Category: 2000 in Film

2000 in Film

X-MEN: a pioneering example for modern superhero cinema (2000 in Film #27)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of July 14th, Bryan Singer’s X-Men…

NOTE: this piece is a re-post from a previous film by film breakdown of the X-Men series.

Though not always discussed in the annals of great comic-book cinema, or even considered the height of its own franchise, Bryan Singer’s original adaptation of X-Men is a seminal moment in superhero cinema.

Before Singer brought Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s formative 1960’s Marvel Comics property to the screen, after over a decade of attempts by a range of filmmakers (most notably James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow), comic-book cinema was principally dominated across the 1980’s and 1990’s by two heavyweights: Superman and Batman. The former ruled the late 1970’s into the 80’s before falling from grace with a succession of sequels whereby the budget went down as the schlock went up, while the latter moved away in the 90’s from Tim Burton’s initial Neo-Gothic vision into a high camp, overblown blockbuster confection. Beyond these behemoths, comic-book films were curiosities – The Rocketeer, The Shadow, The Phantom, The Crow, Darkman, Spawn – films which either garnered a cult audience or disappeared from the radar entirely.

X-Men changed all that. While not the first Marvel property brought to bear on the big-screen, Singer’s film was without doubt the first adaptation of their source material to go mainstream as a major box-office success – two years earlier, the Wesley Snipes-fronted Blade arguably also did well but was too violent and pulpy to reach a wide audience, and many to this day are unaware it even *is* a Marvel adaptation. X-Men changed the game. X-Men showed that comic-book movies could be more than kitsch spectacle or showy theatrics. Superheroes could be *real* people with heart and soul, their villainous antagonists complicated foes, both morally and psychologically; plus, these films could, much like the related genre of science-fiction, work as powerful allegory and social commentary. In other words, comic-book cinema could do what actual comic-books had been doing, without much in the way of critical respect, for decades.

While X-Men absolutely gives in to some of the silliness that weakened comic-book movies of decades past, it also shows what is possible in this sub-genre, and unknowingly lays down a template for the eventual rise and domination of superhero cinema.

Continue reading “X-MEN: a pioneering example for modern superhero cinema (2000 in Film #27)” →

2000 in Film, Film

SCARY MOVIE: a post-modern horror spoof without any post-modern wit (2000 in Film #26)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of July 7th, Keenen Ivory Wayans’ Scary Movie…

All through watching Scary Movie, a film I missed twenty years ago the first time around, I kept thinking as I sat, largely stone-faced and more than a bit repulsed… would 18 year old Tony have found this funny?

The answer is, honestly, yes. Probably. 18 year old Tony found Road Trip, which we discussed earlier this summer, very funny at the time. It certainly isn’t as nasty as Scary Movie in its frat-boy comedy but it’s just as base, obvious and cheap. Both of these films are aimed, squarely, at youthful or teenage audiences who are rewarded by cheap laughs. However, Scary Movie comes from a different stable. Road Trip is an extension of the post-modern revival of the teen sex comedy. Keenen Ivory Wayans’ spoof harkens back to the Zucker Brothers or Mel Brooks brand of cinematic spoof, in this case directly lampooning the modern horror genre, particularly the post-modern horror genre made up of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, with a few other examples sprinkled in.

In fact, Miramax—the production company behind Scary Movie—were already producing a Scream spoof when the film was written, and WGA arbitration gives the writers of that other script credit here given the ideas were undoubtedly fused together to make what would become Scary Movie. The targets are primarily recent examples of the horror movie inversion, the meta-textual examination of horror tropes, characters and narratives which earlier this year remained still in evidence with Scream 3, which was derided (perhaps unfairly) for taking the concept to the max and making films within films, examining Hollywood within that spectrum. It was perhaps both too soon for a spoof like Scary Movie and exactly the right time, given the sizeable box office take that would lead, over the next fifteen years, to four sequels.

Here’s the thing, though. Scary Movie is terrible. Not just terrible, but *horrible*, and considering it so desperately wants to ape Airplane or Hot Shots etc… it is, despite being younger than those films, infinitely already much more dated.

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2000 in Film, Film

THE PATRIOT: an entertaining, if troubling, slice of jingoistic, historical fantasy (2000 in Film #25)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of June 30th, Roland Emmerich’s The Patriot…

If we have seen American cinema across the year 2000 attempt in some way to reconcile America’s place in history as we enter a new millennium, The Patriot is heavily concerned in re-writing and re-conceptualising it.

The Patriot wasn’t actually the biggest box office hit of this weekend, coming in a little short (unexpectedly) of Wolfgang Petersen’s The Perfect Storm. Though both are highly different movies playing in different eras with very different concepts, both do share a particular, definable ‘Americanism’ that even for Hollywood is powerful and potent. The Perfect Storm, telling the story of the Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing vessel out of Massachusetts that sank during the so-called ‘Perfect Storm’ of 1991, boasts a tremendous cast of character actors spearheaded by a grumpy George Clooney and hot-headed Mark Wahlberg but suffers under the weight of melodramatic exceptionalism, overblowing a far more tragic real life story for rousing, heroic and ultimately bittersweet Hollywood effect. Jaws by way of Twister and saccharine, Lifetime drama.

Both this and Roland Emmerich’s take on the American Revolutionary War share a dubious claim on historical accuracy in the same vein of U-571 earlier in the year, and to an extent Gladiator, except the latter looked more inside out on what American exceptionalism actually means at the turn of the 21st century than either of these two films. The Perfect Storm, which—in a very local side note—had its UK premiere at a recently opened Midlands entertainment centre called Star City, with Clooney and Wahlberg in attendance, is now remembered more for the nautical effects—particularly the gigantic wave that sinks the Andrea Gail—than the overwrought script and performances, which pitch these real-life sailors as reckless, masculine sea lovers who needlessly throw themselves into the eye of the storm not just for bounty but for male obsession. It may have performed more strongly at the box office but The Patriot lingers further in the minds’ eye, serving as the first significant Hollywood take in some years on America’s bloody, foundational history.

In truth, the timing of The Patriot, and what it brings to 2000’s ongoing exploration of America’s past and future, is especially timely.

Continue reading “THE PATRIOT: an entertaining, if troubling, slice of jingoistic, historical fantasy (2000 in Film #25)” →

2000 in Film

SHAFT: super-empty but super-cool thrills (2000 in Film #24)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of June 16th, John Singleton’s Shaft…

Once again, this week, I’m handing over to the recurring spectre of 2013-era Tony who last looked at Shaft and devoted some thoughts to it, and once again I’m forced to make a confession: I still haven’t seen the original 1971 Shaft.

As a result, what I continue to wonder is whether I got from the 2000 sequel Shaft–and we must so denote the year as there now, as of 2019’s third sequel, three movies all in continuity and all just called Shaft–what I should have taken, not being conversant in the original. This Shaft, of course, wants to place a stamp on popular culture at the turn of the millennium by replacing Richard Roundtree as lead with Samuel L. Jackson, arguably sailing at the height of his career following his legendary turn in Pulp Fiction, a career that has never entirely faded. Jackson has made a fair amount of dross in the subsequent two decades but he remains in that elite tier of stars who are still A-list, still a household name, and thanks particularly to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, still appearing in the biggest films in Hollywood.

Sadly, we did lose before his time the film’s director, Singleton, who died just aged 51 in 2019 and remains a sad loss not just to African-American cinema, but Hollywood in general. Not all of his films were great, indeed Shaft itself is by no means a great film, but he remains influential to the burgeoning, potentially great black filmmakers of the 2020’s – Ryan Coogler, Steve McQueen, Ava DuVernay etc… all of whom have taken the gauntlet lain down by directors like Singleton and Spike Lee and ran with them. Shaft, in that sense, deserves to be remembered much like its well-known, 1970’s predecessor, and that is perhaps why this version is both a remake of sorts, *and* remains in continuity (a trick repeated by the 2019 Shaft), which was rare in cinema then and remains rare now, to serve both of those masters.

Time then to turn over to 2013-era Tony for his thoughts on whether Shaft lives up to the hype. Let’s find out…

Continue reading “SHAFT: super-empty but super-cool thrills (2000 in Film #24)” →

2000 in Film, Film

TITAN A.E: a disappointingly vanilla science-fiction adventure (2000 in Film #23)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of June 16th, Don Bluth & Gary Goldman’s Titan A.E.…

Look, I know I keep cheating with my own rules when it comes to talking about the king of the box office, but the thought of writing lots of words about Gone in 60 Seconds, even watching it again, filled me with dread.

Dominic Sena’s film ruled the roost in the first weekend of June 2000, while Titan A.E. debuted the following weekend, and the Nicolas Cage/Angelina Jolie-starrer went on to a decent global box office take. It no doubt helped get The Fast and the Furious reboot on the road, which arrived in 2001, and given that has emerged to be the unlikeliest of most successful cinematic franchises ever, Gone in 60 Seconds has a lot to answer for with its high-octane nonsense. The F&F films are at least, for the most part, fun to watch. Gone in 60 Seconds presents itself as a fuelled up riot but ends up a hammy, badly projected slog that seeing once, quite some years ago, was more than enough. I am many things but a glutton for punishment? Not so much.

