Some say the Golden Age of Entertainment is whenever you were a teenager. I’m not really sure if that’s true; after all, the 70s are still staggeringly awesome (Taxi Driver, Network and All The President’s Men all in the same year) and the 80s are just a cinematic wasteland (Blue Velvet, Raging Bull… yeah, that’s pretty much it). But if it is true, I’m a lucky man, for I grew up in the independent film renaissance of the 1990′s. More specifically, I got my driver’s license in 1999, which means pretty much every day after school I drove to town to see a movie during one of the greatest movie years in film history. It was a year that revolutionized nearly every genre, from comedy (Rushmore and Office Space) to drama (Magnolia and The Insider) to action (The Matrix and Fight Club). And as these modern classics reach their 10th anniversaries, it’s worth looking back at what’s aged well, what’s aged badly, and what’s been savagely ripped off.

Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze, written by Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman is now almost unanimously praised as the greatest screenwriter of his generation, but in the mid-to-late 90′s he was just a staff writer for quickly-cancelled shows like The Trouble With Larry and The Dana Carvey Show. He’d developed a reputation as a writer of brilliant but unproduceable screenplays, including a film based on Gong Show host Chuck Barris’ “fictional autobiography” Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind and a failed adaptation of Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief that turned into a meditation on writer’s block titled Adaptation.

But his most notorious work was a bizarre story about a puppeteer finding an interdimensional gateway into the head of character actor John Malkovich. Music video auteur Spike Jonze was keen to make the move to feature films, having invested recent videos like Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” and Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” with narratives, and thought Being John Malkovich would be a perfect directorial debut. Buzz for the film grew exponentially when Malkovich himself agreed to star, and by the time it was released in October of 1999 it was one of the most anticipated films of the year.

Everyone expected something worth seeing, but few expected a classic. That’s exactly what Jonze and Kaufman delivered, though: a film so full of ideas that it feels like it’s bursting at the seams even a decade later. The idea of a portal into John Malkovich’s consciousness isn’t even the weirdest part of the movie; that honor would probably go to an industrialist sea captain falling in love with a midget and constructing a half-floor of a building where she’d never feel small.

And though Kaufman got most of the initial praise for the project’s uncompromising originality, Jonze’s contributions seem more important than ever. Other directors haven’t gotten nearly as much mileage out of his material, either attempting a distracting visual style that adopts the overarching strangeness of the scripts (Michel Gondry) or failing to provide an editor for Kaufman’s wild imagination (Kaufman himself, with the self-indulgent Synecdoche, New York). Jonze, on the other hand, is a classical surrealist, filming the unbelievable with a straight face. It’s because of this that Being John Malkovich has a lasting emotional resonance, delivering lots of laughs but ending up an unexpectedly tragic story of loss and longing.

Does it hold up? Absolutely. Kaufman and Jonze are still constantly talked about in film circles, and Being John Malkovich is unquestionably their most-discussed work (though the divisive Synecdoche, New York may change that in coming years).

What has it influenced? Not nearly as much as other comedy benchmarks of the year like Office Space or Rushmore, though there is the occasional meta comedy that looks at fame in first person like last year’s oddity JCVD.

Was it better in 1999 or 2009? Probably 1999, just because it was so strange and unexpected at the time. Repeat viewings are very rewarding though, and the HD DVD of the film makes the peculiar universe created by Jonze and cinematographer Lance Acord look even slicker.