"Three Kings," one "Witch" and a "Princess"
Salon Arts & Entertainment's critics pick their favorite movies of 1999.
Dec. 17, 1999
Michael Sragow
The best movie critic ever to compile year-end lists was James Agee. For his "Movies in 1945" column in the Nation, he described himself as neither more "hopeful" nor "despondent" than usual -- and then went on to cite two dozen good or better movies. The next year, with bracing honesty, he started his roundup with the statement that he was registering the movies he preferred "of the films of 1946 that I saw -- I missed a number of likely candidates."
Of the films of 1999 that I saw -- I missed a number of likely candidates -- here are the 22 I enjoyed the most. As I sorted them out, they fit together naturally in pairs. And as I assembled them like Noah's flock, they seemed diverse enough to replenish hope for cinema even after a flood of bloated end-of-the-year releases.
David O. Russell's "Three Kings" and Michael Mann's "The Insider"
These films deliver steak and sizzle; their directors are gnarly, instinctive muckrakers working in opposite modes of exposé. Russell operates like a rock 'n' roll comedian riffing on the unreported underbelly and aftermath of the Gulf War. Mann is a symphonic narrative composer, turning the real-life plight of a Big Tobacco whistle-blower -- and the Big Network news producer who fails to protect him -- into a passionate threnody for white-collar man.
David Lynch's "The Straight Story" and Ron Shelton's "Play It to the Bone"
Both of these glorious road movies -- the first fact-based and lyrical, the second flat-out funny -- take roads less traveled. Lynch tracks a 73-year-old man as he rides a 1966 John Deere lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his ailing, estranged brother. Shelton travels from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a lime-green '69 Olds with two best-friend boxers (soon to be opponents) and the woman they both adore. Underneath the banter in these films about life's meaning is the stirring quest of men to achieve redemption by doing one thing right.
Robert Altman's "Cookie's Fortune" and Lawrence Kasdan's "Mumford"
The beauty and the warmth of small-town living -- and the pettiness and claustrophobia, too -- get fond, incisive treatment in these lovely curlicue comedies. In Altman's film, Patricia Neal's luminous performance as a big-hearted woman who tires of existence makes the first section as mysteriously moving as the final section of John Huston's "The Dead." In "Mumford," Kasdan skillfully posits the radical notion that people want plain speaking and kindness from psychotherapy. (And while we're on small towns, let's not forget Michael Patrick Jann's maligned beauty-pageant parody, "Drop Dead Gorgeous," one of the few entries in this vérité-happy year to use a handheld style with knowing and explosive effect.)
Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut" and Wim Wenders' "The Buena Vista Social Club"
Honest-to-God "funk" -- as in (according to the American Heritage Dictionary) "an earthy quality appreciated in music such as jazz or soul" -- returned triumphantly in these movie musicals. The first, a spin-off of the "South Park" TV show, is such a ferocious and apt parody of "story" musicals, from Rodgers and Hammerstein to "Les Miz," that future generations may regard the title as a play on "South Pacific." In Wenders' self-described "musicumentary," Ry Cooder rounds up extraordinary singers and instrumentalists who in their "son de Cuba" arrive at a jazz-pop-folk hybrid that (as Cooder writes in the liner notes to the original CD) is "very refined and deeply funky."
"Toy Story 2" and "Being John Malkovich"
Woody the cowboy doll discovers he once was a huge TV star; Buzz the spaceman action toy comes face to face with a souped-up new model. Most disorienting of all, Malkovich enters a world that is 100 percent Malkovich. The perils of celebrity -- and the pull it exerts on our identities and desires -- receive devilishly sly treatment both in John Lasseter's virtuoso cartoon and Spike Jonze's patchy feature, which heralds the emergence of Charlie Kaufman, a fearlessly inventive screenwriter.
François Girard's "The Red Violin" and Mike Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy."
Musical extravaganzas raised to the level of art. Girard follows a Cremona violin around the world over the course of centuries, while Leigh homes in on Gilbert and Sullivan, D'Oyly Carte and company as they cook up "The Mikado." In the eyes (and ears) of these directors, the "pure" world of classical music and the "silly" world of humorous operettas are equally fraught with social, sexual and mystical meaning -- and heroic achievement and sacrifice.
Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke" and Brad Bird's "The Iron Giant"
In Miyazaki's epic cartoon masterpiece, the incursion of ironworks into the spirit-laden wilderness of Japan's medieval past provokes universal discord -- and a torrential outpouring of primordial imagery. In Bird's engaging animated feature, an iron giant from outer space appears in a small Maine coastal town in the paranoid '50s. Only a derivative "E.T." streak mars Bird's distinctive melding of sentiment and satire, and the Giant himself is a funny-touching-
awesome creation, akin to King Kong.
Udayan Prasad's "My Son the Fanatic" and Neil Jordan's "The End of the Affair"
Islamic fundamentalism and Catholicism, respectively, wreak havoc on personal relations -- and force anti-heroes to examine their failings -- in these fervid expansions of a Hanif Kureishi short story (Kureishi himself wrote the script) and a Graham Greene novel.
Bernardo Bertolucci's "Besieged" and Joan Chen's "Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl"
In these piercing, intimate tales, Bertolucci and his "The Last Emperor" star Chen use their cameras as psychic barometers charting the bonds between a displaced young woman and a loving older man. Bertolucci sets his film in contemporary Africa and Italy, taking off from a story by James Lasdun. Chen's film, based on a story by Gei Lin (who co-wrote the script), grows out of the degradation of city girls "sent down" to the Tibetan steppes during the Cultural Revolution. Along with Prasad's and Jordan's work, these are the most exquisite literary adaptations of the year.
Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey" and Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry"
Both are terrific tributes to circa-1967 moviemaking. In Soderbergh's inspired updating of John Boorman's classic "Point Blank," images of past and present mingle in a British ex-con's brain as he stalks L.A. to avenge his daughter's death. The fractured style evokes the exploratory excitement of the '60s; the narrative captures the destructive nature of its druggy fallout. Peirce modeled her right-on rendering of the Brandon Teena murder case on real-crime films like Richard Brooks' "In Cold Blood." But in capturing the muddled yearnings of the male-impersonating Brandon and his buddies and girlfriends, Pierce goes way beyond Brooks' movie in sympathetic imagination -- and in rough-hewn poetry.
Tim Burton's "Sleepy Hollow" and Neil Jordan's "In Dreams"
The year's best horror movies. Burton's loose adaptation of Washington Irving has bravura to burn and joins the myth of the Headless Horseman to legends of rural American witchery. Jordan's bold linkage of paranormal visions and a woman's maternal feelings makes him the only filmmaker with two worthy 1999 entries (see "The End of the Affair," above). Each of Jordan's films soars en route to a rocky finale. Nonetheless, he's given us more great acts than any other filmmaker on my list.
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