Now, other years are more top heavy than this one. But top to bottom, in my opinion, no movie year was better than 1999. There’s a deep, deep bench of quality films across all genres. I don’t know what happened, but I approve!
For example, Election, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Green Mile, Tarzan, Eyes Wide Shut, Notting Hill, The Boondock Saints, The Mummy, The Spy Who Shagged Me, Analyze This, Any Given Sunday, and the Best Picture Winner, American Beauty also came out this year. That’s enough decent to great films for a PART 2 of the best movies of 1999, because they’re NOT even in the top 15 of the year! Amazing!
Honorable Mentions, I chose 5 because of how packed this year was:
Do you know how hard it is to make science cinematic? That bums me out, since it’s still the best way to get someone a better life, so thanks Joe Johnston and Jake Gyllenhaal, for giving us a movie where calculus – CALCULUS!! – helps our hero, Homer Hiccum, solve a big problem in his story. Plus, Gyllenhaal, and Chris Cooper have one of the great working class father/son relationships put to film. Every high school class should have to watch this movie.
From the cramped coal mines of West Virginia to the gray cubicles of corporate office culture. Mike Judge’s satire has one of the great first hours of any movie, showing how inane repetition and micro aggressions create desperate souls out of everyone, and how “fresh” ideas, no matter how idiotic can win over any corporate stooge if delivered with confidence.
This old fashioned drama has a charming, ubiquitous appeal. Tobey Maguire is excellent playing (another) Homer, a boy trapped in a Maine orphanage, desperate to get out and see the world. Homer’s journey teaches him about life, love, moral complexity, and a purpose driven life, what some call a coming of age story.
I doubt good old Billy Shakespeare thought his stories might be best translated to American high schools. And, yet, this take on Taming of the Shrew is just a blast of a teen comedy. Opposites attract in the form of dancing prodigy Julia Stiles and a little known actor at the time called Heath Ledger, giving us a taste of what he’d have in store over the next decade.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s most ambitious movie might be his best. Weaving a series of Pulp Fiction like vignettes with no connection together using something totally unexpected that may or may not work for viewers. For me? It drove the movie to a whole new level.
Of the many original movie scripts out there, this Charlie Kaufman the gold standard for your originality test: “pupeteer goes onto the 7 1/2 floor of an office building and finds a portal into John Malkovich’s brain.” The story gets even trippier and weirder after that, but the strangeness of the movie never overshadows the powerful themes about control, identity, and legacy Spike Jonze and Kaufman lay out for everyone.
This movie is much more than it’s sterling marketing campaign. The found footage gold standard uses that conceit to the fullest, making audiences truly believe these kids are getting lost deeper and deeper into the woods. The filmmakers restraint is also brilliant, letting everyone’s imaginations run wild at the horror and trauma the Blair Witch will conjure. The dread builds and builds to the brilliant and horrifying climax.
Repressed masculinity has never looked as interesting or fearsome as in David Fincher’s social commentary on the modern man. Ed Norton and Brad Pitt give electric performances, and the Jim Uhls screenplay has an all time twist, and uses that twist to make the movie more interesting after it happens, a feat only great screenplays can pull off.
One of the many Hayao Miyazaki masterpieces from Studio Ghibli. This movie is an animated visual feast, a rousing film quest, an environmental allegory, and a complex drama with numerous compelling characters, ya know, par for the course for the Japanese legend.
This is the movie where the Wachowskis put it all together. Visual effects were transformed forever because of bullet time technology; their story is built around the simple but powerful idea that the world is not real; and finally, the plot uses the hero’s journey to build in some biblical style acts of courage, betrayal, and love. Original ideas rarely reimagine the movie industry like this film did.
