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, 1997, and 1999.
- 1999 Total films seen: 129
- Total seen theatrically: 36
- VHS/TV/DVD/Streaming: 93
Theatrical
During my final two years of high school (1998–99), I monastically shied away from going to the cinema but mainlined the classics at home; on moving to a capital city in early 2000, with more theatres at my disposal and a wider selection of movies compared to my regional home town, I re-embraced seeing new releases in theatres.
However, I only saw six titles in theatres during the calendar year of 1999, catching the rest the following year, mainly across the first few months of 2000 as the most celebrated titles of 1999 competed for awards season validation. While I do think 1999 has been slightly overstated—by podcasts and books and other breathless commentators—as one of the all-time great years, looking at the list it’s hard not to be impressed, nostalgic, and a bit jealous.
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Director: George Lucas; Cast: Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Ahmed Best, Jake Lloyd, Samuel L. Jackson, Yoda, R2D2, C3PO; Writer: George Lucas.
What’s left to say that hasn’t already been said about this magnificent, ambitious, wildly imaginative, terribly boring space opus? I’m grateful to have seen it weeks after most of my peers, so my expectations were tempered, and to also see it with a five-year-old family friend, so my expectations were recalibrated. In the interest of completism, I neglected to mention seeing the Star Wars original trilogy Special Edition re-releases in 1997. The writing was on the wall.
The World is Not Enough and Sleepy Hollow
Two event films that loomed as large as Star Wars for me, and both more satisfying in the short-term. In the long-term, the three titles are a wash, but Pierce Brosnan’s third Bond outing is his second best, with a tremendous opening chase on the Thames, belter theme song, some of Brosnan’s finest pained acting, and memorable villain performances from Sophie Marceau and Robert Carlyle. I haven’t really touched on Carlyle in this series, but between Trainspotting, The Full Monty, this, and a couple of other 1999 titles the Scottish actor was a seal of interest, if not always quality, on projects for a stretch of the 90s.
Sleepy Hollow, meanwhile, might be the last unconditional banger from Tim Burton, though Sweeney Todd and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice have their moments. Whilst the CGI insurgency was creeping into his work, there’s tactile and evocative design as well as agreeably arch work from a game cast, including MVP Miranda Richardson.
The Virgin Suicides, Three Kings, and Being John Malkovich
The connective tissue here is Spike Jonze, as then-husband to Virgin Suicides director Sofia Coppola, co-star of David O’Russell’s Three Kings, and the director of Being John Malkovich. Beyond Jonze, these films are linked in my mind as mission statements from three Young Turk directors who, like Shyamalan, would continue to shape American film into the 21st century.
The Virgin Suicides established Coppola as an empathetic filmmaker dignifying young women and heightened adolescent emotions, with a keen sense of tactility on screen and how to draw upon and harness actors and star power in interesting ways without ever being deferential to it.
Three Kings was a famously troubled production, but marked O’Russell as someone who could bring the oddball, off-kilter sensibility of his earlier independent comedies to mainstream dramatic fare, and the film secured a future benefactor in the unlikely sculpt of Mark Wahlberg. It also helped cement George Clooney as a movie star after a wobbly start, and I’m not talking about his head.
Finally, Being John Malkovich transcends what sounds like a one-note premise with a loopy, playful, heartfelt meditation on identity and celebrity, enabled through a game and benevolent Malkovich himself.
Magnolia
Magnolia’s also very much a young Turk film: an epic urban network drama unfolding at a luxurious pace but constantly engaging, effectively scored to Aimee Mann’s songs. This one has the strongest injection of star power of this quartet via Tom Cruise, slotting perfectly into its gifted ensemble and, like Malkovich, game and attuned to the assignment. The fact Magnolia and the three films above were released the same year as Kubrick’s final film, also starring Cruise, makes 1999 feel like a symbolic passing of the torch from the old directorial guard to a new one. This might be my favourite film of a stacked year, yet only hints at the eccentricity, ambition, and originality that Anderson—initially pegged as an Altman and Scorsese retread—would reveal over the next quarter century.
Bringing Out the Dead, Sweet and Lowdown, The Ninth Gate, and Man on the Moon
While an older guard was moving on and Young Turks rising up, a generation in between of masterful veteran filmmakers—Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and Milos Forman respectively—delivered these four excellent if not exceptional films. What’s striking looking at this quartet is that all but Forman would make better films—indeed, films among their very best—in the coming decade. It’s also curious these four titles are all, in some way, revisiting former stomping ground with younger stars.
