Audio By Carbonatix
In Albert Brooks’s summer comedy The Muse, a ravishing daughter of Zeus — in the person of Sharon Stone — gives a burned-out Hollywood screenwriter a fresh jolt of inspiration. For a price. Brooks’s desperate scribbler must first lavish Tiffany trinkets on his newfound benefactor, put her up at the Four Seasons, provide car and driver, even take her into his humble home, where she becomes pals with his wife. In the end, the writer wins the epic battle with his word processor. And his well-paid spirit guide remains atop the Beverly Hills A-list.
Could it be that Muse Sharon was working overtime in 1999? If this wasn’t the most dynamic year in recent American movie history, it came close — the year in which director Spike Jonze pulled us down a slimy tunnel leading straight to the cerebral cortex of actor John Malkovich and action stylist Michael Mann took on 60 Minutes and Big Tobacco with The Insider. It was the year in which five penniless movie buffs from Orlando, armed only with a videocam and instinct for selling mythology on the Internet, scared the bejesus out of us (and a slew of studio fat cats) with The Blair Witch Project. Washington Irving’s headless horseman rode again, and american beauty> Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening lost their heads and their bearings in suburbia. We hooked into the weird brain waves of comedian Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon and spent twenty years in the joint with Rubin Carter in Hurricane. We discovered the joys of Cuban music at The Buena Vista Social Club, watched a boy commune with ghosts in The Sixth Sense and a girl posing as a boy commune with her true self in the heartbreaking boys don cry>. And for better or worse, we revisited George Lucas’s intergalactic dreamworld in star wars: episode i the phantom menace.>
