90s All Over Me takes inspiration from 80s All Over, the Drew McWeeny/Scott Weinberg podcast that attempted to review every major film release of the 80s one month at a time; that podcast ended circa early 1985 and McWeeny has continued the project on his Substack. The aims of this series are somewhat more modest; rather than covering every month and release in said month, each entry will cover a year of the 1990s, focusing solely on what I’ve seen from that year. The first half of each instalment spotlights what I saw theatrically at the time, contextualising those works in my own moviegoing journey from ages seven to 17 as well as their wider cultural import. The second half covers every other release I’ve seen of that year across physical media, television, and streaming.
Read the previous instalments on 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, and 1997.
- 1998 Total films seen: 128
- Total seen theatrically: 4
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 124
Theatrical
In an earlier piece, I mentioned that I stopped seeing movies in theatres for a couple of years. 1998 was the first of those years. In truth, I would have seen some late 1997 releases in early 1998—for example, I’m pretty sure I saw Titanic early that year, a number of weeks into its lengthy Australian run—but I pivoted to watching films mostly on VHS, and wouldn’t start going to the movies again with any regularity—with the exception of a couple of big 1999 titles like The Phantom Menace, The Sixth Sense, The World is Not Enough, and Sleepy Hollow—until moving to Adelaide in early 2000, where I ended up seeing theatrically a number of the banner late 1999 releases. Consequently, my next piece will be a bumper crop of 1999 cinema memories, the vast majority outside the calendar year or 1999. Until then …
The Man in the Iron Mask
Director: Randall Wallace; Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, John Malkovich, Jeremy Irons, Gerard Depardieu, Gabriel Byrne; Writer: Randall Wallace.
Released in the wake of Titanic, this was the last time Leonardo DiCaprio would work with a director of modest cache on a piece of IP studio programming. That might sound harsh, and I don’t want to diminish audience affection for the Musketeers, nor director Randall Wallace’s pedigree as the screenwriter of Braveheart, nor the opportunity to work with co-stars of the calibre of Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, or Gerard Depardieu. But from his next film onwards, DiCaprio followed the Tom Cruise route of partnering with the world’s top filmmakers—Boyle, Spielberg, Scorsese, Scott, Zwick, Nolan, Tarantino, Luhrmann, Iñárritu—and using his clout to get serious movies made with major studio heft. Consider The Man in the Iron Mask, then, DiCaprio’s Legend or Cocktail.
Ronin
Director: John Frankenheimer; Cast; Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natasha McElhone, Sean Bean; Writers: David Mamet, J.D. Zeik.
Ronin might be the last great Robert De Niro star vehicle. Obviously he’s done solid work since, but this is one of those parts—like Casino and Heat and Jackie Brown—that fits him like a glove, gives him interesting things to do, and taps into that furrowed brow intensity while offering zero opportunity for mugging or ham. Directed by the great, resourceful John Frankenheimer—the veteran director’s penultimate film and a redemption of sorts following The Island of Doctor Moreau (admittedly a disaster not of his making)—Ronin unfolds briskly with streamlined, un-decorative screenwriting in the very best sense and similarly streamlined, superior car chases.
Judas Kiss and Croupier
Director: Sebastian Gutierrex; Cast: Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Carla Gugino, Simon Baker; Writers: Sebastian Gutierrex, Deanna Fuller.
Director: Mike Hodges; Cast: Clive Owen, Gina McKee, Alex Kingston; Writer: Paul Mayersberg.
These titles weren’t released in theatres in Australia until 2000 and 2001 respectively, but as films from 1998 that I eventually saw in theatres, they’re sneaking in here. The former is a clunky American crime film of post-Tarantino vintage, albeit with a British sensibility courtesy of the curious casting of Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as Yankee sleuths; Croupier—a thoroughly British production—is another penultimate film, this time from Mike Hodges, a filmmaker of similar age to Frankenheimer and one of those great British carpetbagger directors, with an eclectic filmography including Get Carter and Flash Gordon.