Bringing Out the Dead revisits Taxi Driver territory, with Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader—also revisiting past preoccupations, also with strong future work ahead—transplanting Nicolas Cage as a haunted ambulance driver for De Niro’s titular haunted cabbie. Sweet and Lowdown casts Sean Penn as one of Allen’s unlikeable artist avatars in a period jazz scene milieu, opposite a charming Samantha Morton.
The Ninth Gate sees Polanski revisiting the occult terrain of Rosemary’s Baby and the detective-out-of-his-depths-against-elite-powerbrokers tropes of Chinatown, with Johnny Depp a lackadaisical rare book sleuth. Finally, Forman revisits the misunderstood counter-culture celebrity themes of Amadeus and The People vs. Larry Flynt, with Jim Carrey method acting—by all accounts to exasperating degrees—as comedian Andy Kaufman.
The Insider and Any Given Sunday
Two superior Al Pacino vehicles, also from masterful veterans—Michael Mann, Oliver Stone—revisiting familiar turf in new settings. The Insider, like previous Mann films, is a procedural about professionals doing what they do well, transplanted to the journalistic rather than criminal or cop milieu and executed with Mann’s own highly professional, procedural attention to the minutest detail and authenticity.
Any Given Sunday, like previous Stone films, shines a harsh light on and dissects a corporatised American institution—here professional football rather than Wall Street, government, or the military-industrial complex—with Stone bringing his patented sweaty energy to the material. I see this as a very transitional Stone film, working without his long-time DP Robert Richardson for the first time and attempting more of a romp—even embracing corny sports movie cliches along the way—after over a decade of firebrand works. While I find merit in all Stone’s features since Any Given Sunday—Alexander, World Trade Centre, W, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages, Snowden—none are essential nor cultural conversation pieces. Pacino is in peak form across both these films, having conquered the 90s after a wobbly 80s, on the cusp of a wobbly 2000s, while Russell Crowe caps his own 90s trajectory from promising Australian talent to internationally acclaimed star in The Insider.
The Limey and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samura
Hip crime films from Steven Soderbergh—from a script by Lem Dobbs, past and future Soderbergh collaborator and co-writer of Dark City—and the iconic, laconic Jim Jarmusch. Both are products of a post-Tarantino world, but disinterested in aping or amping Tarantino’s style.
The End of the Affair and Onegin
Ralph Fiennes has proven a malleable, eccentric screen presence with the passage of time, but haunted romantic heroes of bygone eras was very much his thing for a few years post-The English Patient. As far as period dramas about haunted romantic heroes go, these are pretty good, both drawn from literary classics (Graham Greene and Alexander Pushkin), very capably directed (by Neil Jordan and sibling Martha Fiennes), and featuring gifted casts, including Stephen Rea and an Oscar-nominated Julianne Moore in the former film.
The Sixth Sense, Existenz, and The Rage: Carrie 2
Three genre titles of very different stripes. The first was a colossal crossover hit, anchored by star power and impeccably executed—famed twist included—by its writer-director M. Night Shyamalan, another breakout talent of 1999 who would help define the 2000s and follow his muse to the oddest of places over the subsequent quarter century. The second hailed from a director who’d been obsessively following his muse well over two decades, delivering a film utterly of a piece with his preoccupations. The third was a programmer sequel to a beloved vault title, seemingly cooked up in a lab to appeal to everyone and no one.
Boys Don’t Cry and The War Zone
Julianne Moore’s victor at the Oscars was Hilary Swank for Boys Don’t Cry, one of two superb, transformative performances—the other Million Dollar Baby—Swank has delivered in an otherwise inconsistent career. This and Tim Roth’s directorial debut The War Zone—both dramas laser-focused on tragic family dynamics, real or surrogate—are brutal watches.
American Beauty and Titus
Chalk and cheese, but a curious pairing of a British theatre director tackling American material and an American theatre director tackling British material, both bringing a whiff of theatrical artifice and tapping into alien qualities of their host cultures.
The critical community has not been kind to 1999’s Best Picture winner American Beauty in subsequent years, but I still appreciate it. It’s fascinating that for a period Mendes took on the mantle of probing the American condition—this, Road to Perdition, Jarhead—before seemingly realising how much he loves Britain and going whole hog with 1917, Empire of Light, two James Bond films, and FOUR upcoming Beatles biopics. Titus, meanwhile, is an artful and entertaining adaptation of a lesser, trashier Shakespeare play, with Anthony Hopkins devouring chunks of the ornamental scenery.
