1999: The Podcast John Brooks & Jenn Tisdale

We continue our celebration of the 25th anniversary of 1999 with our eighth installment, April 21-30 1999!
In the last ten days of April we got:

The premiere of WWF Smackdown on UPN!

Jay Leno goes HD!

The Dawson's Creek soundtrack!

Aerosmith!

Election! eXistenZ! Idle Hands!

And some other fun diversions, including the horror that was pan and scan movies!
CageClub icon Mike Manzi joins John for a short look at the end of one of 1999's worst months, and the Star Wars content yet to come!

Blast from the Past was 75th highest-grossing movie of 1999, opening at #4 at the box office on Valentine’s Day weekend and going on to take in $40 million worldwide on a $35 million budget.
The first of two 1999 collaborations between director Hugh Wilson and star Brendan Fraser, Blast from the Past included a stellar supporting cast, including Alicia Silverstone, Christopher Walken, Sissy Spacek, Dave Foley, Nathan Fillion, Joey Slotnick, and the legendary Jennifer Lewis.
Critics were pretty even split on it - partly because it was inevitably compared to 1998's Pleasantville - and none were especially effusive in their praise, but it went on to find a charmed audience on home video and has emerged as the quintessential "hidden gem" in the years since.
One if its fans is actor Samm Levine, who graced the small screen in 1999 in the beloved (and prematurely canceled) television series Freaks and Geeks. He joined John and Jenn to talk Walken, swing dance, and his most famous creation, the beloved character Zoot Suit Ryan.

We're taking a slightly different approach to this one, covering 20 days of April 1999 instead of 15, and, frankly, we're focusing mostly on the 20th, because that's when the Columbine massacre occurred.
Columbine was not the first school shooting, but it was - at the time - the most unthinkable one in terms of scope and scale. 25 years later, it has become significantly less unthinkable, as so many instances of gun-based mass murders in schools have occurred in the meantime that it's difficult to name them all.
But Columbine is also a hotbed of misconceptions and misinformation, and since Jenn works in true crime and John works in a high school they couldn't not talk about it.
But they do sandwich their thoughts on this horrific tragedy with SOME fun, including John's rant on Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and a brief chat about Tal Bachman's "She's So High".
Here is the essay John references in the episode:
Retrospective: 20 Years Later, "Bowling for Columbine" is a Disgrace to Documentary Filmmaking
 

Pushing Tin was the 135th-highest grossing film of the year, grossing 8.4 million dollars on a 33 million dollar budget, opening April the 23rd, 1999 as the #4 movie at the Box Office behind The Matrix, Life, and Never Been Kissed.
Directed by Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco director Mike Newell and written by Cheers co-creators Les and Glen Charles, Pushing Tin felt like a sure thing, especially given its very of-the-moment core cast of John Cusack, Cate Blanchett, Billy Bob Thornton, and Angelina Jolie.
But it never left the runway (get it) with audiences or critics.
What went wrong? And is Pushing Tin a forgotten gem, or was everyone right about it 25 years ago?
This week, John and Jenn are joined by comedian Joe Kwaczala to talk about this weird, uneven, confused, and very pre-9/11 romcom-dramedy thing!
You can find Joe on most of the socials @joekjoek

We continue our celebration of the 25th anniversary of 1999 with our sixth installment, March 16-31 1999!
In the second half of March, we got:

The Oscars! Roberto Benigni jumping on chairs! Harvey Weinstein buying the Best Picture Oscar for Shakespeare in Love!

The premiere of Futurama!


Jack Kevorkian!

Ricky Martin unleashes La Vida Loca upon an unsuspecting world!

Fabio gets hit by a goose!

The Melissa Virus

10 Thing I Hate About You! The Matrix!

and more!
John and Jenn also accidentally create a true crime podcast and wonder if they've pinpointed the moment Gwyneth Paltrow came up with GOOP.

Mickey Blue Eyes was just the 61st-highest grossing movie of 1999. The only major US release of the weekend of August 20, 1999, Mickey Blue Eyes opened in third place while The Sixth Sense continued to dominate the box office. It would go on to make $54 million on a $75 million budget.
Directed by Kids in the Hall alum Kelly Makin and written by Robert Kuhn and Adam Scheinmann, it was ostensibly a romcom vehicle for Hugh Grant and Jeanne Tripplehorn but works better as a romcom between Hugh Grant and James Caan.
Critics were iffy, with most still praising Grant for carrying the movie with a pitch-perfect performance playing to all his strengths as both a comic and dramatic actor and acknowledging the fun of the premise as well as the strength of the jokes but faulting it for failing to carry those things through. Many also pointed to the fact that, upon release, Mickey Blue Eyes was already the inferior Hugh Grant movie after Notting Hill, and the inferior mob comedy after Analyze This.
Joining John and Jenn to talk about it this week is writer Meghan Leigh Paulk. You can find out more about Meghan on her website.