Examiner called, had been drifting vaguely toward graduate school. But suddenly professional moviegoing doubled as secondary education: I was being paid to learn — no financial debt but a lifetime debt of gratitude. 1999: Best. Movie. School. Ever.
A quantitative framing of “great” is evident in a roll call of filmmakers whose movies opened in the United States that year. Every major, majorish, soon-to-be-major director; every solid hack, journeyman and Kleenexploitationist; Pixar! — they all crammed into 1999’s elevator.
Read ’em and weep.
The veterans and elders: Robert Altman, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Sydney Pollack, Clint Eastwood, Norman Jewison, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Milos Forman, Ron Howard, Carlos Saura, Alan Rudolph, Franco Zeffirelli, Alan Parker, Neil Jordan, Lawrence Kasdan.
The funny guys: Woody Allen, Rob Reiner, Albert Brooks, Barry Sonnenfeld, Harold Ramis, Frank Oz.
The art-housers: Jane Campion, Ang Lee, Giuseppe Tornatore, John Sayles, Mike Leigh, Wim Wenders, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Pedro Almodóvar, Hirokazu Kore-eda, David Mamet, Anthony Minghella, Mike Figgis.
The weirdos: David Cronenberg, Hayao Miyazaki, David Lynch, Sam Raimi.
The cool kids: Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, David Fincher, Michael Mann, Nancy Savoca, Lana and Lilly Wachowski.
The new kids: Shyamalan, Christopher Nolan, Guy Ritchie, Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne, Julie Taymor, Sam Mendes, Tom Tykwer, Trey Parker.
Within two November weekends of each other: Wayne Wang, Kevin Smith, Atom Egoyan, Luc Besson, Barry Levinson and Tim Burton.
Few of their movies are what anybody would classify as peak them. Many of these names were taking detours, breaking character, trying something. Spike Lee made a serial-killer thriller (“Summer of Sam”); Mike Leigh, a comedy about Gilbert and Sullivan (“Topsy-Turvy”); Ang Lee, a Civil War western (“Ride With the Devil”). Wes Craven tried Kleenexploitation and made a Meryl Streep movie. If they weren’t making their “best” film, a lot of them probably made your favorite of theirs.
I wrote anywhere from three to five reviews a week, and used the job to quietly stalk my heroes, begging friends to introduce me to Manohla Dargis and J. Hoberman so I could put my foot in my mouth.
The job used me to immediately file a review of “The Phantom Menace” from a New York hotel by phoning it in. On the other end of the line was a beloved copy editor named Bobbie Hess, who summoned the lordly strength to get herself through all of my midair backspacing. I had about five hours to watch and assess Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and the parochial joke of its digital fig leaves. For me, cruel and unusual punishment would entail having to read either one of those two things. Reading both might kill me dead.
The job was a dream come true; but that year was something out of a nightmare, the bucket-and-brooms sequence of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” but with a notepad. It was too much. I can see it now. I can say it. Too much for 23-year-old me. But also too much for America. There were a lot of hit movies that year. And it just feels like the ones we missed whizzed by because neither Lucy nor Ethel had room in their maw to stuff another bonbon, let alone to taste anything. It has taken years to see everything we didn’t see, to figure out what it all was, to discover what it meant, and how much to treasure it. And yet the glutton in me, the maximalist, the hoarder, yearns to invoke 1999’s 15th-biggest song: I want it that way.
Why, though? Well, because what almost certainly made iffy business sense made all the cultural sense in the world. There was something for just about everybody. And even if a movie wasn’t “for you,” it was ready to blow your mind, get on your nerves, freak you out. Genres were being reconsidered, expanded, rejected, mocked, obeyed. Nobody, in a given week, could rely on the same-old, same-old. Even the many bad movies — and they truly don’t get worse than the substantial John Travolta hit “The General’s Daughter” — were … interesting. That’s probably the word to sit alongside “great.”