It’s fascinating to watch careers both catch fire and wind down, and both Ronin and Croupier—whilst discernibly steered by older hands with more classical shooting and editing rhythms—feel assured and confident and are delivered with economy and style. The latter was also Clive Owen’s calling card and the beginning of his grooming by media for the Bond mantle, something that never eventuated. He’s too interesting for Bond, though Hollywood sadly didn’t find him more interesting things to do.
The rest: A Tale of Two Asteroid/WWII/Elizabethan/Animated Insect films
While I pivoted hard to watching older titles at home, I still read film magazines—shout-out to Empire, Total Film and, again, the late great Neon—and watched The Movie Show on SBS and kept track of new releases, seeing certain titles as soon as they hit home video. From childhood to late teens, there were at least eight VHS rental stores around my town, and at this time four were operating, each with different perks: one close to my high school, good for vintage titles; one close to home, where I also rented Sega games; and two at the opposite far ends of town, good for ex-rental sales.
What would I have loved, in retrospect, to have seen in theatres? Had I lived in a capital city, with multiple theatres showing arthouse as well as mainstream titles, I would have loved to see the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski and Warren Beatty’s Bulworth, two ostensibly breezy, shaggy comedies that are also razor sharp and precision-tooled.
Ditto Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters. I’m continually surprised how little cultural foothold Condon’s film appears to have. A poignant dramatization of the twilight days of Frankenstein director James Whale, Gods and Monsters is tonally delicate material artfully directed by Condon—the reason I remain invested in his career despite confounding (though highly profitable) choices to dabble in Twilight films and live-action Disney remakes—with note-perfect performances from Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser.
Finally, The Thin Red Line is my favourite film of this calendar year and perhaps the 1990s. The elusive Terrence Malick’s return to filmmaking after an almost two-decade hiatus, the film is riveting, moving, and hypnotic; thematically rich and lofty, but satisfying as a war drama, moulding the genre material to Malick’s signature, oft-parodied but inimitable style. I’d be hard-pressed to choose between this and The Tree of Life as Malick’s best work; on a given day, it could be either. The film also showcases one of Hans Zimmer’s finest scores.
None of the above titles played at our four-screen theatre, which mainly showed mainstream fare. I look back at that theatre with great affection and nostalgia, but fell out of love with it in 1998, deterred by—not to put too fine a point on it—my own teenage pretensions in conjunction with all the mainstream dreck of the year, an indictment on both the state of Hollywood in 1998 and myself as a sixteen-year-old brat, rather than any one cineplex.
Among said dreck, two asteroid disaster films, Deep Impact and Armageddon, duked it out for box office dominion like Dante’s Peak and Volcano one year prior, but where those titles had some dopey B-movie-on-an-A-budget charm, this pair were overproduced and bloated. Lost in Space, The Avengers (the other one), and Godzilla were similarly overproduced and charmless, despite being derived from chintzy and charming source material, stranding their gifted casts—not even an arch Gary Oldman adds value to Lost in Space—and stalling several careers in the process. Even a weepie like Stepmom—tethered to physics with humans acting alongside other humans rather than CG monkeys, beasts, and weather—feels boilerplate and mercenary.
However, there was also some smart mainstream entertainment that dignified rather than underestimated its audience. The Mask of Zorro is a fun romp from Goldeneye director Martin Campbell, delivered with similar flair, energy, and spirited performances, making its reheated passing-the-torch ingredients feel fresh. There’s Something About Mary is occasionally patchy in its craft but utterly assured in its comic timing and sensibility, with terrific work from Cameron Diaz, Ben Stiller, and especially Matt Dillon.
While a downscale from the inspired, intelligent lunacy of Gremlins 2, Small Soldiers—in characteristic Joe Dante fashion—milks more satirical juice and cinephile catnip from its premise than most directors would. And Enemy of the State is a strong close to the 90s for Tony Scott, its espionage and surveillance milieu affording the director a chance to play with new hardware onscreen and new toys offscreen. The ensemble—from heavyweights Will Smith, Gene Hackman, and Jon Voight to the likes of Jack Black, Jason Lee, and Barry Pepper—attests to Scott’s under-sung knack, like Spielberg, as a talent scout and early adopter.
