Well, here we are in the new millennium! There was a lot riding on the year 2000 from a sci-fi perspective and not a lot of pay off. It was the start of a decade that searched for an identity and never really decided what to call itself. When the ‘aughts’ is the best you can do, your generational identity is in real trouble.
This was the beginning of my adult life proper insofar as I was living on my own for the first time and things were getting serious. I was nearing the end of college and making some important decisions and making them badly. Somewhere along the line here I abandoned my dream of being in the FBI and wanted to shift my focus to filmmaking. I started a Christian alternative rock band. I expanded my online presence as the internet expanded itself.
This year was the beginning of a lot and the beginning of the end of a lot. It included diversions from previously held goals and some conflict with my parents because of it. I was trying to graduate from college while my attention was being pulled in several different directions, and I was trying to figure out more definitively who I was. I was working on a satire website about the paranormal while going on real paranormal investigations. There was a lot going on, and I thought I had a handle on it all.
My roommate moved out and my best friend from High School, Chris moved in. This changed my dynamic at home a bit but things were pretty smooth there. This was a year of my friend and co-worker Adam coming over to play all-night Resident Evil 3 sessions while we were making ourselves sick on Mountain Dew and red vines. This was a year of playing Silent Hill 2 and throwing my controller in the air and screaming when my roommate came home at three in the afternoon. This was a year of skateboarding around the University.
It was also a year of making a bad joke about people getting engagement rings from a mall kiosk called the Piercing Pagoda that led me to accidentally getting engaged. That was a pretty big mistake that had severe reverberations I still feel today. If you ever make such a joke and your significant other that you aren’t ready to marry says ‘Is this an engagement ring?’ when you are just looking for a birthday present for her, say no, for godsakes.
As far as movies went, I was going as often as possible and watching a shit ton of movies I rented as well. I am not sure if this was a great movie year but I love a lot of the movies from this year. This year was the next step toward the coming of super hero movies even if it was still a kind of tentative step in that direction. I loved a lot from this year but I feel like it was searching for identity in the same way that I was. When movies are the timeline of your life, that is a weird place to be.
Runners up in roughly release order: Scream 3, The Beach, Boiler Room, Pitch Black, Erin Brockovich, Final Destination, Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai, American Psycho, Gladiator, Road Trip, Titan AE, Me Myself & Irene, Chicken Run, But I’m a Cheerleader, the Tao of Steve, The Cell, Nurse Betty, the Way of the Gun, Almost Famous, Meet the Parents, Requiem for a Dream, the 6th Day, Unbreakable, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Dracula 2000, O Brother Where Art Thou, Traffic, and Shadow of the Vampire.
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 2000 and why as well. It is also worth mentioning that there will be spoilers here for what are now 26-year-old movies. Let’s dig in!
1.The Emperor’s New Groove-Mark Dindal
The product of a long and troubled development, Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove underperformed commercially in theaters but found a massive audience on Home Video becoming the highest selling home video release of 2001. I didn’t even notice when it first came out.
Telling the story of the spoiled and arrogant Kuzco (David Spade), an Incan emperor who is running his kingdom into the dirt through selfishness and obliviousness, who is accidentally turned into a Llama by his ex-advisor Yzma (Eartha Kitt) and her henchman Kronk (Patrick Warburton) during a botched assassination attempt. Kuzco must team up with Pacha (John Goodman), a disgruntled Shepherd at odds with the emperor over Kuzco’s plans to destroy his village for the Kuzcotopia resort, to get back to the palace with Yzma and Kronk hot on their heels to finish them off. It is basically Midnight Run if Charles Grodin was a llama.
The Emperor’s New Groove is a fairly major departure from the Disney house style when it comes to animation in terms of look and tone. It also eschews the typical musical style for one Tom Jones performed music number at the beginning and that is it. The plot and writing felt a lot different as well and it created a movie that critics liked but audience weren’t sure about until they could watch at home.
Disney didn’t really do it like this again and I think that is a real shame. While Disney cartoons are generally amusing, they aren’t often hilarious romps chock full of quotable lines. They are often much more earnest and heartwarming. The Emperor’s New Groove has heartwarming moments and has a lot to say about the importance of friendship and humility but it is largely irreverent and sarcastic.
David Spade is the perfect Kuzco and his delivery is spot on regardless of if Kuzco is a llama at the time or not. Eartha Kitt sounds like she is having the most fun in the world while John Goodman offers good natured earnestness with a good helping of shrewdness mixed in. Patrick Warburton’s Kronk is a major stand out here with a character who is maybe a bit too stupid and a bit too kindhearted to really be an evil henchman. He is an absolute delight throughout the movie and it is no wonder that the direct to video sequel focuses around Kronk.
As mentioned a the top, this was a massively troubled production with an entirely different story and collection of characters originally planned. There Is a documentary detailing this but Disney has done its best to keep that under wraps, although it pops up on youtube from time to time before Disney has it taken down. I will not enumerate all the trials and tribulations of this movie here, an massive article about it is findable online, but it is nothing short of a miracle that this ever got made at all.
