1999: The Podcast

Boys Don’t Cry holds a 90% Rotten Tomatoes critics score and a pretty astonishing 86% Metacritic. And with scores like that, one might get the impression that was and is a universally admired classic. Billed as a dramatization of the events leading up to the 1993 rape and murder of 21-year-old trans man Brandon Teena, it was nominated for 57 major awards and won 37 of them. 14 of went to star Hila...

Fight Club may well have been 1999's most important box office bomb. With a budget of $65 million, the film barely made back half that at the domestic box office, and barely cleared $100 million worldwide. Yet it remains one of the cult classics of the 1990s, and people often remember it being a lot more successful than it was. A lot of that has to do with the format that would define film in the...

American Beauty was 1999's Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. And it was an unstoppable behemoth when it came to end of year accolades, cleaning up as well at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs, SAG, and more. Critics practically tripped over themselves digging deep into their vocabularies to properly articulate the film's genius. And yet, 23 year later, the consensus seems to be that the film...

The Sixth Sense was 1999's most unexpected phenomenon. And it really was a phenomenon. Filmed on a $40 million budget, the film made a respectable $26 million its opening weekend, but great reviews and word of mouth propelled it to a $293.5 million domestic box office gross and a worldwide gross of just shy of $673 million. It was the only movie to stay #1 for 5 weeks aside from The Phantom Menace...

Stanley Kubrick’s final film (and perhaps the nail in the coffin for Hollywood's most famous couple), the psychosexual thriller Eyes Wide Shut, was released on July 16th, two days after the limited release of The Blair Witch Project, and on the day that birthed a thousand QAnon conspiracy theories as John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy died in a plane crash while everyone in America k...

Starring Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard as themselves – or people who happen to have their exact names – and written and directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999's 10th-highest grossing film, The Blair Witch Project was produced on a budget of less than a half million dollars and grossed $248.6 million at the box office.  One of the founding films in the "found...

The Phantom Menace was, at the time, universally referred to as "the most anticipated movie of all time", and it's unlikely that any movie will ever again carry that distinction. But with anticipation like that, how could it not disappoint? The movie has gone on quite a journey in the last 23 years, from "the first Star Wars movie in 22 years", to "the biggest disappointment of the summer", to "th...

Former Minnesota Vikings punter and current science fiction author ("Otaku") Chris Kluwe joins us to discuss our first movie from our Essentials series - The Matrix. Released on March 31, 1999, written and directed by the Wachowskis and starring Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, Laurence Fishburne, Hugo Weaving, and Joe Pantoliano, The Matrix was something of an unexpected hit that would go on to be...

Was 1999 the best movie year ever? We think it might be, and in this podcast we’ll be exploring the movies that made that year so memorable. Before we start, we invited journalist and author Brian Raftery, who quite literally wrote the book on the movies of 1999 — Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen — to share his thoughts on why it was such an important year for movies and f...