Every year has its fair share of highs and lows at the movies, but some always seem to
stand taller than the others.
With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, 1999 looks like one of cinema's greatest ever
years and each of these films is well worth rediscovering as they reach their milestone
anniversaries.
These are some of the best movies turning 20 in 2019.
As the 20th century drew to a close, society seemed to be spinning headlong into something
of an identity crisis.
It's only fitting, then, that 1999 was also the year that Fight Club brawled its way into
theaters, and left the world asking: "did you know the truth about Tyler Durden?"
Unless you were a fan of Chuck Palahniuk's original book, the answer to that question
was likely no.
Fight Club’s twist is one for the history books, and has got to be one of the main reasons
why watching David Fincher's film adaptation unfold was so much fun.
Part scathing indictment of corporate and consumer culture, part deconstruction of modern
masculine mythos and part exploration of white male privilege, Fincher's film is a take-no-prisoners
look at a society on the brink of self-destruction — and in desperate need of a little anarchy.
Fronted by Edward Norton, Brad Pitt and a marvelously manic Helena Bonham-Carter, anarchy
is just what Fincher and crew deliver with the brutal and bleak bare-knuckle bout that
is Fight Club — which remains just as potent and full of surprises 20 years after its release.
Though it takes a radically different approach to the subject matter, Mike Judge's office
comedy Office Space seems largely cut from the same thematic cloth as Fight Club.
After all, they're both concerned with the soul-crushing materialism of society, and
both follow an office drone so drained by everyday life that they become desperate to
find a way out.
Rather than allow his hypnotist-fractured psyche to start an underground fight-club-slash-anarchist-revolution,
Judge's protagonist takes a slightly less violent approach to personal anarchy — he
enlists his buddies in a scheme to shake down the soulless corporation he works for.
If you've seen Office Space, you’ll know how hilariously wrong that scheme goes, but
the film isn't really too concerned with the heist itself.
Instead, Judge uses the setting and plot of Office Space to spin a not-so-satirical, laugh-out-loud
farce about how effortlessly corporations and consumerism devour individuality.
And while condemning that culture, Office Space is also the rare kind of film which
also understands that many people are just fine toiling away in the corporate digestive
system — so long as they get to keep their sweet Swingline stapler — and that, if you
aren't one of them...
well, nobody's making you stay.
“Oh, oh, and I almost forgot I’m also gonna need you to come in on Sunday too, ‘kay?”
Spike Jonze’s wild, frenetic and endlessly creative film Being John Malkovich may have
netted him an Oscar nomination for Best Director, but it was hardly his first gig in the director's
chair.
The adventurous filmmaker had spent the bulk of the '90s honing his skills and developing
his style while directing music videos for the likes of the Beastie Boys, Weezer, Sonic
Youth, Daft Punk, and Björk.
Where some directors naturally gravitate toward gritty realism and dense personal drama, Jonze
opts to take those same elements and bolster them with visually arresting, semi-whimsical
narratives rife with absurdist flights of fancy and breathtaking stylistic flourishes.
Jonze's style proved more than ideal for Being John Malkovich, which was scripted by Charlie
Kaufman the poet-laureate of the outlandish and the eerily eccentric.
Being John Malkovich, which follows the beautifully bizarre tale of a puppeteer who discovers
a portal into the head of the titular thespian, is dripping with fantastical flourishes from
both writer and director.
It features show-stopping performances from John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener,
and, of course, Malkovich himself.
It also takes more creative and narrative risks than most films ever dare; making it
not just one of the best films of 1999, but also one of the all-time greats.
It's almost impossible to imagine now, but prior to the release of The Matrix almost
nobody knew who the Wachowskis [wuh-CHOW-skees] were.
After all, they had just two films to their names, and one of them — the perfectly dreadful
Stallone-and-Banderas-led action flick Assassins — had only earned them a mere shared screenwriting
credit.
Even their sleek, inventive crime thriller Bound went all but unnoticed upon release.
Needless to say, expectations were practically non-existent for the Wachowskis' follow-up,
which was billed as a tech-savvy, effects-driven action movie featuring Keanu Reeves.
To say the Wachowskis seized the world’s attention in March of 1999 would be a huge
understatement.
Not only was The Matrix a heady, character-driven tale of man versus technology run amok, it
was also a groundbreaking visual leap forward that shaped sci-fi cinema for an entire generation
and became a creative and commercial success that the Wachowskis could never quite repeat.
They can at least take heart knowing that, even 20 years after its release, The Matrix
really does feel as fresh and profound as ever.
“Woah.”
After delivering back-to-back stunners with his first two films, director Paul Thomas
Anderson had many in the business hailing him as the next Martin Scorsese.
New Line Cinema stepped up to produce his third, and he delivered a sprawling, $37 million
art film that followed a dozen or so loosely connected lives through a single day — and
ever-changing weather patterns — in the San Fernando Valley.
Clocking in at a whopping three hours and eight minutes, Magnolia marked Anderson's
most ambitious and personal project to date.
It's a film that seamlessly combined the director's penchant for high melodrama with his flair
for grandiose set pieces and meticulously observed, character-driven narratives — all
set against a billboard-sized canvas, and led by a near-supernatural sense of fate which
is barely even glimpsed in his earlier works.
The result is a colorful mosaic of a movie that proved to be one of 1999's most challenging
and rewarding releases.
Of all the fantastic movies released in 1999, few had quite the cultural impact enjoyed
by M. Night Shyamalan's spellbinding supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense.
Shyamalan's masterpiece arrived in theaters under a shroud of mystery — but thanks to
a star turn from Bruce Willis, one of the greatest child performances in history from
Haley Joel Osment and a mind-blowing twist ending, it became a legitimate cultural phenomenon
almost overnight.
“I see dead people.”
It also cleared well north of half a billion dollars at the box office, earned six Academy
Award nominations, and made a household name of the man who wrote and directed it.
Over the years, Hollywood — and Shyamalan himself — has repeatedly tried and mostly
failed to reproduce the bracing impact of the film's twisty narrative.
Because Shyamalan's vision is so skillfully executed and vividly realized, The Sixth Sense
has only grown in esteem as a result, and the film's hefty emotional impact still hits
home whether you know its secrets or not.
In fact, part of the fun of rewatching The Sixth Sense is searching for clues that you
missed the first three or four or even five times through.
But what's often overshadowed by the film's twist is that, at its core, The Sixth Sense
is also a tenderly observed drama about grief and loss, fronted by a troubled youth learning
to accept the burdens of a gift he never asked for.
That Shyamalan fitted such high drama into a genuinely unsettling ghost story is what
makes The Sixth Sense the stuff of genre legend.
Just a week prior to The Sixth Sense’s arrival in theaters, another stunning supernatural
confection hit theaters in the form of The Blair Witch Project.
Conceived and directed by newcomers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, and starring entirely
unknown actors, the groundbreaking no-budget feature follows three film students who get
lost in the woods while shooting a documentary about a small-town urban legend.
As they struggle to find their way back to society, it becomes clear they're not alone
in the woods, and may be being stalked by the Blair Witch herself.
While that story would have made an interesting enough horror film in its own right, it's
how Myrick and Sanchez executed and marketed their story that really made the The Blair
Witch Project stand apart from pretty much every found-footage flick made before — or
since.
The directors essentially dropped their actors off in the woods, orchestrated spooky events
on a daily basis, and had their performers shoot the action themselves.
The resulting film is gritty and patently terrifying, and looks and feels just a little
too real for comfort.
The filmmakers even doubled down on that realism by setting up a genius marketing campaign
that sold the film to audiences as a real-life documentary.
The stark realism both baffled and enthralled critics and audiences, which helped make The
Blair Witch Project one of the most profitable movies ever produced.
Whether you like his movies or not, Stanley Kubrick is and always will be regarded as
one of the greatest directors that ever lived if not the greatest.
Whether it was any good or not, his final film was destined to be one that cinephiles
world would pore over, debate, watch, and rewatch until the end of time.
To that end, Kubrick, who spent his career testing the limits of cinema with narratively
challenging and morally ambiguous art films, continued to push buttons from beyond the
grave with his moody and masterfully-executed swan song: Eyes Wide Shut.
Based on a 1926 novella entitled Dream Story, the film follows a man who ends up at this
crazy, kinky house where rich folks wear creepy masks and do even creepier, kinkier things.
And no, that summation doesn't quite illustrate the enigmatic power of Kubrick's kinky, semi-surrealist
nightmare.
It doesn't do justice to the complex personal quandaries explored by the husband and wife
in question, either, and nor does it divulge the sheer amount of blood, sweat, and tears
put into the film's torturous, two-and-a-half year production.
While we may never see Kubrick's NC-17 final cut of Eyes Wide Shut, the version which hit
theaters in 1999 remains a haunting last work absolutely worth poring over, debating, watching,
and rewatching.
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp may have hit a bit of a cold streak of late, but there was
once a time when that pairing was one of the most exciting in Hollywood.
So when they announced they were teaming up for an adaptation of Washington Irving's short
story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, there was more than a little excitement around the project
— mostly because the story jibed so well with Burton's ability to make the bizarre
and grotesque so endearing and entertaining.
And that's exactly what Burton did with Sleepy Hollow, which still remains a stunning work
of gothic whimsy.
A crackerjack piece of writing from Seven scribe Andrew Kevin Walker is largely to thank
— Walker’s script transforms Irving's brief and brutal Headless Horseman fable into
a complex murder mystery, pitting the skittish Ichabod Crane as detective on the hunt for
what appears to be a serial killer.
Of course, Crane finds something far more sinister afoot in the town of Sleepy Hollow,
and a never-better Depp helps draw viewers further into the eerie unknown with a performance
that teeters between awkward charm, cagey confidence, and nervy unease.
Thanks to a beautifully bleak visual palette courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki, as well as unforgettable
appearances from Christina Ricci and Christopher Walken, Burton and crew transformed Irving's
classic into a gruesome, gothic fantasia that stands as the pinnacle of the Burton/Depp
cinematic dynasty.
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