The Best and the Worst: May 2000 (contd)

May 2000 continues from yesterday.

The month of May was fruitful for awards season, seeing the release of two films whose popularity and infamy, respectively, lasted well into March of the next year. I refer, of course, to Gladiator and Battlefield Earth.

Gladiator was a hit, Battlefield Earth was a bomb. Gladiator was the #1 film in the USA two weeks in a row, the #3 film of the whole year; Battlefield Earth bankrupted its studio, the #100 film of the whole year.  Gladiator won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Battlefield Earth "won" the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture. Are their reputations warranted?

Read on:

The Forbidden Books: May 2000

And so comes May 2000 and the end of fifth grade. (OK, that may have been early June, but my June post has too much going on already, so let's say it was May)

My teachers liked to make the last week of school a "summer camp" for our mixed 4th/5th-grade class. This year's theme was based around a popular book series whose fourth entry was coming that summer and for which a movie had been announced - indeed, several classmates told me I should audition, despite me pointing out that casting calls were specifically in England. I speak, of course, of Harry Potter. 

I was "sorted" into Gryffindor (we drew random names out of a bucket, I got Oliver Wood), and was completely at sea: I'd never read these books, though it seemed everyone else had, or at least enough for there to be a class debate over how to pronounce "Hermione." It was certainly a boon for Gigi, who had been partially raised in England and so became our in-house expert on how English schools with their houses and prefects worked. We even played a version of Quidditch where I had to be the "Keeper", and seeing as I already had no clue what was going on with actual sports, my memory of this made-up one was me standing in front of the three hula hoops and just kind of...staring. No idea what was going on.

The thing is, I wasn't allowed to read Harry Potter. There was a very short period where my family's Adventism kept such things at bay, the fear at the time being that the youth would be seduced into turning away from God and Christ by the Trojan horse of reading. My family's partaking in this kind of thinking lasted only a year, maybe, and was pretty much undone by my paternal grandmother gifting me The Goblet of Fire at Christmas. When my mom herself saw the first movie at home, there was a bit of a, "This is what people were worried about?" reaction - what was so wrong with an imaginative work where good triumphs over evil?

But that was later. I'm talking about the year 2000, where this was happening at the movies:

Tardy to the Party: April 2000, contd

Well, it took a few days, but here's the rest of April 2000 - all first-time watches for me:

Well, Mom Likes It: April 2000

My most distinct memory from April 2000 is below. Before we get there, I want to point out how, quelle coincidence, all three of these films I rewatched were directed by women. Not on purpose! Just how my rewatches of April 2000 worked out.

America's Actress: March 2000, contd

Continuing from yesterday's rewatches of March 2000, here are my first-timers from that same period. Among them is the first of the second of the year's releases to go on to Oscar glory.

That movie, of course, is Erin Brockovich, which opened before the Oscars for 1999 even aired and immediately had Julia Roberts as the Best Actress frontrunner for the next year's ceremony, momentum that never once slowed down. It was perfect, in a way: despite a Supporting Actress nomination for 1989's Steel Magnolias, her superstardom began with 1990's Pretty Woman, the 20th Century ending with her as our reigning rom-com box office queen, America's Sweetheart. It's only fitting that the 21st Century began with her being lauded not just as a genuine thespian, but as our Best Actress. (Sometimes I think, oh that all happened fast, but that's actually the typical timeline for breakthrough-to-Oscar for female movie stars - Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, Grace Kelly...hell, Audrey Hepburn won for her debut!)

Here's where Erin Brockovich fell within the March 2000 landscape:

Killer Birthday: March 2000

March 2000. This was the month I turned eleven, and I feel like this was the birthday where I got a CD of Highlights from the Phantom of the Opera (with Claire Moore!) and a VHS of Yellow Submarine. I had awakened early in the morning, so there was time before school to listen to the whole CD; the VHS I saved for later.

I had only recently gotten into the Beatles, and I remember it had to be fifth or sixth grade because my introduction to them was through neither their music nor their movies but through a small paperback in our classroom's Take A Book, Leave A Book library: Beatles Diary, written by their chauffeur and road manager, Alf Bicknell. Odd that without any other context, I latched on to the story told in those pages. I was so into the Beatles that, for a project asking us to create an Egyptian-themed calendar, I did one with images of a band called The Scarabs, with, I believe, Anubis in place of Ringo.

While I was turning 11 and dreaming of a past I never experienced, here's what was happening at the movies...

Magic, Melancholy, and Wonder Boys: January/February 2000, contd

Continuing the beginning of the year 2000 and, already, we have our first Oscar winner of the year!

Wonder Boys was originally intended for end-of-year awards consideration in 1999. Getting it all together proved a challenge, though, and the release date was pushed back to February 2000, a surprising decision considering how firmly the November-December period had become Awards Season by that time. Critically acclaimed but met by audiences with a shrug, it came and went at the end of February. Such was the support within the film and critical communities, it was re-released in November, better suited for awards consideration. Indeed, it went on to be nominated for four Golden Globes (winning Best Original Song) and was among the National Board of Review's Top Ten Films of 2000, while star Michael Douglas was named Best Actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. 

But that would be a December 00/January 01 story. We're still in January and February 2000, and Wonder Boys was one release of many - all seen this year for my first time: