PARTY LIKE IT'S 1999........"BEST MOVIE. YEAR. EVER. : HOW 1999 BLEW UP THE BIG SCREEN".....

Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up The Big Screen by Brian Raftery (2019)

              Beyond the fascinating backstories of the groundbreaking  'Cinema Class Of '99', there's a cold hard fact to consider........

               20 years later, one can only wonder if any of these films could get greenlighted by the studios of today.......the studios that now pour oceans of money into superhero movies.

                "The Matrix" of course, would make the cut.  But "Office Space"?  "Election"? "The Blair Witch Project"?, "The Virgin Suicides"?  "Boys Don't Cry"? "American Beauty"?  "Magnolia"? "Being John Malkovich"? "Three Kings"? "Fight Club"?

                Why take a risk on low to medium budgeted movies like those when you can easily sink all that cash into  "Captain Marvel"?

                   How much fun a reader can have with this book strictly depends on your level of interest in the film itself........

                  'Blair Witch' aficionados  will drool over every detail of  how this held-together-with-spit fake 'found footage'  joke hit American's  zeitgeist sweet spot. (You could think of it as a higher-tech version of Orson Welles' "War Of The Worlds" radio broadcast........scaring the shit out of suckers who thought it was real.......)

                   And you can rub your hands and cackle over the making of "Fight Club"......in which director David Fincher takes his revenge on 20th Cenury Fox after his toxic experience of making "Alien 3" for them........accomplishing this by talking them into making "Fight Club", a film that drops its pants and take a huge steaming dump on a society corrupted by corporate culture and consumerism.

                   And digging into to the "making of" dish for all these films, you might chuckle at the fact that many of them found no favor with 1999 audiences......(some of them waited for years until viewers finally embraced them on DVD.....)

                  Deepest of all ironies...…..as you read bout these directors sweating, straining and battling with Hollywood powers-that-be to put their vision on the screen, George Lucas, now unfettered and free of any studio control.(no executive notes to ponder)..….still manages to vomit up the ghastly "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace"...…..

                   BQ's personal favorite moment: M. Night Shamalyan quaking in terror at the thought of correcting a line reading by the almighty Bruce Willis during the making of "The Sixth Sense".......and all these years later watching the terminally bored Willis glumly troop through "Glass" as if he still scares the living shit out of Shamalyan......

                    Regardless of that you think of the films, no movie buff should be without a copy of this book.....a fast, breezy read, brimming with eye-opening glimpes into the high-risk, harrowing process of making movies.......4 stars (****).