Bewitched, Bedazzled, and Bamboozled Am I...: October 2000

Continuing October 2000. You can tell the Fall Movie Season has begun because the releases are all suddenly Thought-Provoking, from Name Auteurs, or premiered at Film Festivals. Well...among the usual blockbuster comedies and Halloween horrors, of course.

No Scares This Halloween: October 2000

October is always one of the happiest times of the year. Even in Florida, one felt the change of seasons, maybe not in weather, but in decor! Pumpkins and witches, bats and ghosts, cobwebs and skulls at every house, on every classroom door, at every supermarket; horror marathons, all month long, on the TV; spooky specials, whether they be another "Treehouse of Horror" from The Simpsons or Cartoon Network's annual rerun of The Halloween Tree (though I think this was eventually taken over as a tradition by ABC Family, later Freeform). Ah, Halloween: that special time of year!

My family adores Halloween, none more so than my father, who loved helping us execute costumes and makeup from scratch. In high school, I spent not a penny when transforming into Raoul Duke - Dad loaned me sunglasses, a Hawaiian shirt, and a visor, then soldered a cigarette holder with cigarette at his garage workbench. Legendary is the time we came back from trick-or-treating with Mom to find Dad as a redneck zombie: face painted completely white, red smearing at his lips and neck, a noose around his neck his hiking flannels and hat completing the effect. Oh, yes, this was a big deal holiday for us.

The problem is, I cannot remember which costume I wore this Halloween. I have perfect recall of the Halloweens of Kindergarten through third grade and the ones of high school, but 4th-8th I can only remember four costumes, and I have no idea when I did each one. I don't think I even have pictures. The best I can figure is, I know for a fact I saw The Emperor's New Groove with my friend Tony in December, and I'm pretty sure the two of us went trick-or-treating together twice in this period, and I was The Phantom of the Opera one time and Charlie Chaplin the other, so I must have been one of those. Unless, of course, this was a year when Halloween fell during rehearsals for The Wizard of Oz, in which I played the Scarecrow, and the reason I can't remember the costume is that I was already in costume, while singing and dancing, though October would have been too early for a dress rehearsal. 

Anyway, the movies of October were not so spooky.

The Last of the Summer: September 2000 (contd)

September can sometimes be seen as a burn-off period, certainly more so in recent years. Summer's over, awards season isn't back, and the industry insiders are focused on the film festivals in Toronto and Venice. That doesn't mean there aren't some gems to be found: 

All Bangers: September 2000

What was I doing in September 2000? I don't remember. But here we have my first rewatch of one of the year's Oscar winners, Almost Famous, critically acclaimed but a box office bomb on its initial release, which nevertheless has gone on to an artistic and cultural reputation that makes many go back and ask, "Why the hell wasn't that nominated for Best Picture?"

Nominees Return: August 2000 (contd)

As though to make up for July's total lack of Oscar nominees, August gave us three...

School's Back from Summer: August 2000

In August 2000, I began sixth grade. For some, this is the start of middle school; for others, the end of elementary school. For me, it was the end of an experience. 

See, I went to a magnet school with only three grades, 4th-6th, and I was in a program that saw me with the same teacher all three years. Ms. Turner is still one of my favorite teachers, we're even friends on Facebook. She was a true personality, a queen - literally, instead of a pointer or a ruler to, uh, point out things on the whiteboard, she had a stuffed glove covered in glitter with a deep red velvet cufft, the handle of which read, "QUEENIE." So close were we, she even got me an audition with a local high school for a part in their production of Mame; I was offered the role of Young Patrick on the spot, but it was canceled before rehearsals even began (it was said the teenage main cast had behavioral issues). 

Of my writing, she was a great encourager, editor, and critic. She streamlined my fiction but also tried to set me free from the confines of conventional storytelling. I remember once when I turned in a direct Star Wars parody for a creative writing exercise, she told me it was funny, clever even, but so structured, I had missed the point of the exercise, which was to let the pen roam and the mind run free, that is, stream of consciousness. Funnily enough, it was also her class that taught me the importance of outlining before writing, though that was the standard for the grade. Still, it was her personal touch, the notes in the margins, the praise for some aspects, the tsk-tsks for others...look, every teacher I've had encouraged my writing, but she was the most instrumental in shaping it.

August 2000, then, was the beginning of the end of an important chapter in my life. This would be my last year with her. Middle school brought more good teachers, and high school still more (including a drama teacher who showed me how to translate what I learned to playwriting, directing, and producing).

Funnily enough, my two rewatches are about the end of summer and the beginning of a new school year:

The Unawarded: July 2000

We have now gone halfway through the year 2000, with 49 films logged and 73 films to go - the back end is always heavy, studios save their "prestige" projects for the winter awards season, banking on immediacy and short memories. But as we saw, lots of films in the first half of the year went on to nominations and wins! In fact, the only two months with no Oscar nominees in the year 2000 are January and July. Why July? I don't know, let's take a look at the options:

Fictionalizing Facts: June 2000 (contd)

My mother was very helpful to me with this batch of movies. When I told her how I was wrestling with my feelings regarding one of the movies, she immediately sent me the book it was based on and, of course, I read it. 