The Thin Red Line famously competed alongside another war drama, Saving Private Ryan, for Best Picture, as did Elizabethan-era period films Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love. The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan are immersive in very different ways, the latter’s visceral, experiential combat scenes befitting from director Steven Spielberg’s skillset for crafting rollercoaster rides. Its scale and ensemble are impressive, its simulations of warfare authentic and marvels of staging, and I tip my hat—one final time in this series—to Spielberg’s preternatural instinct for blocking and composition. However, there’s a lot of filler and the bookending scenes and rug-pull are daft; Malick’s film, in contrast, is far more textured and rewatchable.
Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love both feature the Virgin Queen, Joseph Fiennes, Geoffrey Rush, and healthy doses of palace and Hollywood intrigue, romance, and chicanery. Though pegged as the “serious” one, time has proven Elizabeth salty and pulpy, enriched by Cate Blanchett’s star-minting performance but enlivened by fun turns from Rush and Christopher Eccleston. Shakespeare in Love, meanwhile, is witty and literate, and while the film’s reputation has suffered due to unfavourable comparisons to Ryan & Elizabeth and the sour aftertaste of Miramax’s own chicanery, it remains spry and very engaging.
The 1990s saw the rise and fall of several genres, with several in sharp decline or petering out by 1998. The Western revival launched by Dances with Wolves was largely done. The erotic thrillers titillated into existence by Basic Instinct were largely done, with Wild Things a tongue-in-cheek blip on the radar. The spoof movie was largely done, with Baseketball—by virtue of its director and cast—straddling both ZAZ and South Park’s comedy stylings.
However, the tail of Scream was still very apparent with The Faculty, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legends, and Halloween: H20, with several stars from this new ecosystem washing up in the better-than-average teen comedy Can’t Hardly Wait. The tail of The Silence of the Lambs, extended with Seven, can be seen in Fallen and Desperate Measures, the latter elevated by Barbet Schroeder’s adept direction and Michael Keaton as a B-grade Hannibal Lecter type. And a love child of Tarantino and Trainspotting emerged from Albion with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, establishing Guy Ritchie’s house style and, most significant in retrospect, introducing Jason Statham to the masses.
The tail of Batman was almost exhausted, but 1998 yielded two disparate Marvel features from David Goyer scripts: telemovie Nick Fury: Agent of Shield—starring David Hasselhoff as the eye-patched hero—and Blade. The latter initiated a new era of comic book movies that has both never ceased and reinvented itself multiple times over, truly transforming the genre into the coin of the realm. While Blade broke Wesley Snipes as an actor in some respects, narrowing the variety of roles and opportunities afforded him in the 2000s, he’s undeniably magnetic here and Stephen Norrington’s film, some ropey of-its-era CGI aside, is slickly produced.
The action hero had evolved throughout the 90s, finding unlikely (sometimes brief) new avatars in the likes of Michael Keaton, Nicolas Cage, and Johnny Depp. 1998 welcomed no new Schwarzenegger or Stallone releases, the latter strategizing post-Copland, while a third-billed Bruce Willis played a uniformed bureaucrat in The Siege. Steven Seagal’s The Patriot went straight to video: it’s a curious hybrid of Seagal actioner, modern Western, and Outbreak-style viral thriller, though not particularly successful in any of those genres, with no punches thrown until 45 minutes into its 90 minute runtime and only the briefest displays of aikido. Dolph Lundgren, meanwhile, headlined a solid John Woo-directed TV pilot, Blackjack, viewable on YouTube in its entirety.
There were still brawny hard-asses on cinema screens, including an uncharacteristically boring Kurt Russell in Soldier, another overproduced sci-fi-action spectacle (albeit with an unusually high pedigree, coming from Blade Runner scribe David Webb Peoples). But there was also the cerebral Kevin Spacey-shaped hero facing off against Samuel L. Jackson in The Negotiator; Mark Wahlberg’s hapless crook in The Big Hit; a new spin on the buddy-cop formula with Rush Hour; and a true action novelty in Run Lola Run, introducing Franka Potente to world audiences.
