Best. Movie. Year. Ever. Quotes

“Two decades ago, just as people were worrying about the movies, multiple generations of filmmakers came along and started a counterinsurgency that would reshape the culture for years to come. It wouldn’t last as long as anyone would have liked, and only a few people appreciated it at the time. But it happened. And it can happen again—even now, at a time when some people have given up hope on the movies altogether.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“In the midnineties, similar state-of-the-art grumblings had worked their way through backlots, theater lines, and magazine meeting rooms. They shared the same deep concern: the movies were in a spiritual crisis. Studios had become obsessed with pointless remakes and retreads. Young people, meanwhile, were spending more of their time and money on at-home distractions such as video games. And TV was threatening to siphon all of Hollywood’s power: in October 1995, Entertainment Weekly’s cover story offered “10 Reasons Why Television Is Better Than the Movies,” citing such hits as Friends and ER. The industry needed something new. As one anonymous studio executive said at the time, “We’re making a lot of movies that people don’t want to see.” At that exact moment, the Wachowskis were sprucing up The Matrix.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“It’s a remarkable about-face from the late nineties, when movies were considered a crucial part of our culture—and our daily lives. Watching them felt like a pleasurable duty; making them felt like a higher calling.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“For some, the instant pleasures of the small screen—whether an HBO show or a watch-at-home Netflix movie—long ago eclipsed the grand promises of the multiplex. To the younger consumers who absorb much of what they watch through a phone or a laptop, going to see a movie is an occasional luxury, not a necessity. Why head to the theater when there are hours of stuff available right here in your home?”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“If The Matrix and Being John Malkovich were being pitched today,” says Cho, “they’d be pitched as television shows.” Cho, like many actors of his generation, now works in both film and television—a situation that some performers didn’t find too satisfying in 1999. “Television used to be the graveyard for filmmakers, actors, and writers,” notes Brendan Fraser, who earned some of the best reviews of his career for the small-screen roles he took on starting in the midaughts.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“If The Matrix and Being John Malkovich were being pitched today,” says Cho, “they’d be pitched as television shows.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“For both writers and directors, television offered creative opportunities that rivaled, or even surpassed, what they’d done on the big screen. “We can make TV shows now the way we made feature films in 1999,” says Run Lola Run’s Tom Tykwer. “The freedom we have, the experimental power that is given to us, the crazy open-mindedness of the audience towards new ways of storytelling—it’s all massively shifted from cinema to television.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“The notion that Hollywood is fifty percent for the almighty dollar, and fifty percent for ideas that challenge and take root and bear fruit—that’s just fucking rubbish. The almighty dollar drives Hollywood.” Twenty years later, with audience members increasingly interested only in expensive big-spectacle movies, the studios need movies they know people will show up for. In that environment, Fincher says, “Who wants to take a risk? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“The sheer number of sequels and reboots doesn’t leave much room for big-budget movies with out-there ideas. In 1999, there were fewer than a half-dozen major-studio-released sequels—an almost unthinkably low number decades later, when release schedules often include more than thirty sequels or reboots per year. And no matter what kind of movie a director wants to make, studios are rarely interested in eking out modest sums on smaller, smarter projects—a model that made many of the films of 1999 possible.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“the studios tend to steer filmmakers and actors toward long-term franchises that eat up years of their schedules, overregulate their creativity, and give them little freedom or time to do anything else—except maybe join a different franchise.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“For the most part, they want the blue-pill version of the world. “I think 9/ 11, in a very subconscious way, changed the reasons people go to the movies,” says Steven Soderbergh. “It’s an event the country still hasn’t processed or healed from, and without anyone saying it out loud, this sense of ‘Well, you go to the movies to escape’ really increased. People have always gone to the movies to escape—but after 9/ 11, that feeling really took hold.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“The mainstream audiences that were willing to be confronted in 1999 now largely want to sit in their seats undisturbed. “You don’t really go to movies for ideas anymore or to get challenged in the way that you used to,” says American Pie’s John Cho. “They’re more like bedtime stories: you know what you’re going to get, and you use it to get a particular feeling.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“In the prestreaming, presmartphone era, movie theaters were destinations, not diversions. People remember where they first saw The Phantom Menace, The Blair Witch Project, or American Pie—and who they were with—because they were major social or cultural moments. The movies of 1999 aren’t mere nostalgia trips; they’re a part of people’s lives.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“In early 2018, Spacey’s American Beauty performance was even left out of an Academy Awards montage celebrating past Best Actor winners. By then American Beauty had become a perpetual target for critics, who questioned the film’s Best Picture bona fides: How could a movie about a bored suburban creep win in a year of Election and Being John Malkovich? But the elements that made American Beauty seem so fantastical back in 1999 make it all the more relevant in 2019: its self-entitled pervert; its angry, screen-addicted teen; its fuming Nazi-lover next door. Like many of the movies of that year, American Beauty plays like an accidental warning of what was to come. You just had to look closer.