Defining any year as the “best ever” for movies can’t come
off as anything but hyperbolic, and you’d be right to be wary of a book called Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew up
the Big Screen when there’s a picture of Jar Jar Binks on its cover. Yet hyperbole
or even making a case for all-time-greatness status is not the point of Brian
Raftery’s new book. Best. Movie. Year.
Ever.is a zippy history of a year in which films may not have always been
great but very often blasted off into bold new directions. As awful as The Phantom Menace was, you cannot argue
that it wasn’t a prescient indicator of the kinds of movies that currently
dominate cinemas. Several that year were equally prophetic, as The Matrix predicted the Internet’s
mass-mesmerism, Election put its
finger on how much of a sloppy mess the political process was about to become, Run Lola Run solidified the influence
video games continue to wield over cinema, and The Blair Witch Project introduced the inescapable found-footage
genre.
However, the main thrust of Best. Movie. Year. Ever. is that 1999 was more of an era-finale
than a new-age milestone as the stunning audacity of films such as Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, and Being
John Malkovich failed to really take root on the big screen and television
was poised to finally surpass film as the more daring visual medium. So there
is a slight elegiac tone to Best. Movie.
Year. Ever. Of the 30 movies Raftery covers, I saw 22 of them within a
year or so of their releases. I can’t imagine myself doing that again in this
era of nonstop comic book movies and pointless remakes.
Nevertheless, Best.
Movie. Year. Ever. is a complete blast, full of highly entertaining tales of
filmmaking with ample support from many of the people who helped make them. It’s
also something of a history lesson as Raftery often places the films in a
current events context, indicating how, say, American Beauty reflected the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Office Space was a reaction to a
soul-deadening shift in office culture, Boys
Don’t Cry synched up with the murder of Matthew Shepard, and quite a few of
the year’s pictures did the same with the Columbine massacre.
My only complaint is the amount of attention Raftery shines
on certain films. I felt as though he buzzed through movies such as The Virgin Suicides, The Mummy, and The Limey too quickly to really provide a sense of their
significances or adequate histories of their creations, while he lingered way
too long on the tiresome Fight Club. However,
the storytelling is never dull, and the film selection is pretty thorough (the
only ones I would have tossed in are The
Straight Story and Audition). In
2019 we aren’t likely to get a selection of films as interesting as the ones
that boogied through cinemas twenty years ago. I doubt we’ll get another book
about cinema history as riveting as Best.
Movie. Year. Ever. this year either.
