![]() Two of the year's best performances, by Hilary Swank and Chloe Sevigny, in the story of a girl named Teena Brandon who declared herself a boy named Brandon Teena. (Fox Searchlight Pictures/Courtesy of Everett Collection) In 2019, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in The Library of Congress. ![]() LOVERS LOST Co-stars Chloe Sevigny (left) and Hilary Swank were both nominated for Oscars and Swank won Best Actress for playing a transgender man brutally beaten and raped. Remarkable, that this war action comedy could also be praised by President Clinton for its politics. The violence and arbitrary nature of war is captured in startling photography (wounds have never seemed so real), and the movie is somehow cocky, satiric and moving, all at once. The world seems to shrink while we're watching, as a prisoner places a cellular call to his wife and a cable news reporter stands in the middle of the action. On another level, it's a Catch-22 examination of the insanity of war, where every morning you find out who you are, or aren't, shooting at today. On one level, it's an adventure tale about soldiers in the Gulf War who capture a map to Saddam 's horde of stolen gold. (Eric Robert/Sygma/Getty Images)Īnother dazzling display of directorial virtuosity, by David O. Russell (left, with Ice Cube, Saïd Taghmaoui, and George Clooney in 2000 in Paris) has a slew of actors who return to his projects (Jennifer Lawrence, Christian Bale), he and Clooney reportedly had a fistfight when the actor defended crew members he felt were being verbally and physically abused by the director. The movie is funny and very smart, metaphysical in a way, and so bountiful you feel not just admiration but gratitude.ĪLL THE KING’S MEN The war film’s battles also were on set. First Cusack and then a series of paying customers line up to take their trip inside Malkovich, and in one dizzying scene Malkovich even enters his own brain, which is like turning your consciousness inside-out. Behind a filing case, he finds a hole in the wall that is a portal directly into the brain of the actor John Malkovich (playing himself). John Cusack stars, as a man who gets a job on floor 7 1/2 of a very strange building (the visuals inspire sustained laughter). And unlike many MTV refugees, Jonze doesn't crank up the volume and the visual overkill his film unfolds slyly, with delight, like a magician showing you the trick is far from over. Most movies top-load their bright ideas in the first half hour this first feature from music video vet Spike Jonze, with screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, is a continuing cascade. ![]() Being John Malkovich was the year's best, a film so endlessly inventive that I started grinning at the way it kept devising new ways to surprise me. The last four months of 1999 were a rich and exciting time for moviegoers-there were so many wonderful films that for the first time in a long time, it was hard to keep up. The Telluride and Toronto festivals had already started lobbing in great new films, and by the time I saw Being John Malkovich and Three Kings early in October, it was clear that Hollywood's hounds of creativity had been set loose and were running free. (Photos and captions are additions by Jennifer Laski for The Ankler as accompaniment to Roger Ebert’s original writing, which is running intact and in full.) Herewith, Roger Ebert in his own inimitable words: In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. Thank you to Chaz, and please visit more of Roger Ebert’s writings at. ![]() The seeds of multiverses, sequels and franchises were being planted as the new millennium - and its streamers, superheroes and strikes- was set to begin (as was, by the 2010s, real diversity on and off screen). ![]() On his honorable mentions list (five movies “tied for 11th” and a series of animated films), he did include Toy Story 2 and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. Of course, not all movie economics made sense: Michael Mann ’s The Insider took home $60.3 million - but cost $90 million to make.īut in 1999, on the precipice of the Big IP era of Hollywood, nearly all the projects on Ebert’s list still were original ideas. American Beauty grossed $363.5 million on a $15 million budget (and would win Best Picture) Boys Don’t Cry, a $2 million budget indie, brought in $20 million. 31, 1999) as a vivid example of the industry’s evolution from an era when indies were made and seen, and mid-budget movies dominated. Sparked by that notion, Janice Min reached out to Chaz Ebert, Roger Ebert ’s widow, for permission to re-print her late, great husband’s assessment of that year’s 10 best movies (published Dec. We present the below in honor of festival season underway.Ī few months ago, Richard Rushfield dropped a line into a column that he considered 1999 to be the best year in movie history. ![]()
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