When this came out, I was vaguely aware that it is a thing that existed but I did not see it in theaters nor did I rent it when it came out on video. I was not really out on animation, but I hadn’t really sought out Disney animation since the Hunchback of Notre Dame, focusing instead on their Pixar output instead. So, I ignored The Emperor’s New Groove on release.
It wasn’t until around 2003 that I would notice the Emperor’s New Groove while I was working at Hollywood Video in Arkansas. This is a real fast forward moment and it is skipping a lot life, but I eventually moved to North Little Rock Arkansas and started working as an assistant manager at Hollywood Video. I was miserable pretty much instantly upon moving there and I was on a particular shift one night and one of my co-workers had put The Emperor’s New Groove in on the house system. Unlike Blockbuster, there were no trailer tapes to play. We just had to put in Disney movies.
As I was working an awful shift, with cranky people and endless complaints, I was hearing the dialogue to the movie and Kuzco’s acerbic, acid tongue was a perfect match for what I wanted to be saying to these people. Add to that, hearing David Spade’s voice, an Arizona native, soothed my homesickness in a way that kept me moving forward. I fell in love with the movie hard that night.
It quickly became my go to movie to put in and listen to at work. It was cathartic and hilarious at the same time and it was exactly what I needed. It reminded me of when I used to work for my parents as a kid doing manual labor to earn money to get a new video game or something and I would tape the audio from cartoons or movies and listen to them while I worked. It was a real comfort.
One night, I decided to take it home and actually watch it since I had never really done that. It was enormously weird. While I generally knew what it looked like and had seen snatches of the movie while working, watching it was surreal as I had already decided what the action looked like in my head and it was very strange to actually see what it all looked like.
I have watched it several more times since then and I genuinely love it but occasionally it is still weird to see it like it is some kind of animated version of the uncanny valley. The characters live in my head in a particular way and that way doesn’t really agree with how they actually exist in the movie. Weird or not, however, this movie kept me sane in a very difficult time in my life and it has been a major source of comfort ever since. And it is hilarious, there is also that.
2.X-Men-Bryan Singer
Following the success of Blade, Bryan Singer’s X-Men took the next major steps in the world of super hero movies as legitimate movies. Up until this point, comic book and super hero movies were seen as less than, especially after the real capital earned by Tim Burton’s Batman films was squandered by Joel Shumacher. Super hero movies were something to be embarrassed by and if you did make one, then it had to be changed for movie audiences to accept it so you might end up with one or two key elements of the comic but you were not likely get the whole thing. Blade changed that and X-Men doubled down in a big, bad way.
Focusing on Rogue (Anna Paquin), a runaway mutant whose powers cause her to absorb the powers and essence of anyone she touches, and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), a grizzled drifter with no memory of his past and a skeleton and claws laced with the unbreakable metal adamantium and a wicked healing factor, as they run afoul of a group of ‘evil mutants’ and are subsequently saved by another group of ‘not evil’ mutants. They are taken to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, a mutant sanctuary and front for the covert operations by the X-Men: Cyclops (James Marsden), Storm (Halle Berry), and Jean Grey (Famke Janssen). Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), telepath and headmaster, reveals that these ‘evil’ mutants Sabertooth (Tyler Mayne), Mystique (Rebecca Romain), Toad (Ray Park) are a terrorist cell led by holocaust survivor turned militant Magneto (Ian McKellen) and were trying to capture Wolverine for some unknown reason. It turns out that they are after Rogue and her ability to absorb powers in a bid to turn everyone into mutants so that they growing anti-mutant sentiment will be a moot point. That is a lot to take in for people who have never read an X-Men comic but people dug it.
There were still remnants of the old school embarrassment which led to a change from the colorful costumes from the comics to a Matrix-like black leather uniform but we took what we could get. Wolverine had the hair, claws and acted like fucking Wolverine. Who cares that Wolverine is 5’3” in the comics and Hugh Jackman is 6’1.” He looked like Wolverine and acted like him too. Who cares if Mystique suddenly had weird scales all over her body, presumably to hide her naughty bits while shapeshifting. She acted like Mystique and did Mystique shit.
X-Men is not a perfect movie, nor is it a perfect X-Men adaptation but it was worlds better than I had any reasonable hope of getting. I went to see it at a sneak preview screening and I was absolutely blown away. When Wolverine first appeared in the movie cage fighting before eventually popping his claws on both the bar tender and his beaten opponent, I wanted to cry. Here was fucking Wolverine and I was watching it in a packed movie theater and not by myself in my bedroom wishing that things were different. I loved it so, so much.
