This year is a bit of a palate cleanser after the previous year’s trauma. Things largely just continued in my life. I was still in school full time, working at Blockbuster, and training karate pretty intensely.

There weren’t a lot of needle moves in this year except for a breakup at the end of the year which happened after seeing Tomorrow Never Dies in the theater. Subsequently going to see Titanic on Christmas sucked a bit more as love stories are not awesome after breakups but the last hour was pretty rad. I followed it up that night with an American Werewolf in Paris which is an objectively bad movie, but I still really loved it anyway.

I did get to go to a world premiere this year, which was a pretty big deal to me. Spawn, based on Todd McFarlane’s creator owned Image comic of the same name, was made into a movie and because McFarlane lives in Scottsdale, the world premiere was held in Phoenix at the Ahwatukee Foothills Village AMC with the afterparty held at Planet Hollywood. A friend of mine at the time won tickets to this world premiere and afterparty from the radio and took me because he knew that McFarlane was my favorite comic book artist/creator and I loved Spawn.

It was pretty amazing to go to this. It is the only world premiere I have gone to and it was insane that the director, Mark A.Z. Dippe, was sitting two rows in front of me. We got free popcorn and drinks and McFarlane spoke before the movie started. The movie’s fine. I will always have a soft spot for it because of the experience but making a PG-13 version of a very R-rated comic is not the best idea in the world and the CGI effects do not hold up now. The performances were fun and got the broad strokes of Spawn right so I like it but the animated Spawn series on HBO is considerably better.

After the movie we went to the after party and got some rad give aways, including an exclusive Spawn comic with the characters from the movie on the cover. I was able to get that signed by the cast at the party. I met Martin Sheen and couldn’t shake his hand when he offered because a gel pen had exploded on my hand. I met Michael Jai White and he was cool. I felt strange being so physically intimidated by someone the same height as me but the dude is imposing as shit. When I met McFarlane I completely froze. I managed to squeak out ‘could you sign these, please?’ to him before completely getting locked out of my faculties. He signed Amazing Spider-Man 300, the exclusive book, and Spawn #1  for me.

This meeting, while cool in terms of proximity, haunted me for years for my failure to tell this man how I felt and how much he had inspired me. I would love to say that it was because I had heard he could be prickly sometimes and that is why I froze but that wasn’t it, just like when I eventually met Mike Patton (my favorite singer of all time). I was just straight scared to meet people who I admired. I would eventually get redemption with McFarlane as I met him a second time years later at a Gamestop management conference. I told him that I had locked up when I met him at the Spawn world premiere but I wanted to thank him because without him I wouldn’t be an artist. He gestured to my name badge and asked ‘Why are you still doing this?’ I told him I didn’t know how to do anything else. He spent the next 10 minutes giving me advice and encouraging me to believe in myself. A year an a half later I would get my first book deal. But I am getting way ahead of myself.

This year in movies was kind of weird as there are a lot that I liked but there were a lot of sequels and big swings that did not pan out. It seemed like studios were trying to chase the success of the past couple of years and largely failed. The same could be said for most years really but it seems particularly pronounced this year. As you will see from the list below, there were still plenty of good movies released.

Runners in up roughly release order: Waiting for Guffman, Touch, Lost Highway, the Daytrippers, Liar Liar, the Saint, 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Breakdown, Sprung, Face/Off, Men in Black, George of the Jungle, Air Force One, Spawn, the Full Monty, Cop Land, Even Horizon, the Game, Boogie Nights, Gattaca, Starship Troopers, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Alien: Resurrection, Good Will Hunting, Scream 2, Titanic, Tomorrow Never Dies, An American Werewolf in Paris, As Good as it Gets, and Wag the Dog.

If you have not read the introduction to this exercise, I recommend you do so for context regarding what this all is. In short, be nice, these are my favorites based on how I encountered them in my life and what they mean for mean to me. This is not a list of objective best movies in their respective years and if a movie that you love or is considered great does not appear, it does not mean that I think it is shit or that I don’t love it. These are just my favorites for particular personal reasons. Feel free to let everyone know your favorite five for 1997 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 29-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!

