Bottom Line

All's fair in love, war, and paranoia in 1999

by Peter Keough

If we learned anything at the movies in 1998, it's that our values are worth dying for (in Saving Private Ryan), worth being sullied (in There's Something About Mary), and worth being subverted (in The Truman Show). Something similar will happen in 1999, too, as we start by hitting the beaches again -- putting our patriotism, courage, and macho virtues on The Thin Red Line -- and end up in March with the camera turned again on ourselves, showing our doubts, dreads, and insecurities on Ed TV.

JANUARY

Legendary auteur Terrence Malick, director of the brilliant Badlands and the beautiful Days of Heaven, returns to the screen after an absence of 20 years with The Thin Red Line, an adaptation of James Jones's scathing bestseller about the Battle of Guadalcanal. It should offer as much bloodletting as Spielberg's take on D-Day (if less flag-waving), and features a cast worthy of The Longest Day, including John Travolta, Sean Penn, George Clooney, Woody Harrelson, and Nick Nolte.

Nolte also gets to explore the male ego under fire in Affliction, Paul Schrader's interpretation of Russell Banks's novel about a small-town cop and big-time loser beset by bad luck, a bitter woman, and a legacy of violence. James Coburn, Sissy Spacek, and Willem Dafoe share his pain. Equally benighted but more of a winner is Brendan Gleeson in The General, where he portrays the rise and fall of a real-life robber baron in contemporary Ireland. John Travolta, meanwhile, portrays a more dapper macho case in Steven Zaillian's adaptation of Jonathan Harr's nonfiction bestseller A Civil Action. Travolta's a high-powered attorney seeking damages in the infamous Woburn toxic-waste case who finds himself drawn in deeper than he planned.

Bringing a female, if not necessarily feminine, touch to the month is Sharon Stone in Sidney Lumet's remake of John Cassavetes's Gloria; she's a tough moll whose ruthless maternal instinct kicks in when the mob threatens a little boy. Jamie Lee Curtis is back battling aliens again in Virus, this time on board a Russian research vessel in the middle of the ocean with shipmates William Baldwin and Donald Sutherland. And Annette Bening gets tough in Neil Jordan's In Dreams, where she's bedeviled by nightmares that prove to be the real deeds of a serial killer; Robert Downey Jr., Aidan Quinn, and Stephen Rea are part of the dream cast.

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FEBRUARY

More confused guys return this month in Wes Anderson's offbeat comedy Rushmore, as Jason Schwartzman plays an eager-beaver prep-school student getting no help in the ways of women and the world from woeful tycoon Bill Murray. Meanwhile, Nicolas Cage gets lost in a morass of pornography and murder as he tracks down the origin of a snuff film in Joel Schumacher's 8 mm. Lucky for Kevin Costner it's jogging divorcée Robin Wright Penn who finds the Message in a Bottle and tries to track the sender down; after having no luck with the mail in The Postman, Costner is hoping for better from this romantic comedy by Luis Mandoki. On the other hand, Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill) will try to extend his good luck with animation to live action with Office Space, a comedy about struggling corporate drones starring Ron Livingston and Jennifer Aniston.

MARCH

Very bad things take a feminine twist in Roger Kumble's Cruel Intentions, a modern-day Dangerous Liaisons with upper-crust Manhattan teen Sarah Michelle, in cahoots with hunk Ryan Philippe, playing sexual pranks on clueless Reese Witherspoon. For the most part, though, the women this month suffer more than they are suffered. Take Juliette Lewis in Garry Marshall's The Other Sister; she's a mentally handicapped young woman seeking her own life away from clinging mom Diane Keaton. Or Michelle Pfeiffer in Ulu Grosbard's The Deep End of the Ocean: a mom who loses her three-year-old in a hotel lobby, only to have him seemingly resurface nine years later. Sounding vaguely like Agnieszka Holland's Olivier, Olivier, it co-stars Treat Williams as the unhelpful hubby.

Boys still will be boys, however, in Mike Newell's Pushing Tin, starring Billy Bob Thornton and John Cusack as rival air-traffic controllers whose one-upsmanship sometimes comes close to one-downsmanship for their clients; Cate Blanchett and Angelina Jolie are their better halves. Macho bullheadedness gives way to apparently paranoid delusions in Mark Pellington's Arlington Rd., in which university prof Jeff Bridges begins to suspect the model family next door of being a mom-and-pop terrorist outfit. Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack co-star in what looks like a combination of The Parallax View and The Addams Family.

Finally, the narcissism, voyeurism, and paranoia of The Truman Show come full circle in Ron Howard's Ed TV, as video-store clerk Matthew McConaughey agrees to have his life broadcast as a 24-hour television program. A remake of the 1994 French-Canadian feature Louis 19: Le Roi des Ondes, it also stars Jenna Elfman, Ellen DeGeneres, Elizabeth Hurley, and Woody Harrelson. No sign of Quentin Tarantino participating, but one wonders if the whole concept of 15 minutes of fame has had its 15 minutes run out.