The movies of 1999

Chris: 1999 was a fantastic year for cinema. Everyone was on their A game.

Helen: Let’s be honest. George Lucas was not on his A game. Chris: Let’s start with Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace, a movie Beth was old enough to see in cinemas.

Helen: It’s not very good.

Beth: My dad was reviewing films in 1999. He took me to Bristol to see it at a press screening. And I thought afterwards, “That must have been a terrible film,” just to see his crestfallen, solemn face.

Helen: We had heard the bad word about it and how bad Jar Jar Binks was, and so I was braced for it being worse than it was. So I wasn’t absolutely appalled. There are good things about it. The Duel Of The Fates, for example. And probably something else.

Dan: It’s a better film than

The Rise Of Skywalker.

Chris: I will die on this hill as well.

Dan: My take on The Phantom Menace and the prequel trilogy now is, say what you like about them, at least they had a story.

Helen: It was about taxes, though.

Chris: Only partially.

Helen: But at least George Lucas was trying something. He was trying to push the envelope as he did in the 1970s, just with less success.

Dan: He was pushing the envelope in the wrong direction.

Helen: While we had the unexpected thump of Star Wars, we also had the absolute “What the fuck?!” of The Matrix. I saw that six times in the cinema. It lifted my entire year.

Dan: That was one of those movies where you walk out of the cinema afterwards and go, “I think I’ve got superpowers!” It was a comic-book movie, really. The way it handled the idea of powered individuals through this idea that the world isn’t real blew my tiny mind.

Chris: And one of those movies where forewarned was forearmed. It came out in March in the US, and the summer here.

Helen: But I don’t think anyone really knew what we were in for. It did feel like it came out of nowhere and had changed everything. Why is anybody bothering to make movies if they’re not this ambitious? It was mindblowing.

Beth: Ambition is the word here, in terms of world-building and philosophy and storytelling. And Trinity was the fucking best.

CHRIS HEWITT

Visited London in 1999. Saw The Mummy. Has been paying off the debt since.

DAN JOLIN

Was living the dream in ’99, as Reviews Editor at a film mag whose name we forget.

HELEN O’HARA

Lived in Paris in 1999. Fave films: La Menace Fantôme. La Matrice. Le Doigt De Bow.

BETH WEBB

In 1999 saw The Sixth Sense at a sleepover. The twist: all her friends were ghosts.

Helen: Trinity is so good.

Beth: Keanu was a hero who didn’t mind being saved, so I loved the number of times she got to save the day for him. It was the first time I’d seen a woman on screen doing that. She was what I got to grow up with.

Dan: It redefined action movies. Up until that point it was big men and big guns. It took its cue from Asian cinema. We hadn’t seen as much of that then.

Chris: It was the year of the sleeper. The Matrix. American Pie. The Blair Witch Project. And The Sixth Sense. Which was a phenomenon. Again, it came later so we all knew there was a twist.

Dan: I saw it an early press screening and had no idea. I remember not massively enjoying it because something felt off. I was going, “Why is nobody talking to Bruce Willis?” And then of course the end happened and I went, “Oh, right. That’s why it was weird!”

Beth: That’s a big part of the appeal, that unsettled feeling. It’s almost as effective as the big twist. It absolutely scared the shit out of me.

Helen: I did see the big twist coming but only because I’d read reviews that said there was a big twist, and then you’re sitting there guessing what it can be.

Chris: It was one of two big horror films that came out that year. The other was The Blair Witch Project.

Dan: Amazing film. I love that film. I rewatched it recently and it still holds up. It wasn’t just some gimmick.

Beth: For the time, what they were able to do with such limited resources, to draw out that level of terror, was terrific.

Dan: It’s a fantastic horror because you don’t see anything. It’s all in how the actors sell it.

Helen: I really liked it. I was a bit frustrated by not seeing anything. I thought there would be a bigger pay-off. That said, Mike in the corner at the end is terrifying.

Chris: It’s one of the rare examples of a movie that birthed an entire genre. It’s interesting that The Sixth Sense wasn’t copied in that way.

Beth: You can’t. Or else everyone is going to see the twist coming.

Dan: It was the year of twists. The Matrix has a first-act twist. It’s not real! The Sixth Sense. And then Fight Club, which has an amazing twist.

Chris: What is it, Dan?

Dan: It’s all a dream.

Chris: Brad Pitt is a ghost.

Dan: It’s Calvin and Hobbes, innit? Hobbes isn’t real! Tyler Durden is The Narrator! Can you believe it?

Beth: If we’d listened to Helena Bonham Carter at the beginning, it would have all made sense. She was right all along.

Helen: I love that film. I saw it five times in the cinema. Beth: I watched Fight Club again in preparation for this and thought I’d just watched Joker.

Helen: I find it less nihilistic than Joker. I think it’s a deconstruction of toxic masculinity and therefore it has to portray it in order to do that.

Dan: It’s funnier. It’s a comedy, for starters. Whereas Joker

isn’t, ironically.

Chris: Anyway, we have completely and utterly violated the first rule of Fight Club by talking about it.

Helen: And the second rule.

Chris: The third rule is no fly tipping. But it was a good year for comedy. Bowfinger. American Pie. Erm, Deep Blue Sea.

Helen: It’s a hilarious film.

Chris: Not sure it’s meant to be a comedy. But it’s a not-verygood film that I love with every fibre of my being.

Helen: The Samuel L. Jackson speech in that is an all-time great comedy and action moment.