“Interesting” has long lost any meaningful association with enthusiasm, fascination or importance. But that’s really what made 1999: It was the most interesting year. The masterpiece was not the dominant mode. Risk and idiosyncrasy were. Take “Inspector Gadget,” down at No. 7 and, after a month, still raking it in. The trend of awful movies that began as old TV was in full effect in ’99 — “Wild Wild West,” “The Mod Squad,” “My Favorite Martian,” “Dudley Do-Right.” And if you were taking “Inspector” the cartoon and turning it into a Matthew Broderick romantic comedy, somebody had to figure out how to get his gadgets to go-go in live action, how to go-go gloopily enough to get a 7-year-old to go gaga.
More interesting now is how determined to become an old-fashion beat cop this plucky, all-but-adolescent Gadget is and how invested the city’s shady brass (Cheri Oteri and Dabney Coleman, gaga experts) is in Joely Fisher’s Supercop technology. When rich meany Dr. Claw (Rupert Everett) clones Gadget so that good Broderick can beat his mechanical bad self up, two law enforcement fantasies collide.
I worked alongside three indefatigable critics: Walter Addiego, G. Allen Johnson and Bob Stephens. They handled both what I couldn’t and, although I’m ashamed to confess it now, what I was too cool for. I was too cool for “Inspector Gadget,” for instance. So Allen dealt with it. That was something I had to curb in my approach to the job: cool, yes; too cool, no. I had been a big Village Voice reader and those folks — Hoberman and Amy Taubin and Dennis Lim, Jessica Winter and Michael Atkinson — seemed ultracool to me. I did a lot of Village Voice karaoke back then while I figured out a voice that sounded like mine.
There was so much movie criticism being done by so many different people with so many different approaches to watching and writing about movies. So many peeves and politics and theories. That summer, Roger Ebert invited me to co-host two episodes of “At the Movies” after Gene Siskel’s death. After we taped, he walked me around Chicago and offered what felt, to a cool kid, like radical advice: Forget theory, write for everybody. So I spent that year learning and unlearning. What to do with my peeves? What were my politics? Everybody, Roger?
With the movies in that Aug. 20 Top 10, I was figuring it all out. Renny Harlan’s genius-shark thriller, “Deep Blue Sea,” was in ninth place and kind of a hit in its third week. I don’t know why I spent so much of the review lamenting that one of my favorite musicians (LL Cool J) was now a stock character at a doomed oceanic research station: Black Cook Who Knows He’s Gonna Die.
Yet, it’s clear that my peeves were my politics. It was a good year to air those politics in order, say, to lament what the movies were asking of Black people — the men, anyway; you had to wait all the way until October and “The Best Man” to find a Black woman with much more to do than sit around or fall over. For the men, the juiciest parts were behind bars: Isaiah Washington in “True Crime,” Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence in “Life,” Michael Clarke Duncan in “The Green Mile,” Denzel Washington in “The Hurricane.” One sobering thing about “The Matrix” is that at least Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus and Gloria Foster’s Oracle were trying to get the word out that none of us was free.
Twenty-five years later, that Aug. 20 crop is still pretty tasty. Movie stars still meant something to us. Sometimes, they were thinking aloud about their meaning. Roberts spends a long hunk of “Runaway Bride” at a hair salon debating the value of personality types with Joan Cusack. What’s better: quirky or weird or mysterious? It’s a wonderful bit. This movie star, one of the greatest, is considering what makes her her alongside one of the great character actors, a title that falls to anybody too weird or too quirky and not mysterious enough to be a regular star.
As a movie, this thing still works. It’s the same “Pretty Woman” lineup — Roberts, Richard Gere, Héctor Elizondo, Garry Marshall directing. But a new plot and a decade more definition on Roberts’ and Gere’s stardom dispel the reek of desperation. Something’s being advanced, compounded rather than merely retrod. (Another “Universal Soldier”? That’s desperate.) Gere’s a chauvinist USA Today columnist fired for getting a bunch of stuff wrong in a story about how Roberts jilted a bunch of fiances. Vowing to report the real story, he swans down to her small Maryland town — for GQ!
