10 Things I Learned From Watching So Many 2000 Movies This Month

by Patrick Bromley

This month has been educational.

I've watched a lot of movies from the year 2000 since picking it for this year's F This Movie Fest. Watching so many films from the same year does interesting things to your brain, causing you to make connections that you might not otherwise make. This isn't really that kind of list. This is just a list of some observations I've had over the last month of watching movies.

1. Erika and I Saw Pretty Much Every Movie in 2000

Going through the titles released in 2000 is a trip down memory lane given just how often E and I went to the theater this year. We were pretty newly dating, we had no kids, and were just starting to work full-time so we had a lot of freedom to go to the movies, which is what we loved to do. This is how I saw stuff like Gossip and Supernova and What Planet Are You From? and The Big Kahuna and Titan A.E. and The Tao of Steve and Whipped and a whole bunch of other movies that don't exist projected on 35mm on the big screen. These days I would love to see any of these movies that way but back then we took it for granted as something to do on a Saturday.

2. This Was the Year I Fell Back in Love With Sandra Bullock

I've mentioned this on a few recent podcasts (I think) but I had turned on Sandy B. by the year 2000 thanks to a string of movies I either had no interest in seeing (In Love and War, Two if by Sea) or movies I actively disliked (Practical Magic, Speed 2: Cruise Control). Seeing the trailer for 2000's Gun Shy incessantly before every movie I saw in late '99 and early 2000 didn't help matters either. But then I saw 28 Days, her comedy drama in which she plays an alcoholic court ordered to attend rehab, and was pretty impressed by both her and the movie. Miss Congeniality later the same year sealed the deal: Sandra Bullock and I were back on good terms. I think she's gooooorgeous. I want to daaaaate her. Love her and maaaaaary her.

3. Red Planet is Better Than Mission to Mars

It stands to reason that I was very, very excited to see Mission to Mars in April of 2000. Brian De Palma was still, at that time, my favorite filmmaker and was coming off Snake Eyes, a movie I had loved. He was doing science fiction for the first time! It was the first movie I ever saw projected digitally, which didn't do it any favors in terms of liking it more. It's bad. It has some ideas and a few decent sequences (the one with Tim Robbins is the best thing in the movie), but it didn't work for me at all. I caught up with Red Planet, released the same year in a real Dante's Peak/Volcano situation, on snapcase DVD the following year and thought it was pretty forgettable, too. Rewatching both this month, I realize that Red Planet is much more successful in its modest goals than Mission to Mars in its loftier ones. It's still not great, but certainly more entertaining than I remember and way more willing to lean into B-movie pulp than M2M, which think it's Solaris. Plus Val Kilmer and Carrie-Anne Moss are hot together and Gary Sinise and Don Cheadle are not.

4. Robert De Niro Jumped the Shark

I know the common wisdom is that The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle broke Robert De Niro, casting him in a role that's beneath him as Fearless Leader in a messy, mostly unsuccessful adaptation of a beloved '60s cartoon. As a halfway defender of that movie, I don't think it's the worst thing he did in 2000. No, that would be Men of Honor, the based-on-a-true-story drama about Navy divers and how racism is bad that plays like a 30 Rock parody of this material. Somehow De Niro manages to be more cartoonish here than in the movie where he plays a literal cartoon, and the fact that he gives such a big, broad, bad performance (as a dirty dirty racist officer married to Charlize Theron, who thought she was in a Tennessee Williams play) in such a bad movie tarnishes his legacy way more than Rocky and Bullwinkle. He should have known better. The fact that he was so good in Meet the Parents this same year doesn't even totally help because it enabled his pivot to comedy in the 2000s, which led to forgettable movies like Showtime and eventually Dirty Grandpa. This year was the beginning of the end for one of the best to ever do it.

5. I Like The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas

I avoided the Flintstones prequel for 26 years because despite being a fan of The Flintstones since childhood I was not a fan of the 1994 live action film and because the trailers made the sequel/prequel look pretty awful, like a community theater production of the first movie. I know JB recently named it as one of the worst movies of that year. But I got a bee in my bonnet about seeing it this month and was pleasantly surprised by just how silly and funny I found it (that it's co-written by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, the pair responsible for the great Josie & The Pussycats, no doubt makes a huge difference). If you were to replace this movie's cast -- Mark Addy, Kristen Johnston, Stephen Baldwin, and Jane Krawkowski -- with the original movie's cast but keep everything else the same, you'd have a pretty solid Flintstones movie. Any adaptation of the cartoon that includes Alan Cumming playing The Great Gazoo knows exactly what it is. 

6. Erika Loves Action

The year 2000 was the year that Erika decided she loved action movies. The titles responsible? Gone in 60 Seconds, part of this year's F This Movie Fest and not a great movie but a great movie to skeet through, and John Singleton's remake of Shaft starring Samuel L. Jackson. The latter wound up being the first DVD she ever owned when a friend and I went in together to buy her a player and a movie for her birthday in 2001. I love that these movies, which are like 2 1/2-3 star movies at best, are what inspired her affection for action movies and not the dozens of better ones she had already seen. She's the best.

7. Many Comedies of 2000 Have Not Dated Well

As I started working my way through the movies of 2000 over the last month or so, I noticed that so many of the comedies released that year depended on outdated ideas about women and stuff like gay panic and transphobia to try to score laughs. I guess I was surprised because it's technically this century and what the fuck are we even doing, but at the same time it's been 26 years and progress has been made. Dude, Where's My Car? was probably the biggest offender of the ones I watched; I actually wanted to program it for F This Movie Fest because it's sneaky good in so many ways, but it steps wrong so often and in such big ways that there was no way I could include it. Not very shibby, guys.

8. 2000 Pretty Much Killed the 2nd Wave Teen Movie

As a kid who great up in the 1980s, the Teen Movie has always meant a lot to me -- not just the films of John Hughes, but all of his imitators and the junk inspired by the likes of Porky's too (but not Porky's 2). Seeing that genre return in 1999 with the success of She's All That, American Pie, 10 Things I Hate About You, and a few others gave me hope for what was clearly looking to be a 2nd wave. That lasted about a year, because by 2000 it had already led to stuff like Loser, Here on Earth, Down to You, Whatever It Takes, Boys and Girls, and The In Crowd and the genre pretty much ended the resurgence in its nascency. More good teen movies would still be made here and there, but you just can't survive that many bad entries and still remain viable at the box office. 

9. I Didn't Miss Much

I know I said we saw everything in 2000, but that was an exaggeration at best and a lie at worst. There were some movies that fell through the cracks, which I've been trying to rectify this last month by seeing some of what I missed. None of those will end up at the top of my ranking, even though some of them (like Finding Forrester and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas and Girlfight) were ok to pretty good. Girlfight, in particular, deserves credit for giving us the career of Michelle Rodriguez. Also I didn't get a chance to see In the Mood for Love this month, which I'm guessing would have made my Top 10 so when I say I didn't miss much I'm full of shit because I still missed that one.

10. We Really Did Have It All

While I hesitate to call 2000 a "great" year for movies, it's the kind of year we don't get anymore: one with a ton of variety, movies both big and small and, even more importantly, a lot of movies right in the middle. I miss the middle. We got not one but two movies about Mars expeditions. We got family movies both animated and live action. We had comedies. Spike Lee was experimenting with shooting on digital and Robert Zemeckis was cranking out an extra banger while on hiatus from shooting one of his best movies. Things were changing, yes; digital projection started rolling out this year and X-Men was released, helping to change the face of the modern blockbuster. But we still had a healthy ecosystem for movies. Looking back after 26 years, we didn't realize how good we had it.