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“Or maybe you employ one of Palahniuk’s most cited Fight Club lines—“ You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake”—as a putdown for anyone you perceive to be overly sensitive foes, which is how several right-wing nationalists used the term during the 2016 presidential election.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“In the twenty years since their release, they’ve come to mean something different to everyone who watches them.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“many of the year’s movies lingered long into the twenty-first century. Decades after Office Space, it’s impossible to look at the sterile corporate cubicles that populate so many sitcoms and TV ads—with their gray desks and grave-looking inhabitants—and not see the influence of Judge’s white-collar comedy.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“But the films of 1999 aren’t just constantly being rewatched. They’re being forever reinterpreted, their themes still chewed over and fought over to this day. “Without getting too maudlin or fanciful,” says Todd Field, “at that time, we were ardent in seeing film as a way to enlarge our collective consciousness.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“There’d been so many dynamic films in 1999 that viewers would need time to fully absorb what had happened, and many of the year’s commercial letdowns enjoyed remarkable afterlives. The exploding DVD and cable TV markets that revived Office Space and Fight Club would resuscitate many of the year’s commercial failures. They’d also ensure that hits such as The Matrix and The Sixth Sense would appear on late-night TV for years on end, their various body bends and plot twists becoming familiar to even the most casual film viewers.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“where they’d drink Mountain Dew, play Nerf basketball, and talk for hours, riffing on the film’s numerous bull’s-eyes: masculinity, consumerism, their aggravating elders. “We were sitting around, thinking of all the things we wanted to stick a fork [into],” says Norton, who was especially irked by the recent revival of the Volkswagen Beetle, an icon of the flower-power era that was being targeted to younger drivers. “They just wanted to repackage an authentic baby boomer youth experience to us—they don’t even want us to have our own,” he says, laughing. “They just want us to buy sentiment for the sixties, with a little fucking molded flower that you sit in the dashboard. And they wonder why we’re cynical.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“It was one of many briskly written yet impactful mission statements in Palahniuk’s book, which earned positive reviews from a few major critics—the Washington Post called it “a volatile, brilliantly creepy satire”—as well as the author’s own father. “He loved it,” Palahniuk says. “Just like my boss thought I was writing about his boss, my dad thought I was writing about his dad. It was the first time we really connected.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“Fight Club’s quiet 1996 release came just a few years after the arrival of the so-called men’s movement, in which dissatisfied dudes looking to reclaim their masculinity would gather for all-male retreats in the woods. They’d bang drums and lock arms in the hope of escaping what had become a “deep national malaise,” noted Newsweek. “What teenagers were to the 1960s, what women were to the 1970s, middle-aged men may well be to the 1990s: American culture’s sanctioned grievance carriers, diligently rolling their ball of pain from talk show to talk show.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“It was the early nineties, and Palahniuk was employed at a Portland, Oregon, truck-manufacturing company called Freightliner. Many of his colleagues were well-educated, underutilized guys who felt out of sorts in the world—and they put the blame on the men who’d raised them. “Everybody griped about what skills their fathers hadn’t taught them,” says Palahniuk. “And they griped that their fathers were too busy establishing new relationships and new families all the time and had just written off their previous children.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“A few days after screening Blair Witch, journalists would come into work and find an unmarked, unofficial-looking envelope waiting on their desks; inside would be one of the film’s creepy stick man figures. Some writers, who’d been spooked by the movie, weren’t amused. “One of them said, ‘I walked right down to the corner and put that motherfucker in the trash can,’ ” remembers Blair Witch publicist Jeremy Walker.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“The Matrix was ten years ahead of its time,” says Run Lola Run’s Tom Tykwer, who cites the film as the first to truly understand the way the online world was becoming “our second home.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“Warner Bros., like the rest of the major studios, had watched moviegoers grow increasingly tired of unsolicited remakes and retreads. They wanted new adventures, new ideas. “Sequels were faltering,” says di Bonaventura. “And a lot of genres were dying: action-comedy movies, buddy-cop movies. We knew we needed to do something different.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“It was an epiphany that would propel other 1999 films such as Fight Club, The Matrix, and American Beauty—stories in which the heroes abandon their jobs before finding themselves.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“The popular definition of “independent movie” was changing. Instead of the cheap acts of insurrection that had spurred the movement in the early nineties, such as Clerks and El Mariachi, many of the new indies were glossy, classy, and thoroughly nana-pleasing. By the time Sundance 1999 rolled around, there was a well-worn playbook for turning a low-budget movie into a middlebrow success, one that Miramax had helped create: find a slightly outsidery tale of uplift with a famous face or two; hype up its festival cred and underdog charm; roll it out delicately across the country. Then a bunch of kids went and got lost in the woods, and the rules changed all over again.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen

“This book is based upon more than 130 interviews conducted between March 2017 and January 2019. At times I also rely on archival interviews, speeches, videos, and commentary tracks.”
― Brian Raftery, Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen