Run Lola Run was the first time I was confronted with an issue that would later sort of bother me, though in retrospect, I'm glad it's a precedent I unwittingly set. Namely, it causes some consternation to know that my favorite movie of 1999 is actually from 1998.
Because it was released in its home country in 1998, Tom Tykwer's German language masterpiece, still in my top 25 films of all time, is rightly given a (1998) in parentheses every time someone makes mention of it. However, I had no possibility of ranking it in 1998 because it was not yet released stateside. I made the choice to rank it as my number #1 of 1999 -- it easily bumped the previous frontrunner, Toy Story 2, down to also-ran status -- before I even considered or was consciously aware that there was a potential release year mismatch. But I have subsequently been able to justify this by deciding that every movie deserves the right to have a run at my #1 spot in the first year it's available for me to watch, even if that's two years after it first surfaced in its country of origin. Even if it's three. (In fact, the second post ever on this blog, in January of 2009, was about this very subject.)
Although I have named a handful of other foreign language films my favorite of the year -- Beyond the Hills in 2013, Toni Erdmann in 2016 and Parasite in 2019 -- only Beyond the Hills has caused this sort of year mismatch again. Beyond the Hills is a 2012 film and yet it is my favorite film of 2013. It's something I live with.
As a nice snapshot of where I found myself in 1999, I rented Run Lola Run through a service that also delivered snack food, ice cream, and other little odds and ends to your apartment. I lived in New York at the time. That sort of service has since become commonplace, but at the time it was mind-blowing. In a night of indulgence, I may have also had them deliver me some Ben & Jerry's and some Krispy Kreme donuts. I was 26 and I was going to live forever. Once you finished watching, you dropped the movie in one of these little collection bins scattered around the city. I only wish I could remember what the service was called. I don't think it lasted particularly long.
I was in New York the whole year of 1999. It was the year I finished graduate school at Columbia Journalism School and spent the second half of the year temping. My longest temp assignment was at Goldman Sachs, where I worked for maybe six months as an assistant to investment bankers. I had a nice bond with the other assistants and I'd sometimes stay late to cover the night phones, which was great because you could order dinner up to $20 (that was a lot at the time) and they sent you home in one of the company's town cars. Pretty good deal for a couple extra hours of work that also paid you overtime. Toward the end of that year I also started my first really serious relationship, which lasted about ten months, with the girl I took to my senior prom. We didn't have a long relationship in high school but lasted nearly a year this time around, despite being in different cities (New York and Boston).
Nineteen ninety-nine is often considered to be one of the great movie years of all time, as you will see from the titles below -- and how much some of them have risen in general appreciation, as well as my own appreciation, with the benefit of reflection.
Here is how my films ranked in 1999, when I closed off my list at the beginning of 2000:
1. Run Lola Run
2. Toy Story 2
3. Three Kings
4. Galaxy Quest
5. The Straight Story
6. Being John Malkovich
7. The Iron Giant
8. The Blair Witch Project
9. Election
10. American Beauty
11. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
12. Sleepy Hollow
13. Titus
14. The Sixth Sense
15. Topsy-Turvy
16. Go
17. Dogma
18. The Limey
19. Muppets from Space
20. Fight Club
21. Magnolia
22. The Matrix
23. American Pie
24. Bowfinger
25. The Hurricane
26. The Red Violin
27. Notting Hill
28. The Insider
29. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
30. Cookie's Fortune
31. The Talented Mr. Ripley
32. Some Fish Can Fly
33. EdTV
34. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
35. Dick
36. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
37. Man on the Moon
38. Varsity Blues
39. Outside Providence
40. Eyes Wide Shut
41. The Minus Man
42. Office Space
43. At First Sight
44. Any Given Sunday
45. Cruel Intentions
46. 200 Cigarettes
47. Payback
48. Bicentennial Man
49. The Muse
50. Runaway Bride
51. The Mummy
52. Three to Tango
53. October Sky
54. William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
55. Analyze This
56. A Dog of Flanders
57. Wild Wild West
And here is the order in which those movies rank out of 6038 movies currently on my Flickchart. Following the ranking is the percentage of the ranking out of 6038 and the number of slots they rose or fell on my Flickchart compared to the other movies from that year that I ranked at the time. A positive number indicates a comparative rise of that many slots, a negative number a fall.