Like Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise was out of commission, toiling for Kubrick on Eyes Wide Shut, but several movie stars—in star-driven movies of varying quality—picked up the slack. Then-wife Nicole Kidman, for one, co-starred alongside Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic, a film I don’t care for that has surprising generational cachet. Eddie Murphy vehicle Holy Man is largely forgotten and intermittently amusing at best, but I’ll take it over several of his more popular, family-friendlier titles of ensuing years. Ivan Reitman’s Six Days Seven Nights isn’t the engaging adventure it could or should be, but this unassuming programmer starring Harrison Ford and Anne Heche has a whiff of historic import, with Ford standing by and keeping Heche on the project in the very 90s media aftermath of Heche’s coming out. Tom Hanks headlined a pair of features hitting multiple demographics, providing a fatherly anchor for the abovementioned Saving Private Ryan and reteaming with Meg Ryan a third time on the charming You’ve Got Mail.
John Travolta headlined a pair of adult dramas, Steve Zaillian’s A Civil Action and Mike Nichols’ Primary Colours. The former is sturdy and smart, and though crusading lawyers/journalists fighting for underdog causes was very much a movie star thing in this era—see also Erin Brockovich—Zaillian’s film is a cut above. The latter film probes the Clinton presidency with the lightest of kid gloves, but as more class and substance than its topical novelty might suggest. That both films exist at their level of production and promotional heft is testament to Travolta’s pull in this period, though a couple of years later the comeback train would spectacularly derail. In contrast, Dancing at Lunghasa and weepie One True Thing are Only Fans Meryl Streep films, for a particular subset of die-hard fans at that, while Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer is handsomely-made, very pretty, and pretty boring.
Alongside these veterans, there were attempts—both successful and unsuccessful—to mint new movie stars. Following his supporting role in Broken Arrow, footballer Howie Long took centre stage in Firestorm. Long fell short as action lead, but the film is a decent addition to the canon of firefighter movies—see also Backdraft, Ladder 49, etc—with solid set-pieces and several effective weapons/debris-flying-at-camera moments that suggest the film was conceived for 3D. The film is notable as cinematographer Dean Semler’s directorial debut; his swansong, the abovementioned The Patriot, was also a 1998 release. Carrot Top, meanwhile, made both his debut and swansong as comedy leading man in Chairman of the Board. The film is pretty dire, with the Top—who I can verify is very funny on stage—stranded without his props and routine, but it did yield this memorable late-night banter:
Norm MacDonald also made his debut and swansong as comedy leading man in Dity Work, with Chevy Chase—his SNL Weekend Update precursor—anointing MacDonald with a supporting turn and delivering his best work of the 90s. Both the film and MacDonald are funny, but MacDonald’s particular talent—meandering into saying savage, horrible things with disarming Canadian guile—is better served in other mediums.
However, stars who were successfully minted and/or cemented include Cameron Diaz on the abovementioned There’s Something About Mary; Adam Sandler with The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy, the former massaging his rougher edges for the mainstream; Gwyneth Paltrow across the abovementioned Shakespeare in Love, the charming Sliding Doors, a Great Expectations update (more below), and disposable thrillers A Perfect Murder (more below) and Hush; and George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez on the very entertaining and stylish Out of Sight. The last of the mid-to-late 90s spurt of Elmore Leonard crime comedy adaptations—see also Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Touch—Out of Sight saw Steven Soderbergh reining in (mostly) Clooney’s bobblehead and securing cachet—a decade after his breakthrough Sex, Lies & Videotape—to play with bigger budgets and doodle in the mainstream, sometimes at the centre, sometimes in the margins.