Titan A.E. fell short of John Singleton’s remake of Shaft next week, which this blog will cover, but this felt an interesting picture to cover simply for the fact animation hasn’t exactly been at a premium this year so far, and Don Bluth & Gary Goldman’s film honestly *should* have been quite something. All we’ve really had in 2000 is Dinosaur, an interminably dull picture with a far more intriguing backstory than eventual film, do some box office damage, so Titan A.E. had the space, as an independent animated picture backed by 20th Century Fox, to enrapture children and captive adults. Yet it did neither, collapsing at the box office in the wake of hundreds of animators on the film being fired as Fox Animation Studios collapsed, and the CEO who commissioned it, Bill Mechanic—who just a year or so earlier had Fight Club made—was shown the door.

It could be why you may not even remember Titan A.E., despite a strong cast, enjoyable science-fiction premise, and a wealth of promise. Twenty years on, it’s hard to even argue for it as a lost animated great.

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2000 in Film

SHANGHAI NOON: anachronistic escapism that has worn well (2000 in Film #22)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of May 26th, Tom Dey’s Shanghai Noon…

Again, this week I’m cheating, because I just cannot bring myself to devote time, energy and words to the box office winner of the June 2nd weekend: Big Momma’s House.

This is partly because in a few weeks, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps is incoming and touching on similar ground, but also because there doesn’t seem to be any cultural relevance or reward in discussing Martin Lawrence gurning as a woman while dressed in a fat suit. The thought of devoting time to that is depressing, even while the proliferation of such base, lowest common denominator comedy is arguably an extension of content we saw in the 90’s such as the Farrelly Brothers successes such as Dumb & Dumber or There’s Something About Mary, simply taken to a different level, and partly designed to appeal to an African-American audience. It is, put simply, not my thing.

Shanghai Noon, however, perhaps does warrant a look. Tom Dey’s comedic action adventure was released the same weekend as Mission Impossible II and, as you can imagine, struggled to hold its own under the weight of the Tom Cruise sequel and Disney’s Dinosaur, but it nevertheless slightly out performed its modest budget and struck something of a chord, with not just the star wattage of Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson but the mash-up of multiple genres that came together for quite an old-fashioned bit of fun; the kind of film you could imagine having been made in the lighter, brighter 1980’s, and almost at odds with the darker, serious, dour blockbusters that would come to define an edgier, even more earnest decade before the Age of Marvel.

To discuss this one in more detail, however, I’m handing back over to 2013-era Tony, who reviewed the film back then, and who you may remember discussing Road Trip recently, before returning with a postscript. Take it away, younger self…

Continue reading “SHANGHAI NOON: anachronistic escapism that has worn well (2000 in Film #22)” →

2000 in Film

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II: slick, empty, sub-James Bond spy action (2000 in Film #21)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of May 26th, John Woo’s Mission Impossible II…

NOTE: this piece is a re-post from a previous film by film breakdown of the Mission Impossible series.

Mission Impossible II is a film that remains eternally fascinating to me, particularly as the demonstrable nadir of, otherwise, one of cinema’s most consistently entertaining blockbuster franchises.

The better entries of the Tom Cruise-led modern adaptation of Bruce Geller’s iconic 1960’s espionage TV series are easier to write about, in many respects. You have the Euro-centric, Hitchcockian suspense and classic retro thrills of Brian De Palma’s first 1996 take on the material, and once JJ Abrams and Bad Robot get their hands on the property from 2006’s Mission Impossible III onwards, the franchise becomes a much slicker fusion of all-American spy thrills, combining modern technology, action spectacle and ‘spy-fi’ theatrics. Abrams’ III is an adaptation of his TV series Alias in all but name. John Woo’s II is the clear, harder to define aberration.

In a way, it also remains the most interesting.

Continue reading “MISSION IMPOSSIBLE II: slick, empty, sub-James Bond spy action (2000 in Film #21)” →

2000 in Film

ROAD TRIP: a post-American Pie comedic artefact (2000 in Film #20)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of May 19th, Todd Phillips’ Road Trip…

This week, I’m cheating a little bit, because I’m not talking about the biggest box office hit of the weekend in mid-late May. That honour goes to Disney’s interminably dull Dinosaur, but I’m more interested in Todd Phillips’ Road Trip.

Dinosaur, while boasting a fascinating production history that is far more interesting than the picture itself (Paul Verhoeven was once down to direct it as a live-action, early 90’s mega-blockbuster), the film is about as vanilla Disney as you can imagine, and it romped home at the box office to, by this point in 2000, rake in almost $400 million worldwide. Not quite the haul of the still-dominant Gladiator, but a relatively close second. This is understandable. The competition besides Gladiator, and the incoming Mission Impossible II, was not exactly stellar. Road Trip, the second most successful new film of that weekend, was designed to appeal to a very different crowd.

Being an 18 year old (almost), when Road Trip came out, you can imagine how eager I was to see a film like this. A-Levels were about to come to an end with my final exams in Drama and Media Studies (I had it tough, I know…) and a summer of freedom before University in the autumn beckoned. A film like Road Trip was catnip to my friends and I, despite the fact I attended cinemas regularly myself, more regularly than my compatriots at college. Road Trip was a picture we all went to see and we howled. We were precisely the target audience and we reacted accordingly. Twenty years on, the effect is not the same. The effect wasn’t even the same 13 years on, as I reviewed the film in 2013, and I’m going to turn over to ‘Past Tony’ to lend some thoughts about the film from a distance, and then return to add a modern postscript.

So, 2013-era Tony, does Road Trip hold up down the years?  Continue reading “ROAD TRIP: a post-American Pie comedic artefact (2000 in Film #20)” →

2000 in Film, Film

BATTLEFIELD EARTH: a space opera with all the grandeur of a packet of crisps (2000 in Film #19)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of May 12th, Roger Christian’s Battlefield: Earth…

What makes a bad movie? It’s a question that might be harder to imagine than you think. No filmmaker, from Ed Wood through to Orson Welles, sets out to make a bad movie. Roger Christian and John Travolta certainly didn’t set out to make Battlefield: Earth into a bad movie, and yet, objectively, they produced one of the worst pictures in cinema history.

Bad movies are as subjective as great comedies. For every one person who laughs like a drain at Some Like It Hot, another will be thrilled and excited by Batman & Robin. How do you quantify the poor quality of a piece of art? Cinema is seen differently by millions of people. Which means there are audiences out there who truly believe Battlefield: Earth is not just an enjoyable film, but a good one. A film of objective, critical and technical quality. After watching Christian’s film, what would you say to someone of that opinion if you don’t share it? The best response would likely be to wish them well, get on with your day, and vow never to set eyes on the picture again. That, believe me, is what I plan to do with Battlefield: Earth. Once was, without doubt, more than enough.

My position, then, as a critical amateur, is that Battlefield: Earth is not just a bad movie, but an objectively terrible one. It has absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever and I can honestly say, with some degree of factual certainty, that it was the first American made film of the 21st century, made on a significant budget with any sense of cultural capital, to achieve that. Travolta suggested it would be “like Star Wars, only better”. It ended up being a record breaking achiever (tied only with Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls) of Golden Raspberry Awards, the ‘Razzies’ being the tongue-in-cheek Academy Awards for terrible cinema. It failed to make back it’s ultimately sizeable budget. And any hopes on the part of the producers it might spawn a sequel or franchise to rival George Lucas’ magnum opus soon vanished into the ether.

Battlefield: Earth stands, almost squarely in the middle of the year 2000, as an abject example of how *not* to make a film, and time, you can trust, has not been any the kinder to it.

Continue reading “BATTLEFIELD EARTH: a space opera with all the grandeur of a packet of crisps (2000 in Film #19)” →

2000 in Film

FREQUENCY: a nostalgic sci-fi reverie of American family values (2000 in Film #17)

A J. Black

This year, 20 years on from the year 2000, I’m going to celebrate the first year of cinema in the 21st century by looking back at some of the films across the year at the turn of the millennium which took No at the box office for their opening weekends.

This week, released on the weekend of April 28th, Gregory Hoblit’s Frequency…  

As someone who is a sucker for a good time-travel yarn, Frequency scratched an itch for me as a viewer, even if it did so in more of a sedate manner than this sub-genre is used to.

When most people consider time-travel stories, certainly at the movies, their mind will go straight to the iconic staple of that genre: Back to the Future. There had been films concerning interlopers across time before, of course; 1962’s La Jetee, later remade as Twelve Monkeys, or earlier with George Pal’s seminal 1960 version of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and numerous after that, but Robert Zemeckis’ film sent time-travel into the cultural consciousness and made it *fun*. It added wonder to what has always been a knotty science-fiction concept, even when played for eccentricity or colour, as it was often on television particularly in the 1960’s with shows like Star Trek, Doctor Who or The Time Tunnel.

Frequency is a different texture of time-travel film because it not only takes the subject matter more seriously, but it frames the broader science-fiction concept underpinning it in overly non-science-fiction terms. Gregory Hoblit’s film is about loss, about coming to terms with the past, and about the desire and fantasy wish-fulfilment of changing your own personal history. Life didn’t pan out for Jim Caviezel’s John Sullivan the way he might have imagined after his heroic fireman father, Frank (played with all-American sincerity by Dennis Quaid), dies in a fire when he is just a little boy, and their strange, almost magical connection via an old CB radio—thanks to a mystical aurora borealis in the sky—gives them the chance to not just connect, but actively play around with temporal physics. It’s a personal father and son drama with time-travel trappings.

In that sense, Frequency owes a debt to anthology science-fiction such as The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits, in attempting to ground the subject matter in a level of humanity. The message is simple: you *can* go home again.

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