When I was leaving after the movie was over, studio reps were interviewing audience members about what they thought. I walked past a guy who sounded identical to the comic book guy on the Simpsons saying “my one point of contention is that Wolverine is a skilled martial artist and would have beaten Mystique handily.” I was at once amused by how petty a complaint that was when that movie rocked out so much and also agreed with him. I wasn’t going to worry about it. I wasn’t going to worry that Halle Berry seemed to wish she was doing anything else in the world beside being Storm. This was the closest it had ever gotten. As I sit here on a mountain of riches and on the precipice of a new X-Men franchise starting after Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars clear the deck of the old crew, it is hard to remember how much of a gift this movie was. But it was. Oh my god it was. I have watched this movie so many times and I will be forever grateful for it. Bryan Singer is problematic as hell nowadays but he did give us the X-men on the big screen with the sort of legitimacy that only the director the Usual Suspects could have. This makes me a little conflicted, as does Joss Whedon’s punch ups to the script. I am glad we don’t have to rely on these guys any more for this kind of movie. Part of that is thanks to X-Men as well because Kevin Feige, current architect of the MCU, got his start here. Sometimes good can come from bad.
3.Snatch-Guy Ritchie
Stepping up in a major way from indy freshman effort Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch elevates director Guy Ritchie’s complex crime caper skills to the next level
Telling a complex story centered around the theft of a priceless diamond, Snatch offers a murder’s row of talent including Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones, Brad Pitt, Stephen Graham, Benicio del Torro, Dennis Farina, Lennie James, and Jason Flemyng. The twists and turns are prototypical Ritchie and set the template for his crime pictures for years to come.
Snatch is at once hilarious, surprising, and fresh. With dialogue that is as snappy as it is funny, the movie just exudes style. Ritchie’s particular brand of crime movie started a trend in copy cat British crime films in a similar way to the effect Tarantino had on American crime movies.
Snatch is infinitely rewatchable and very tricky to recommend at Blockbuster without getting slapped across the face. Even Madonna was not immune to this as she managed to get in hot water for wearing a Snatch t-shirt while she was with Ritchie. People were kind of jumpy about the title even though it was just referencing stealing something.
I saw this on video and it immediately became a movie that my friends and I would quote ad nauseum. I love Guy Ritchie movies and while I enjoyed Lock, Stock , it was Snatch that really got me into him. I have enjoyed the vast majority of his subsequent movies but I think Snatch remains my favorite as it really nailed the formula. I can put it on any time and I am happy.
4.High Fidelity-Stephen Frears
An adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel of the same name, High Fidelity follows Rob (John Cusack) who owns a struggling record store as he attempts to make sense of where he went wrong with his now ex, Laura (Iben Hjejle who has now hooked up with his neighbor Ian (Tim Robbins). Rob recounts his top five break-ups and calls them all in order to ascertain if he was at fault and is an asshole or if it was something else unrelated. This exploration leads to heartbreak, depression, and self-discovery that further leads to him following his dream of producing music and DJing.
Shifting from London in the novel to Chicago in the movie, High Fidelity is mostly faithful to the source material while adding layers of pathos to Rob with Cusack’s ability to appear to be a nice guy no matter how miserable of a shit he is playing. Jack Black and Todd Lusio are phenomenal here as Rob’s record store employees and Tim Robbins looks so punchable in this movie it makes me want to cry.
I saw High Fidelity in the theater and many times since and I read the book. I really dug both a lot and I am sad to say that I deeply identified with Rob. I too love top five lists (See also: the article you are reading now) and I have a collection of exes who would have interesting things to say if I were to call them inquiring on what happened. I failed, at the time, to recognize who Rob was and how fucked up he was. This was not really someone you wanted to emulate unless you are ready to be miserable and alone long term.
That being said, I did once reference this movie in a dating profile in which I said that my past can be summed up by a series of John Cusack characters and that I was in the Rob from High Fidelity stage. It is no wonder that I did not get a lot of interest at the time.
Regardless of Rob’s flaws, he is still a fun character and the movie is fun over all. This is another one that I quote a lot and can watch at any time.
5.Best in Show-Christopher Guest
Probably the best in show of Christopher Guest mockumentaries, Best In Show follows several sets of dog show contestants as they make their way to the Mayflower Dog Show hoping that this time, their particular dog scores best in show.
The characters are a collection of weirdos who are all way too into their dogs from Harlan Pepper (Christopher Guest) who loves his hound dog roughly as much as he loves naming nuts to Gerry (Eugene Levy) and Cookie Fleck (Catherine O’Hara), a couple who drive cross country to get to the dog show running into calamity and Cookie’s ex-boyfriends at every turn.
The characters are all deeply funny and the performances are incredible, which is all the more impressive for the movie being only slightly scripted. From screaming fights over the loss of Busy Bee, a dog toy, to the ‘God Loves a Terrier’ song, Best in Show never lets up with comedy banger after comedy banger.
I saw this in the theater and shared it with my parents and while they were hesitant at first, they were overwhelmed by the movies deeply funny charms. This is another infinitely quoted movie that is also fairly accurate to dog shows even in its exaggerated moments.
We lost Catherine O’Hara earlier this year and I went and saw this at the Loft with my partner, Angela, who had never seen it before. That was a wonderful and cathartic moment as everyone in the theater was grieving her loss by celebrating one of funniest things she did. I love moments like that, when I can share a movie I love with someone that I love. Not only does it feel like you are getting to relieve the movie vicariously, you get to be there when they experience something amazing. I also can’t think of a better way to honor Catherine O’Hara that to celebrate one of her best movies with friends and family.