The 1999 Mini-List

[swo17]

ELIGIBLE TITLES FOR 1999

VOTE THROUGH NOVEMBER 30

Please post in this thread if you think anything needs to change about the list of eligible titles.

[therewillbeblus]

Can you please add

She and Her Cat (Makoto Shinkai)

[mteller]

Please add Postmen in the Mountains (Jianqi Huo)

[yoshimori]

A year of a variety of delights. julien donkey-boy may be my favorite film of the decade, much less the year. Charisma - so strange and funny. I remember The Winslow Boy and Not One Less making a class of college kids cry, audibly. ... And the Denis, Jonze, Ramsay, etc etc.

Two Japanese films I'll vote for if you can add them are Morita's Black House and Shiota's break-out Moonlight Whispers. I've got Miike's Audition as 1999 - I think Tony Rayns brought it to Canada that year - but looks like you've got it as 2000. I defer, of course, to your dating conventions. I may be the only one here who's seen Cate Shortland's 20-minute "FLOWERGIRL", but I'll vote for it if it appears on the list.

[therewillbeblus]

I have a sinking feeling that the Michel Deville from '97 will be orphaned, but if anyone has access to back channels, I strongly recommend 99's La maladie de Sachs, which is a contender for Top Five Devilles. It's the kind of film I think just about anybody would enjoy

[swo17]

All added. And yes, Audition screened at a festival in 1999 but received no awards recognition there and had its wide opening the next year

[uncut_gem]

No Muppets from Space?!

[domino harvey]

For my Letterboxd bros: Reminder that the greatest music video of all time, “Let Forever Be,” is eligible this year

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Holy shit - just looking at the thumbnail of that takes me back!

[The Narrator Returns]

Could you add Alan Rudolph's Breakfast of Champions? And Gregg Araki's Splendor?

[swo17]

Added

[TMDaines]

Gonna try really hard to not have Swo need to remind me to submit, like a disappointed teacher asking where my assignment is, but one that at least lets me keep up the illusion of my having it all in hand.

[knives]

Could you add Alan Rudolph's Breakfast of Champions? And Gregg Araki's Splendor?

Sorry to you, but I really despised Rudolph’s step into Bonfire of the Vanities style flop adaptation. Because, man, not even a giant of Rudolph’s talents can survive the awful, arrogant, ineptitude of Kurt Vonnegut. All of the things I like about Rudolph are reduced to this annoying hyperactive malaise. Fortunately Rudolph is unable to be so undeservingly hateful as Vonnegut so that the veneer of sympathy and love can appear. Willis’ breakdown when left to the simplicity of performance is grand, but sadly it is often pilloried on all sides by noise visual and aural that allow for no accessibility. The less said about the Trout segments the better.

It was fun to see one actor’s cameo though when I just am unable to mentally peg him as being a real actor yet.

[domino harvey]

I read the book back in high school when I was trying to “get” Vonnegut. Turned out I did get him just fine, I just didn’t like him. Can’t imagine an adaptation being anything resembling watchable

[knives]

It really isn’t watchable. Just so grating. I think macro it is better than the book, but as an experience it is far worse because of the attack on the senses that film has which literature thankfully limits.

[Mr Sausage]

I’ve never read Vonnegut. Why is he so inept?

[therewillbeblus]

I've always felt that, what Vonnegut did, Tom Robbins did a hundred times better

[domino harvey]

I’ve never read Vonnegut. Why is he so inept?

I wouldn’t say he’s inept, he’s fine at what he’s trying to do (shock the normies, a low hanging fruit anyways), I just don’t like it. He’s the perfect gateway adult author for teens— general weirdness, arrogance, short bite-sized chapters and a broad irreverence plus rando things like taking up space to include a drawing of an asshole in this book, for instance. It feels against the rules when you’re younger, but even then I struggled to get more out of it than that. I think he’s not clever and the little eccentricities mask some general incompetencies in a playing tennis without a net fashion. I read Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House, and Galapagos and it took that long for teenage me to realize the just because they’re easy to read and feel like they’re breaking the rules doesn’t mean it’s enough

I will say I remember enjoying a film based on one of his books I have not read, Mother Night, but I doubt reading the source text would prove more rewarding than just watching it again

[mteller]

Was not aware it was hip to hate on Vonnegut now.

[knives]

To Sausage, I generally agree with all of what Dom just said, though I encountered him as a college student who was dissatisfied right away. When I said inept I was thinking of how I do believe he was trying to convey deeper ideas, but that his immaturity and lack of flexible thinking as well as his need to be naughty undermines all depth hence inept.

I've always felt that, what Vonnegut did, Tom Robbins did a hundred times better

Thanks for the rec.

[therewillbeblus]

I've always felt that, what Vonnegut did, Tom Robbins did a hundred times better

Thanks for the rec.

If we're talking recs, I'd start with Jitterbug Perfume, and then Still Life with Woodpecker. Those are his richest novels

[cantinflas]

Gonna try really hard to not have Swo need to remind me to submit, like a disappointed teacher asking where my assignment is, but one that at least lets me keep up the illusion of my having it all in hand.

Hah, I got the reminder for the 1998 list and I'm not even remotely a regular, that's how locked in Swo is. I'd previously abandoned it out of frustration but getting shamed into it at the last minute was the best thing because I just went with my gut and stopped overthinking it.

Then I did the 1999 list the same way shortly afterwards which was very satisfying. A timely reminder to take heed of this passage from the Hagakure straight outta 1999's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.

[John Cope]

FWIW, and as someone who loves Rudolph, I also hated Breakfast of Champions. I do, however, love the book, or at least did many years ago when I first read it. It may be a surprise to learn that this is among Rudolph's favorites of his own films. Of course it was a long gestating passion project for him but I would much rather have seen his other such project, an adaptation of Larson's The Far Side.

Meanwhile, I will add that I love Keith Gordon's adaptation of Mother Night (a book I have not read); it was in my top 5 for '96.

[knives]

Moloch was a far better experience. It’s a lot more down to earth stylistically than most other Sokurov’s letting us sit plainly with this mad idiot. The lighting and production design cover this up some, but the movie almost feels like an early ‘30s slapstick vision of the man. He remains utterly ridiculous with a bear conclusive scene that I half thought was going to end in a pie fight. Also his cabinet is given this treatment as I was sure for some of the run time that Goebbles was played by a woman. I was chuckling quite heavily.

This isn’t only some Mel Brooks type goof though as the humour also really conveyed how unnerving this man was and more to the point how power is such a disassociating thing that it almost necessarily has to turn to madness. What Hitler was doing seems so abstracted from this view that it feels no different from playing Risk. That’s the horror of the joke.

[Lowry_Sam]

I take it these are all 2000? Some are listed on IMDB under 1999 (festival dates?) despite having 2000 release dated & wanted to make sure:
American Psycho
High Fidelity
Water Drops On Burning Rocks

And these have a 1999 release date listed in their home countries on IMDB:
Lola And Billy The Kid
La Nouvelle Eve