I’ve been writing about the movie year of 1999 for the past seven months, and something that’s striking in a selective survey of everyone’s favorite pre-millennial cinema year is that much of it really looks like any other year of its time – drastically different, sometimes nigh-unrecognizable, from a quarter-century-later vantage, but not a bounty of endless treasures, either. Granted, some of this has to do with my attraction to the marginally remembered and sometimes ill-regarded curiosities of the year, avoiding some of the biggest, most overcovered titles. But the fact is, for those of us living through it, it took a while to register that 1999 might be a well-above-average movie year. It would also be ridiculous to point to a single day as an inflection point in that year. And yet: There is something compelling about August 6, 1999, arguably the best weekend for wide-release American cinema of the entire year. For that matter, has there been a better such weekend since?
Movie release calendars are opportunism, strategy, superstition and luck all colliding on a weekly basis, so, again, don’t ascribe them too much importance. Does it really matter if Three Kings, Bringing Out the Dead, Being John Malkovich, The Straight Story and the American release of Princess Mononoke didn’t all hit theaters on the exact same opening day, if they were all playing in movie theaters simultaneously in the same autumn? Probably not, but there’s still something satisfying about the idea that on a single weekend – in August, no less, still largely considered a dumping ground at the time – anyone with any kind of access to a multiplex had their choice of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, the instant animated classic The Iron Giant, the loopy superhero spoof Mystery Menor, making for some terrific marquee problems, the sweetly subversive teen comedy Dick. For good measure, 8/6/99 was also the weekend that The Blair Witch Project added another 1,000 theaters (and, hell, Deep Blue Sea added another 47). Eyes Wide Shut was still around, and Bowfinger jumped in the following weekend. Sometimes it can take months to accrue ten wide releases this good.
8/6/99 was the epicenter of this unexpected quality boom, and it goes without saying that it offered a more varied menu than the equivalent weekend 25 years later, which starts on parallel footing with the release of another M. Night Shyamalan thriller, then immediately trips over Harold and the Purple Crayon and gives up (at least in terms of wide releases). In ’99, multiplex crowds could choose between Bruce Willis in a hushed, spooky thriller with then-faint rumblings of a killer twist ending; the last and maybe best hurrah of Rene Russo as the decade’s most durable on-screen chemist, in a charming heist romance; Ben Stiller leading an eclectic alt-comedy cast through a colorful big-budget spoof with some Simpsons/SNL-style irreverence; a more directly SNL-inspired cast of comic ringers acting opposite a delightful Michelle Williams and Kirsten Dunst in a period-set teen comedy; and the decade’s best challenge to Disney animation dominance, from the filmmaker who would next make The Incredibles.
Of course, most people just opted for The Sixth Sense – that weekend, and over the weekends that followed as buzz built on its surprisingly strong opening to create one of the biggest hits of the year. Not quite as big as the Star Wars prequel that was the highest-grossing domestic release since Titanic, but with week-to-week holds that were more reminiscent of the latter than the former. If Phantom Menace came with the closest thing to a guarantee of big money, The Sixth Sense was the year’s genuine cultural phenomenon, turning a piece of typically direct Shyamalan dialogue – say it with me: “I see dead people” – into a catchphrase and (not that) eventually into a hacky punchline, if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s an imperfect, sometimes stupid measure, but it works: Truly, no single line from any 1999 movie lives on so permanently in the cultural afterlife. That The Sixth Sense also contains multiple delicate meditations on grief and enduring relationships has made sure that Shyamalan topping it – as a mass-audience phenomenon, anyway – seems increasingly unlikely with each passing year.
The Thomas Crown Affair, meanwhile, didn’t become director John McTiernan’s biggest hit, but it was his last popular and well-reviewed movie to date, and one of his most purely elegant movies. It’s also Pierce Brosnan’s one good movie that riffs on his suave James Bond persona without spoofing it, and the one time Rene Russo played a star’s woman-of-action love interest in a ’90s movie that actually affords her scenes from her character’s point of view. In general, the movie prioritizes its characters over action; it’s a heist movie with all of two heist sequences, one at the beginning of the movie and one at the end, more clever than adrenalized. The rest is Russo and Brosnan circling each other with attraction and occasional frustration (and having some surprisingly explicit sex).
Thomas Crown became a go-to choice for adults throughout August – while the three more youth-oriented movies from August 6 all more or less tanked. Mystery Men was arguably ahead of its time, spoofing superheroes before they became ubiquitous in the following decade – and as such, was forced to adapt a broader approach to its satire that either steals from or lovingly parodies (probably both) the Schumacher era of Batman movies in particular. It now feels deeply alienated from what most superhero movies look and feel like, in no small part because it has a vastly more distinctive live-action-cartoon look, full of fish-eye lenses, busy production design and ad-campaign distortion. (The director, Kinka Usher, made commercials, and returned to that world immediately following his sole feature credit.) The Iron Giant, meanwhile, threw back to hand-drawn feature animation the same year that Toy Story 2 nudged the form further toward a CG future. Everyone who loved it pretty much knew it was going to be considered a classic for decades after its flop release, and they were right – to little avail, given that Bird never made another 2-D cartoon again, and Warner Bros. again halted any designs on legacy-upholding feature animation. Dick, meanwhile, was of its time enough to feature two rising stars (and future faces of cinematic ennui) in Williams and Dunst, but its own throwback setting – to the Watergate era, complete with a pitch-perfect Dan Hedaya as Richard Nixon – probably puzzled some of what the studio assumed would be its target audience.
In any environment, it would be difficult for five new movies to all become hits; that even one of them became a huge smash defies the odds already. That smash is the one of the five with some measurable impact on the dawning millennium, jumpstarting Shyamalan’s career and giving Bruce Willis another ten-plus years of major big-studio stardom. But even The Sixth Sense didn’t exactly portend a new cinematic vanguard – part of Shyamalan’s ongoing appeal is his willingness to engineer B-movies and Twilight Zone premises. Some of the Summer 1999 crew may even have helped (in whatever small way) hasten the demise of These Types of Movies, gradually adding them to the ever-lengthening list of studio programming we’ve become nostalgic for. You can extract premillennial tension from plenty of the great (and not-so-great) movies that followed in the fall of ’99; by comparison, this group of five looks, if not carefree, maybe understandably unwitting about their place. They’re just several months’ worth of good movies coming out on a single day. It’s easy to look back on 1999 with fondness, for the sheer volume of good-to-great movies we were getting with what became stunning regularly sometime around midsummer. That same fullness of time, however, can also reveal something less honeyed: a going-out-of-business sale that some of us were lucky to attend, and now cursed to remember.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor atPaste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including GQ, Decider, Vulture, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following@rockmaroonedon Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.
