For being the month new Star Wars finally rampaged into our lives, May was surprisingly busy at American theaters. Perhaps the studios had learned something from avoiding Godzilla the year before and figured, hey, if it’s bad we can soak up some of the business. We got the wide break of Election to start the month, rereleases of Stop Making Sense and The Third Man and My Dinner with Andre, and a veritable feast for art-house patrons with classics like After Life and The Castle. We even had Trekkies opening against The Phantom Menace, which is some kind of commentary on both of those fandoms. (It’s also still fantastic and mortifying by turns.) After discarding these choices and a few others–because how am I supposed to make a joke about Just Cher’s Face?–I present to you the best, worst, and weirdest of the month that began the 1999 Summer Movie Onslaught. Fittingly, we start in 1996 with…
Black Mask: The basic pitch for Jet Li in America was “fit but humorless Jackie Chan,” and since we were years away from the exploding-mouse-butt “Down with the Sickness” fight from The One that almost sort of tracked. Black Mask got a belated release to capitalize on that bit in Lethal Weapon 4 where Li cut some guns in half with his bare hands–which was awesome!–but it continues last month’s Parade of Disappointing Tsui Hark Movies. We’d see this again in 2001 with a terrible Miramax edit of Iron Monkey. Wither Once Upon a Time in China or Peking Opera Blues? Black Mask is perfectly fine, but everyone involved did something better with their time in the same year. I still had the poster up on my wall, because Jet Li is breaking into some kind of nonsense-but-cool pose that typifies his pre-Hero output and I got the thing free as a promo for the soundtrack. The USA release is wall-to-wall hip-hop on the soundtrack, with the most notable artist being Everlast. It’s bad enough to make the whole thing mortifyingly dated by default.
RATING: A Worse Yesterday
The Love Letter: The only movie that dared open wide against The Phantom Menace. This looks fake, right? Like it’s a parody movie poster in a movie about movies? And why wasn’t Tom Selleck a bigger movie star? He’s great in In & Out and Three Men and a Baby was a gigantic hit, so I got no clue. Anyway, I’m not fully convinced this movie is real and we’re also all suckers for not having Tom Everett Scott in every movie ever made.
RATING: Three Stars and a Maybe This Movie Doesn’t Actually Exist
The Mummy: Before we sold The Mummy‘s legacy on being The Most Bisexual Experience, they sold it on gigantic faces! Big faces over the pyramids! In horror-movie scenarios! Chasing a biplane! It got my butt in the theater opening weekend; I had been advertised old-school Universal Monster mayhem combined with big-budget special effects, and you could take that to the bank when it’s from the guy who made Deep Rising. A brilliant poster for an iconic movie, so I can barely make a joke here. I’m not going to add anything meaningful into the online discourse for The Mummy. Justice for Kevin J. O’Connor, I guess? There was no spot for him in Licorice Pizza, PTA?
RATING: All the horses on the right side of the river
Notting Hill: I really do miss the era of gentle romantic comedies featuring one entirely unhinged character that wandered in from an earlier draft of the script. Rhys Ifans is the best part of Notting Hill, but there’s no reason to sleep on Hugh Grant drifting towards his late-career sarcastic streak. (“We’re a travel bookshop. We sell…travel books” will sit in my mind forever as a perfect delivery.) Americans had this weird conception of Hugh Grant as a perpetually-stuttering mess, a person who was paper-thin and easy to push around, the kind of Brit that exists solely in the mind of the Ugly American who needs to find some kind of derogatory stereotype that requires zero research. That’s probably not a hundred percent of the reason for his career shift, but he’s certainly spent the 21st Century playing different versions of humanity’s worst impulses, a disaster of a person even when he’s theoretically the hero. I remember very little of this one and I haven’t gone back to revisit it like I have with something like Music and Lyrics, but the poster is a perfect metaphor for a lot of movies like this one. The big Julia Roberts template got most people in, but I’m here for the slightly English weirdness.
RATING: Up a hill, down a mountain
The Phantom Menace: Oh hell yeah, here we go with Drew Struzan! This poster was part of the seven-month onslaught from first trailer to release, just constant head-punching merchandised march to MORE STAR WARS. Star Wars was back even though we thought it was gone forever, and these movies were going to be just as good as the first ones and everything was going to be beautiful. Hindsight shows us–or maybe it shows me–that aside from R2 being there and John Williams’ music there wasn’t so much that felt like Star Wars out of the stuff we were being shown. But we all wanted to believe. (Good on ya if you truly love the Prequels.) Even this poster gives us a look that’s more Special Edition than original release. Star Wars was already something fundamentally different, but I didn’t want to get off the hype train. The poster is still gorgeous, a lovely piece of painted art amongst a poster jungle that was increasingly turning to butchered Photoshop jobs. (Looking sideways at next month…)
RATING: Episode One calorie, diet Star Wars
The Thirteenth Floor: If you hadn’t yet gotten your fill of “do we live in a simulation” movies after watching The Matrix a few times, then boy do we have the next disappointing movie for you! Trading shootouts, revolutionary special effects, and deep world-building for…um…Craig Bierko, The Thirteenth Floor is a remake of Fassbinder’s Welt im Draht and also an adaptation of Simulacron-3. It’s a way worse experience than either the miniseries or the novel, and [spoilers for a twenty-five-year-old movie that you weren’t gonna watch in the first place] the big twist is right there on the poster. Back then I thought it was aggressively stupid that someone would create a virtual-reality simulation of Los Angeles filled with sapient characters and not bother to render anything east of El Monte, but now I just see this film as prescient for knowing we’d be obsessed with half-baked 90s nostalgia crafted with bad tech in the far-future year of 2024. Anyway, Existenz was released a few weeks before this movie and it’s a better take on living in a simulation, no matter what Žižek says.
RATING: 13/100, I’ve never managed to finish the damn thing despite several attempts and the presence of multiple Vincents D’Onofrio
Trippin’: There was a torrential downpour the night The Phantom Menace opened in New York, but street teams were still out in force making sure we remembered that other movies existed. One of the freebies was the trailer to Trippin’ on a one-time-use cardboard-and-foam VHS tape. I was fascinated by the tech that seemed at turns novel and super wasteful, and I watched the trailer until it stopped working something like three views in. This was the red-band trailer which means it had swearing and boobs, and how else are you going to entice a freshman? I don’t remember seeing this poster anywhere as a kid; the most I remember anyone talking about Trippin’ was in post-Columbine op-eds which thought a school-shooter-adjacent dream sequence was tasteless. Looking at it now it feels generic but at least trying to hit all the major beats to let you know what the movie is about. I’m stunned that Donald Faizon stays in the background here as he was easily the most recognizable actor in the cast. We were some time away from Dr. Turk Turkleton, but he had already been Murray Duvall for four years straight.
RATING: Trip ‘n’ Fall, awarded $10,000 plus punitive damages in the resulting lawsuit
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Remember, I was a Django Reinhardt kid. Of course I was going to run out to see the newest Shakespeare adaptation on opening weekend. Is this movie a good adaptation? Is it a good movie? Does it hold a candle to the Mickey Rooney one? I don’t really remember and I don’t care so much. This poster is lousy and was swiftly replaced by a version that highlighted all of the film’s stars. The concept of Kevin Kline doing Shakespeare got me into the theater and would get me into theaters again. Stanley Tucci could do no wrong after Big Night and The Impostors. This poster could have simply been a list of the cast on a black background and I would have rushed to Union Square for the very first screening. It was a bonus that some of my favorite Shakespeare was delivered by the Dad from ALF. (Side note: Midsummer is the first of three perfect performances by Sam Rockwell in 1999, and this scene where he steals the whole damn movie in front of both David Straithairn and Christian Bale made me go from “who is this guy” to “I must see everything he does forever” in two minutes flat.)
RATING: Richard III out of Ten for the poster, Henry VI Part 1 out of Ten for the movie
Next Time: A few all-time failures, a couple of super-hits that you don’t remember, Phil Collins, and my all-time favorite German film. I BELIEVE!