Mike Looks Back at 1999

"NOTE: I haven't seen "Man On The Moon" or "The Green Mile" yet, so that may be on some list at some point. But the year is pretty much over, so here we are:

1.) Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
2.) Fight Club
3.) American Beauty
4.) Run Lola Run
5.) Being John Malkovich
6.) Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels
7.) The Iron Giant/Princess Mononoke
8.) The Matrix
9.) South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
10.)The Straight Story

Runner-Up: Rushmore (I wish I had space for it; it was a great movie), The Blair Witch Project (in the immortal words of Mr Show, "Fuck yeah that wide!"), Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me

Over-inflated Piece of Shit: The Sixth Sense (oooooh, he's a ghost! Scary!) Actually, it's ONLY a piece of shit once you've seen Fight Club and you learn the meaning of a trick ending. I liked Sixth Sense until I got into a heated discussion with the Scott Goldman of Madison "fame" about the validity of both movies twists. Scott kept on blabbing on about the great set-up for the ending of Sixth Sense, and I just coutnered with "Yeah...but...The WHOLE MOVIE WAS JUST A WAY TO GET TO THE ENDING." Fight Club had meaning attached to the twist it employed and, therefore, in retrospect, Sixth Sense seems supremely hollow

*******

As a bonus, my Revised (as of today) Top 10 Records of the year, in no order. I took out Tenascious D to make room for Luna, and there was some restructuring. Like the movie list, I feel bad making this without having heard the Mazzacane box yet, but it's the end of the year, so here we go:

MacArthur Parker --- s/t
Connie Acher --- Lovesick Lipservice
No Neck Blues Band --- Birth of Both Worlds 2xCD
Superchunk --- Come Pick Me Up
Pavement --- Terror Twilight
Luna --- Days Of Our Nights
Meat Puppets --- Up On The Sun re-issue
Small Axe --- A Shot To The Body
Various NZ Artists --- Bottom Of The World comp
The Simpsons --- Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons!

Live Shows:

1.) Beef and Connie Acher & Jelly, The Loft, 7/10/99
2.) the three Figgs shows at Valentine's, one for every season on the calender
3.) Gay Tastee/Gaven Richards/Connie Acher & Jelly, Cafe Web, 12/18/99
4.) Mike Watt/Two Dollar Guitar/Stars of Rock, Valentine's, 11/22/99
5.) The Golden Calves, The Loft, 7/27/99
6.) Brown Cuts Neighbors present Let The Power Fail! cabaret, The Loft, 5/22/99
7.) No Neck Blues Band/Sabir Mateen Trio, The Loft, 7/6/99 (it would be in the upper echelons of the list if I had SEEN NICK)

...Other than the Loft, Albany kinda sucked for live music this year, eh?

*********

And, why not, Television!

1.) The Simpsons
2.) Homicide: Life On The Street
3.) Mr Show W/ Bob and David
4.) Futurama
5.) Crusade
6.) Late Night W/ Conan O'Brien
7.) Law and Order
8.) The Daily Show W/ Jon Stewart
9.) Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
10.) Tenascious D

Runner-Ups: South Park, The Drew Carey Show, X-Files (a hundred points off for last season's Crap Fest), Dennis Miller Live, Powerpuff Girls, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, The New Batman-Superman Adventures

*********

I contemplated writing a list of my favorite video rentals of 1999, but that would just be a needless study in obscurantism. Does anyone else care that about the metal-tentacle scene of "Tetsuo Iron Man"? It was a cool movie. Japanese from 1988. Black and white. The whole movie was extremely disturbing to say the very least.

See? It would be 10k of me talking about movies like that.

---

Mike Keegan
12.31.1999

http://www.klink.net/~tatara/DFFQI.html