Brian Raftery

I took a while to finish Best. Movie. Year. Ever. because I kept stopping to watch the movies. I regret nothing. An excellent work of criticism and behind-the-scenes stories of 1999 films, in B.M.Y.E Raftery finds something interesting to say about everything from Fight Club to Cruel Intentions. He holds out on putting the films of 1999 into 2019 context for much of the book. Instead, Raftery focuses on the making and release of the movies. How they were a product of a flash of indie filmmaking that hasn't happened since 1999 and the Y2K panic. There's so much to say about the films and history of 1999. The epilogue, which does contextualize the movies (red piller's love of a film made by two trans women, Kevin Spacey's allegations making American Beauty all the more creepy, etc) could be a whole other book.… (mehr)

You can guess someone's age from the film years they eulogise. The movies of 1999 came along just as I was beginning to pay attention to films not made by Disney, and via DVDs and TV repeats would hang around right through my adolescence. I have never been as excited for a film as Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, never been as scared by one as I was by The Blair Witch Project, and doubt I'll ever again feel the illicit thrill I got from watching American Pie for the first time.

And, like anyone, I'm going to enjoy a book that tells me my own personal experience was special and better than other people's.

A compliant audience I may be, but Raftery makes a convincing argument for the importance of 1999 in film history. Even if you're not convinced by his claim that it represented a "30-year harvest", he's persuasive that in its films you can see many important changes occurring – as well as excellent filmmaking. There's the decline of the star vehicle, the emergence of vocal online communities, and the emergence of the studio franchise mega-movies that dominate cinemas today.

It's also difficult to deny the influence of many of the movies that came about that year. Doubtless they were helped by arriving at the perfect moment to ride the explosion in content-hungry TV channels, and the arrival of DVD (the lower unit cost of which made it much more affordable to buy movies to keep). But the novelty and inventiveness of films such as The Matrix, Blair Witch and American Pie is hard to deny when their imitators clogged up cinema screens for much of the following decade.

It's easy, as a film fan, to look back on a time when executives believed complex, difficult-to-categorise films could draw large audiences, but, as David Fincher observes in this book, those executives were wrong. Many of these now-lauded films – Fight Club, Office Space, Election – flopped at the box office and some created serious headaches for their studios. Whether we like it or not, good movies that don't make money will wreck a studio. That's why the mid-budget movie died.

For better and for worse, 1999 set the stage for the films we get today, and Raftery's book is a very good explanation as to why.… (mehr)

First, the elephant in the room: was 1999 the best movie year ever?

Yes, IMO. I said so at the time. When I saw this book, I ordered it through Amazon, then ran around to all my friends and family waving it about and loudly declaring "Remember how I always said 1999 was the best movie year ever? Well someone else agrees with me!"

On Criticker.com (my equivalent of goodreads, I use it to track what I've seen and how much I liked it, and it recommends new films for me) it divides my films into 10 tiers, tier 10 being the set of films with my highest ratings. Of those 129 films in tier 10 (I watch a lot of films, I've rated about 1,600) 12 of them were from 1999 alone (my next fave years would be 1997 and 2001, both with 7 apiece).

My 1999 feeling was that each weekend I would see a film (or two), and it would be great. And every other weekend I would see something especially great, and about once a month I'd see something that jumped up to personal favourite, or instant classic. Raftery actually doesn't even cover some of my all-time favourites from 1999: the outrageous musical South Park Bigger Longer and Uncut, my fave Mike Leigh film Topsy Turvy, the incredibly well-cast The Talented Mr. Ripley (Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffmann, and a new-on-the-scene Cate Blanchett), or Toy Story 2, my favourite of the Toy Story films, complete with the Saddest Song of All Time.

So I'm firmly on board behind the premise of the book.

And then, rather than tell me a bunch of facts I already knew about the films (I am, after all, somewhat well-read and somewhat of a movie buff), he told me a bunch of facts that were mostly new and interesting. Hurrah! A well-written, well-researched book on a subject near-and-dear to my heart? What's not to love.

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!… (mehr)