I hereby declare 1999 to be The Year of the Genre Flick. What the fuck--new millennium, perfect time for grand pronouncements. But tell me you don't agree. Most years, we'd be lucky to get one decent comedy, or horror flick . . . this year these pictures were tumbling all over each other on the way to the theatres.

Granted, not all great films, but not all crap either. Varying quality here, but each of these films provided a surprisingly strong dose of hilarity: American Pie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Dick, Mickey Blue Eyes, Notting Hill, and South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut. And the horror films! Okay, a lot of them sucked, but there were pleasures to be found in: The Blair Witch Project, Deep Blue Sea, eXistenZ, The House on Haunted Hill, Lake Placid, The Sixth Sense, Stigmata, and Stir of Echoes.

But enough dilly-dallying. You came for a Top Ten List, and a Top Ten List ye shall get:

THE TOP TEN MOVIES OF 1999
GUY MOVIES PERVERSION WORST ASSORTED AWARDS

10. Cookie's Fortune: Giddily funny light entertainment from Robert Altman. Julianne Moore's mousy Salome is worth the price of admission. Read my original review.

9. Blair Witch Project, The: A lot of people hated this picture, but those of us it scared, it scared the hell out of. Read my original review.

8. Limbo: The mannered performances of John Sayles' cast may put off some people, and the ending left some baffled. But my God . . . what an ending! Read my original review.

7. The Sixth Sense: Maybe you heard of this one? This surprise mega-hit was better than it had any right to be. Read my original review.

6. American Pie: Porky's for the 90's, but a class production all the way. Sexy and screamingly hilarious. Read Morgan Phillips' original review.

5. Man on the Moon: A lot of critics are complaining that this picture doesn't explain Andy Kaufman, but that's what I like about it. It may only be entertaining because Kaufman was so entertaining, but it's still incredibly entertaining. Read Hoffman's original review.

4. The World is Not Enough: You got a problem with that? One of the most enjoyable movies of the year, and the best Bond in ages. Read my original review.

3. True Crime: Hardly anyone saw this Clint Eastwood crime drama, which is a pity, because it was the most packed film of the year. Packed with drama, packed with humor, packed with suspense . . . Maximum value for your entertainment dollar. Read my original review.

2. The Limey: A little film. An unimportant film. A great film. Steven Soderbergh took a violent revenge drama and made it art. Read my original review.

1. Three Kings: For the triple threat of artistry, relevance, and entertainment value, I couldn't find anything this year to surpass Three Kings. An important, and more importantly, fun movie. Read my original review.

THE TOP TEN GUY MOVIES OF 1999
TOP TEN PERVERSION WORST ASSORTED AWARDS

So why have a Top Ten list and a Top Ten Guy Movies list, when there's bound to be lots of overlap? Well, there are different sets of criteria for both lists, and there were plenty of pictures this year that were terrific Guy Movies but didn't have their shit quite together enough to rate on the big board.

10. Three Kings: Ice Cube, Marky Mark, and George Clooney are three macho dudes out there fighting authority to do right by the Iraqis. Very cool.

9. The Matrix: Too much silly portentous dialogue for my tastes, but you got to admit, it kind of rocked. Read Alex Dorn's original review.

8. American Pie: Sex, masturbation, and the all-consuming teenage need to get laid. Any guy can relate.

7. The Corruptor: A smart police drama. Chow Yun-Fat and Mark Wahlberg go head to head as cops who may or may not be corrupt in various combinations. Some of the loudest action scenes since Ronin, too. Read my original review.

6. True Crime: Clint Eastwood, adulterer, burnout, alcoholic, fighting the clock for justice/redemption.

5. Blue Streak: This Martin Lawrence cops and robbers action/comedy wasn't accorded nearly enough respect by critics. It's four times smarter than recent films of the same genre--Rush Hour, for example. Read my original review.

4. The Limey: Terence Stamp's daughter is dead, and he's going to find out why, even if he has to kill everyone to do it. Awesome.

3. The Thirteenth Warrior: The action scenes could have been better, but who wouldn't want to spend a few months hanging around with these lusty, ass-kicking Vikings? A better film than its reputation. Read my original review.

2. Payback: Revenge movies don't get much cooler than this ultra-violent Mel Gibson vehicle. Sure, it ain't Point Blank, but it's great in its way. Read my original review.

1. The World is Not Enough: What can I say? Bond is back.

THE TOP TEN MOMENTS OF PERVERSION OF 1999
TOP TEN GUY MOVIES WORST ASSORTED AWARDS

Those conservative Christians have something on the ball when they accuse Hollywood types of being a bunch of twisted degenerates . . . this year seemed to trot out the best of the best of sadists, pedophiles, necrophiliacs, and general purpose sleazebags. God bless every one of them.

Here are my favorite moments of perversion, degeneracy, and leering from the movies of the past year:

10. Sharon Stone kissing the 108-year-old, soon-to-be-deceased-and-looking-it George C. Scott full on the mouth in Gloria.

9. Heather Graham shagging Fat Bastard so she can implant a homing device in his rectum in The Spy Who Shagged Me.

8. A cute blonde army captain tying herself naked and spread-eagle in a courtyard after phoning her daddy to come have a peek in The General's Daughter.

