Last Updated on 05/09/2024 by Arun jain
A sci-fi film whose climactic choice – red pill or blue pill? – It has become so famous that it is a meme. A found-footage style documentary horror film that achieved cult-classic status. A “Star Wars,” a “Toy Story” And Two Tom Cruise movies.
The year was 1999, and it was blessed with an abundance of cinematic wealth. So many, in fact, that “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the highest-grossing indie films of all time, Fifth highest-grossing film at the US box office Three weeks after its publication.
“It was definitely an epic year,” said Stephanie Goodman, film editor of The New York Times. She led a team of more than a dozen writers, editors and designers who produced “Class of 1999,” a month-long series celebrating the 25th anniversary of what many argue is the greatest year in movie history.
The multimedia project, which includes features, profiles and critical essays, explores not only the director’s innovation and risk-taking in 1999, but how his films were chillingly prophetic of today’s cultural, social and political themes.
Have a look at how The opening scene in “The Matrix”. proved remarkably prescient; How to an essay “Blair Witch” prefigures the age of misinformation; Profile of Haley Joel Osment, who was 11 when he starred in “The Sixth Sense”; An article about Tom Cruise’s weakness; a Playlist of the year’s top movies; Reflections on Films Review in 1999; And A A roundup of favorite films of the yearSelected by authors and critics. (Readers were also invited to share their picks.)
“A lot of people who worked on it had a strong connection to the movies,” said Ms. Goodman, who was a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times in 1999. “That’s one thing that made the year special, plus almost every major filmmaker of the last 25 years was working that year.”
The year offers much worth re-examining and revisiting. The team – which included Times movie critic Alyssa Wilkinson; journalists Maya Salam and Malena Rizic; freelance film critic Amy Nicholson; pop music critic Lindsey Zoladz; and Wesley Morris, a critic at large — decided to take an analytical approach by mixing reported features and personal reflections.
Ms. Wilkinson, who wrote about the themes — artificial intelligence, fake news, transgender life and Gen X — that made “The Matrix” a classic, said she knew the film held up today, but how prescient it was. It was not understood. Until her latest report.
“It felt incredibly contemporary and also felt like it got so much right about the future,” said Ms. Wilkinson, who first saw “The Matrix” as a high school student. “Even a few years ago, when I watched it again, I didn’t clock the AI stuff as much as I did when I watched it again for this piece.”
Ms. Salam had a similar experience when she rewatched “Blair Witch,” which she first saw the summer before her sophomore year at the University of Kentucky. The fictional film was marketed as a documentary with promotional materials that included missing persons posters for its largely unknown lead actors.
“We are now in an age of misinformation, but the sensation of not knowing whether something is real or not, or whether something is true, was an unusual sensation at the time,” said Ms Salam, who spoke to The film’s directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, for his article.
For Mr. Morris, who made his debut as a professional film critic at The San Francisco Examiner in 1999 at the age of 23, that abundance was not only inspiring, but overwhelming. For the “Class of 1999” project, he wrote a retrospective about the joys and challenges of navigating such a stacked first year as a film critic.
“Not everything was a masterpiece, but everything was interesting,” said Mr. Morris, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism. “That’s what we critics need – something that engages our brains, our nerves and our hearts. Those connections were everywhere in 1999.
Mr. Morris’s essay garnered over 300 comments, many of which are personal recollections. But all articles have drawn responses and memories.
Ms. Wilkinson said she has received many emails from people who remember watching “The Matrix.”
“A lot of people are like me and saw it as a teenager or in college,” she said. “But the ideas in them aren’t necessarily ones that you adopt as a teenager, and then you come back to them as an adult, and that’s really shocking,” she said.
Given the enthusiastic response, Ms Goodman said the team may look into other years. But, she said, there will likely never be another year like 1999.
“It was still a year when mid-budget films were being given the green light in Hollywood, and so you weren’t under pressure to do big at the box office,” Ms. Goodman said. “The fact that filmmakers didn’t have to make such big swings meant they could make more creative choices.”
Post Watching movies like 1999 appeared first New York Times.