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My Favorite Movies of '99
By Matthew Prins
Let me be blunt. If we're going to have this critic-reader
relationship, we need to be honest with each other. You go first.
Tell me your biggest fears and worries as a reader, or any confessions
you have. No, no, no: not in an e-mail. Right now. Out loud.
Uh huh. Okay. Really? How interesting. That's great.
I hope this was useful for you, talking to words on a computer monitor.
It should be very therapeutic. Now I must acquiesce. I have a
confession, one that may destroy any meager status I have as a film
critic. My admission is quite disgraceful, I realize, but I must
alleviate my guilt. As of today, March 15th, I have only seen, um,
well, one Best Picture Oscar nominee. You read correctly: I have seen
only one, as in the number less than two but greater than the number of
Pamela Anderson Lee's Oscar nominations. [Author's note on March 19th:
Hooray! I'm up to two now, thanks to a cheap-show presentation of "The
Sixth Sense."] I suppose I should feel some sort of quasi-professional
obligation to see all five nominees, and I do, actually. But my budget
is not unlimited, and I don't get into movies for free, so there's a
point where I have to decide if I want to see something depressing like
"The Green Mile" or instead see something light, but fun, like
"GalaxyQuest". Oftentimes, well, I just want to see "GalaxyQuest."
Not that I ignore arthouse films by any stretch; along with the movies
below, I've seen "Sweet and Lowdown," "Election," "The Straight Story," "All
About My Mother," "Three Kings," "Run Lola Run," "Eyes Wide Shut," and surely
others that I can't think of right now. Instead, perhaps there is a
different problem: recent films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar
haven't generally excited me. I'm not prone to hate the nominees, mind
you, but I generally don't rave over them. Of the nine best-picture
nominees I've seen from the 1998 and 1999 Oscar Awards, there's been
one I liked a lot, three I liked, one I liked until the last ten
minutes, and four that I was rather indifferent about. Not exactly a
stellar record.
I plan on seeing the 2000 Best Picture Oscar nominees I haven't seen
yet, but it's more out of cinematic obligation than out of a hope that
I'll get wondrously excited about one of them. I won't likely find a
nominee incompetent or ridiculous ("The Cider House Rules" is an
egregious exception), but I often find best-picture nominees, well,
rather blah.
Here, then, are five films that are certainly not blah. Two were
reported to have had a good chance at pilfering a best-picture
nomination, and in any logical universe one would be considered a
shoo-in for a best-documentary nomination. None of them has been a big
financial success: two made barely over $20 million, one made around $5
million, and two haven't cracked $1 million and aren't likely to. They
may not be blockbusters, but I promise you this: each of them is a
whole lot more enjoyable to watch than "The Cider House Rules."
Magnolia
I tell you this because perhaps it will be easier to explain why
"Magnolia" was my favorite film of 1999. Since proclaiming "Magnolia" as
my favorite film of the year, I've been wondering why it received that
illustrious honor. Objectively, it isn't perfect; some of the subplots
almost belong in a soap opera, and there isn't enough unification among
the many divergent stories. But here's the deal: I have a strong bias
toward audacity. And without any doubt, "Magnolia" was the most
audacious film I saw in 1999. Forget about the amphibian-laced ending
for a moment. (If you don't know what I'm referring to, stay in the
dark until you've seen the film.) Instead, think about the Philip
Seymour Hoffman character buying porn for an admirable and -- dare I
say -- Christian purpose. Think about characters breaking the third
wall by singing along to an Aimee Mann song that was on the film's
soundtrack, not in the proper events of the film. And my gosh: think
about a film bold enough to have a fundamentalist/evangelical Christian
character who a) doesn't molest, rape, or kill anyone by the end; b)
stays true to his beliefs through the entire film, despite numerous
predicaments; and c) despite a high degree of naivete and tactlessness,
is probably the most admirable major character in the film. That,
folks, is my kind of audacity. ("Magnolia" should be showing at cheap
shows shortly, if not right now.)
Being John Malkovich
Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
The Winslow Boy
After Life
And now, some short words on five other 1999 films worth checking out.
"Topsy-Turvy" was one of my five favorite films of 1999, and I would have
included it in the above had I not just written
a review of
it. "Eyes Wide Shut" was a lot better and a lot more moral than
critics gave it credit for; it wasn't perfect, for sure, but I have no
idea where the very negative backlash against the film came from in
secular circles. (All the nudity and sex surely turned off Christian
critics, but it was necessary to the point of the film.) Despite too
much earnestness, "The Straight Story" was terrific and made me want to
make a pilgrimage back to my home state of I-O-UH. "Toy Story 2" was the
best sequel since "Babe: Pig in the City" (a long time, I know) because
it had a tender emotionality that wasn't in the original. And, for a
short moment, let's be fair to the Oscars: "The Sixth Sense" was on my
top-ten list for literally a minute; the ending was such a
perfect shock that I severely overrated it until I thought about how
utterly implausible the rest of the movie becomes after the revelation
in the final reel. Despite that realization, I still think "The Sixth
Sense" is an very interesting film, and I certainly recommend it more
than, say, certain Oscar-nominated Tobey Maguire vehicles.