I’ve written at length about stars here and in my other pieces, conscious that the Hollywood star system will be broken in many respects in the 2000s with the ascent of IP. Stars are not essential to anchoring or enjoying films: I’ve no frame of reference for the leads of French farce The Dinner Game or Serbian black comedy Black Cat White Cat, both very fine films from veteran directors—Francis Veber and Emir Kusturica, the latter following his recent Palme d’Or win for Underground—with cultural mores baked in at a cellular level. However, stars were essential to certain types of original films getting made in Hollywood at the scale they were made: something like A Civil Action would not exist without a Travolta as its engine, and certainly those star-anchored legal thrillers don’t exist in our current IP-dominated era.
Nonetheless, star power and IP can be seen co-existing in the likes of Lethal Weapon 4, the overstuffed, rudderless, improv-feeling, but still watchable final instalment in that series. While this film marks the series as the closest 90s franchise to Fast and Furious in its family focus, it’s also a case study in how disinterested 90s franchises were in building any larger lore, focused squarely on the immediate and finite gratification each instalment brings.
Stars and IP also intersect in US Marshalls—the okay sequel to The Fugitive in which Tommy Lee Jones pursues Wesley Snipes, helmed by superb editor turned average journeyman director Stuart Baird—and Blues Brothers 2000, the second poor sequel to a John Landis-directed all-timer in as many years (after An American Werewolf in Paris), albeit here delivered by Landis himself. I love Dan Aykroyd and appreciate his entrepreneurial sensibilities, but this is bloated, bland, and uncool.
Other 1998 IP included two movie spin-offs of TV shows: Star Trek: Insurrection, a dip from First Contact but not an embarrassment, and The X-Files: Fight the Future, which can’t help but feel like a mega-episode, spinning wheels between seasons. More finite was Babe: Pig in the City, with Babe producer George Miller taking the directorial reins. Miller has directed six sequels across three franchises—Max Max, Babe, Happy Feet—and is unique in never repeating himself, here putting a flamboyant, darker, goofier urban stamp on the original’s farmyard fable. Other sequels included Bride of Chucky, Phantasm IV, Species II, and The Decline of Western Civilisation Part III; one of these things is not like the others.
Remakes from 1998 included two Hitchcock retreads: A Perfect Murder, Andrew Davis’s above-mentioned, rather loose remake of Dial M for Murder, made with gloss and star power but ultimately inconsequential; and Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, which I find fascinating. There was also a very Hollywood gloss on Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, City of Angels; Martin Brest’s remake of 1934’s Death Takes a Holiday, Meet Joe Black, a film exasperatingly high on its own supply and Brest’s post-Scent of a Woman prestige, with extended pregnant pauses to bathe in profundity ultimately amounting to lengthy dead air; and a likeably unpretentious Disney programmer in the Mighty Joe Young update. 1997’s stirrings of a monster movie renaissance continued into 1998 with Godzilla, Deep Rising, Sphere—Barry Levinson’s second star-studded Michael Crichton adaptation, as big and empty as the haunted underwater spaceship it’s set on—and Russell Mulcahy’s Tale of the Mummy. Elsewhere in the genre there was something old (John Carpenter’s horror-Western Vampires), something new (J- horror breakout Ringu), something borrowed (Apt Pupil, Bryan Singer’s Stephen King adaptation drawn from the same source anthology—Different Seasons—as Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption), and nothing blue, unless you find Blues Brothers 2000 especially horrific.
Alongside the competing asteroid, war, and Elizabethan films, 1998 saw competing animated bug films with Pixar’s A Bug’s Life and DreamWorks’ Antz. Though the animation is ugly, Antz wins for this viewer thanks to its impressive voice cast—setting the mould for subsequent DreamWorks films, for good or ill—including Woody Allen (a sign that the 1990s were a very different time), Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, and Christopher Walken. Disney also released Mulan and DreamWorks Prince of Egypt, both quality, traditionally-animated historical epics.
In addition to his voicework in Antz, Allen served his usual demographic with Celebrity—a quite good and underrated effort featuring Kenneth Branagh doing voicework as Woody Allen—and served as subject for the documentary Wild Man Blues, an intriguing glimpse into Allen’s ostensibly normal and functional marriage to Soon-Yi Previn as they travel Europe with Allen’s jazz band. Like his recent autobiography, Allen is simultaneously revealing and evasive as documentary subject, making Wild Man Blues a fascinating but ultimately not very illuminating venture.
