1999 a very good year for animated films, the crop included The Iron Giant, Princess Mononoke, Tarzan, Toy Story 2.

It was a great year for movies period…Election, Being John Malkovich, The Insider, Boys Don’t Cry, One Day In September, The End Of The Affair, All About My Mother, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Topsy-Turvy, just to name a few.

But the best animated film and one of the best movies of that year was South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Forget 1999, it may be one of the funniest movies of all-time, certainly up there with This Is Spinal Tap, A Night At The Opera, the films of WC Fields, the three early films of Albert Brooks (as well as his shorts), Animal House, Borat and the '70s comedies of Woody Allen.

Along with the original versions of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night Of The Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby was one of the most frightening film-watching experiences of my life. And what really makes Rosemary’s Baby an even more special film is that if you took the "horror" elements out of it and you just had a film about a young couple in New York City in the late '60s it would still be completely entertaining. It’s a great lesson in storytelling: interesting characters first will make the "horror" more powerful.

The perfectly taut screenplay credited to director Roman Polanski follows Ira Levin’s novel almost scene for scene, line for line. There is not a loose shred in the script, which may sound simple enough on paper - newlyweds Guy (John Cassavetes) and Rosemary (Mia Farrow) move into an old Manhattan building where they become friends with the elderly couple next door (Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer). Slowly the pregnant Rosemary begins to suspect that they and their creaky posse are part of a witch’s covenant of devil worshippers who are hungry for her unborn baby.

I have not seen the remakes of the original The Bad News Bears and its bawdy, sports film cousin, The Longest Yard. And though it stars Billy Bob Thornton, one of my favorite actors of his generation, I just have no interest in it. Knowing what they can and cannot get away with today, I assume the remake pales in comparison. One film, the remake, is a scheme to make money off a brand name, while the original version was created by one of the more underrated, personal filmmakers of the 1970s, Michael Ritchie.

Coming off of the charming teen beauty-pageant comedy Smile (a kinda "Altmany" gem, almost Nashville-light, in need of being rediscovered) and the biting political satire The Candidate, director Ritchie made one of the greatest sports comedies of all time and frankly one of my favorite movies of all time. Though the two horrid sequels, The Bad News Bears In Breaking Training and the even worse, much worse The Bad News Bears Go To Japan may have helped to bring down its reputation, it’s actually much better than you may remember or may have heard. If you’re not a prude about the language it’s a perfect film to introduce to a teenager who’s into baseball or just admires adolescent rebellion and mayhem.

Back in ’77 the film Sorcerer was considered a mega-bomb, both artistically and financially. Coming off the mammoth success of both The French Connection and The Exorcist, it would mark the beginning of an enormous career decline for director William Friedkin. However in retrospect, Sorcerer is one badass action thriller and one of the most underrated films of the '70s.


Then it was Friedkin's turn to swing for his home run. For his epic he would do a remake of French director Henri-Georges Clouzot's adventure movie, Le Salaire de la Peur (The Wages Of Fear). Clouzot had of course also done the greatest French mystery thriller of all time, the more Hitchcockian than Hitchcock Les Diaboliques (Diabolique). Friedkin developed the remake for superstar Steve McQueen to head the international cast. Sorcerer was green-lighted with a budget that in its day made it a big, big event movie. But unfortunately McQueen got sick and then died and the film never made back its bucks. But what ended up on the screen is wildly spectacular filmmaking.

The "American dream." Many of the WWII GIs and their wives thought they were living it. It was the goal. A place of respect in society. Materialism. Love. It was all promised…Or so they thought. The flaws in the dream were gradually exposed throughout the '50s and especially into the '60s. One of the first to do so was the great filmmaker, George Stevens, a WWII vet himself (he shot some of the most important war footage ever recorded, the liberation of Paris and the Nazi camp in Dachau). Using Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, as a springboard, Stevens showed the horror of the ambitious dreamer (it was also made into a rarely mentioned film by Josef von Sternberg in 1931).

What is now considered Stevens' so-called American Trilogy begins with A Place In The Sun and then goes on to include his greatest masterpiece, Shane, and then James Dean’s final film, the overlong Giant. He would follow up the cycle with the touching, but stagy, The Diary Of Anne Frank, in ’59. Unfortunately his disastrous biblical epic, The Greatest Story Ever Told, in ’65 would more or less send him into early retirement as a director (he would pop out once more, five years later, for the Warren Beatty snoozer, The Only Game In Town).

A Place In The Sun, in retrospect, is the perfect peek into the dark side of America in 1951. George Eastman (Montgomery Clift), a modest, steady young man, accepts a job from his rich uncle at a factory. He gets involved with a mousy co-worker, Alice (Shelley Winters), eventually knocking her up, a major inconvenience when he meets and falls for the boss’s wealthy, fast lane daughter Angela (Elizabeth Taylor at her most stunning). The two have an intense chemistry for each other. George gets a taste of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but he is stuck with his whiny pregnant girlfriend who is basically blackmailing him into marriage. George will do whatever it takes to get rid of Alice so he can get his share of what he thinks the world owes him.