Snow Falling on Cedars, Eye of the Beholder and Molokai: The Story of Father Damien
Three very different international features from three very different Australian directors. Snow Falling on Cedars sees Scott Hicks working in the wheelhouse established by Shine: finely-burnished, humanist period drama, albeit without the levity afforded by the character of David Helfgott.
Eye of the Beholder and Molokai see Stephan Elliott and Paul Cox venturing outside their wheelhouses, which they would both return to subsequently: Elliott trading broad Australian comedy for an artsy American Ashley Judd thriller; Cox directing a period drama with overseas location shooting—albeit of modest scale and character-driven—about a priest ministering to a leper colony. The latter is the more successful of the two ventures, though Eye of the Beholder features some solid work from Ewan McGregor.
Toy Story 2 and Dogma
Perversely, both Disney franchise product: one from the Pixar stable, the other from Kevin Smith’s Miramax-produced ViewAskewniverse. Both are overrated, though the latter mainly amongst Smith’s loyal fan base, and only Toy Story 2 exhibits a discernible leap in craft and storytelling from its predecessor/s.
The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile and The Talented Mr Ripley
In aesthetic terms, the Oscar-baitiest awards season players of 1999—well-cast, handsomely made, adapted from literature, and rather tasteful—though the Academy did not take the bait on The Talented Mr Ripley (the best of the three) and The Green Mile and Cider House Rules don’t really compare to the less-decorated The Virgin Suicides, Magnolia, Three Kings, or Being John Malkovich.
Mystery Men, The Messenger: Joan of Arc and The Buena Vista Social Club
Three European-born directors—two of them major name filmmakers—jobbing overseas. Due to its genre (superhero comedy) and standing as commercial director Kinka Usher’s debut and swansong, Mystery Men is the odd one out, and an odd one to boot, but the film is witty and pulls off its digs at a genre shortly to become omnipresent. Joan of Arc was evidently conceived as a prestige picture for Luc Besson and then-wife/star Milla Jovovich; whilst it falls short, Jovovich is strong and the film conjures some medieval atmosphere. I have zero memory of Wim Wenders’ documentary about the titular Cuban musical group, but note it was and remains a work of some adoration.
The rest: The Matrix, The Mummy, and Ravenous
1999’s status as a milestone year doesn’t depend solely on its biggest successes (e.g. Phantom Menace) or boldest titles (e.g. Being John Malkovich) or most (then) venerated releases (e.g. American Beauty), but also a deeper catalogue of studio-produced or distributed titles, from micro-budget to the sort of mid-budget programmers we’ve seen strike a chord with audiences throughout the 90s (your Pretty Womans, your Ghosts, your Home Alones etc). And while I’m not as crazy as some about cyberpunk sensation The Matrix, pitch black subversive satire Fight Club, cult TV comedy spinoff South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, micro-budget found-footage chiller The Blair Witch Project, sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest, or sequel Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, I understand why they matter and were exciting and elevated genres and careers, most notably the Wachowskis and David Fincher.
More my speed were The Mummy, Bowfinger, and 10 Things I Hate About You. Perhaps the unkindest cut against Phantom Menace was that The Mummy—made on a lower budget and with less CGI quality control, held together with scotch tape and charm—proved twice as fun and thrice as nimble, and remains very, very watchable. Bowfinger—about an innovative huckster director engineering a movie around a hapless star—is Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy’s best work of the 1990s, playful and clever and landing witty potshots against Hollywood and Scientology.
10 Things I Hate About You, loosely riffing on The Taming of the Shrew, is the best of the teen-Shakespeare films and a superior teen comedy, elevated by the casting of Heath Ledger and Julie Stiles. Though director Gil Junger would do little of interest, the film’s screenwriting duo would craft further better-than-average comedies in the noughties with Legally Blonde, She’s All That (updating Twelfth Night), and The House Bunny.
