1998 Tagged Articles at Cinematical
Lebowski Meets Truman: Rewinding 1998
Every once in a while my brain returns to 1998, the first full year I worked as a film critic. What happens is that something will remind me of a movie that has aged particularly well, something like The Big Lebowski or A Simple Plan, and I'll notice that there were quite a lot of good movies that year, and that many of them didn't get much love at the time. But then I'll start thinking about all those movies that did get lots of love -- especially Oscar love -- and how they haven't aged well at all. By looking at the Oscars and the box office list, you'd think it was a terrible movie year, but in reality it was a great movie year. How does this happen?
One of the things I ask myself is: why wasn't Jeff Bridges nominated for Best Actor for The Big Lebowski? And come to that, why wasn't Jim Carrey nominated for the otherwise highly acclaimed and beloved The Truman Show? Or Warren Beatty for Bulworth? How about George Clooney for Out of Sight, Robert Downey Jr. for Two Girls and a Guy, or Johnny Depp for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Or, heck, why not the 14 year-old Eamonn Owens for his astonishing performance in The Butcher Boy? The answer is, of course, because the Academy had to make room for message movies, war movies and Holocaust movies.
Our Favorite Summers: 1998
Filed under: Fandom », Summer Movies »
Believe it or not, I wasn't yet a full-blown movie geek in 1998. I didn't even start saving my ticket stubs until the summer of '99. In all fairness, I hadn't been quite old enough to go to the movies by myself yet -- not much younger than any of my colleagues in the summers they covered, but young enough to spare you the math.
Every third weekend, my younger brother and I spent with our father, and a reliable way to spend time together was often to go to the movies or rent something and stay home. So by only (probably) going to the movies every third weekend, I only saw maybe six movies theatrically over the course of those eighteen weeks. I'll bold those that I remember going to see as I go along, and then touch upon the rest of the releases in between.
(By the way: the weekends in the summer of 1998 happen to line up with those of this summer. Let's see just how far we've come...)
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