It was the year that global communication networks did not die and Y2K proved to be a false alarm, President Bush was inaugurated, the USS Cole was attacked by Yemeni terrorists, Yugoslavian president Milosevic was overthrown, and a six-year-old boy named Elián González stood at the center of an international media circus. The human genome was deciphered, Mad Cow disease hit Europe, and Concorde crashed killing 113 in France. At the beginning of the year, on a wave of internet hyperbole, America Online purchased Time Warner for $165 Billion, since described as the worst business deal in history. One month later Web stocks plunged and the online gold rush soon ended.
In the world of entertainment, Vertical Horizon's "Everything You Want" and U2's "Beautiful Day" dominated the airwaves, The Marshall Mathers LP was the fastest selling solo album ever, and it was blasphemy not to love Radiohead's Kid A. Nobody watched the Sydney Olympics as they were too busy with the first series of "Survivor" and "Big Brother", James Cameron's "Dark Angel" debuted on Fox with Jessica Alba, while "The West Wing" and "The Sopranos" dominated remaining water cooler conversation. Guy Ritchie married Madonna and Harrison Ford split after 17 years from ET screenwriter, Melissa Mathison. Stephen King sold 50,000 copies of his first ebook Riding the Bullet in just three days, the FTC accused the entertainment industry of marketing R-rated content to teens, Warner Brothers announced that Darren Aronofsky - hot off Requiem for Dream - would helm the next Batman movie, and Robert Downey Jr was freed after a 14 month jail sentence, only to be re-arrested in November for possession of cocaine and diazepam.
The Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy genres were enjoying the success of the previous year's The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project, The Sixth Sense, and Sleepy Hollow, while recovering from the disappointment of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (which everyone went to see anyway, to the tune of $924 Million worldwide) and a series of weak remakes, including The Mummy, Wild Wild West (winner of multiple 2000 Golden Razzies), Jan de Bont's miserable The Haunting, and William Malone's House on Haunted Hill.
2000 Overview: Theatrical Horror Movie Releases
The year 2000 was far from vintage for fright films, as the doldrums of the late 1990s mired the theaters in franchise-ending duds and the success of The Sixth Sense opened Hollywood accountant's eyes to the profit possibilities of the PG-13 horror film. Still, there were some bright spots and emerging talent to be found among the wreckage.
Wes Craven's renaissance and, thankfully the era of the self-aware horror film, drew to a close with the patchy Scream 3 and his "Wes Craven Presents" credit on Scream Editor, Patrick Lussier's Dracula 2000, which introduced Gerard Butler (300) to a wider audience, had an interesting quasi-religious backstory for the Count (Lussier also directed Prophesy 3: the Ascent the same year), but had little else to offer, though that didn't stop the duo and screenwriter Joel Soisson returning with two straight-to-DVD sequels in 2003 and 2005. Incidentally, the actor playing Jesus, David J Francis went on to direct a trilogy of movies in his Canadian homeland, Zombie Night (2003), Awakening (aka Zombie Night 2, 2006), and Reel Zombies (2008), with distinctly mixed success. Lussier, of course, would deliver a remakes of My Bloody Valentine (2009) before taking over the Halloween franchise from Rob Zombie for Halloween III (2011)
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, was a double disappointment, both as a muddled sequel to its ground-breaking forbear and as the directorial debut of documentarian Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost), who deserves kudos for taking the film in a different direction from The Blair Witch Project, but showed little flair for coherent storytelling and character development. As is often the case with famous flops, the film actually did well, if not spectacularly, earning $26.44 Million at the US box-office and another $21.30 Million in the rest of the world from a $15 Million budget which, it has to be said, was $14,940,000 more than the first one cost.
Rounding out the negatives – we'll avoid the first of the ludicrously successful Scary Movie films, which made $278M spoofing something that was already a spoof – two high-profile releases from major studios went noticeably off the rails this year. Lost Souls, the interminably dull directorial debut of Spielberg's favorite cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski (Schindler's List, War of the Worlds), with Winona Ryder, Ben Chaplin and John Hurt, was delayed for a year in order to avoid clashing with Peter Hyams' Arnie-vs-Satan flick End of Days, but missed out on all the pre-millennial angst and sank without a trace. The same fate befell Chuck Russell's equally dull Bless the Child, from Omen producer Mace Neufeld and Paramount, which took three writers - one hot off the script for the TV movie "Tuesdays with Morrie", the other two have yet to work again - to adapt Cathy Cash Spellman's potboiler. This plodding bore starred Kim Basinger and Jimmy Smits, as well as Rufus Sewell, Angela Bettis, Christina Ricci, and Ian Holm, wasting all of them.
On the positive side, 2000 saw several decent films across the budgetary spectrum. Robert Zemeckis followed his metaphysical science fiction epic, Contact (1997) with the haunted house movie, What Lies Beneath, which has grown in stature since its initial chilly critical reception (though it was a box office hit, see chart below) and while this $90M production still feels a little episodic, the screenplay by actor, Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson in Iron Man) pays off in a tensely handled, virtually silent final section, thanks to top notch emoting from Michelle Pfeiffer and an out-of-character Harrison Ford.
Made for a lot less, Sam Raimi's The Gift, from a screenplay by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson (the duo behind the excellent 1992 thriller One False Move), is a prime slice of Southern Gothic, telling the story of a Savannah psychic (Cate Blanchett), who may hold the secret to the presumed murder of a local girl (Katie Holmes) by local bad boy Donnie Barksdale (Keanu Reeves). For my money this is way more effective than Raimi's over-praised return to his roots at the end of the decade and scores in atmosphere and chills where Drag Me to Hell (2009) relied on gross-out and slapstick.