Also a cut above were smaller, less conspicuous thrillers like Stir of Echoes, effectively adapted from genre mainstay Richard Matheson’s novel, and Best Laid Plans, a nifty little noir three-hander; comedies Office Space—a wolf in chill sheep’s clothing satire about workplace bureaucracy—and Election, an equally sharp satire of high school politics from Alexander Payne with some career-best work from Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, redeeming himself for Godzilla; and dramas like the sweaty Summer of Sam, helmed by Spike Lee with fire in his belly; Clint Eastwood’s True Crime, a sturdy programmer after flirting with ostentation in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil; and David Mamet’s The Winslow Boy, the American stage provocateur deftly and delicately adapting Terence Rattigan’s very British 1946 play.
Side bar: A recent episode of podcast The Hip Pocket digs into American Beauty, Fight Club, and Office Space—and to a degree The Matrix—as sketches of inexplicable white-collar malaise at the tail end of the affluent, comfortable 1990s: basically the sort of films that would be thwarted instantly post-911. Worth a listen.
Of course, there’s trash among the treasure, like junky family programmer Inspector Gadget—instantly undoing Matthew Broderick’s Election redemption—or the busy, uninvolving Wild Wild West, an unsuccessful reunion of the Men in Black director/star team of Will Smith & Barry Sonnenfeld and an invitation co-stars Kevin should have deKlined and Kenneth should have said “Bra, nah”. Then there are films that just hang there, despite all the talent before and behind the camera and all the evident expense and craft: Angela’s Ashes, a very handsome and costly portrait of Irish poverty; Anna and the King, retelling the story of The King & I sans all the fun; Entrapment, wasting its charming leads; and Bicentennial Man, like Toys earlier in the decade an overproduced bore that could simply let Robin Williams be the special effect.
John McTiernan’s medieval monster movie The 13th Warrior is compromised product, heavily reworked by source author (and infrequent filmmaker) Michael Crichton. However, the director’s other 1999 release—The Thomas Crown Affair remake with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo—is classy, breezy, stylish entertainment.
I mentioned earlier I don’t remember a lick of The Buena Vista Social Club. Ditto Sam Shepard adaptation Simpatico; Jane Austen adaptation Mansfield Park, affording Frances O’Connor her global debut; underrated French director Francois Ozon’s Criminal Lovers; Neil Jordan chiller In Dreams; Disney’s Tarzan, though its earworm of a Phil Collins song remains persistent; and, somewhat to my shame, Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. This is not an indictment on these titles but a casualty of seeing 127 titles from this calendar year. I certainly can’t imagine a Neil Jordan thriller starring Annette Benning being a waste of time, nor watching Jeff Bridges, Nick Nolte, and Sharon Stone deliver Sam Shephard’s dialogue.
Lest you wonder how one can see 127 films from a year, the answer is mundane: don’t watch TV. Don’t watch a season of The Sopranos—which also debuted in 1999—and you too can watch and completely forget Simpatico, Mansfield Park, Criminal Lovers, In Dreams, Tarzan, and All About My Mother.
Amidst much newness and novelty, several genre trends set in motion throughout the 90s persisted in 1999. Tarantino-inspired crime movies included If Dog Rabbit—directed by Matthew Modine—and The Boondock Saints, the sort of mindless film thirteen-year-old me imagined Pulp Fiction to be before I ever saw Pulp Fiction. Troy Duffy’s movie has a cult following, with a third instalment in the works, but the legacy of the documentary it spawned is equally strong, with 2003’s Overnight exposing a director prematurely emulating Tarantino’s ego but sorely lacking his talent.
The tail of Seven, formerly the tail of The Silence of the Lambs, was evident in Fight Club (from David Fincher) and Sleepy Hollow (scripted by Seven scribe Andrew Kevin Walker), but also The Bone Collector. Built on the sturdy frame of Jeffrey Deaver’s airport thriller, the film is novel in centring on a paralysed detective (Denzel Washington), though derivative of earlier genre entries with housebound sleuths (Copycat) and African-American detectives (Kiss the Girls, Seven). Looking back over his 1990s, that feels par the course for director Phillip Noyce, whose mainstream works followed in the footsteps of others: see remake Blind Fury, sequels Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, Basic Instinct derivative Slither, and TV spin-off The Saint. The procedural is performed by a colourful cast of character actors doubling as suspects, albeit ones easily vetoed through process of elimination (scratch Michael Rooker because he played a cop/killer already in Sea of Love; scratch Ed O’Neill because the theatre would erupt in laughter). Shortcomings aside, Washington has gravitas on tap even when immobile and bed-bound; he’s very capably supported by Angelina Jolie, on the cusp of stardom. This was the first of two Noyce/Jolie collaborations—see also the tasteless Salt—and Jolie’s first of three collaborations with DP Dean Semler, whose compositions fall short of the baroque best of the genre (e.g. Darius Khondji’s work on Seven) but are in line with its general aesthetics.