I’ve mentioned already films by Australian directors jobbing overseas: Firestorm, The Patriot, Tale of the Mummy. To this list I’d add Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and Alex Proyas’s Dark City, both intriguingly about humans as fishbowl subjects of 24/7 reality shows. That’s literal in the case of The Truman Show—where Jim Carrey’s titular protagonist gradually realises his world is a manufactured reality television program—and more metaphorical in Dark City, where aliens study human behaviour in the titular cityscape until one subject (played by Rufus Sewell) stumbles onto the conspiracy.
Both films are excellent, but I’m especially fond of Dark City, visual stylist Proyas’s follow-up to The Crow, co-scripted by the ubiquitous David Goyer and impressively shot by Dariusz Wolski. The film largely unfolds in ruthlessly short, punchy scenes, with no wasted or throwaway shots in its swift, efficient 100-minute runtime. For the record, that’s 30 minutes shorter than Lost in Space, 35 minutes shorter than The Man in the Iron Mask, and 40 minutes shorter than Godzilla, none of which have to tease, reveal, explain, and satisfactorily pay off loopy high-concept sci-fi premises.
Like Blade Runner and Burton’s Batman—leaning more towards the latter with its mannerist compositions & score and arch sensibility— Dark City is in step with the noir films of the 1940s and expressionist cinema of the 1920s, evident in the film’s moody lightning, baroque architecture and decor, Sewell’s darting-eyes, near-careening-off-the-rails characterisation of the hero wrongfully-accused of murder, Kiefer Sutherland’s career-best Peter Lorre-esque mad scientist turn, and William Hurt reaching dry acting apotheosis. Jennifer Connelly is a little wasted, but delivers nice work regardless. Despite constant effects trickery, the settings of Dark City feel physical, tangible, tactile, and in this respect refreshingly at odds with modern blockbusters, and indeed with Proyas’s subsequent work, which has leaned heavily upon CGI. It’s also the second time in 1998, following Lost in Space, that William Hurt got lost in space.
Local titles from local directors included The Interview, Head On, and The Boys, all somewhat overrated gritty dramas and very much of their moment, but with redeeming style and performances; A Little Bit of Soul, a ribbing of politicians and academics that’s not particularly amusing; Dead Letter Office, which has some charm; Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer’s thoughtful drama with thriller elements, co-scripted by and starring Heather Rose—who has cerebral palsy—and wringing decent juice from its premise and constraints; and Radiance, Rachel Perkins’ adaptation of Louis Nowra’s play about three Indigenous sisters of different ages, fathers, and temperaments reunited for their mother’s funeral. Where previous Nowra adaptation Cosi felt freer of its source text, there’s a stagy quality to Radiance, given the (largely) single location, dialogue-heavy scenes, and recognisable ebb and flow of stage drama. Nonetheless, the film is enlivened by great performances by Deborah Mailman, Rachel Maza, and Trisha Morton-Thomas.
There was also a Yuletide offering in Crackers, one of a small—but thanks to streamer Stan, steadily multiplying—canon of Australian Christmas movies. The shadow of The Castle looms large over Crackers, and while it’s not as good a film, it’s certainly more of a film, with cameras in motion and some craft on display. While characterisation and performances feel loud-for-loud’s-sake in the film’s early scenes, Crackers ripens with its running time: character and relationship arcs emerge and evolve, narrative threads are played out, and there are setups and payoffs and some nice, weird grace notes. Warren Mitchell is particularly good as the black sheep and well-meaning core of the family.
As partly government-funded ventures, there is built into Australian cinema what Pauline Kael disparagingly called a “seal of good housekeeping”. Kael said this of the New Wave heritage dramas of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it’s still evident today and was evident in the late 90s, with even ostensibly grungy and daring films like The Boys and Head On working within prescribed aesthetic and ideological parameters. Ditto for the British government-funded (in part or whole) releases of 1998—tormented artist biopics Love is the Devil and Hilary and Jackie, disability romantic drama Theory of Flight—and the “quirky” British comedies with American studio backers eyeing that Full Monty money: Little Voice and Waking Ned Devine. No bad titles, some quite good ones, with some talent nurtured that would bloom in the 2000s—Daniel Craig in Love is the Devil, Paul Greengrass directing Theory of Flight—but all feeling inorganic and calculated, in some way beholden to a mould.