7. A costume shop owner pimping his 15-year-old daughter to Asian businessmen in Eyes Wide Shut.

6. Joan's sister getting stabbed to death and then raped, in The Messenger.

5. Mira Sorvino getting Sapphic at Plato's Retreat in Summer of Sam.

4. Famke Janssen getting tied up, electrocuted to death, and then fondled by a randy doctor in The House on Haunted Hill.

3. Saffron Burrows stripping out of her wet suit in Deep Blue Sea in order to electrocute a shark. Okay, this one is leering but not perverted. But trust me--if you saw Saffron Burrows the way I see Saffron Burrows, you'd realize that this is one of the sleaziest ones on the list.

2. Armin Mueller-Stahl going into a virtual reality world he's created in order to have sex with a cocktail waitress who looks like his daughter in The Thirteenth Floor.

1. The final shot of Dick: blonde teeny-boppers Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams lasciviously licking a couple of lollipops bearing the film's title.

WORST FIVE MOVIES OF 1999
TOP TEN GUY MOVIES PERVERSION ASSORTED AWARDS

I should qualify this section by saying that because I get to choose which movies I see, I probably miss many of the worst movies each year. However, you can rest assured that each of the movies below is awful enough to warrant inclusion no matter how much other crap was out there.

5. Jakob the Liar: Another one of Robin Williams' sanctimonious attempts to bring joy into our shabby lives, this film starts out bad and ends downright appalling. A primer in how not to make a Holocaust film. Read my original review.

4. Teaching Mrs. Tingle: Kevin Williamson's much-anticipated directorial debut is a lightweight film with a virtually anonymous cast of young, personality-free actors. And it's so boring! Read my original review.

3. Bats: You'd expect Bats to be bad, but actually it's sublimely bad. The writing is at a level of professional incompetence rarely seen in this era of higly polished studio script doctors. Kinda worth a look for that reason. Read Eli Roth's wonderful review.

2. 8MM: The commercials for this film actually bragged about it being the collaboration of writer Andrew Kevin Walker and director Joel Schumacher. So what did Hollywood's most amateurish writer and Hollywood's most soulless director come up with? An ugly, really crappy film. And self-important, too. What's that line about "a tale told by a couple of idiots"? Read my original review.

1. Mystery Men: Cinema might just not get any worse than Mystery Men, which is the most poorly made studio film I can remember in ages. A great pity considering the terrific cast. Fart jokes, bowling ball humor, and an absolutely clueless filmmaker wasting the studio's money . . . It bombed, and it deserved to. Unwatchable. Read my original review.

OTHER ASSORTED AWARDS
TOP TEN GUY MOVIES PERVERSION WORST

Year's Best Actor: Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. I know, everyone's saying that. Sorry.

Year's Best Actress: I'm going to have to recuse myself from this category because the only criteria I have on which to judge actresses is whether or not I want to fuck them. I'll second the conventional wisdom that Hilary Swank was really terrific in Boys Don't Cry, but I didn't want to have sex with her, so she couldn't have been all that good. If you go by the old Academy standard of which actress had a big close-up of her bawling crocodile tears, then I'd definitely have to go with Michelle Pfeiffer in the otherwise underwhelming Story of Us. And her I'd definitely fuck.

Year's Best Supporting Actor: I'm going to pass on Tom Cruise in Magnolia because that damn movie was such a stinker. Instead I'm going to go with the obscure choice of Luis Guzman for The Bone Collector and The Limey, simply because every time I see his name in the opening credits I know I'm going to have something to look forward to. And, in spirit of compromise, he was also in Magnolia. But then, who wasn't?

Year's Best Supporting Actress: Gotta be Julianne Moore, for Cookie's Fortune. And yeah, sigh, Magnolia, and probably the seven other pictures she was in this year. She's just terrific in everything. What can I say?

Year's Best Sport: John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich. Sure, you could figure it's his not insignificant ego that made him agree to take the part, but Malkovich really put his shit out there . . . You gotta respect any actor who could do that kind of self parody and also perform the . . . what was it called? "Dance of Desolation and Despair?"

Year's Darkest Film: Nope, not 8MM . . . there was actually a picture darker. That would be In Dreams, a film that starts out on a chipper note when Annette Bening finds out her husband is cheating on her. Then her 6-year-old daughter is murdered by a psychopath. Then she goes insane and is institutionalized. Then her husband is murdered and a dog eats his face. After all this, when she finally drives off a bridge and drowns, it's presented as upbeat! A real bummer of a picture.

Year's Worst New Special Effect: Fake digital breath. You know, for when there are ghosts in the room. This egregious bit of cinematic laziness popped up The Haunting and Stir of Echoes and I think one other picture I can't remember now. Do they think we can't tell the difference? A true sign of class: The Sixth Sense used the real thing.

Year's Worst Third Act: Since it's going to be getting all this Oscar attention, I'd better give some lip service to American Beauty, just so you know I've seen it. This film starts off Oscar-calibre, but ends in the ugly world of sitcoms and B-movies. Almost to the finish line, but then face first into the mud.

Okay, that's it, that's all I have for this year . . . a terrific year. Here's hoping 2000 is even better, and here's hoping some significant percentage of us actually live to see it!

Till then.