Another post-Seven derivative was 8mm, likewise from a Walker script and helmed by Joel Schumacher, one of two 1999 films from this creative of dubious taste and judgment. The other film was dramedy Flawless—a questionable title for a Schumacher film post-Batman & Robin—in which drag queen Phillip Seymour Hoffman cares for bigoted stroke victim neighbour Robert De Niro.
There were also grungy British films activated by the success of Trainspotting and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Plunkett & Maclean is an inconsequential but glossy highwaymen film executed with panache by Jake Scott—son of Ridley, nephew of Tony—featuring two of the stars of Trainspotting in Robert Carlyle and Johnny Lee Miller. Heart, meanwhile, is a drama thriller featuring Christopher Eccleston and scripted by TV royalty Jimmy McGovern; sadly, the film demonstrates that the resourceful McGovern is ill-suited to dabble in the abstract. More successful is Antonia Bird’s Ravenous, a historical dark comedy thriller set in the US about grisly happenings at a military outpost, effectively scored by Michael Nyman and performed with relish by the ubiquitous Carlyle, Guy Pearce, and Jeffrey Jones (controversy noted).
I mentioned previously becoming disproportionately invested in Pearce and Russell Crowe’s careers following LA Confidential. I loved that they were very different actors with very different personalities—Pearce an inner city urbane type, Crowe a charming bogan—doing very different sorts of films, as evidenced by The Insider and Ravenous. Following both actors, watching as their stock rose and fell and as cachets shifted between them, has been a rollercoaster ride. I love that Pearce was back in the spotlight in a big way with The Brutalist, and I love that Crowe, while not making particularly good films right now, is clearly living his best and biggest life.
I’ve already mentioned some work done by Australian filmmakers abroad: Molokai, Snow Falling on Cedars, Eye of the Beholder, and The Bone Collector. To this list can be added Double Jeopardy, another mainstream thriller and another Ashley Judd vehicle. Not one of Bruce Beresford’s best films, it’s nonetheless well-crafted with the care and sturdiness characteristic of his work. Local Australian productions, meanwhile, included Erskineville Kings and Paperback Hero, both launching Hugh Jackman; Jane Campion’s energetic misfire Holy Smoke, which as Kate Winslet’s first post-Titanic role served as a mission statement of sorts for her future career; the very watchable crime romp Two Hands, launching Heath Ledger and Rose Byrne; and two intriguing dramas in Passion and In a Savage Land.
In a Savage Land—about husband and wife anthropologists (Martin Donovan, Maya Stange) in Papa New Guinea affected by marital tensions, extramarital temptation (via Rufus Sewell), and the Second World War—is an "Australians abroad" film where Westerners becoming embroiled in offshore political (see also Balibo, The Correspondent) and/or romantic (see also Far East, The Year of Living Dangerously) intrigue in the recent past or volatile present. It’s a sub-genre that grants local directors an all-too-rare opportunity to concoct some exotic, old-fashioned Hollywood hokum and Australian actors a rare chance to play crusading professionals and reluctant freedom fighters, though two of the leads here are imports. Donovan and Sewell are wonderful, as is Stange, period-appropriate but bringing just the right whiff of modernity. Like Molokai, the film is handsome but not wasteful: director Bill Bennett resourcefully conjures pre- and post-war Adelaide—before and after his protagonists’ odyssey—through smart, economical use of locations. Whilst an original work, In a Savage Land has the narrative sweep and thematic texture of a meaty source novel. It’s a rare Australian film that hubristically reaches for greatness, albeit doesn’t quite get there.
Passion dabbles in the same troubled pianist biopic terrain as Shine, here focusing on Australian-born composer & pianist Percy Grainger (Richard Roxburgh), who finds fame but is handicapped by his predilection for self-flagellation and the “unnatural hold” of his mother (Barbara Hershey). Peter Duncan’s film strikes me as one of the last films bearing the overt influence of the Australian New Wave in its period setting, European influence, choice of Australian marginalia as subject matter, and aesthetic approach. It’s not subtle: the film’s thesis that Grainger’s maternal fixation renders him dysfunctional is circled, underlined, highlighted, and hammered home at every opportunity, the five screenwriters delivering all text, no subtext. But Roxburgh, on the cusp of a period of jobbing villain gigs abroad, is terrific. Not Australian, though starring local talent and also about a troubled musician (Jacqueline Du Pre), was the well-made Hilary and Jackie.
