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4.01 AVERAGE
4.01 AVERAGE
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
I hadn't realized just how many significant films were released in 1999 (Fight Club, Office Space, The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, and The Blair Witch Project, just to name a few). The output from Hollywood that year was really incredible, and arguably unprecedented. Raftery breaks down the stories behind the making of these films, their impact (both at the time and their legacy since), and the collective social and emotional alchemy that existed at the close of the century that inspired such storytelling.
Highly recommended for film fans and anyone nostalgic for the 90s. It made me want to rewatch so many of these movies again.
Highly recommended for film fans and anyone nostalgic for the 90s. It made me want to rewatch so many of these movies again.
Fun book. It's a little like reading 20-odd behind-the-scenes articles, connected by a loose thesis and a thread of cultural history; the book has a very superficial momentum. However, it's neat to consider Raftery's position, which I hadn't previously - that 1999 was an original and game-changing movie year - and to look back on movies I saw as a late teen (or at least, saw as trailers!). It's a good, quick library read - which is, cheerfully, exactly how I read it.
informative
medium-paced
I'm not a big movie watcher, books are more my thing. But I do enjoy a good movie now and then. I was intruiged to see what movies I actually have seen of those movies shown in this book. Embarrassing little to be honest but I did enjoy reading about those I had seen. Starter out reading about everything but quickly got bored doing that so I jumped around to those I knew more about. But I still think the book was well researched and well written.
A readable and very well researched look at some of the most memorable films from 1999 - including The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty (and Pie), Election, Office Space, The Phantom Menace, to name only a few - and how the culture and media of the late 90s and the end of the 20th century spoke to these film and filmmakers. Raftery also contrasts 1999 with 1969 (the Raging Bulls, Easy Rider film year) and 2019. A fun read for film fans.
There’s too much good stuff in this book for me to even highlight all of it. Two chapters that stand out are the ones about “Fight Club” and “Boys Don’t Cry,” in part because those movies really knocked me flat when I saw them in the theater in 1999, but also because it’s genuinely astonishing they both got made in the first place. I listened to the audiobook, and it’s very well read. This book mentions Mark Harris repeatedly, and though it’s been many years since I read “Pictures at a Revolution,” his magnum opus about the films nominated for best picture at the 1968 Oscars (and how beautifully they encapsulated, as a group, American society and pop culture and cinema at the time), I do think “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.”deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence as Harris’ masterwork. If you’re a cinephile, this one’s a must.
I don't have too much to say about this. It's a collection of essays on various movies released in 1999. Raftery does a good job balancing a handful of topics (behind the scenes, social commentary, reception, etc.) in writing about the different movies. Some of the chapters/essays lean more toward one topic than another. He relies on a combination of interviews (reported in the present tense) and research (reported in the past tense), which all blends together pretty seamlessly. His choice of films is pretty broad — Fight Club, Iron Giant, and Run, Lola, Run all get discussion — and that does a great job reflecting the range of films that were released in 1999. Some of his focus, on the other hand, is a little curious. He packs Phantom Menace, Iron Giant, and Galaxy Quest all within one chapter, but then Boys Don't Cry gets its own chapter. That's not a judgment on the latter, but I would wager that Phantom Menace had a bigger cultural footprint at the time of release, and also that it or Iron Giant would have a longer shelf life than Boys Don't Cry. I suppose that's why this is his book and not mine.