In contrast, despite some common stock players—Christina Ricci, Martin Donovan—there’s little stylistic or thematic uniformity to the American independents and quasi-independents of 1998, some good, some not so good, but all fascinating: Darren Aronofsky’s micro-budget directorial debut Pi; actor Vincent Gallo’s directorial debut Buffalo 66; Don Roos’ directorial debut (after a lucrative screenwriting career) The Opposite of Sex; Larry Clarke’s sophomore feature Another Day in Paradise; Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life; John Waters’ Pecker; future studio helmer David Dobkin’s Clay Pigeons; and a UK-US co-venture in Todd Haynes’ Citizen-Kane-for-Bowie Velvet Goldmine.
Two great sophomore titles worth highlighting are Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and Neil La Bute’s Your Friends and Neighbours. While Bottle Rocket introduced Anderson’s voice to filmgoers, the witty and heartfelt Rushmore, along with The Royal Tenenbaums, establishes the periodic table for the genre-unto-itself of subsequent Anderson films, particularly in its casting—welcoming Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman into the fold—and art direction. Meanwhile, Your Friends and Neighbours remains La Bute’s strongest work for film, rudimentary in craft but with the playwright-director’s misanthropic dialogue and worldview findings it’s brightest avatars in the sextet of Ben Stiller, Aaron Eckhart, Natassia Kinski, Amy Brenneman and, especially, Jason Patric and Catherine Keener.
New versions of oft-adapted literary classics hailed from both veteran and burgeoning auteurs: Billie August helmed a well-cast but dry Les Misérables, Dario Argento a ropey Phantom of the Opera—his 1987 thriller Opera was a better riff on the material—and Alfonso Cuaron a contemporary but ornate adaptation of Great Expectations, featuring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow in one of her five 1998 releases. Both Les Misérables and Great Expectations are heavily abridged from their weighty sources and suffer from comparison to other, better—though not necessarily more faithful—adaptations. Ditto Drew Barrymore vehicle Ever After, conceived and marketed as a stripped-down Cinderella retread that’s stripped down to the point of boredom.
In contrast, Jonathan Demme’s Beloved has no previous adaptation of its Toni Morrison source novel to contend with, though Spielberg’s The Colour Purple serves as a shadow text and cautionary tale for the filmmaker. I like both works—very different films from very different directors—for different reasons, and am pleased Danny Glover got to exercise more serious acting muscles alongside Lethal Weapon 4. Like 1997’s Kundun and Amistad, and indeed The Colour Purple, I wager Demme—though an innately empathetic director and fully understanding the assignment—would not be the obvious guy to execute the material today.
Las Vegas was employed throughout the 90s as a backdrop for light Nicolas Cage comedies (Honeymoon in Vegas), dark Nicolas Cage dramas (Leaving Las Vegas), erotic dramas with the same plots as light Nicolas Cage comedies (Indecent Proposal), and gangster films about its very own inception (Bugsy), among other things. The gambling Mecca featured prominently in several 1998 releases: telemovie The Rat Pack, a fairly boilerplate biopic elevated by a reliable ensemble; Very Bad Things, a bucks-night-gone-wrong black comedy that makes The Hangover look like Daddy Day Care; and Terry Gilliam’s inventive but ultimately draining adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-soaked Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Atlantic City, meanwhile, afforded the backdrop for Brian De Palma’s thriller Snake Eyes, which contains some ingenious set-pieces and filmmaking. The milieu of gambling also provides the background for Rounders, a modest but satisfying thriller from John Dahl that occasioned this delightful behind-the scenes Matt Damon/John Malkovich anecdote, while the American nightclub scene got two very silly treatments—though one had serious aspirations—in the sanitised 54 and Will Ferrell/Chris Kattan SNL spinoff A Night at the Roxbury. Whilst synonymous with Vegas, Elvis was equally synonymous with Graceland, the titular destination of road movie Finding Graceland. With Jonathan Scaech and Bridget Fonda as leads and Harvey Keitel playing a man who believes himself Elvis, this is a film that could only have emerged in the 90s, and not a particularly great one.