Bret Easton Ellis's novel, American Psycho already felt like a relic of 1980's yuppiedom when it was published in 1991, so it's to director, Mary Harron's credit that after years of spinning through the hands of Oliver Stone and Leonardo DiCaprio, she managed to produce an enduring film which, though by no means a classic, bears repeated viewing today. Thankfully expunging much of Ellis's ultra-violence (and his endless brand name-checking), Harron and co-scripter Guinevere Turner (who, in an eyebrow-raising career move, later wrote Uwe Boll's BloodRayne), create a detailed satire of Me Decade excess: the obsession with the perfect business card, the search for the quintessential exfoliation routine and the godawful taste in music. Cinematographer Andrzej Sekula (Pulp Fiction) who went on to direct Cube 2: Hypercube (2002), provides chilly visuals, perfectly in keeping with the vacuous narcissism of the film's protagonist. And former child actor, Christian Bale proved to the world he was all grown up, paving the way for his dominant profile throughout the rest of the decade.
In a genre that spent the previous four or five years soaked in smirking self-reference, Ginger Snaps came as a breath of Canadian fresh air, particularly as it was part of the then tired werewolf sub-genre. Using the curse of lycanthropy as a metaphor for female adolescence, unleashing an inner power, may owe a little to Brian de Palma's Carrie, but Karen Walton's script, backed by John Fawcett's able direction and excellent lead performances by Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins as the misanthropic Fitzgerald sisters, make for the finest film of its type since An American Werewolf in London (1981). Given a scant cinema release in 2001, this has improved in popularity over the years and was followed by two sequels, the intriguing Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed and the misfire prequel Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (both 2004)
Shadow of the Vampire is one of the biggest delights of 2000, directed by E Elias Merhige (previously creator of the arty, impenetrable Begotten and a couple of Marilyn Manson videos) from a script by Steven Katz (check out his Wind Chill from 2007), the film treads a delicate line between horror and comedy and revels in period detail thanks to production design from Assheton Gorton (Legend) and cinematography by former gaffer, Lou Bogue (A Clockwork Orange, Terror Train). John Malkovich camps it up as FW Murnau, filming the 1920 Nosferatu with Willem Dafoe's Max Schreck, an actor who is perhaps a little too close to the character he's portraying. With Udo Keir as Albin Grau, the head of Prana Film, and Cary Elwes as cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner, as well as Eddie Izzard as actor, Gustav von Wangenheim, this is one of the films of the decade, and it's a shame that Merhige's only feature since has been the disappointing serial killer thriller, Suspect Zero (2004).
Other notable US releases included the first of the Final Destination franchise, directed by former "X Files" and "Millennium" producer, James Wong, which spawned three sequels. The Skulls was as big, glossy and empty as you would expect from a movie directed by Rob Cohen, just prior to his career bump from The Fast and the Furious (2001) and xXx (2002) and not even William Petersen can save this dull tale of an Ivy League secret society which somehow managed to spawn a Joe Chapelle-directed follow-up two years later, the same year that screenwriter John Pogue also delivered the execrable Rollerball and Ghost Ship. Urban Legends: Final Cut, was directed by John Ottman, who stretched himself too thin and smartly returned to his other eclectic careers as editor (X2, Superman Returns) and composer (Fantastic Four, Orphan). Also failing to make many waves was Robert Lee King's screen version of Charles Busch's camp stage production, Psycho Beach Party which earned just $268,117 in 11 cinemas, but does feature the second big-screen appearance by a young Amy Adams.
One movie that was also little seen, but deserves a wider audience, is the underrated Cherry Falls, which starred the late Brittany Murphy, Jay Mohr, Michael Biehn, and Candy Clark. Directed by Australian, Geoffrey Wright, who introduced Russell Crowe to the world in Romper Stomper (1992) and boosted Sam Worthington's profile with Macbeth (2006), the film, shot by Anthony B Richmond (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Candyman), tells the story of a serial killer, targeting high school virgins, and has never received the love it deserves, despite winning the Best Director award at the 2000 Sitges Fantasy Festival. Wright had a bumpy ride in Hollywood, first being fired from the ill-fated Supernova (2000 - See Part Three) and then seeing Cherry Falls distributor, October, bought out by USA Films who, having little interest in a horror movie where sex saves the day, cut the nudity – Wright describes the edition released as the "airline version" – and dumped it. The film received a cinema release in Europe, but went straight to video in the US, where it's currently only available on a discontinued 2001 DVD in a double bill with the same year's portmanteau movie, Terror Tract. If one half-decent thing comes out of Murphy's tragic death, it would be the rediscovery of this subversive little gem, which features one of her best performances.
2000: Top 20 Box Office, Worldwide
1. Mission: Impossible II ($546,388,105)
2. Gladiator ($457,640,427)
3. Cast Away ($429,632,142)
4. What Women Want ($374,111,707)
5. Dinosaur ($349,822,765)
6. How the Grinch Stole Christmas ($345,141,403)
7. Meet the Parents ($330,444,045)
8. The Perfect Storm ($328,718,434)
9. X-Men ($296,339,527)
10. What Lies Beneath ($291,420,351)
11. Scary Movie ($278,019,771)
12. Charlie's Angels ($264,105,545)
13. Erin Brockovich ($256,271,286)
14. Unbreakable ($248,118,121)
15. Gone in 60 Seconds ($237,202,299)
16. Chicken Run ($224,834,564)
17. Vertical Limit ($215,663,859)
18. The Patriot ($215,294,342)
19. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ($213,525,736)
20. Miss Congeniality ($212,742,720)
In Part Two we take a look at Straight-to-Video movies of the year 2000, Part Three concentrates on Theatrical Science Fiction releases, Part Four will detail Direct-to-Video Science Fiction, and Part Five will look at Super Hero and Fantasy films, Foreign Language releases and list those actors and crew we lost that year.
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