All critics have prejudices. I am not an exception
to that rule, nor would I want to be; how boring it would be to view
movies entirely objectively! So let me give you some examples of my
biases. If a movie has lots of fart jokes, I probably won't like it.
If a movie has a grown-up who really hates kids/dogs, and then the
grown-up is around a kid/dog all the
time, and then the grown-up starts loving all kids/dogs, I probably
won't like it. If a movie stars Pauly Shore, I probably won't like it.
There are exceptions to these rules ("Mystery Men" and "As Good As It
Gets" come to mind for the first two rules, respectively), but chances
are movies with these qualities ain't makin' my top-ten list.
Speaking of audacity, I suppose "Being
John Malkovich" has just a wee bit of it; how else can you describe a
film that revolves around a portal that spits people out onto the New
Jersey Turnpike after they spend 15 minutes in John Malkovich's head?
I don't feel particularly original having "Being John Malkovich" on this
list, since it was probably the most acclaimed film of 1999 after
"American Beauty." I think many critics, though, focused too much on
Charlie Kaufman's inspired screenplay and not enough on Spike Jonze's
restrained direction. In "Being John Malkovich," Jonze revels in one of
the most important rules of effective comedy: the more outrageous the
situation it is, the more realism there needs to be to counteract it.
Jonze brought out the emotional dispair in "Being John Malkovich" that
could have been lost if he had played the wackiness of the screenplay
too, well, wackily. (I saw the film again at a cheap show last week,
so hopefully you should be able to, too.)
"Wait a minute," you yell loudly
enough for me to hear all the way in Virginia. "Isn't 'Mr. Death' a
documentary? Why don't you complain about it's nonexistence in the
documentary category rather than giving it a prestigious spot as a
best-picture nominee?" Simple: Errol Morris, the documentarian behind
"Mr. Death", will never get a nomination for best documentary. Never.
Never ever. As Roger Ebert said in a "60 Minutes II" story on Morris a
few weeks ago, "He's too good for an Academy Award. The Academy Award
documentary branch doesn't have people smart enough to understand why
Errol Morris makes [what should be] Oscar-winning documentaries."
Here's Morris' problem with the Academy: he does documentaries the way
they should be done. He focuses less on the issues brought up in his
films than on the people involved with the issues, which is ultimately
the more satisfying approach. In "Mr. Death", the issues are capital
punishment and the Holocaust, but both those are secondary in the film
to Fred Leuchter, a man so engulfed by hubris that he becomes a
Holocaust denier simply because members of the Holocaust revisionist
movement, more than anyone else in the world, treat him with the
respect and reverence he thinks he deserves. ("Mr. Death" should be
hitting arthouse theaters within the next couple of months.)
There are two types of Christian film critics:
those who are primarily concerned about potentially offensive content
in film, and those who try to take a more holistic view of film from a
Christian perspective. I fall squarely into the latter camp, but I
would agree with many proponents of the former viewpoint that the most
intriguing trend in cinema during 1999 was the resurgence of G-rated
films aimed entirely at adults by "edgy" filmmakers. (Perhaps it is
simply a surgence: I can't recall offhand a single instance of the
trend outside of 1999.) Admittedly, it was only a trend of two, but
both examples were stellar. Many preferred David Lynch's ode to a man
crossing Iowa on a lawnmower, "The Straight Story," but I was more
impressed by David Mamet's quietly nerve-wracking take on sacrifice,
material wealth, and, in the subtlest of ways, even sexuality. "The
Winslow Boy" is a period piece that isn't obsessed with its period, and
it's a court drama with nary a court scene; a bit audacious, no? Very
well-received when it came out, it was ignored on critics' top-ten
lists, and neither Nigel Hawthorne nor Jeremy Northam got the Oscar
nominations they deserved. (It was released on video a little over a
month ago.)
All you need to know about "After Life" in advance is
the question at its focus, so intriguing that it was placed prominently
on the film's posters: "What is the one memory you would take with
you?" The first half of "After Life" is primarily spent watching people
picking that memory; interestingly, half of the people filmed are
actors reading lines, and half are real people giving their real
answer, but the movie is filmed such that the audience can't tell the
difference. The second half is people recreating these memories and
committing them to film. The worldview presented in the film is
explicitly non-Christian ... there is no heaven and no hell in "After
Life"'s afterlife, and there doesn't seem to be any omnipotent creature
overlooking the proceedings ... but the existential questions raised are
certainly important for Christians to think about. "After Life" was the
only film of 1999, including "Magnolia," that I wanted to see again right
after the credits had rolled. (I imagine it will be on video soon, but
I don't have an exact date.)