1999 was the best year ever to go to the movies; there’s a whole excellent book about it and journalistic backup from everyone from NPR to Entertainment Weekly. Looking at any given weekend box-office chart yields both a deep bench of certifiable all-timers and also complete befuddlement. Hey, did you know that Inspector Gadget made almost $100 Million in the States back when that meant “actual hit” rather than “will only lose all the money in the world before streaming”? That Runaway Bride was one of the biggest movies of that year? That Bicentennial Man, a movie so sentimental that you can bore into it and let the sap out, sold twice as many tickets as Fight Club did?
It’s easy to watch nothing but the best movies when you’re looking back after a quarter-century, but when you’re deciding in the moment at your local theater or perusing the newspaper movie clock you’re deciding on vibes and hype. Sometimes you have to flip a coin, and if you were a high-school kid like me and often making choices at the dollar theater with your friends you were at the mercy of heads, tails, and the two best-looking posters there.
I’m not exactly the prime demographic for 1999’s nostalgic pull, because no matter how much I wanted to be in the In Crowd as a high-school kid and no matter how much I gave into trends and the latest thing I was still the nearly-fifteen-year-old-weirdo convincing their parents that we should go see Robert Altman’s latest for movie night. (I was correct; Cookie’s Fortune might be his unheralded best.) It’s like the great writer Sarah Marshall once wrote: “one thing I try not to do is generalize about kids today not knowing what x y or z is, because there will ALWAYS be weird 13 year olds out of time who exclusively listen to Django Reinhardt and I know because I was one of them.”
I spent this month writing a term paper about Duke Ellington’s Carnegie Hall performances and listening nearly exclusively to those recordings; I was nobody’s prime demographic, so take that into consideration when I’m talking about going to the movies back then. With all that said, here are my thoughts on the movie posters of the month as I saw them in theaters or from Blockbuster or from a copy purchased off a rug outside of the Empire State Building or on the new miracle of DVD. It was a really good time to be a fan of the movies, but you wouldn’t know that from…
Foolish: If you were around fifteen years old in 1999, your first reaction was probably “Master P is doing what with who?” Master P? With the tank in the “Make ‘Em Say Uhhhhh” music video? I Got the Hook Up was just now making the rounds of bootleg VHS in your favorite Queens hangout, and an instantly-forgettable Friday knockoff co-starring Martin Sheen(…’s brother) wasn’t gonna make anybody love Master P for his comedy skills. Eddie Griffin was everywhere in 1999 and it feels like the only lasting impact he had was that one track on Dre’s 2001. Anyway, I forgot this movie existed until I started writing this column.
Rating: 99 out of 99 Ways to Avoid This One at Blockbuster
Never Been Kissed: I remember hating this poster. Nothing was lazier than taking a generic publicity photo of Drew Barrymore and slapping it next to the title of the movie. We all just sort of knew Drew Barrymore, right? She was Gertie in E.T. and then you knew her from something else, even if that all seemed to be either small parts or low-budget crap. I really liked Doppelganger but I wasn’t pretending like anybody else saw it. The monoculture 90s meant that she could be Bjergen Kjergen or Casey Becker, appear in a Woody Allen movie nobody at all purchased tickets to, do a wedding hostage comedy that barely saw release, and then rampage back with Ever After and The Wedding Singer because people remembered her as Firestarter or as the time she showed David Letterman her boobs. Now she was headlining her own romantic comedy and the entire pitch was “look, Drew! See this movie!” Boring and unfair, especially considering that the movie is a stone-cold classic.
Rating: Josest Grossest
Twin Dragons: Limping into theaters seven years after its Hong Kong premiere, Twin Dragons was a cornerstone release in Harvey Weinstein’s hatred of actually making money. The real problem is that Twin Dragons isn’t very good. I’m an extreme Jackie apologist but we were already in Rush Hour territory, so ain’t nobody going to see a sub-Project-A Jackie Chan in a hastily redubbed and re-edited goof. Twin Dragons might be the worst movie from either Ringo Lam or Tsui Hark, and yes I’m including the Van Dammage they caused in the States. The poster itself is another choppy photoshop job from Miramax that tells you very little about the movie, although it does promise that Jackie is gonna hit somebody with a violin, which doesn’t happen.
Rating: Aces Go Nowhere
Ten Things I Hate About You: Look, it stars all these teen people who you might see in Teen People and it’s got something to do with Shakespeare, there’s your hook and you’ve probably already seen the trailer. For a lot of teen comedies of this vintage I trusted the cast, and here we had 3rd Rock and Alex Mack and Bernard the Elf which was enough for me. This poster was a placeholder for outside the theater; the intended audience was hearing about it through MTV and the nascent internet. And being both a Shakespeare nerd and a comedy nerd, I was already on it because Larry Miller and Darryl “Chill” Mitchell and Allison Janney and Joe Isuzu David Leisure. Side note: I went to go see Ten Things with my dad, so maximum teen discomfort at the various dick jokes.
Rating: Henry V out of Ten Things
The Matrix: Holy shit, is that Joey Pants? I loved EZ Streets! We all knew The Matrix was going to be something special; the promotional materials had pushed the weird visuals and the deep mystery at the heart of the story. Keanu moved funky and could make crazy leaps out of helicopters, so it looked like he had finally maybe shaken off the post-Speed funk. The poster pushes just how different this movie would feel compared to everything released in the spring of 1999, a weird computer-green-blasted dark-sided affair in long coats and small sunglasses. This certainly wasn’t The Out-of-Towners or Analyze This, but its odd-duckness worked in its favor as everything ran screaming away from the mid-May release of Episode I. The Matrix stayed in the box-office top ten until nearly the Fourth of July, at which point seemingly every teenager in America had seen it. (My first screening was on a bootleg VCD in my school’s computer lab, a copy purloined in Chinatown by a senior superfan who had already seen The Matrix three times by May First. That seems like the perfect introduction.) After Columbine the scariest thing to Middle America was a young person in a trenchcoat, and that mystique probably fueled the box-office dominance of the film. All I knew laying eyes on this poster for the first time was that I knew the Fratelli Brother and Cowboy Curtis and Ted, but who was the woman with the Glock? Sometimes all you need is a striking character design. Within the year I’d know Trinity (and Neo and Morpheus and Mouse and Apok and Twitch and Tank) better than anyone.
Rating: One out of The One
Go: It’s the poster for Swingers but for people who had purchased You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby on release day. That was enough for me! Catching this one on video was an object lesson in how quickly something could date itself. I liked the movie well enough but even by fall break in 1999 it felt like a relic. Also doesn’t Taye Diggs spend most of his on-screen time talking about tantric sex? How did William Fichtner get top billing here? Timothy Olyphant wasn’t famous enough off of Scream 2?
Rating: Three out of six or maybe nineteen interconnected plotlines
Next Time: Big faces and talking a lot about Drew Struzan!