The Projector #3: Beach Reads (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

 With the support of our pals over at Filmspotting, we launched The Next Picture Show in November of 2015, a few months after the demise of The Dissolve. We’ve kept it going for going on four years and and 186 episodes without taking much of a break. This week, we took a week off due to vacations and other demands. And it felt… pretty good! But we’re excited to be back recording another set of episodes this week. And it should be a fun pairing as we look at two different takes on masculinity and the extreme measures some take to stay manly in a culture that demands manliness without fully defining what that means.

So what have we been up to? I don’t know about the others, but I’ve been doing some reading and can return with some recommendations. I can highly recommend Brian Raftery’s recent book Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen, an in-depth look at that year’s defining films. Was it the best movie year ever? Consider some of the films covered The Sixth Sense, Eyes Wide Shut, Fight Club, The Blair Witch Project, Boys Don’t Cry, Rushmore, The Matrix, The Virgin Suicides, Three Kings… the list goes on. (And you could make a pretty good sequel with some of the films not covered: Topsy Turvy, Summer of Sam, Galaxy Quest, etc.) If not the best, it was certainly a year in which something unexpected seemed to appear every weekend. I remember even taking films like Go and Run, Lola, Run for granted. Sure, they were good. But going to the movies meant something even better might be just around the corner. And that’s how moviegoing would always be, forever and ever.

It didn’t last and the book ends on an elegiac note discussing the great new golden age 1999 never ushered in. But before that, Best. Movie. Year. Ever. captures why it was such a special moment via a lot of firsthand interviews. Raftery clearly did his homework and talked to a lot of people and while I thought I knew everything about the stories behind these movies, he proved me wrong with every chapter. (Favorite detail: Joe Pantoliano trying to get the studio to pay for his pre-Matrix liposuction.)

Also worth your time: Wild and Crazy Guys: How The Comedy Mavericks of the ‘80s Changed Hollywood by Empire editor Nick De Semlyen, which weaves together the stories of Bill Murray, Steve Martin, John Belushi, John Candy, Rick Moranis, Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase and others into a coherent account of how a new generation of comedic minds took over movie comedies in the ‘80s. It’s not as filled with revelations as Raftery’s book, but the big-picture approach adds a nice bit of perspective to some of the decade’s biggest movies. (Nobody had bigger ups and downs than Chevy Chase and it’s easy to forget that Martin’s film career didn’t meet with much commercial success in the years between The Jerk and Roxanne, as well-liked as films like The Man With Two Brains and All of Me are now.)

OK, if that’s not enough suggested reading for you, here’s some more. And, thanks, as always, for supporting the Patreon (and look for a special episode on Midsommar a bit later this week):

Speaking of 1999 movies, Keith Phipps wrote about Galaxy Quest and fan culture for The Verge.

If you’re watching the new season of Veronica Mars on Hulu (and you should) Scott Tobias has your catch-up in the New York Times.

For NPR, Scott Tobias also reviewed A Faithful Man, the second directorial effort from Louis Garrel.

Elsewhere, if you want to learn how Midsommar achieved its ickiest effects, Nate Jones has a piece in Vulture.

Over at ScreenCrush, Matt Singer offered a defense of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Matt also revealed what some of us have known for a while: He’s got a book coming out in October called Marvel's Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular: The Definitive Comic Art Collection. Matt’s a huger Spider-Man fan and he talked to a bunch of legendary artists for the project, so there’s no way this isn’t going to be great.

At Uproxx, Mike Ryan worries that the waning of cable means we’re losing one of our unifying cultural experiences via the piece “Woe To ‘Tango And Cash’: Mourning The Impending Death Of The Communal Random Movie On Cable.”

Finally, is it too early to start talking about the best movies of the 2010s? I’d argue yes, yes it is. (I mean, Spies in Disguise doesn’t come out until Christmas.) Nonetheless, Indiewire has put together a pretty compelling list of the decade’s best. Read it. Argue about it. Make a list of the can’t-miss movies you missed and watch them.