1.Chasing Amy-Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith’s third film and a return to formula for him after Mallrats failed at box office, Chasing Amy was a return to personal, independent filmmaking. Following two comic book creators Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck) and Banky Edwards (Jason Lee) who are on the verge of getting a cartoon deal for their characters Bluntman and Chronic, Chasing Amy has become controversial in years since due to its handling of queer themes and issues.

When Holden meets Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), he falls in love fast. She is an independent comic creator and cool as shit. He is invited to hang out with her at a club and, much to Banky’s delight, he realizes that she is gay. They begin a friendship that ultimately develops into something more which throws her life into upheaval and causes major problems between Holden and Banky. Things further explode when Banky digs up past dirt that proves that Alyssa previously dated men. In a predictable explosion of male fragility, Holden unleashes his insecurities on Alyssa because he can’t get the thoughts of dozens of past dicks out of his head. They break up and Holden is even more sullen than usual before he and Banky meet up with Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) to give them money for likeness rights for Bluntman and Chronic. Silent Bob tells a story about his ex-girlfriend Amy and how he was similarly confronted by her past sexual exploits and had difficulty dealing with it which similarly led to a break up, Silent Bob now identifies as a massive mistake that stemmed from his own insecurity. Holden being a dipshit of the absolute highest order takes entirely the wrong message from this and suggests that he and Alyssa balance the scales by having a threesome with Banky. Holy fucking shit.

Chasing Amy is a tricky movie nowadays. When it was released, it was nominated for 16 awards from various organizations and won five of them including Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Jason Lee) from Film Independent Spirit awards. Joey Lauren Adams was nominated for several of these awards. It was heralded as a return to form for Smith who filmed this on a $250,000 budget and made just over 12 million worldwide. But in the years since, the conversation has shifted somewhat and people’s mileage definitely vary on the movie’s handling of Alyssa and the resulting romance.

It doesn’t help that, particularly at the time, there was a prevailing attitude that homosexuality was a choice people made and that lesbians just needed to find the right guy to turn it all around. That wasn’t the actual point that Smith was trying to make here but it didn’t help the narrative that existed at the time. At first blush, it could appear that Banky’s dismissive “all lesbians need is a good deep dicking” is the thesis statement of the movie and a lot of people run with that on both sides of the argument.

I will not presume to tell anyone else how to feel about this, especially not queer people in general or lesbians in particular who are offended by this. I have a definite take about this movie and what it is saying, which is informed not just by my opinion but also what Smith says about it now, but I am not going to tell anyone else their feelings on this are wrong.

That being said, I think the biggest real issue here is the bi-erasure that it unwittingly supports. In 1997, bisexuality was not something that was widely talked about or accepted. I knew a number of gay people at the time that dismissed bisexuality as being wishy washy or not wanting to admit that they were ‘all the way gay.’ This attitude continues now but at the time it was pretty universal. Positioning Alyssa as a lesbian as opposed to being bisexual is doing a lot of the controversial heavily lifting in terms of queer sensitivity here. Smith has said in recent years that if he was better educated at the time he would have made Alyssa bisexual. This is a problem to acknowledge but it is also an artifact from a different time with less understanding and it being a point of discussion now can be helpful in understanding the issue in the first place.

I attended a San Diego Comic Con panel for Chasing Chasing Amy, a documentary about the effect the movie had on the documentarian, Sav Rodgers. The panel included Rodgers, Smith, Riley Rodgers, Trish Bendix, and Princess Weekes. It was an interesting panel as Sav Rodgers told his story of being queer in Kansas and Chasing Amy helping keep him alive and other panelists took Smith to task for the handling of lesbian relationships and what the film did to attitudes toward lesbians at the time. For his part, Smith acknowledged the missteps, up to and including being a straight man talking writing about lesbian issues. I bring up the panel to illustrate how divided people are on the film and that it isn’t just one thing.

