Best. Movie. Year. Ever.

Most film buffs, if asked what the best year in movies was. cite 1939, for that year had the double-barrels of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, plus Stagecoach, Gunga Din, Beau Geste, Ninotchka, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Wuthering Heights. Brian Raftery makes a case for 1999 in his book, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen. While 1999 has nothing to match GWTW or The Wizard, it is a compelling document of how 1999 was an anomaly, and in some ways the end of something, more than just a century.

"Studio executives have long lusted for the so-called four-quadrant movie—a film that appeals equally to men and women, young and old. But 1999 was a four-quadrant year: it had something for everyone," Raftery writes, and with twenty years hindsight there is a certain pattern--1999 was a year of incredible originality. All of the films he writes about, save one, were not sequels, reboots, or part of franchises. "The sheer number of sequels and reboots doesn’t leave much room for big-budget movies with out-there ideas. In 1999, there were fewer than a half-dozen major-studio-released sequels—an almost unthinkably low number decades later, when release schedules often include more than thirty sequels or reboots per year."

Raftery writes about a couple of dozen films in a "behind the scenes" kind of way, interviewing the major participants. He structures the book chronologically, beginning with the Sundance festival in January and concluding in December (the epilogue will discuss the Academy Awards) but also arranging the films by theme, such as high school films and films about African Americans. But a few films loom large over the narrative: The Blair Witch Project, The Matrix, and Fight Club.

The Blair Witch Project, which I believe is still the most profitable film ever made, turned heads at Sundance, and then opened in the fall to a full range of responses: “ ‘Blair Witch’ may do $200 million worldwide,” said October Films cofounder Bingham Ray, “but it’s still a piece of shit.” But it also spawned the "found footage" genre: "The Blair Witch Project lived on in spirit, as the found-footage genre Myrick and Sanchez had popularized was utilized by several hit movies: Cloverfield, Chronicle, and the Paranormal Activity films. Cheap portable cameras became so prevalent—and viewers so much more accustomed to jittery edits and jerky movement—that people were no longer barfing in the aisles."

The Matrix, which I watched again last night, may be the single most important film of the year, as it was incredibly original and utilized a new kind of visual effects--"bullet time"--and while the sequels weren't nearly as good it stands as a kind of Wizard of Oz for the computer age. As for Fight Club, it was a box-office dud, but lived on in home video, becoming a commentary on masculinity that is quoted today. "A movie that had once seemed so distastefully nihilist came to seem alarmingly prescient: It addressed the new rise of our-brand-could-be-your-life consumerism that would dominate the next century, and it provided an inadvertent blueprint for the sort of decentralized, shits-and-giggles anarchy that would later be adopted by online collectives like Anonymous."

Home video is one of the side discussions of Best. Movie. Year. Ever., as other films, most specifically Office Space, survived empty theaters to become popular with folks watching at home. Other things that affected the industry in that year were the mergers of many of media companies: "It had begun in 1989, when Time Inc. had merged with Warner Communications, effectively creating the biggest media company in the world, one that owned everything from HBO to People magazine to Warner Bros. Over the next few years, the deals continued at a brisk clip: Sony purchased Columbia Pictures; Viacom, which owned networks such as MTV and VH1, acquired Paramount; Disney bought ABC. By the time the decade was over, the major entertainment companies were fatter than ever before."

Raftery also brings in the real world to the discussion, mentioning the Clinton impeachment trial, the Columbine shootings, and the Y2K hysteria. Of course, tying events like these into movies is a case of apophenia, seeing patterns that don't exist, as the movies of 1999 were all conceived and made before these events occurred, and are seen only as how they might have reacted. American Beauty, the Best Picture Oscar winner, can be seen as a response to Clinton's peccadilloes, but of course the movie was written well before, the same with Fight Club and Columbine, or The Matrix and Y2K.

Perhaps the most significant thing that happened in 1999 was the debut on HBO of The Sopranos, the first real broadside of television against the movie business. It began a trend that saw creativity abandon the penny-pinching world of Hollywood, where directors could get big money for projects that they could make without interference. I think that takeover has just about finished. Movie actors no longer see working in TV as some sort of ghetto, and transition back and forth all the time.

While the book is good for conversation starting, it also has some holes. Raftery is selective about what he writes about. He does write about The Phantom Menace, and how the film was negatively reacted to (George Lucas was incredibly defensive about it), but mentions only tangentially huge bombs like Wild, Wild West and many other forgettable and derivative films like My Favorite Martian, The Mod Squad, Inspector Gadget, or Dudley Do-Right. He also doesn't do into great depth about great movies by important directors that just don't fit his narrative, like Summer of Sam, Bringing Out the Dead, The Talented Mr. Ripley, or even Toy Story 2 (Pixar doesn't get a mention in the book). When people write books about years, they often pick and choose, lest their central thesis be questioned. He only tangentially mentions two of the five Best Picture nominees, calling The Cider House rules a "mawkbuster" and The Green Mile "pokey," whatever that means.

It's a fun book, though, and interesting to look back twenty years, as I lived through this and never considered '99 a particularly great year. But it did have a lot of innovative films, with others that I haven't mentioned including The Sixth Sense, Rushmore, Election (my personal favorite of the year), The Insider, Being John Malkovich, and Magnolia, which came out late in the year and had an ending suitable to the Y2K business: a plague of frogs.