Chris: It was a good year for teen movies. Election, American Pie again, and beloved of some people in this group but not me,

10 Things I Hate About You.

Dan: Can I list them now?

Helen: This is the definitive adaptation of Shakespeare’s

The Taming Of The Shrew. It’s impossible to make that play work and not be obnoxious. Yet this film is the opposite of obnoxious.

Chris: What am I missing? I saw it once, didn’t like it much, didn’t like Heath Ledger at all, which I feel bad about.

Beth: You look like a normal, functioning human, but it seems you’re dead inside.

Helen: It’s so clever. There are so many zingers in the script. Dan: I didn’t see Election as a teen movie. It got sold as one, it looked like one, and it smelled like one, but it’s very different. It’s a political black comedy. There are no easy answers with it, and it’s got such depth, like 10 Things I Hate About You.

Helen: We should mention

The Iron Giant. It’s an incredibly touching film. And has the single best use of the word “Superman” in human history.

Chris: Right, enough squabbing. Let’s vote!

Dan: “It shot out of nowhere, did things we’d never seen on screen before, changed action cinema, and blew our minds into the next century. Just don’t mention the sequels.”

Helen: “David Fincher’s gleeful satire is anchored by great performances and bags of style. Anarchy at its coolest.”

Beth: “Brad Bird’s gorgeous take on Ted Hughes’ Cold War children’s tale is a beloved comfort blanket of a film.”

Beth: “Alexander Payne’s deliciously dark high-school satire, with Reese Witherspoon on star-making form.”

Helen: “A cast full of future megastars play one of the smartest scripts of the year. Shakespeare would totally dig it.”

Dan: “Steven Soderbergh took a revenge-thriller set-up and created an almost cubist look at regret and loss.”

Chris: “How’s this for a twist: this isn’t a horror movie; it’s a deeply emotional story about grief and acceptance.”

Helen: “The return of Terrence Malick gave us the most meditative war film ever made, arguably his masterpiece.”

Chris: “Perhaps Sam Raimi’s most atypical movie, dark and sombre. But it retains the power to shock and move.”

Dan: “It’s a shock to see it rank so low — the defining found-footage horror movie, with real snot and everything.”

MATTHEW POPE’S

Blood On Her Name is an entry in the unsurprisingly thriving American rust belt noir subgenre, which focuses on bad decisions made by struggling folks in desperately deprived circumstances. It begins with a man dead on a concrete floor, and Leigh (Bethany Anne Lind) — owner of an auto repair shop in the backwoods — unsure what to do about (and with) the corpse. The twist is that the protagonist, who has experience with both sides of the law, could make the body disappear and the problem go away, but feels an obligation to the dead man’s family to leave him where he can be found so they have closure — which, of course, eventually makes a terrible situation worse for everyone. It’s a short, tough, twisted tale, with fine work from Lind and the always-good Will Patton as her estranged father.

Julian Richards’ Reborn is stitched together, Frankenstein-fashion, from a selection of horror/mad-science classics — including Frankenstein, Psycho, Room and Carrie — to bring together an unusual mother-daughter team. The stillborn daughter of actress Lena O’neill (Barbara Crampton) is shocked to some sort of life in the morgue and raised in captivity by a necrophile attendant. On her 16th birthday, Tess (Kayleigh Gilbert) zaps her tormentor and escapes — homing in on her mother, who happens to be hosting an acting class where she needs a girl to play her daughter in an intense role-playing session. The electric-powered waif racks up a body count as she tries to maintain a relationship with her mum, who is coping with career and emotional issues of her own. It’s a mix of B-picture schlock and affecting personal drama, with great work from long-time genre mainstay Crampton and newcomer Gilbert.

“Phobos is one of the most unstable environments in the solar system — that’s why they call it the doomed moon.” It’s seldom a good sign when films misspell their lead actor’s name in the opening credits, and Doom: Annihilation , which turns Amy Manson into Amy Mason, more than follows through on this promise, giving you that reboot of the computer game Aliens

knock-off franchise you never even bothered not to want. Lieutenant Joan Dark (Manson) goes to “the doomed moon” (near Mars) and battles utterly generic mutant zombies and fireballtossing alien demons while a mad scientist (Dominic Mafham) perfects his Jeremy Irons imitation. Manson, who has proper films on her CV (Beats, Run, Real), deserves to survive… filmmaker Tony Giglio perhaps needs to rethink his career strategy, or fall back on a sequel to Soccer Dog: The Movie.

David M. Rosenthal’s Jacob’s Ladder , a clumsy remake of Adrian Lyne’s nightmarish 1990 drama, is one of those films that’ll just put you to sleep. In the new version, set in Atlanta, trauma surgeon Jacob (Michael Ealy) and his grunt brother Isaac (Jesse Williams) are African-american veterans of the Afghan War who suffer PTSD and have a complicated relationship with each other and Jacob’s wife (Nichole Beharie). Their identities shift, twists that could easily be redacted reveal that dead people are alive and sane people are crazy (but only provisionally), and a few images from the old film (demons on the subway, unearthly corridors, a sexy angel sprouting demon wings mid-coitus) crop up. A lot of time is spent in an unsettling hotel lift, vets dosed with a government-approved evil drug froth at the mouth and die, and everyone emotes intensely while absolutely nothing important goes on until a final trundle down an over-lit symbolic corridor. Even Doom: Annihilation

has more going for it.