I punched in 1972 and there were some fantastic movies that year (The Godfather, Deliverance, Cabaret, Solaris, Jeremiah Johnson, Aguirre - the Wrath of God, The Last House on the Left, Silent Running, The Heartbreak Kid, Fat City, etc.).
Also tried 1973 — same (The Day of the Jackal, Soylent Green, Westworld, The Wicker Man, Papillon, American Graffiti, The Sting, Serpico, Mean Streets, High Plains Drifter, Don't Look Now, Badlands, The Long Goodbye, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Three Musketeers, Fantastic Planet, etc.).
I think they simply made better movies decades ago.
Maybe if they stopped the endless reboots, remakes, sequels and derivatives. There’s still a good one every once in a while. Oh well, I know what movie I’m watching today… you’ll shoot your eye out, kid!
Welcome to Hollywood's two decades of superhero movies.... I'm sure historians will greedily watch many of the classics of this early part of the 21st Century.
It's Christmas, I shouldn't be so negative.
I think I'll indulge in Alastair Sims' version of "A Christmas Carol".
It’s the J.J. Abrams misery box storytelling that ruined most TV shows / movies for me. Turning lazy writing from a vice into a virtue. Many shows now feel like they’re actively and intentionally wasting my time, ironically curing me of my desire to watch TV/Movies freeing up time for better uses.
The other lazy writing is the lack of conflict resolution enabling a continuous source of needless conflict, making an entire show out of a situation that could have easily been resolved if there had been a single ‘adult’ in the room. This has the added problem of normalizing the extreme confrontational or evasive communication styles as opposed to productive engagements. I guess this is what happens when TV raises a generation and then that generation goes on to make their own TV shows, each cycle worse than the previous. As bad as ‘engagement’/‘rage bait’ YouTubers are now I shudder to imagine what the next generation would bring.
Hollywood has done reboots/remakes forever how many remakes of "a star is born" for example has had three remakes (1954, 1976, 2018) since its first version in 1937. There is nothing new.
huh, american beauty was 99. i always remember the "plastic bag caught in the wind" scene - when i was in middle school, years before i saw the movie, i was sitting on the sidelines during football practice and saw a plastic bag caught in the wind. it was hypnotizing, enrapturing - i dont know how long i watched, but that floating bag caught against the side of the school building was one of the most beautiful things ive ever seen.
Nobody even knows about Dark City which came out the same year. Because the freaking Matrix came out too. That's just how many good films there were that year. If Dark City came out today it would be lauded as most original thing in a decade.
I refer to dark city all the time when creating AI agents, when Kiefer would inject them with particular memories when the city stood still. And Shell Beach pops into my mind when I take the train to the former grandios Coney Island.
Existenz was another unique underappreciated movie of that year and whose theme never got picked by any other movie. When Jude Law realizes that the Chinese food he is eating can be put together to assemble the gun my mind was blown.
And Dark City was delayed after it was finished, it should have come out before The Matrix.
I copy here my previous HN comment from June 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36415981
I watched Dark City years after watching The Matrix (on opening in the cinema) and I enjoyed it very much, have watched it multiple times over the years.
This is Mr. Hand [Richard O’Brien] talking in ”Memories of Shell Beach”:
> It was a very groovy movie, you see?
> I remember saying to Rufus Sewell [who played the protagonist], I said, you know, it actually, truthfully, it really doesn’t matter, does it, whether it’s a box-office success because we’re going to get paid as actors anyway, sorry Alex [Proyas] but this is true, we’re gonna get paid as actors anyway and isn’t it nice to be part of something which is groovy?
Fun fact: 1999 was also 'peak public phone booths'. Ever since then, they've declined in number and now are almost impossible to find. Every year it gets harder to follow that damn rabbit...
Oh that explains it, I thought it was just when I came of age. I did become suspicious that perhaps it wasn’t just a personal bias when I noticed the same movies on lists made by very different age groups.
I graduated in 1995 in LA. Going to the movies was something most of us did every weekend. Just show up and get a ticket for the next thing you haven’t seen yet.
Many consider 1994 the best single year for movies ever.
I got really lucky that that was also my peak movie going year.
It was around this time, in a little city of about 15,000, in South Australia, when my mum received a gift and voucher from Blockbuster for being in the top ten for most movie rentals in one year.
This was a time when movies were on VHS tapes, and there was a bit before the start of the movie that said something like “have you seen every movie ever made?”[1]
And at the time it certainly felt like we had watch nearly everything that store and one other had over the previous five years.
It was peak music too. I really don't think things have got much better since 1999. If you watch/listen to something even from 1997 it seems dated. But 99? Could have been made yesterday.
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&releas...