She and Gere don’t need to Go There. But all you want to know is how the plot mechanics are going to send them anyway. The movie takes its sweet time resolving all its questions. Namely: How could Gere be dumb enough to fall for her? Because she’s Julia Roberts, yes. But also because the person Gere’s playing — and having a blast doing so — really is narcissistically dumb. The only way this movie works is if Roberts and Gere have some kind of ancient movie history for the comedy to play with.
Lots of actors had a good 1999. Nobody had a better one than Roberts. Nine weeks before “Runaway Bride,” she let Hugh Grant mope and sputter his way into her heart in “Notting Hill,” and people went crazy for that.
The movies were still trying to figure out what else this superhuman cardigan could do. “Mickey Blue Eyes” takes Grant’s English auctioneer and marries him to the mob. Once you see his version of a wiseguy — it’s like watching someone getting ready to sneeze — you wish the movie had done more with the marriage. This movie treats the meekness and bookish charisma that worked on Roberts as evidence of feminine mystique. When he breaks into a run, Jeanne Tripplehorn, as his schoolteacher girlfriend, actually laughs at him. This is Grant’s first stateside swing, and out of the gate, the movie’s wondering if he’s man enough for us.
I have no memory of going to see “Bowfinger.” But evidently I did — and dug it. Steve Martin wrote, Frank Oz directed. The plot’s absurd and absurdly complicated. Martin plays a deluded filmmaker who can’t land the biggest star in Hollywood, an insecure egotist named Kit Ramsey (Eddie Murphy), for his new sci-fi-action movie (“Chubby Rain”). So he stalks him and instructs his cast and crew to shoot around an unwitting Kit. Martin keeps his crosshairs fixed on the movie business but also on Scientology (Kit’s an adherent of an outfit called MindHead). They’ve tossed in so many throwaway gags that half of those could be the basis of a second rude comedy.
It’s 97 minutes (movies ran shorter then), and after 85, the “Check engine” light comes on. The movie is smartly, warmly cast around its edges, as perfectly as “Mickey Blue Eyes” and “Runaway Bride” are around theirs. But Murphy is still the magnet, live-wiring his way through it all: antic, paranoid, horny. The coup is Martin giving him another chance at Peter Sellers excess, introducing Kit’s dorky brother and having Murphy play him, too. The circumstances are resonant. Murphy used to be the biggest star in the world. Then it was “Metro” and “Holy Man.” In “Bowfinger,” he’s at a piquant 10 out of the gate, screaming for respect at anybody he sees: “Get my door just as fast as you get Tom Hanks’!” Bowfinger” ended up only a loose hit. But everybody remembers it for how superbly meta Murphy seemed to be.
Before 1999, “meta” was not a concept I had really grasped. Suddenly, every third movie seemed to be in some way about itself, filmmaking or the movie business. John Malkovich as a personal theme-park ride landed in meta’s hipster strike zone. The Voice introduced its annual film poll in 1999, which “Being John Malkovich” topped. (It was also near the top of whatever list I made that year.) But “Blair Witch” was meta’s commercial and cultural gateway.
The first time I watched it was beside Ebert. The movie ended, and I sat there chilled, shocked that its three filmmaker protagonists were never found. He saw my open mouth and hunted for the appropriate paternal warmth to break the news: “That’s because they’re not real.” Until then, I remember watching a particular kind of tragedy: middle-class white kids lost in America looking for ghosts they couldn’t understand.
The second time I watched it was two weeks ago. And I was amused by how taken I had been with the arguably new conceit of found-footage filmmaking. Twenty-five years under the “Blair Witch” influence has rendered identifiable a DIY language for cheap thrills. And yet the shakes and blurs and amateurish camcorder operation affected me anyway, the way the mics hear what can’t be seen until one character tries locating the source of the night bumps.
Shyamalan trots out a jump scare or two in “The Sixth Sense,” but he was principally old-fashioned. He made a melodrama disguised in a bedsheet, like E.T. at Halloween. My worst tendencies converged the evening I originally saw it: I was so cool I passed out — “The Sixth Sense,” a sleeper in every way! I awoke in time for the reveal, which at least confirmed where Bruce Willis’ charisma had gone: limbo.
I hadn’t watched this one in its entirety since, but it’s all as I recalled. The sepulchral dankness across Shyamalan’s Philadelphia. The exquisitely whispery tenderness of Haley Joel Osment’s acting. What a calf he was. (And what a crime for him to lose an Oscar to anything having to do with “The Cider House Rules,” even Michael Caine.) Toni Collette, as Osment’s mother, also made an impression on me. Shyamalan didn’t have to write her part this fully; she didn’t need to etch it so finely. Yet, the movie’s all the more devastating for their labor. I was moved this time. That was new. In 25 years, I’ve learned what it means to carry sorrow. And this is one of Shyamalan’s strongest studies of grief’s geological table.
My misgivings haven’t changed. Willis’ child psychologist character is a gimmick. It’s as if Shyamalan watched “Ghost” and thought: What if nobody knew Patrick Swayze was dead. The gimmick is a problem. If people could see this guy hovering incessantly near this little boy, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be in “Doubt.” Which raises a conundrum, because any time Willis exists away from Osment, the movie’s dead, too.
So. This has been me taking the scenic route to explain why I still like “The Thomas Crown Affair” better. It was just such a surprise to rediscover how professional a movie it is. Just serious enough about what it’s up to and yet loose, sexy, aware of what it is. Brosnan’s a Manhattan moneybags who steals Impressionist oils with the Robb Report zeal his homies would put into golf. Russo’s the insurance investigator on his tail and seduced into a conflict of interest. Side-eyeing them both is Denis Leary’s detective. John McTiernan keeps it all kinds of light. But it’s never frivolous. There are stakes. Mostly, they’re Russo’s: Is she really going out with him? Unclear. But she’s having a good time figuring that out.
This was still a time when characters had sex for no reason other than that’s what people do. Although you could already feel the Bill Clinton scandal changing our ease with that. But the sex in “The Thomas Crown Affair” will shake your leg a little. Russo was in the goddess mold that Sophia Loren, Catherine Deneuve and Gina Lollobrigida helped shape. American movies have erased their sort of womanliness. The fun Russo’s having in “Thomas Crown” is the fun of a woman who loves being herself and who loves being with Brosnan.
I spent the last night of the last year of the 20th century alone on a hill overlooking downtown San Francisco, waiting for what turned out to be nothing. The Examiner nobly sent its staff to explore and inspect the Bay Area in anticipation of Y2K, an anticlimax that was the closest I came that year to a vacation. Anticlimax felt right. Where do you go after 1999? We had made it to the 2000s, where fresh crises awaited. But it’s clear now that we left the bounties of ’99 back there.
It’s too much to say that everything since at the movies has been anticlimactic. But hasn’t it? “The Sixth Sense” was the second-highest-grossing movie that year. The top earner made almost double. That was “Phantom Menace,” which, despite how loudly George Lucas’ directing begs to differ, was cooked up for world domination. The lesson Hollywood learned was more of that and less Shyamalan, more bankable certainty, less spaghetti at the wall. Shyamalan still got to be himself, and continues to be. But I’ve always had the sense that his success was a fluke that in the minds of some of the studios’ bottom-line thinkers might not have warranted the gamble. The first “X-Men” movie would open in 2000. It made a star of both Hugh Jackman and the mutant he played, a part he’s performing, still, to enormous sales in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” Shyamalan’s latest original, “Trap,” is doing … OK. But boy, does that title double as concise cultural criticism.
1999 was one of the last years in which nobody totally knew what might happen when you put a movie out. We didn’t know what we wanted. We were as much in the habit of being curious as being marketed to. It was the last of the riskiest years. And maybe all of that gambling was bad business. It’s still hard for me to believe that year actually happened. I guess I was a risk, too. It’s hard, now, to believe somebody took it.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