The teen movie was going steady in 1999, the tail of Scream evident in Teaching Mrs Tingle, helmed by Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, starring his Dawson’s Creek star Katie Holmes, and drawing on the same “What if teachers were bad guys?” energy as The Faculty, here embodied by a game but slumming Helen Mirren.
Where 10 Things I Hate About You drew upon Shakespeare, She’s All That draws on Pygmalion. Varsity Blues plays like a rural teen version of Any Given Sunday, heightened and overblown in its own way. Never Been Kissed is a light confection, while Jawbreaker and But I’m a Cheerleader tap darker comedic veins and Jason Biggs taps pastry in cause célèbre American Pie. Anywhere But Here and miniseries The 60s tackle parent-child generational divides, while Three to Tango and Girl Interrupted see teen stars of yesterday adulting, the latter a terrific showcase for Winona Ryder and Oscar-minted Angelina Jolie. Wes Craven was also ostensibly adulting, taking a break from putting teens in peril to make pedestrian true story Music of the Heart, with Meryl Streep playing a refreshingly untormented musician.
With its own ecosystem of young stars jutting between TV soaps, slasher films, and comedies, the teen movie was a cost-effective genre. I can see how it planted the seeds—not all, but a handful—for the decimation of the movie star system in the 21st century. However, the big movie stars of the 90s were mostly present, accounted for, and making bank in 1999, and while some of their output can’t help but feel retrograde in the greater celluloid arc of 1999, they’re all integral to the infrastructure.
For example, Robert De Niro lampoons himself lucratively in middlebrow comedy Analyse This. There’s meat and potatoes revenge action courtesy of Mel Gibson in Payback, and Arnie action infused with occult trappings in End of Days. There’s a muscular mystery thriller courtesy of John Travolta in The General’s Daughter. There’s romantic drama courtesy of Kevin Costner in Message in a Bottle and For Love of the Game—the latter directed (solidly) by the unlikely Sam Raimi—and Harrison Ford in Random Hearts, working a second time with Sydney Pollack. There’s upper-tier romantic comedy courtesy of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, more middlebrow romantic comedy from Roberts and Richard Gere in Runaway Bride (re-teaming with their Pretty Woman director), Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock making an energetic coupling in Forces of Nature, and Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer struggling to make Rob Reiner’s The Story of Us work. And Denzel Washington headlined the abovementioned The Bone Collector, but also brought gravitas to traditional biopic The Hurricane, Norman Jewison’s penultimate film.
Though not really occupying the same tier as the above stars, Ralph Fiennes had his thing going, as seen in Onegin, The End of the Affair, and time-spanning, multi-generational family saga Sunshine, and whilst her commercial stock had fallen, Sharon Stone is excellent in melodrama Gloria, with Sidney Lumet remaking the John Cassavetes romp.
Missing in action since 1996, Tom Cruise returned to theatres in Magnolia and—the cause of his protracted absence—Eyes Wide Shut. Though the late Stanley Kubrick was the film’s overriding auteur, this is one of those Kubrick titles—alongside Spartacus, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining—where the director was working with a humongous star and, particularly on the latter two films, breaking them down. Here Cruise—the aspirational hotshot hero of consecutive box-office bonanzas, deft at action and drama and rom-coms alike—is cast alongside his real-life wife (Kidman, wonderful here), cuckolded in her fantasies, has unfruitful flirtations with other women, is on the receiving end of unwanted gay attention as well as gay slurs (intertextually evoking rumours that have long swirled around Cruise), and brutally cut down by the true power elite—embodied masterfully by Sydney Pollack as a master of the universe type—and, par the course for Kubrick, forced to repeat these indignities across infinite takes. It’s fascinating star deconstruction that gives the film an extra level of frisson.
As hinted above, Eyes Wide Shut’s status as Kubrick’s final film and Cruise’s presence in Magnolia the same year does make this disparate duo feel like a symbolic end of one era and ushering in of a new guard. While Lumet and Jewison and John Frankenheimer—all roughly Kubrick’s contemporaries—would make a handful of films between them in the 2000s, they were the last of that vintage, and anyway of a different stock to Kubrick, epitomising classical filmmaking and old-school professionalism over Kubrick’s rarefied air.
