‘If you see one movie this summer, see Star Wars. If you see a second, see Austin Powers.’ Thus spake trailer-man, in the teaser for Mike Myers’s upcoming comedy sequel, and to a great extent, that’s exactly what happened in the summer of 1999. Well, almost.
The 20th century was running out of time and that summer was impatiently filled with as many tantalising prospects as any big movie season in recent memory. It appeared to be the summer of comebacks. Following Terrence Malick’s long-awaited return to directing in the recently-released The Thin Red Line, Summer ’99 would see not only George Lucas but Stanley Kubrick making their much-delayed encores – though we knew by then that this was actually Kubrick’s swan song.
An exercise in peak-nostalgia seemed inevitable, but the season proved to be full of surprises. None more so than the success of that second Austin Powers film, The Spy Who Shagged Me. The first movie was a low key hit back in 1997, eventually pulling in just over $53m. In the two year gap, however, it became perhaps the last great home video mega-hit (supplemented by the shiny new DVD market).
When the sequel arrived, its loyal new fanbase gave it an opening weekend that eclipsed the first film’s entire box office haul. Within weeks, characters like Mini Me and Fat Bastard had become newly-minted pop culture icons, soundtracked by Madonna’s mega-hit Beautiful Stranger. Unexpected doesn’t cover it.
What was expected was the blanket domination of Star Wars; the saga returning after 16 years – which doesn’t actually seem that long now, but to an original child fan from the 1970s it felt like an eternity. Jaws had dropped in the tens of millions when the first trailer appeared in November 1998 – remember that fizz of ecstasy when you saw Darth Maul’s second light sabre fire up? The hysteria of that first glimpse was made all the more contagious by the internet, which was by then a ubiquitous – if maddeningly slow – presence in most households.
Cometh the hour, The Phantom Menace delivered. It crossed the $100m line faster than any film before it and eventually took twice as much as the silver medal winner, Austin Powers. Yes the podrace was fun, if a bit long, and yes, the Duel of The Fates three-way lightsabre battle was a highlight…but…well…um…
Put it this way, by Christmas, the new Star Wars action figures were filling bargain bins in toy shops around the globe. Despite record grosses, the overwhelming feeling was of despondency and disappointment. The most hotly anticipated film of the decade turned out to be a rather tedious tale about taxation and intergalactic trade routes. Simon Pegg’s character in Spaced spoke for us all when he burned all of his Star Wars merchandise at the start of the second series.
Eyes Wide Shut – once it was finally released after a seemingly never-ending shoot, reams of tabloid controversy about its supposedly lurid subject matter; made-up tabloid gossip about its married co-stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the sudden departure of Harvey Keitel from the cast and the permanent departure of its director – appeared at first to be another damp squib.
Perhaps disappointed by all the talk of having to edit around orgy scenes to avoid an NC-17 rating in the States, audiences were largely unenthused by Kubrick’s intellectual yet dreamlike study of infidelity, real or imagined, and it petered out with a $55m gross (Kubrick’s highest, mark you). Nonetheless, unlike The Phantom Menace, Eyes Wide Shut has been re-evaluated in the years since and free of all the hoo-ha, it exists today as a worthy and fascinating final work from one of the great masters.
Such glowing platitudes were largely absent from the reviews for Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy, but that didn’t stop it becoming the second-biggest comedy of the summer. Solidifying Sandler’s transformation from frat-boy cult comic to mainstream superstar, Big Daddy was one of the most successful representatives of an especially strong summer for comedies. If we were all about to get wiped out by the Y2K bug, at least we were going to go out laughing.
Julia Roberts proved once again that she was the queen of romantic comedy with not one but two appearances in the top ten. Runaway Bride marked her hugely anticipated Pretty Woman reunion with Richard Gere and director Gary Marshall. It was a big hit but has proved less durable over time than her other summer comedy, Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill.
Bravely opening within the scorch radius of The Phantom Menace, the ruse paid off and the spiritual follow-up to Four Weddings & A Funeral was a hit around the world, marking the official end of Hugh Grant’s period in the sin bin after 1995’s Divine intervention, and creating an unlikely new star in the form of Rhys Ifans, stealing the show as Grant’s unhygienic lodger, Spike. Hugh Grant would also make it a double in Summer ’99 – his mafia comedy Mickey Blue Eyes was a decent sized hit (and it’s better than you might remember).
Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy both shared a winning return to form in Bowfinger, with Murphy giving one of his funniest ever performance as the awkward, errand-loving Jiff. The seemingly never-ending American Pie franchise began in summer 1999 though its cast of beautiful young things never quite managed to achieve the same level of cult superstardom as their elders, Stifler’s Mom and Jim’s Dad.
The sexual conquest of a warm fruit pie might have felt like boundary-pushing excess, until the arrival of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, which put Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s TV sensation into cinemas and quickly redrew the line when it came to onscreen profanity. The result was ingenious and hilarious (I vividly remember when I saw it with my friends Scotty and Paul, we were laughing so much during the ‘Uncle F***a’ song that people in the audience thought that at least one of us would fatally asphyxiate). It also became an unlikely Oscar hopeful when ‘Blame Canada’ was nominated for Best Song.
There were supposed to be laughs in Wild Wild West, but none made the final edit. It was something of a 1990s tradition for a major film star to suffer a humiliating disaster, and this summer, unexpectedly, it was Will Smith’s turn. Smith was still cresting the wave of Independence Day and Men in Black that had made him Global Superstar #1, and indeed this wouldn’t quite be the knockout blow that Last Action Hero had been for Arnie in ’93.
