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!
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| 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....
Fantasia 2000
release: January 1
dir: James Algar / Gaëtan Brizzi / Paul Brizzi / Hendel Butoy / Francis Glebas / Eric Goldberg / Don Hahn / Pixote Hunt
pr: Donald W. Ernst
scr: Gaëtan Brizzi / Paul Brizzi / Brenda Chapman / Elena Driskill / Carl Fallberg / James Fujii / Eric Goldberg / Joe Grant / Don Hahn / Irene Mecchi / Perce Pearce / David Reynolds / Mel Shaw
cin: Tim Stuhrstedt (live action sequences)
A series of vignettes based around classical compositions, a sequel to 1940's Fantasia.
There was a time when you could not go to the regular cinema to see an IMAX film, such technology was only available as side attractions at museums, like the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale, FL (where my family watched Everest one Father's Day in 1998), or The Fernbank Museum in Atlanta, GA (where my aunt, my mother, and I saw Myseries of Egypt, starring Omar Sharif, in the summer of 2000). Following a series of "premieres" in late 1999, Disney released Fantasia 2000 in an IMAX exclusive format to coincide with the dawn of the New Millennium. It played consistently until its wider release later that summer. As I recall, I did not see it until high school, maybe college?, at the home of the girl I was then dating.
Like its predecessor, it needs no words, merely music and visuals to find transcendent moments - I think of the rebirth of the forest in the "Firebird" finale, or the link between swimming in the ocean and flying through the air found in the second segment, "Pines of Rome." The greatest sequence is the Al Hirschfield-inspired "Rhapsody in Blue", depicting the intersecting lives, disappointments, and fortunes of a diverse set of Manhattanites. However, as is true with most anthologies, one's investment varies depending on the segment. Two sequences made my eyes glaze over: "The Sorceror's Apprentice", the exact same vignette from the original with Mickey Mouse out of his depth enchanting brooms and mops; and "The Steadfast Tin Solider", which, while boasting digital effects and animation that moved the medium forward, is just one of those things I can not get into. This is not to pooh-pooh the actual artistry on display in those vignettes, and I'm sure you will have your own favorites.
The Boondock Saints
release: January 21
dir/scr: Troy Duffy
pr: Chris Brinker / Robert Fried / Elie Samaha / Lloyd Segan
cin: Adam Kane
A pair of Boston Irish brothers mete out vigilante justice on the city's underworld while an FBI profiler tracks their every move.
A genuine cult film that barely saw a week-long release in 2000 before being rediscovered on home video in the mid-00s. It became enough of a phenomenon to warrant a sequel (2009's The Boondock Saints II: All Saints' Day), a 25th anniversary re-release, and a place in my own DVD collection after a cousin gifted it to me; he, a sister, and a friend of mine all recommended the movie to me (highly recommended, I should say), and I watched it in my room for the first time probably between 2005 and 2007. This was my first full rewatch since then.
Listen, there's no accounting for taste. My favorite movie is Xanadu, God knows its reputation is much more dire than The Boondock Saints'. It's just that The Boondock Saints is a genuinely terrible movie, a patchwork of ideas for "cool scenes" blendered (no, not blended, I mean blendered, with the awful noise that comes with it) with the kind of Tarantino-esque rat-a-tat dialogue that a generation of young filmmakers seemed to think was easily executed. All the action is in flashback, the script goes back and forth between the FBI agent's POV (admittedly funny, thanks in large part to Willem Dafoe's baroque performance) and the brothers' (mundane, cliched, formless), and it takes for granted that you'll sympathize with people who have a bloodlust because don't worry, they only kill bad guys. There are good movies about such people, but they actually take the time to write real characters. Even allowing for the low budget, it's just so scattershot and ugly in construction, from script to edit, that it's nigh unwatchable. I do not understand why people like this movie. I do not understand why someone would think I would like this movie. It is reprehensible, morally and cinematically.
Isn't She Great
release: January 28
dir: Andrew Bergman
pr: Mike Lobell
scr: Paul Rudnick, from the article "Wasn't She Great" by Michael Korda
cin: Karl Walter Lindenlaub
Jacqueline Susann becomes a sensation thanks in no small part to husband Irving Mansfield and their shared instinct for publicity.
Bette Midler! Nathan Lane! Jacqueline Susann! That was all I needed to know when I bought the DVD my freshman year of college, the bonus being the ensemble that included John Cleese, David Hyde Pierce, and Stockard Channing. The DVD was seen once in the dorms and never again until March 2025....
I think my instincts then were right. It's a biopic whose pedigree writes a check that the movie itself can't cash. Back then, I wasn't as familiar with Susann's life and oeuvre as I am now (I even have Dolores and Yargo in my collection!), yet even then, I had a sense of, "Oh, was that all there was?": if you know the true story, you yearn for the missing details; if you don't know the true story, you wonder what the big deal is. One has the impression that Jackie's stage career, marriage, book career, cancer, and death all occurred within The Sixties - not any specific years, just, you know, The Sixties and all that phrase conjures. Where is the Jackie who had an affair with Ethel Merman? Where is that literary life beyond Valley of the Dolls? Where the hell is Josephine, her beloved poodle and subject of her debut best-seller? Perhaps the mistake is in centering Jackie and Irving, colorful but unknowable characters, instead of building a narrative on someone in their orbit: the article credited as the screenplay's source, from the POV of one of her editors, reads more interesting than what the movie delivers, making it clear that the lead should have been, ahem, David Hyde Pierce as the harried editor. It's just limp - isn't that bad?
Scream 3
release: February 4
dir: Wes Craven
pr: Cathy Konrad / Marianne Maddalena / Kevin Williamson
scr: Ehren Kruger, from characters created by Kevin Williamson
cin: Peter Deming
A new Ghostface stalks the Hollywood set of a new movie about the Woodsboro Murders.
I remember watching this at a friend's house in high school, maybe my junior year? I'd seen Scream my freshman year on DVD (purchased because Drew Barrymore was in it, haha!) and Scream 2 my sophomore year during AMC's October-long horror marathons, and then I think we wound up marathoning all three of them the next year? I don't know, maybe I'm misremembering.
Well, the movie is less interested in scares than in spoofing Hollywood and its need to drain its cash cows of every drop - that is, spoofing the very existence of Scream 3. Parker Posey's fun as an actress playing the movie version of Courteney Cox's Gale Weathers, but meta laughs have always been tough for me to abide. Like, I'll giggle, I'll acknowledge, but they always feel so unearned. The reveal is ridiculous, Neve Campbell feels like she checked out somewhere in the middle of the Scream 2 red carpet, the Gale/Dewey thing continues to spin its wheels, and there's not enough done with its huge ensemble (Deon Richmond, you deserved better!). And yet, it has on its mind the disposability of women in Hollywood, a provocative subject for a slasher film, what with its own history of exploitation and "disposable" women, to take on, and it threads this throughout. There's fun to be had, but one can't help feeling everyone's already over it.
Tomorrow, we look at eight films also released during January-February 2000, all my first time watching, including Boiler Room and Wonder Boys.
1 comment:
I share your opinion of Boondock Saints. I have a sister who loves it.
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