So we're gonna watch movies like it's 1999

I was browsing a list on yahoo (100 Movies to See Before You Die: Modern Classics Edition) and noticed that 1999 was a banner year for modern film. Of the 19 years included (1990 - 2009) the year 1999 had more inclusions than any other - 10% of the 100 listed to be precise. According to Yahoo (who chose movies based on their artistry, originality, and pure cinematic entertainment) 1999's 10 prized films are:

All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre)
American Beauty
Being John Malkovich
Election
Fight Club
The Matrix
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime) R
un Lola Run (Lola rennt)
The Sixth Sense
Three Kings

There are a couple on that list that I might not list as my all-time favorites, but they would qualify as runners-up (Election, Run Lola Run) and a few I thought were very good upon initial viewing, and still get sucked into when they're on the tele (The Sixth Sense, The Matrix). But if I were stranded on an island and could only bring 10 films with me, well, I'd have a very hard time narrowing the list to only 10...But 3 top contenders are on the 1999 list - American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, and Fight Club.

After seeing these movies, I remember thinking that the art of filmmaking was experiencing a renaissance. I thought, FINALLY Big Hollywood (BH) was opening up to story telling that didn't follow the same beaten path. After all, these weren't small indie films; they were big studio, big budget, big star movies. I thought the financial success of these fantastic films meant that American audiences were FINALLY relinquishing their hold on standard realism and opening themselves up to the possibility that great stories with incredible intelligence and heart could be told in non-traditional ways, and without the cookie-cutter BH happy ending. These films took so much "American Dream," cracked it wide open, and exposed its corrupt and deadening underbelly for all to see. And we, the audiences, looked at these film-as-mirror reflections and sighed with relief - "It's not just you" these films said "it's everyone. The insurance guy with the sterile IKEA apartment? The seemingly-perfect family? John Malkovich? Every single one of them is fucked up."

I wonder now, looking at this list, if 1999 was a special year in film because it was 1999. Was there some great underlying fear of Y2K pushing us (and BH) out of our comfort zones a la Lester Burnham? Was it turn-of-the-century collective conscience opening us all to a twisted search for self on the 7th-and-a-half floor of an office building in the middle of the night? Perhaps we were finally giving in to our own Tyler Durdens, and giving a big fat blow-up-the-credit-card-industry finger to our self-help loving, furniture-assembling, status obsessed culture.

I can’t say for certain that timing had any quantitative effect at all on the makings of these films – they were likely in some stage of concept or production well before the last year of the last century of the last millennium any of us will know to begin with the number 1. I do know these films were brave, they were letting it all out, partying like it was the year of their release, and if they taught us nothing else we should all remember this: if we are not our fucking khakis, then neither should be our art.