Cruise’s ascent as an action hero was a 21st century phenomenon. Of the 90s guard, Stallone was still on post-Copland hiatus, but Van-Damme was kicking around and kicking heads in inferior sequel Universal Soldier: The Return. Christopher Lambert—the oddest of action stars—fought Beowulf and re-teamed with Highlander director Russell Mulcahy on Resurrected, while Starship Troopers’ Casper Van Dien (also in Sleepy Hollow) headlined Doomsday actioner The Omega Code.
Horror-wise, Dark Castle released William Castle remake House on Haunted Hill, affording Geoffrey Rush, as did Mystery Men, opportunity to unload slabs of ham. Also released were Stigmata, Troma’s Terror Firmer, Takashi Miike’s Audition, and Deep Blue Sea, which has its moments but strains—unsuccessfully—to be as fun as The Mummy.
A side bar to raise a glass to Samuel L. Jackson and his prolific 90s, from small roles in titles like Goodfellas, Patriot Games, Jurassic Park, and True Romance to major roles in Pulp Fiction, Die Hard With a Vengeance, The Long Kiss Goodnight, A Time to Kill, Hard Eight, Jackie Brown, Sphere, and The Negotiator, culminating in 1999 with Deep Blue Sea and The Phantom Menace—in a role that exists entirely because he told George Lucas he wanted it—and with Rules of Engagement, Shaft, and Unbreakable the next year. Jackson was, like Gene Hackman, an omnipresent and always welcome part of the tapestry of the 90s: everywhere, never bad (even in bad titles), always good, and often great.
Comedy-wise, while Williams and Carrey were pulling at heartstrings and Martin and Murphy tickling the funny bones, Rob Schneider graduated from supporting player to leading man with Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo: not high art, but a film that fulfils its ambitions. There’s also Martin Lawrence vehicle Blue Streak, hockey comedy Mystery Alaska, black comedies Drop Dead Gorgeous (about beauty queen rivalries) and Pushing Tin (about dysfunctional air traffic controllers), and charming literary comedies A Midsummer Night’s Dream and An Ideal Husband, the first of two Oscar Wilde adaptations helmed by Oliver Parker and starring Rupert Everett, redeeming himself for Inspector Gadget. Pushing Tin and An Ideal Husband both feature a jobbing post-Elizabeth Cate Blanchett, delivering good work but not really being tested.
The Straight Story, David Lynch’s G-rated Disney production about a farmer driving his tractor across rural America to visit his ailing brother, is neither the late filmmaker’s most experimental work nor his most normal, both categories wildly reductive. It is, like every other Lynch film of the 90s, doing its own thing while uniquely, recognisably his work. Meanwhile, Disney’s 1940 anthology Fantasia was continued—and its best segment, ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, revived—in Fantasia 2000. The animation is impressive and the classical music superb, but with segment hosts like Bette Midler and Penn & Teller, likeable as they are, it’s not exactly built for posterity.
Stuart Little also targeted family audiences, as did French film Asterix & Obelix Take on Caesar, kickstarting a junky but lucrative Francophile family franchise. Gerard Depardieu portrayed the rotund Obelix, and while he looked morbidly obese in 1999, by today’s standards Depardieu was in pretty good shape. Also hailing from France but markedly less family-friendly was Catherine Breillart’s provocative Romance, as well as the stylish black & white romantic drama Girl on the Bridge, featuring lovely performances from Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis.
For the record, some notable films of 1999 that I have not included because I haven’t seen them: Tea with Mussolini, Beau Travail, Go, Cruel Intentions, Detroit Rock City, Instinct, Happy Texas, Ed TV, At First Sight, Life, Mickey Blue Eyes, Human Traffic, Dick, Big Daddy, October Sky, Mystery Alaska, The Astronaut’s Wife, Brokedown Palace, Limbo, Idle Hands, The Bachelor, The Love Letter, The Other Sister, Blast From the Past, Jakob the Liar, Mumford, Crazy in Alabama, The Haunting, Lake Placid, Bats.
While this effectively wraps the 1990s, there’s one more instalment in the tank, a post-script entry on 2000, where we check in one last time with the graduating class of 1999, flash forward on a number of notable careers, launch some franchises and kill off some others, meet the parents, learn what lies beneath, find out what women want, conduct a requiem for a dream, look for Alibrandi, remember the Titans, and more. To be concluded.