1999: The Podcast

It's a big September 1999 episode, featuring the one and only Dan Colón!

In September, we head into the final quarter of the year and welcome some landmark moments in pop culture, with the arrivals of:

Plus Chris Cornell, Martin Lawrence, earthquakes, Y2K, and more!

Find Dan on Twitter @DanColon

Spike Lee's Summer of Sam should have been the perfect 1999 movie.

After Lee’s breakthrough 1989 film Do the Right Thing, he was on a roll in the 90s, giving us 1990s’ Mo Better Blues, 1991’s Jungle Fever, 1992’s Malcolm X, 1994’s Crooklyn, 1995’s Clockers, 1996’s Get on the Bus, and 1998’s He Got Game.

And so a gritty, Scorsese-esque New York crime like Summer of Sam headlined by the rising star Brody and Leguizamo at his most popular seemed like a no-brainer. And maybe because its nearly two and a half hour run time just didn’t appeal to audiences in the middle of summer, for some reason SoS (which served as a near-perfect metaphor for the anxiety of pre-Y2K America) just never caught on with critics or at the box office.

But has our equally volatile (and true crime obsessed) 2024 America made the film newly relevant? And where does it stand in Spike Lee's oeuvre?

To discuss, John welcomed back film and culture writer and frequent guest Julia Sirmons to the show.

Late August is often called the Dog Days of Summer and...boy, did the end of August 1999 every live up that reputation!

August 16-31 was something of a drag. After a summer filled with huge moments in entertainment, culture, and news, suddenly, for a couple weeks, not much happened.

But not nothing! We still got the requisite end of summer bad movie dump, featuring:

Plus chart-topping albums from Christina Aguilera, The (Dixie) Chicks, and Lou Bega! Plus, pop singer Vitamin C drops the album that would give us 2000's graduation anthem "Graduation (Friends Forever)"!

Plus, Regis Philbin for the first time asks America, "Is that your FINAL ANSWER?"

Also...East Timor begins its journey to becoming a new country!

This week, John is joined by good friend of the show Julia Sirmons for the most boring two weeks (but a fun episode of) 99@25!

For an end-of-summer special, Dan Colón, of CageClub's very own The Monsters That Made Us podcast, joins John to talk about the greed, mayhem, and madness that defined Woodstock 99.

The Woodstock that was just so great that it convinced everybody to never Woodstock again, 1999's 30th anniversary festival (inspired by the relative success of the 25th anniversary Woodstock 94) was...a lot of things. But mostly it was an epic disaster that somehow managed to take bad situations and terrible ideas and make them much worse.

What went wrong?? Well, aside from everything, John and Dan explore some of the specific problems that sent Woodstock 99 into a fiery tailspin, and discuss why this is such and important milestone in how our culture got to where it is today.

We're nearing the end of summer, and this time we take a look back at a very entertaining first half of August, 1999.

August 1-15 gave us:

This week, John is joined by friend of the show Tyler Birth (with a brief appearance from his new mouse friend!) as they take a look at a little bit of Monica, Jessica, Sandra, Rita, and everything else that mamboed our way in the beginning of August!

But, to make up for it, we have the delightful and hilarious Jacki Krestel (@zombie_jacki) to join John in a walk down 1999 memory lane!

July 1999 included:

Plus, join John and Jenn next week for a more in-depth look at what is universally agreed to be the best Woodstock in another summer special episode.

John and Jenn take a crack at explaining the baffling summer 2024 box office. Why did PLANER OF THE APES and FURIOSA fail where INSIDE OUT 2 succeeded? Is the summer movie season a thing of the past? And why do people seem less inclined to go to the movie theater for just ANYTHING?

Covid? Prices? Capitalism? All of the above?

Find out what we have to say in this special summer episode about America's increasingly, depressingly empty cinemas.

Arlington Road was 77th highest grossing movie of 1999, released 25 years ago last week on July 9th, unfortunately crowded out by some other big releases, namely American Pie, released the same day, as well as Wild Wild West, Tarzan, and The General's Daughter, all in their second weeks.

Directed by acclaimed music video director Mark Pellington (Pearl Jam's "Jeremy"), with a script from future Oscar nominee Ehren Kruger. a score by David Lynch’s personal composer Angelo Badalamenti, and starring two of the finest actors of their generation, Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins, Arlington Road has a lot going for it.

25 years later, it's also turned out to be one of the most prescient and relevant movies of the year. At times unbearably tense, deadly serious, and eye-rollingly goofy, it's ambitious, uneven, and incredibly entertaining.

Lawyer, occasional movie producer, and writer Matt Belenky is probably the world's most biggest Arlington Road fan (prove us wrong!), so John and Jenn invited him on to look back on this very 1990s genre film.

Find Matt on Twitter @JagrWatch68

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut is...very funny.

It's also absurd, obscene, and one of the best movie musicals not called Moulin Rouge of the last few decades.

The humor of the show and the movie, though, has always been too things - edgy (bordering on shocking) and timely. South Park the series has produced some of the smartest, most incisive satire anywhere in its 25 years of existence, but that kind of humor doesn't always age well?

So how does this movie hold up in that regard? We asked someone who loved it at the time - John's friend George Freitag - if he would still rave to strangers about it at Denny's like he did 23 years ago.

Blame Canada, join La Resistance, and save Terrence and Phillip as we talk about South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, a title that refers solely to the the fact that the movie is bigger and longer than an episode of the show and did not have to be edited for television!

Find George on Twitter if it still exists @georgefreitag

This week, we're covering the second two weeks of June, 1999 (16-30), perhaps the most teenage-boy two weeks of the year.

This week:

This week, John is joined by special guest Matt Romano, co-host of RETURN OF THE POD!