December 31, 1999
Ah, there's nothing like the smell of a mass-mailed cyber-greeting in the morning! This is being sent prior to Y2K to ensure that systems failures do not interfere with delivery of my best wishes to you for a happy and healthy new year (and for those who count funny, a new century or millennium).
My house is now covered with a shimmering layer of brand-spanking-new and not-at-all-defective vinyl siding. (So far as we know--keep your eyes on the mailbox for that next class-action notification.) In honor of its face-lift, the time has come to name this noble estate. Please send me your suggestions. Sorry, but "Tara," "Monticello," "Blackacre," and "Chez Spaz" have already been taken.
A list of recommended cultural products encountered in 1999 follows. I can't offer any single money-back guarantee to everyone on this list, but tailored recommendations are available upon request.
Aaron Caplan
Still awaiting the unconscionably slow release of Errol Morris's Mr. Death. There's always next year...and until then:
How nice to have a film that doesn't dwell on its premise. There simply is a portal that lets you eat breakfast from inside somebody else's body. Now let's do something with the idea. Think how many other movies would have belabored the point...and how few of them would have cameos by Orson Bean.
This Spanish comedy plainly influenced by Jeunet et Caro (and why not?) marks one of the only times I've seen anything good at the Seattle Int'l Film Festival. Set in the part of Spain that looks most like Nebraska, it is a gorgeously filmed story of the heartbreak caused when selfish space aliens refuse to carry on the family communion wafer business.
Out of Sight works equally well as caper movie and love story. Three Kings works as caper movie and political satire.
Wiseman documents the high school as factory for cannon fodder, while Election shows it as factory for misogyny.
Silent movies without slapstick.
Following the carefree pantheism of Tron, the theology of the Toy Story series gets ever weirder. This time our ghost-inhabited little machines learn to love deities who promise nothing except to wad them up and abandon them. Job Lightyear? Or perhaps, given the inescapable link to merchandising, their problem is simply too little planned obsolescence--parents, keep that economy spinning and give your children toys whose bodies will break before their hearts do. Meanwhile, South Park reveals Satan's pernicious influence on the show tune.
East LA visits Muscle Shoals.
Send us your song lyrics--we'll set them to music and make you a star! Highlights include the stunning title track ("They fill coins in the fortune fountain/ searching for a place in the mountain/ where the sexless surgeons could moan/ watched by clergymen with faces of stone/ under the law of human absurdity"), "I Lost My Girl to an Argentinean Cowboy" and "City's Hospital Patients" ("They'll view x-rays all for your sake/ they'll soon find out just what makes you ache...You'll receive flowers with the finest smell/ and sincere wishes that you get well.")
The heartwarming drawings of Bil Keane gone horribly awry, through the intervention of anyone who wanted to write new captions for old pictures. This web site is no more, but while it lasted it answered enduring questions, like what was in those cereal bowls ("Mommy, my soylent green tastes funny!") or what little Billy was really looking for as dragged that dotted line all over the neighborhood ("We have to go back! I left my wallet at the crime scene!")