MIB’s director Barry Sonnenfeld seemed like the safest hands in the business but this was an irredeemable mess that has somehow become even more unwatchable over the years. Wild Wild West’s certain position as the season’s other big family actioner was stolen by The Mummy, whose old fashioned Raiders-style derring-do found a surprisingly wide audience. A new franchise was born and Brendan Fraser’s swashbuckling performance turned him into a matinee idol – though not in time to save his other summer opener, Dudley Do-Right.
Cast an eye at the lower end of the charts and you’ll find some solid gold in the margins. Spike Lee channelled pre-millennial panic into his stunning Summer of Sam, which studied the effect of serial killer ‘Son of Sam’ on the lives of a group of Italian American pals in New York in the sweltering summer of ’77.
Contemporary, post-Oklahoma terrorism paranoia lay at the heart of Arlington Road, in which Jeff Bridges starts suspecting that his neighbour Tim Robbins might not be as friendly as he seems. Darkness and light were blended masterfully by Alexander Payne in his outstanding political satire / high school comedy Election, which saw Reece Witherspoon emerge as one of the great future stars of the new millennium.
Foolishly ignored at the time, though adored instantly by the few who saw it, Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant has (appropriately) grown in stature over the years and is now rightly regarded as one of the finest animated films of the decade. Back then, young animation fans were too busy being overwhelmed by Disney’s Tarzan, which saw the House of Mouse seeing out the century on a high after a run of middling hits.
While the kids thrilled at the sight of a gnarly Tarzan surfing his way around the jungle vines, their parents snuck off in droves to watch more grown-up fare like The General’s Daughter, with John Travolta and Madeline Stowe: a sort of A Few Good Men with shoot-outs.
Fans of glamorous art-theft were twice spoiled, first by former James Bond Sean Connery who acted as mentor and unlikely lover to the possibly duplicitous Catherine Zeta Jones in Entrapment. Even better was the then-current James Bond, Pierce Brosnan in John McTiernan’s superior remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, the kind of classy adult thriller that hasn’t been seen in cinemas for years. (McTiernan would alas come a terrible cropper that summer with The 13th Warrior, whose financial losses would have made the Wild Wild West producers feel like Croesus by comparison.)
Perhaps, given the general feeling of unease as 2000 AD loomed up ahead, it wasn’t surprising that horror films did well that summer. Deep Blue Sea, with its celebrated ‘sharks eat Samuel L Jackson in the middle of his speech’ moment was great fun, as was gigantic crocodile comedy Lake Placid. Speed director Jan de Bont, by contrast, went to commendable lengths to ensure that his CGI-plastered The Haunting was inferior in every single conceivable way to Robert Wise’s original classic.
Two horror movies though, went beyond mere success. Bruce Willis’s sombre-looking chiller The Sixth Sense, written and directed by first-timer M. Night Shyamlyan, landed a very respectable $26m opening in early August…then stayed inside the Top 10 until November, topping out with an extraordinary $293m gross. The ‘twist’ ending was milked for all its worth but ultimately, the film was rewarded for its script, performances – by 11 year old Haley Joel Osment especially – genuine shocks, tangible sense of dread and assured, patient direction.
Meanwhile, something new had been happening in the background. Something called an ‘internet marketing campaign’…only no one was really sure what was being marketed. All we knew was that three young film-makers had vanished in the woods somewhere in Maryland a few years back, and the police had found their camera equipment and were hoping it would help with their investigations. Talk of a forest-dwelling witch was at this time dismissed as mere speculation.
And so it came to pass that in the summer of Star Wars, a film shot on camcorders with a budget of sixty thousand dollars was inveigled into the cultural conversation, using the world wide web as a free advertising tool, and took just under $250m at the global box office. The Blair Witch Project was a phenomenon and, yes, soil-yourself-scary.
The final summer movie season of the 20th Century gave us an expertly blended cocktail of nostalgia and prescience. Star Wars had reminded us of the ‘80s blockbusters we’d obsessed over when we were kids. The Mummy called back to Spielbergian adventuring and old Universal horror, while Austin Powers brought back 1960s pop-kitsch to life. With Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick tied the final bow to his gift of a filmography that had fascinated cineastes since the 1950s.
But with The Blair Witch Project, we had something new, an announcement that all bets would be off in the 21st Century. Moreover, the entire summer season had taken place in the shadow of a truly innovative game-changer, The Matrix, released in March. Many critics cited The Wachowskis’ cyberpunk classic as the reason The Phantom Menace felt so curiously stale. This was defiantly a film for now; informed and influenced, yes, but a singular, super-modern creation, from its ground-breaking, instantly iconic effects, to the music and its themes.
This was the future and it was suddenly here. And it was so bright, they had to wear shades.
This is not the first time Cai Ross has cast his cinematic eye back a quarter century. You’ll be pleased to know he’s done this before. Here are links to the equally excellent Summers of Cinemas Past on HeyUGuys.
I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing: The Summer of Cinema ’98 – 25 Years on. – HeyUGuys
I Make This Look Good: The Summer of Cinema ’97 – 25 Years On – HeyUGuys
Welcome To Earth! The Summer of Cinema ’96 – 25 Years On. – HeyUGuys
“Houston, We Have a Problem.” The Summer of Cinema ’95 – 25 Years On. – HeyUGuys
Pop Quiz, Hotshot: The Summer of Cinema ’94 – 25 Years On – HeyUGuys
When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth: The Summer of Cinema 1993 – 25 Years Later – HeyUGuys
Hasta La Vista, Baby: Revisiting 1991’s Summer of Cinema 25 Years Later. – HeyUGuys
Wait Till They Get a Load of Me: 1989 – The Year That Changed Hollywood – HeyUGuys