It did make me appreciate the film more as a largely successful adaptation of an impossible-to-adapt story, yet at the same time, the book's own shortcomings pulled into focus what I didn't like about the movie. 

But it wasn't the worst movie I saw...

Summer in Atlanta: June 2000

June was the most important month of my year 2000. This was the month my mom and I went to Atlanta for a week, staying with my Aunt Jenny. And boy, did we keep busy!

This was the trip where I made my first appearance on television! 

Mind, it was the closed-circuit Emory University station, as part of the sketch show created and produced by my cousin. It was a good show. Past episodes included a Blair Witch Project spoof (the movie was the sensation of 2000) and a prescient sketch called Homoerotic, Or...? wherein two men were presented with a video or photo - of three guys clad only in swim trunks being hosed down, for instance - and debated whether it was clearly homoerotic or just "good clean fun," which just demonstrates how old those debates are. Anyway, I was there when they filmed a "behind-the-scenes" sketch on the making of the show, and was of course cast as the Godfather of Comedy (see above), the ultimate decider of what was or wasn't funny enough to make it to air. The two jokes I remember: a Gladiator reference (see how popular it was?) wherein I gave my approval through the old emperor's thumb technique...

...and me flipping through a script until a tired Tom Green reference (see how popular he was?) made me hurl it across the room. That didn't make it the final cut. The entire episode is here, my bit is at 18:26, that's my cousin Clay hosting the segment.

This was also the trip where my fascination with Ancient Egypt (borne of my love for The Ten Commandments) came to its zenith with a look at the Fernbank Museum's Mysteries of Egypt exhibition. What I remember most is the IMAX film of the same name, where Omar Sharif tells his grandson ofthe native boy who really discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen, and who, despite the legend of a curse, lived to a ripe old age; and the journals of Napoleon's Egyptian exhibition, with richly detailed drawings of the French taking obelisks "home".

This was the trip where I saw the original Psycho at the Fox Theater. Sponsored by TCM, the entire program was a throwback to cinema days of yore. There was live organ accompaniment as we sang old tunes for the pre-show: "Yes, sir, that's my baby / No, sir, I don't mean maybe..." There was a short before the main feature - coincidentally, the Looney Tunes "What's Up, Doc?", a snippet of which I had watched just the previous night when my aunt introduced me to Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?. And let us not forget: Janet Leigh herself was there, live, on stage, for an introduction and Q&A (oddly, what I remember most is not just her talking about how sweet and easy Alfred Hitchcock was to work with, but how her co-star and Hitch's daughter, Pat Hitchcock, would tell her how frightened classmates and teachers looked when he picked her up from school). Then, the film itself, a masterpiece. I had seen it a couple times before at home, but you truly have not lived until you've seen it on the big screen. Everything is more horrifying. Did I skip a shower that night? Of course I did. Did I hesitate before going up the stairs, sure that Martin Balsam's fate also awaited me? Baby, I had to turn on all the lights before mounting the first step. And this was before digital projection was a thing, so the silver screen was truly silver.

Naturally, there were other movies and television shows. No Time for Sergeants and the aforementioned What's Up, Doc?; Auntie Mame, which became a perennial for me, one I introduced many friends to, I've even seen some revival screenings in cinemas, it is one of my all-time favorite movies; a glimpse at a VHS cover at the video rental store turned me on to Freaks, which I found and rented and fell in love with when I got back to Florida.

Honestly, my auntie did

And then there was Daria, which had its season premiere the same night as the Psycho screening. Aunt Jenny, helpfully, recorded the whole thing, including the two-hour marathon that played beforehand and half of the follow-up program: Making the Video for Janet Jackson's "Doesn't Matter" from The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. I still have the VHS. Very gracious when one remembers this was Aunt Jenny's birthday weekend. To celebrate, we had tea at a traditional tea room - was it Mary Mac's, or am I misremembering? - friends of hers visited, and the day ended with a (homemade by one of the said friends?) coconut cake. I know she had fun doing the rest of it, too, but one can't overstate how much thought she put into making this trip meaningful and enjoyable for me and my mother.

Our last night, the moms went to bed while my cousin Carl and I stayed up late in the basement and read out loud Paddy Chayefsky's The Hospital. We stopped when 11-year-old me came upon the phrase, "It is nipple-clear that she is braless." Did we move on to Marty, or did we just chat about the Beatles, or both? I think both. We then listened to a Jesus Christ Superstar highlights CD featuring Claire Moore. Then dawn broke and it was time to leave...

Elsewhere at the movies...