Whilst playing supporting scumbag in Rounders to Matt Damon’s clean-cut hero, Edward Norton serves as the compelling lead of Tony Kaye’s American History X. A thorny work birthed from a troubled post-production, the film—about a reformed neo-Nazi released from prison and reunited with his wayward younger brother—is flawed but impressive, ambitious but intimate, lengthy but immediate and shorn of superfluous niceties. Between these films, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Primal Fear—less so Everyone Says I Love You, though Woody Allen’s anointing still carried cachet—it’s easy to see why Norton was being touted as the emerging screen actor of his generation, though the 2000s would moderate such proclamations.
I’ll end this piece by spotlighting three effective but very different noir thrillers or 1998. Zero Effect, Jake Kasdan’s directorial debut about an oddball dysfunctional detective played by Bill Pullman, doesn’t feel quite as fresh now in the wake of multiple mainstream TV oddball dysfunctional detective shows like Monk and Elementary; indeed, it feels like an impressively-made pilot for one of those shows. Nonetheless, as films that feel like TV pilots go, it’s a pretty good one and lets Pullman fly his freak flag after a mid-90s stretch playing white bread roles in While You Were Sleeping, Casper, and Independence Day.
Robert Benton’s Twilight—no relation to the sparkly vampire saga of the 21st century—focuses on a more old-school Hollywood gumshoe—literally an old-school gumshoe operating in Hollywood—played by Paul Newman. I cited A Civil Action above as a film that wouldn’t exist without its star, and ditto for Twilight, an unremarkable but polished film that’s elevated and enriched by Newman’s presence and minimal fuss performance skimming deep reserves of cool and integrity. Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon co-star.
Finally, A Simple Plan focuses on our-of-their-depth crims rather than sleuths, here three blue collar schlubs—including brothers Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton—who happen upon a crashed plane and suitcase full of cash. The film was a deliberate attempt by Sam Raimi to rein in his attention-grabbing style in service of sturdy material, and while I’m not a proponent of directors feeling they should tone down their signature, I can’t argue that it absolutely worked in this case: Raimi would be helming Spider-Man within a few years, at which point he would start layering the Raimi showmanship back in. Thornton was rightly Oscar-nominated, and Bridget Fonda as Paxton’s Lady Macbeth-esque wife is well-used in one of her last screen roles, but the MVP is the late Paxton, playing—as he did in One False Move—an everyman hero with fatal fallibility, a big fish in his own pond but small fry in the grander scheme. I find jokes about actors being indistinguishable condescending generally, and looking at Zero Effect and A Simple Plan remain bamboozled that people ever looked at Pullman and Paxton in those films—or Spaceballs, or Lost Highway, or Aliens, or Near Dark, or True Lies—and thought “Man, these boring guys named Bill, I can’t tell them apart”.
For the record, some notable films of 1998 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: The Idiots, The End of Violence, Following, Phantoms, Gia, The Object of My Affection, Dr Dolittle, He Got Game, What Dreams May Come, The Gingerbread Man, The Hi-Lo Country, Goodbye Lover, The Replacement Killers, Mercury Rising, Disturbing Behaviour, Taxi, The Mighty, Return to Paradise, Hurly Burly, Hope Floats, Living Out Loud, Permanent Midnight, Wide Awake, The Newton Boys, Simon Birch, Palmetto, The Parent Trap, The Acid House.
If you’re still here, thanks for enduring and see you back here for 1999, when the Star Wars saga returns to screens, a Universal Monster is reborn, and new talents, veteran talents, and even medium talents cap off the century with a surprisingly deep bench of classic or at least very good releases. To be continued …