1. The Iron Giant (10, 100%) 6
2. Run Lola Run (22, 100%) -1
3. Galaxy Quest (38, 99%) 1
4. Election (42, 99%) 5
5. The Matrix (109, 98%) 17
6. Three Kings (126, 98%) -3
7. The Sixth Sense (162, 97%) 7
8. Toy Story 2 (164, 97%) -6
9. The Straight Story (261, 96%) -4
10. Being John Malkovich (263, 96%) -4
11. The Blair Witch Project (298, 95%) -3
12. Fight Club (451, 93%) 8
13. The Limey (743, 88%) 5
14. Office Space (753, 88%) 28
15. American Pie (763, 87%) 8
16. American Beauty (766, 87%) -6
17. Go (781, 87%) -1
18. Titus (842, 86%) -5
19. Topsy-Turvy (869, 86%) -4
20. Dogma (913, 85%) -3
21. Muppets from Space (982, 84%) -2
22. Bowfinger (1007, 83%) 2
23. Sleepy Hollow (1033, 83%) -11
24. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1170, 81%) -13
25. Magnolia (1204, 80%) -4
26. Notting Hill (1215, 80%) 1
27. The Insider (1279, 79%) 1
28. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1364, 77%) 8
29. The Hurricane (2074, 66%) -4
30. Cookie's Fortune (2188, 64%) 0
31. Man on the Moon (2296, 62%) 6
32. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (2377, 61%) -3
33. The Red Violin (2454, 59%) -7
34. Outside Providence (2619, 57%) 5
35. The Minus Man (2694, 55%) 6
36. EdTV (3119, 48%) -3
37. Eyes Wide Shut (3125, 48%) 3
38. The Talented Mr. Ripley (3459, 43%) -7
39. Varsity Blues (3535, 41%) -1
40. Some Fish Can Fly (3540, 41%) -8
41. Dick (3670, 39%) -6
42. The Mummy (3984, 34%) 9
43. The Muse (4094, 32%) 6
44. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (4127, 32%) -10
45. At First Sight (4235, 30%) -2
46. Bicentennial Man (4258, 29%) 2
47. Any Given Sunday (4458, 26%) -3
48. Payback (4925, 18%) -1
49. Cruel Intentions (4936, 18%) -4
50. A Dog of Flanders (5260, 13%) 6
51. October Sky (5316, 12%) 2
52. William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (5394, 11%) 2
53. 200 Cigarettes (5441, 10%) -7
54. Analyze This (5444, 10%) 1
55. The Runaway Bride (5766, 5%) -5
56. Three to Tango (6016, 0%) -4
57. Wild Wild West (6023, 0%) 0
Five best movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): American Movie, Audition, Ravenous, The Story of Us, Tarzan
Five worst movies I've seen since closing the list (alphabetical): Detroit Rock City, The General's Daughter, Liar's Poker, The Velocity of Gary, The World is Not Enough
Biggest risers: Office Space (+28), The Matrix (+17), The Mummy (+9)
Biggest fallers: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (-13), Sleepy Hollow (-11), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (-10)
Stayed the same: Cookies's Fortune (30th), Wild Wild West (57th)
Average percentage on Flickchart: 60.93% (1 of 9 so far)
Just how great was the year 1999? The 57 movies I ranked average nearly 61% on my Flickchart, a full five percentage points higher than the previous highest ranking of 55.72%, set last month with the year 2000. Interestingly, though, if you were to open it up to all the 1999 movies I've seen on Flickchart, the percentage would correct itself more toward the middle, since two of those worst movies I've seen since closing the list (Detroit Rock City and Liar's Poker) are in my bottom 25 on my whole chart. Speaking of which, I have no idea how I came to decide that Three to Tango was so awful. I know I didn't like it, but how much worse could it be than a misfired romantic comedy? Those usually occupy more of a middle ground. I might have to watch that one again at some point just to see if my apparent hatred of it holds up.
Still, to accentuate the positive as I started last paragraph doing, 1999 has four movies in my top 100 and eight movies in my top 200 on Flickchart -- certainly high totals for the nine years we've looked at so far.
One of those eight movies is the comparatively lowly ranked The Matrix, which I continue to marvel was only my 22nd ranked film in 1999. Clearly we didn't know the long-term cultural impact this would have at the time, and I remember thinking it was a really cool action movie but maybe not a lot more than that. Obviously its greatness has been revealed to me over time.
But The Matrix's 17 spot rise makes it only the second highest riser. Office Space jumped 28 spots, which again I think is an example of the film's unexpected endurance in the culture -- an endurance that has seeped into my thought process as I rank. I think I've still only seen it all the way through that one time, but I have allowed the rest of society to convince me of its classic status. The experience of seeing Office Space was a unique one; it was a film I and a half-dozen other journalism school students saw as a way to decompress after attending the funeral of a classmate's father. (A classmate I had just started seeing at the time, as it so happened.) You'd think that might have negatively colored my impression of the movie, but I remember laughing a bunch and it having the desired effect on our psyches. It was clearly just ranked too low in 1999, when it came in behind mediocre movies like Varsity Blues and Dick -- the latter of which I think of myself as actively disliking. Then again, it's just another indication of the strength of the year in terms of quality.
Along those lines, the big fallers are not fallers because I have adjusted my impression of them, but just because other gems that had previously been hidden to me have clawed ahead of them. If you ask me my impression of movies like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Sleepy Hollow, I would speak quite highly of them -- though maybe the fact that both directors have been revealed as one-trick ponies has kept them from holding their relative spots in my rankings. Meanwhile, I think I've just become more realistic about the actual value of the Austin Powers sequel, though at the time I quite enjoyed it -- and actually some of the most iconic Austin Powers material, such as Mini Me and Fat Bastard, comes from that movie.
Okay, October pushes us one year back to 1998. We're only three years from finishing this project.
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