Ok, maybe not the best movie mash-up on You-tube.

It's no Curious Case of Forrest Gump

or Brokeback to the Future
But heres the point, As it says, both of these films came out in 1999.

American Beauty also came out that year which is essentially the same film.

I'm only beginning to realize the impact this concentration of films had upon my impressionable 17 year old mind.

They all focus on a central character, an every-man, who has been offering his life to the machine and finds a convenient exit in order to live out his true existential calling.

These were my heros, and in many ways still are, as the movies themselves are representations of the ideas of those who would soon become my literary heroes Sartre, Thoreau, Vonnegut, Orwell, Huxley and the like, though lately I find myself reading things far less confrontational....so it goes.

Any way you want to slice it though, 1999 was a great year for movies .It was the year of Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, Titus, Payback, Dogma, and Eyes Wide Shut...though I can't say I watched that one until a few years later And, it was also the year of Office Space which is strikingly similar in theme to the big 3 above.

But if you were 17, an outsider, and had seen The Faculty, and Disturbing Behavior the year before, then you knew that the status quo were all sheep pulling their wool over your eyes anyhow. 1999 was the nail in the coffin.

Collectively we let our stubble grow, started appreciating bed-head, got familiar with eastern-thought, wore dark colors, and tried to find the back door. Our great war , tyler told us, was a spiritual war, our great depression our lives.

Those of us who didn't stay home voted for Nader.

The rest is an inconvenient history.