I feel like the divisiveness was necessary table setting before I talk about how much I love this movie. I agree that it is very 90s in its attitudes and presentation but I also feel like it was kind of an important movie for its time and continues to resonate in terms of the discussions that are being had about these sorts of things now. The bisexuality angle of it is important to acknowledge now, even if it wasn’t especially talked about at the time.

All of its thematic resonance aside, the movie is really fucking funny. It has all of the signature snappy Kevin Smith dialogue in a more mature setting. There is all of what I love about Smith’s movies with interconnectedness to the other Askewniverse movies and comics and movies in general. The ‘Jaws’ scene in which Banky and Alyssa one up each other with injuries sustained during sex is amazing. Banky’s angst over people thinking that inking is just tracing is both hilarious and resonant with comic artists. Hooper X’s (King Mustafa Obafemi) speech about black representation in comics is awesome. There is a lot of insanely good material here, aside from LGBTQIA+ issues.

The performances are also incredible. This was Ben Affleck’s first leading role and remains an incredible performance. Holden is an absolute fucking idiot but he remains likeable for at least half of the movie which is a testament to Affleck’s charisma and overall likeability. Joey Lauren Adams absolutely kills in this movie and I think it is the best thing she has ever done. That kind of pisses me off too because she should have gotten so much more after this and it is a goddamn travesty that her career didn’t explode after this. Jason Lee is maybe my favorite of Kevin Smith’s regulars outside of Jeff Anderson and he solidifies why here with his performance. Banky is an asshole but Lee’s delivery and commitment to that is amazing.

I saw Chasing Amy at a sneak preview screening at the University of Arizona’s Gallagher theater. My girlfriend at the time got screening passes but she wasn’t sure what the movie was and knew that it was a romantic comedy of some kind. I showed up with the sort of enthusiasm that I tend to have for that sort of thing, which wasn’t much, but when I saw the poster I lost my fucking mind. I was well into the ‘following Kevin Smith’s exploits online’ phase of my fandom, although I wasn’t to the ‘building a lasting family of internet friends from Kevin Smith fan message boards’ phase yet, so I knew his next movie was Chasing Amy and I was enormously excited. I loved it.

I really loved the blend of more mature storytelling with the references and dick and fart joke humor. When it comes to his material, that is always my preference although I love his sillier stuff too. I loved that Holden and Banky (both named after Catcher in the Rye characters) were comic artists/writers as I still wanted to do that in addition to the FBI. I loved the connections to the past movies. I even kind of loved how much of a dipshit Holden was and how catastrophically he fucks up at the end because things didn’t work out for him and his bullshit. I think that is a feature and not a defect.

That last piece, that Holden fucks up and loses everything at the end for being a jackass, is the thing that I think that keeps this movie from being the anti-queer screed that people think that it is. Because sometimes people assume that characters are speaking for writers and the attitudes they espouse are the attitudes of the writer. The fact that Holden makes the wrong choice and is ultimately punished for it demonstrates this and is kind of the whole ass point.

I showed this movie to my mom for some reason. I don’t know why, honestly, but she ended up really loving it and thinking it was an important movie for young people to see. Not because of the queer elements but because of the message that you shouldn’t judge the past of a partner and letting go of your own insecurities are important. This was a nice touchpoint to have with her with Kevin Smith movies. It was much better than her asking me what ‘snowballing’ was after Clerks.

Chasing Amy is a complicated movie but I continue to love it. If it was made with hate and sneering derision I would feel differently but it wasn’t. The shortcomings in understanding are honest and Smith acknowledged this many times in the years since, including in subsequent appearances of the characters in other movies. It is an artifact of a different time and can be seen in that context, part of an evolution of understanding in a society that moves at a glacial pace toward acceptance. Again, if you hate it because it offends you, I understand. For me, it is a piece of art that makes me laugh while addressing insecurities that once plagued me and went a long way toward dispelling. Movies are, as ever, very personal and this one is no different. For my part, I love it.

