Election year

Is this one Hollywood's worst ever?

Shame, shame, shame!

We're more than midway through 1999, and all the bankers and agents and producers and marketers and accountants and studio heads and story analysts and script doctors and directors and writers, and all those zealous VIP meetings and anxious story conferences and cell-phone super-emergencies, and all those trillions of dollars spent and more zillions pocketed, have managed, in total, . . . one genuinely fine Hollywood release (or American indie release) in all those dealing-wheeling months.

Election. That's it, baby.

Watching Reese Witherspoon fight, fight, fight, for the student-council presidency in Election, seeing Matthew Broderick bumble so comically in the classroom and in the bedroom, one can feel jubilation over being at the movies. The comic spirit of the great Preston Sturges (Miracle at Morgan's Creek, Sullivan's Travels) has been rejuvenated with director/screenwriter Alexander Payne's hilariously screwy script and unapologetically slapstick sight gags.

Otherwise? Two pretty good dramas (Limbo, Cookie's Fortune), two fairly decent teen films (Go, Cruel Intentions), two erratic but funny gross-out comedies (Austin Powers, South Park), one underrated drama (October Sky), one underrated comedy (A Fish in the Bathtub).

One very good movie and seven bearable ones in six months. Conclusion: unless things shape up in July-December, we are on our merry miserable way toward the worst annum for American cinema in all celluloid history.

Did movies used to be better? You betcha.

At the risk of being a pedantic old poop, let me take you back, pilgrim . . .

It's 1939, 60 years ago. (Peter Bogdanovich wrote a famous essay crowning 1939 the choicest year ever for American movies.) Gone with the Wind. The Wizard of Oz. The Women. Ninotchka. Young Mr. Lincoln. Stagecoach. Only Angels Have Wings. Wuthering Heights. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Gunga Din. The Roaring Twenties. That's a lasting classic every month!

Let's try 1959, 40 years ago. North by Northwest. Some Like It Hot. Rio Bravo. Imitation of Life. Anatomy of a Murder. Porgy and Bess. Suddenly Last Summer. The Nun's Story. Some Came Running. Ben-Hur. Ten enduring films!

Even 1919, 80 years back, gave us two still-revived D.W. Griffith masterworks, True-Heart Susie and Broken Blossoms (BB revived this very week, at the Harvard Film Archive on Sunday), and some decent but unremarkable films from Chaplin, John Ford, Erich von Stroheim, Cecil B. DeMille. The 1999 American cinema is on a thrilling path to be the new 1919!

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Here's a benefit you don't want to miss: a $25 evening at the Coolidge Corner this Tuesday, July 20, at 7 p.m., to aid the 36 artists of the Kendall Center in Belmont who lost their work and possessions in the devastating April 9 fire. You get cocktails, hors d'oeuvre, networking, slide shows, a talk by the Globe's Cate McQuaid. You get a rare screening of the 1958 British comedy classic The Horse's Mouth, which was adapted from Joyce Cary's magnificent portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-shaggy-dog novel. The film is about the misadventures of a down-and-out painter (Blake-quoting in the book) whose life's achievement is a massive allegorical wall mural of Lazarus's toe. You can't improve on Alec Guinness as Gulley Jimson, the movie's lager-dependent hero, who's said to be based loosely on Dylan Thomas.

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All those sweaty, Type-A film students are apparently misdirected in believing that Hollywood craves new blood behind the camera. The big need out on the coast, the studios say, is on screen, for sinewy, youthful action heroes. The all-important 18-34 male demographic is beginning to step away from Stallone's Rocky and Sly's over-40 friends, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal.

"These guys are aging," an anonymous exec complained to the Hollywood Reporter. "Who are those guys who you would strip naked to the waist? Hanks you wouldn't. Cruise you would. Harrison Ford, barely. Jim Carrey you would think twice. Travolta, no. Who is the guy taking over for Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger?"

Wanted! A new superboy for the George W. Bush era!

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I've been gently nudging my friends at the Boston Jewish Film Festival to make part of their yearly program a meeting (and a retrospective) with an old-timer from the movie business. Unfortunately, my number-one choice, actress Sylvia Sidney, died last week at 88, and I'll never hear how the one-time Sophia Kosow of New York City became one of the few Jewish leading ladies in 1930s Hollywood. (Others: Joan Blondell, Paulette Goddard.) Her specialty was dewy-eyed nice girls involved as enablers with hot-headed fall guys (Fritz Lang's Fury and You Only Live Once), also angelic girls of the slums (William Wyler's Dead End). An aging Sidney in a wheelchair was one of the handful allowed to survive the Apocalypse in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!

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You want fluff? People recently reported that Jamie Lee Curtis is backing the civil disobedience of her 12-year-old daughter, Annie, who said no to slicing up the perennial frog of her biology class. Curtis put a bumper sticker on her Mercedes: "Proud Parent of a Student Who Won't Dissect."