At the Movies: 1999
Manners are a way of showing other people we care about them.
Adam, “Blast from the Past.” 1999.
The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club.
Tyler Durden, “Fight Club.” 1999
I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.
Ann Scott, “Notting HIll.” 1999
There was a time before Covid, way back when, that my companion and I would probably be in a movie theater on a Friday afternoon. A recent New York Times article, “The Movies of 1999,” has me thinking about the films that year before Y2K and how many we saw. Looking over the entire list of American films released in 1999, I realize just how much time we spent in theaters in Lexington, KY. This was a time when the local video store membership was still the way to see movies at home and when Netflix sent DVD’s to your home through the US Postal service. Yes, the mail was quicker and mostly reliable pre- 2000.
I’m a Star Wars fan. While I understand prequels are designed to answer lingering questions of a fan base and build a new fan base, I think those that no longer need to speculate and discuss how Anakin Skywalker became, transformed into, Darth Vader, are missing something important about what films can do. Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace began the backstory of the franchise. I’m one of those people that is comfortable with ambiguity and unanswered, quality questions.
Mention something out of a Charleston Heston movie and suddenly everybody’s a theological scholar.
Metatron, “Dogma.” 1999.
You can find edited versions of Dogma if the “F word” offends you. There are a lot of “F words” and other language that you could, may, find offensive. Jay and Silent Bob, Jay because Bob never speaks, and the cast use language to shock, but this little comedic fantasy’s deep impact is its exercising a theological idea and religion traditions to a possible logical conclusion. Plus, it has a great cast. To borrow from Monty Python, it was something completely different.
Our context is awash, shaped, and conflicted by social media and “influencer” accounts. Three years before Jason Bourne there was Tom Ripley who posits,
“I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody than a real nobody.”
Tom Ripley, “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” 1999,
The only explosions are interpersonal. Moral relativism is abundant. This wasn’t the only
Buzz and Woody returned in “Toy Story 2.”
James Bond returned in “The World is Not Enough.”
“The Green Mile” offered a different image of an angel or Christ character’s last days waiting execution.
Hilary Swank cosplayed Brandon Teena, a trans man that was murdered which brought LGBTQ+ conversations to mainstream big screens in “Boys Don’t Cry.”
“Three Kings” tells the fictional story of American solders stealing gold, stolen from Kuwait, at the end of the First Gulf War.
The animated, “The Iron Giant” told the story of a boy, an alien robot, and how friendship can change us for the better in the midst of the Cold War. And, baseball fans got to hear Vin Scully call a game and for a moment Billy Chapel put “professional” back in baseball in “For the Love of the Game” even though he was an ego centric, aging player and boyfriend.
South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, Wild Wild West, Big Daddy, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (O Behave!), Life, The Mummy, Election, The Sixth Sense, and others offered laughs, frights, cultural commentary through laughs and scares, romcom hope, drama, philosophical and religious inquiry, and Disney-ride level adventure.
The choice Morpheus offers Neo applies to all kinds of truth (Truth).
You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.
Morpheus, “The Matrix.” 1999.
Your year of choice, especially mentioning PHANTOM MENACE, is almost beyond recognition in the aftermath of the subsequent 25 annums. Lucas wasn’t forecasting that all or even most children will eventually succumb to The Dark Side. Within 10 years, however, we had pretty much accepted that American exceptionalism had been a ludicrous narrative with not only young Anakin giving way to Darth Vader, but having exposing us to our greatest fear that at root, we are all The Joker just waiting for our “rules” and “civilization” to collapse so we can be at one another’s throats in five minutes.
Thanks for your reflections and God bless—