2.Grosse Point Blank-George Armitage

Asking the question ‘What would happen if a hitman showed up to his high school reunion,’ Grosse Point Blank follows Martin Blank (John Cusack), a hitman who fucked up a job and is now required to do a make good job in his old hometown of Grosse Point on the weekend of his 10-year high school reunion. While in town he attempts to reconnect with his high school girlfriend Debbie (Minnie Driver) who he stood up for prom while having an existential freakout, and his best friend Paul (Jeremy Piven) who he similarly has not seen since skipping town. To complicate matters, rival hitman Grocer (Dan Ackroyd) is in town upset because he feels that Martin stole the job from him and because Martin won’t join the assassin union he is trying to put together. Further, two government agents are in town, Lardner (Hank Azaria) and McCullers (K Todd Freeman) waiting for Martin to complete his job so they can take him out. Lastly, yet another hitman, Feliz La PuBelle (Benny ‘the Jet’ Urquidez) has been sent to kill Martin in retaliation for a botched job in which Martin accidentally killed his target’s dog. Oh, and his target for this hit turns out to be Debbie’s dad Bart (Mitchell Ryan).

Grosse Point Blank is a kind of crazy mixture of action, romance, comedy, and drama that has a lot of moving parts but all of those parts fit together by a well crafted Swiss watch. With a healthy dose of existential crises, Gross Point Blank is sharply written with more on its mind than the high concept premise. The action is convincing and exciting and the comedy is on point and relatable. There are a ton of quotable lines in this movie but I think my favorite comes when Martin is talking on the phone to his therapist (Alan Arkin) after learning that his childhood home has been torn down and replaced by an Ultimart convenience store “You can never go home, Oatman, but you can shop there.”

I saw this movie in the theater with friends mostly off the strength of my love for John Cusack but also because I am damn near addicted to movies about hitmen. The mid to late 90s were a great time for me because hitman movies were all over the place. Most of them were not nearly this clever, though. I loved this movie from the jump and watched it over and over on video.

I was many years from my 10 year reunion and I was still in the headspace that such things actually mattered so I thought a lot about what mine would be like and how I would feel seeing people I went to high school with again. As it happened, I have never gone to any of my reunions for a variety of reasons, none of which had to do with any kind of existential crisis. But I haven’t really felt like I lost much from not going and I don’t think it is really that important. Part of this has to do with social media, I think. I am connected to most of the people I went to high school with that I would be interested in seeing at a reunion and I have had very little that I felt needed reckoning with. So while I imagined that I related to the angst of seeing people from high school at a reunion when I first saw this, I find I relate much less now.

There are plenty of aspects I still relate to, though. Being accepted for who you are, wanting acceptance from those you care about despite the urge to isolate, and what it is like to have several groups of hitmen trying to kill you at the same time are all resonant themes here that I continue to reckon with and think about. Transitioning into respectable adulthood and the angst associated with it is something that I think we can all understand to some degree or another. Grosse Point Blank taps into this in as fun a way as possible and I am here for it. I still watch this movie all the time and I love it.

3.Fierce Creatures-Fred Schipisi, Robert Yang

The follow up to A Fish Called Wanda, Fierce Creatures brings Kevin Kline, John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin back together for another comedy that is completely unrelated to their previous film. And as controversial a take as this is, I like Fierce Creatures better.

Fierce Creatures follows the take over of a zoo in London by a massive corporate conglomerate, Octopus, run by Rod McCain (Kevin Kline) a Rupert Murdoch style tycoon who place hefty financial demands on their companies. In response, new zoo director Rollo Lee (John Cleese) institutes a Fierce Creatures policy in which all the animals must be dangerous in order to raise revenue. Things are complicated when new executive Willa Weston (Jamie Lee Curtis) and McCain’s corrupt and stupid son Vince (also Kevin Kline) are sent in to right the ship. Hijinks and intrigue ensue.

I saw this with my former friend and abuser as I often did most Monty Python adjacent things. He remained in my life for years after the assault because I was so deeply in denial about what had happened and the depth of grooming and subsequent dependence that existed. It isn’t uncommon but it really sucks. Despite that, I loved the movie.