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:

The Beginning of a New Age: January/February 2000

The year 2000 began with a genuine sense of history. Once the ball dropped and Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve continued without blackouts, internet outages, or planes falling from the sky (that wouldn't be for another 20 months), we celebrated as citizens of a New Millennium, laying the groundwork not just for the next century but the next ten centuries!

We started with eyewear

When the media spoke of the Y2K bug, a glitch that would convince the world's computer systems that the year had turned to Zero, it was in apocalyptic terms. Yet, in a sense, it did feel like Year Zero, in that there was a sense of renewal, of possibility. We were living in the future, Two Thousand! Even I, a fifth grader, ten years old, felt it. I seem to recall the slightest hitch in my breath when some joker turned the lights off just as the countdown hit "three....two...ONE...HAPPY NEW YEAR", but soon I was swept up in the emotion, in watching the people around me -  mom, Dad, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins - celebrate how we, they, had made it. There were people in the room who seemed to have seen it all: WWII, the moon landing, the Concorde, the internet at your fingertips, now marveling that they were part of this new era. My God, what would we do with this blank slate, this call to shape the world?

We would keep living, it turns out. The real opportunity to shape the 21st Century would not come until November (it was an election year!). Until then, we returned to work, to school, back to reading The Ballad of Lucy Whipple, to doing homework while watching Pepper Ann in the afternoon, to evenings with Dilbert and Malcolm in the Middle. 

And people went right back to the movies. Indeed, some went the very first day of this New Millennium....

The Year 2000: An Introduction

The Turn of the Century is a phrase that, growing up, I knew referred to that blurry period between the Gilded Age and WWI. Working with people born after 2001 humbles one into realizing, somewhere between the reminiscences of Y2K paranoia and Daria, that for many, and soon many more, the Turn of the Century occurred just 25 years ago. And I was part of it!

With the gravity of that realization, I decided my look at the year 2000 would be different from other retrospectives. I lived through it! I watched many of the hits either in theaters that year or on VHS (ha!) the year after! And what I didn't see, I certainly knew about thanks to daily conversation, TV spots, newspaper reviews, and subsequent pop culture references. So, instead of the usual 65-80 films, I watched 122, doing my best to watch in the order of their release (the only exception: January releases, which I sprinkled throughout because...well, I'm not sure why I did that, but that's how it worked out). I had my friends on Instagram vote on what I should prioritize. And I decided to spend two months talking about it.

Sunday, I'll discuss the films released in January and February 2000 that I was already acquainted with; Monday, I'll discuss the films released in January and February 2000 that I saw for the first time. And it will continue in that pattern until September, when I take a look at that year's Oscar race category by category (well...ten categories, at any rate), culminating in my personal picks for the best of the year.

By the way, these are the 122 films:

28 Days

102 Dalmatians

Almost Famous

American Psycho

The Art of War

Autumn in New York

Bamboozled

Battlefield Earth

Beau travail

The Beach

Bedazzled

Before Night Falls

Best in Show

Big Momma's House

Billy Elliot

Boiler Room

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

The Boondock Saints

Bounce

Bring It On

The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy

But I’m a Cheerleader

Cast Away

Cecil B. Demented

The Cell

Center Stage

Charlie's Angels

Chicken Run

Chocolat

Chuck & Buck

Chunhyang

The Contender

Coyote Ugly

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Croupier

Dancer in the Dark

Disney's The Kid

Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Dr. T and the Women

Dracula 2000

Drowning Mona

Dude, Where's My Car?

Duets

The Emperor's New Groove

Erin Brockovich

Eye of the Beholder

Fantasia 2000

The Fantasticks

Final Destination

Finding Forrester

Get Carter

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Girlfight

Gladiator

Gone in 60 Seconds

Hamlet

Hanging Up

High Fidelity

Hollow Man

The House of Mirth

The In Crowd

Isn’t She Great

Judy Berlin

Keeping the Faith

The Last September

The Legend of Bagger Vance

Love & Basketball

Love’s Labour’s Lost

Malèna

Me, Myself & Irene

Meet the Parents

Men of Honor

Miss Congeniality

Mission: Impossible II

Mission to Mars

Next Friday

The Ninth Gate

Nurse Betty

The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Paragraph 175

The Patriot

Pay It Forward

The Perfect Storm

Pitch Black

Pollock

Psycho Beach Party

Quills

Ratcatcher

Red Planet

Remember the Titans

The Replacements

Requiem for a Dream

Return To Me

The Road to El Dorado

Road Trip

Romeo Must Die

Rules of Engagement

Scary Movie

Scream 3

Shadow of the Vampire

Shaft

Shanghai Noon

Shower

Small Time Crooks

Snatch

Space Cowboys

State and Main

Sunshine

Thirteen Days

Traffic

U-571

Unbreakable

Urban Legends: Final Cut

Vatel

The Virgin Suicides

What Lies Beneath

What Women Want

Wonder Boys

X-Men

Yi Yi

You Can Count on Me

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