Southern Sass: Looking Back at the 'Best Movie Year Ever'

4.16.2019

Looking Back at the 'Best Movie Year Ever'

In 1999, Reese Witherspoon ran for student body president, Brad Pitt begged us to hit him, Tom Cruise said "fidelio," three teens investigated the Blair Witch, Heath Ledger danced and pranced

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National

April 16, 2019

Looking Back at the Most Important Movies of 1999 with Brian Raftery
A Q&A with the Author of Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

In 1999, Reese Witherspoon ran for student body president, Brad Pitt begged us to hit him, Tom Cruise said "fidelio," three teens investigated the Blair Witch, Heath Ledger danced and pranced and sang "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You," Keanu Reeves dodged a bullet (or 80), Jason Biggs violated an apple pie and more than one famous actor slid into the enviable mind of John Malkovich through a portal on the seventh-and-a-half floor of a nondescript Manhattan office building, only to be spit out on a muddy ditch near the New Jersey Turnpike.

And that was just on the silver screen.

Back in the real world, the scenes unfolding were just as indelible: the president had just been impeached, the Columbine shooting rattled the nation, the internet as we know it was taking shape and Y2K—that mythical technological rapture—loomed on the horizon, waiting to hurl society into chaos.

All of this and more are dissected in Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. Written by veteran film journalist Brian Raftery, and based on over 100 interviews with industry folk from Christopher Nolan to Kirsten Dunst, the new book is a compendium of 1999's most important films, as well as a kind of history of America at the turn of the millennium. Not only did the year's movies reflect the preoccupations of their moment—see: the middle-class malaise in Office Space and Fight Club; the newfangled identity crises of the digital age in The Matrix and Being John Malkovich; the Clinton-era anxieties over marriage in American Beauty and Eyes Wide Shut—they also foreshadowed shifts in the years to come, both in Hollywood and the country-at-large.

Last week, I caught up with Raftery over the phone to discuss the most overlooked movies of 1999, the best movie year since and which film would've won Best Picture, had the Oscars for '99 been held today...