I am a massive fan of Monty Python and have a particular love for John Cleese. I love Michael Palin as well so I would have been on board with this from the jump. The brilliant Kevin Kline duel performance was a surprise that just pushed the film even higher in my esteem. Jamie Lee Curtis is always value added so the package is as complete as you could get here.

Fierce Creatures is something of a comfort movie for me and over the years I have watched it when I am feeling down or out of sorts and it always cheers me up. It wasn’t super available for awhile so there was a time when I wasn’t able to watch it much but that has since been rectified and I have watched it recently and it is again comforting.  

4.LA Confidential-Curtis Hanson

An epic period crime story that takes place in 1950s Los Angeles, LA Confidential is an adaptation of enormous James Ellroy novel and manages to be a tighter and more focused story than the novel but still offers the same gritty feeling and tone.

Following three very different detectives all trying to uncover the truth behind the same conspiracy, LA Confidential delivers a twisty, noir tale with compelling performances and a fantastic screenplay. Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and Russell Crowe are all absolutely terrific as they clash and cooperate their way through a much more streamlined crime than in the novel without losing depth or weight. James Cromwell is equally excellent as their manipulative Captain that has more to do with the conspiracy than any of them realize.

I saw LA Confidential in theaters first and fell deeply in love. I then started reading James Ellroy and I was blown away. The novel is hardboiled and gritty but is also enormously complex and takes place over a much longer timeline. The movie streamlines and focuses the story to a much more palatable form and a lot of credit has to go to director Curtis Hanson for being able to keep it digestible without taking away the bite or impact. This movie really sold me on Guy Pearce and Kevin Spacey was perfect for the Hollywood detective who seemed to want to be an actor more than a cop. Crowe’s rough and tumble bruiser was a perfect fit for him and he does a fantastic job of his character’s volatility.

I don’t want to say too much more about the plot or goings on of the movie but this kind of film is right up my alley and led to me reading several of Ellroy’s novels. I am still sad that we didn’t get a movie of the follow up White Jazz but it has been so long now, I am sure that ship has sailed. Even still, we have LA Confidential and that is more than enough.

5.Jackie Brown-Quinten Tarantino

An adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, Quinten Tarantino’s third film and follow up to Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown is solidly in Tarantino’s wheelhouse while offering a slightly different flavor than Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs. Both of those previous films were very much inspired by Elmore Leonard mixed with blaxploitation films. This film goes right to the source and Tarantino manages to handle the converging storylines masterfully.

The twisty plot follows flight attendant Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) who gets caught transporting drugs and cash for criminal Ordell Robbie (Samuel L Jackson) by FBI agents Ray Niccolette (Michael Keaton) and Mark Dargus (Michael Bowen) who want her to help them catch Ordell. Enter Max Cherry (Robert Forrester), a bail bondsman who helps with Jackie’s bond and becomes embroiled in a plan to steal money from Ordell and get him taken out in the bargain.  Also in the mix are Louis Garza (Robert DeNiro), Ordell’s ex-con partner who has just gotten out, and Melanie (Bridget Fonda) Ordell’s surfer girlfriend.

Rum Punch is one of Leonard’s greatest novels along with Get Shorty, and Out of Sight and Tarantino delivers a sturdy adaptation while still enduing it with his own sense of style and aesthetic. He manages the twists and turns enormously well and the whole thing is legible instead of a mess of switchbacks and nonsense.

I saw this in the theater with my parents and they liked it a lot aside from the opening shot of Jackie riding a moving walkway at the airport during the opening credits. Mom was very impatient about this but I thought it was great and helps to lull the audience into the movie.

I was already on the Elmore Leonard train before this, thanks to Get Shorty, and I had already read Rum Punch before seeing the movie. I was a little nervous that the movie wouldn’t do the book justice but Tarantino unsurprisingly nails it. This is his wheelhouse in a very real way and while some people were disappointed with it when it first came out, I think it is one of his strongest films. Elmore Leonard can be difficult to get right but Jackie Brown is the middle movie in a trio of films that absolutely nailed it. If for some reason you have not checked this out, you must right away.