DARING DIRECTORS, EDGY THEMES MARK A GOOD MOVIE YEAR.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

As national institutions go, Major League Baseball and John Glenn were more impressive. But the movies sure looked a lot better than, say, the national government in 1998, and that came as something of an unexpected surprise.

Unexpected because, for the three previous years, every sector of the film culture had essentially fallen down on the job. Hollywood entertainments were uniformly juiceless, mostly miscalculated commercial calculations; independents became precious and derivative; foreign imports were wan when they got here at all.

But 1998 saw those trends reversed. Many studio films took artistic risks, often with remarkable creative or popular success (``Saving Private Ryan,'' ``The Truman Show,'' ``There's Something About Mary,'' ``The Mask of Zorro,'' ``Enemy of the State,'' ``Pleasantville,'' ``Antz,'' ``Bulworth''), though sometimes with wayward individualism (``Beloved,'' ``The Thin Red Line,'' ``Babe: Pig in the City'').

Meanwhile, both the American indie scene and the rest of the world showered us with distinctive visions. Sure, there was the usual run of talkative criminals and sad-eyed but plucky Third World orphans. But these were more than made up for by some of the best work ever from world-class filmmakers John Boorman, Neil Jordan, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami, Bigas Luna, Paul Schrader and Wong Kar-Wei.

Equally as pleasing were the introductions of talented new directors like Vincent Gallo (``Buffalo 66''), Thomas Vinterberg (``The Celebration''), Takeshi Kitano (``Fireworks'' and ``Sonatine''), Don Roos (``The Opposite of Sex''), Lisa Cholodenko (``High Art''), Peter Howitt (``Sliding Doors''), Richard Kwietniowski (``Love & Death on Long Island''), Darren Aronofksy (``Pi'') and Kirk Jones (``Waking Ned Devine'').

And let's not forget the filmmakers who made the leap from good to great this year, such as Bill Condon with ``Gods and Monsters,'' ``Elizabeth's'' Shekhar Kapur, ``Shakespeare In Love's'' John Madden, ``A Simple Plan's'' Sam Raimi, ``Happiness' '' Todd Solondz and ``Life is Beautiful's'' Roberto Benigni.

Heck, even some of those motor-mouthed gangster and foreign urchin movies were pretty good last year.

So, despite the two dumb meteor/comet movies and the ascendancy of intellectual antichrist Adam Sandler, 1998 was not a bad movie year. Not one, though, to inspire Pollyanna predictions of an art-form renaissance.

It was, after all, the year of ``Godzilla,'' a movie it was universally agreed was awful but that managed to make the top 10 box-office list anyway. It was a year when Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams, two of the most anarchic comic talents of their generation, traded their genius for bland likability in aggressively mushy feel-good product. It was a year when the commercial bottom fell out of the stupid teen-age horror movie market, but the things were so cheap to make they kept putting them out anyway.

It was the year that Jerry Springer made a movie.

``Psycho'' was remade, and Akira Kurosawa died.

It was, to sum up the negatives in a single title, the year of ``Orgazmo.''

Bad as that movie was, though, it was part of 1998's best film trend: shattering taste barriers. From ``Private Ryan's'' graphic D-Day footage to the spewing sophomorics of ``Something About Mary'' to the runaway misanthropy of ``Happiness,'' ``Your Friends and Neighbors,'' ``Very Bad Things,'' ``Apt Pupil'' and a dozen others, filmmakers made the extra effort to sustain the movies' traditional role of threat to the nation's morals.

Considering the competition from the White House, Congress and Ken Starr, it was not an easy mission.

While some of these transgressive films were embraced by critics and public alike, most of them were denounced and shunned. Which, in its odd way, was a very good thing (``Orgazmo,'' of course, excepted). It's proof positive that the unimaginative timidity that pervades the industry still hasn't wiped out the will to make dangerous, exciting movies.

While cinema's power to still shock and provoke was something to celebrate throughout the Year of Monica, we should not overlook the wonderfully tender comforts the movies brought us as well.

Think of the compassion exchanged between Joan Allen's TV mom and both her real-life son (Tobey Maguire) and gentle new lover (Jeff Daniels) as her emotional color is covered up, then gloriously exposed in ``Pleasantville.'' In a much more realistic mode, the central father-child relationship in ``A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries'' was a remarkable display of both sensitivity and good sense.

Then there were Ian McKellen and Brendan Fraser in ``Gods and Monsters,'' an ode to impossible, enriching friendship if there ever was one. And say what you will about Oprah Winfrey's ``Beloved,'' but the passion her ex-slave shared with Danny Glover's character in that movie was almost tactile in its spirit-salving mercy.

Tenderness and terrorism: These may be the qualities we'll remember best about the films of 1998. But as those two widely divergent themes suggest, the real glory of the year just past was its variety. For all the doubling we were subjected to - computer bugs, World War II combat, television satires, those Earth-threatening space rocks - there was more than enough diversity to satisfy every taste.

Whether you liked eye-popping computer design (``What Dreams May Come,'' ``Dark City'') or classic black-and-white (the faithful recut of Orson Welles' ``Touch of Evil''), respectful piety (``The Prince of Egypt'') or satisfying sleaze (``Wild Things''), political prescience (``Primary Colors'') or pure escapism (that ``Star Wars'' trailer), the films of 1998 gave it to you.

And they gave you your choice of a whole lot more. As the wider, dumber national melodrama wound down to the strictured options of impeachment or censure, it's no wonder movies enjoyed their best box-office year ever. They remembered the nearly lost art of engaging us, amusing us, moving us and occasionally even enlightening us.

And just when we needed it most.

Performer of the Year

British stage aristocrat Ian McKellen came out of movie nowhere to register two of the most mesmerizing film jobs of the year. His empathetic, complicated and complete portrait of director James Whale in ``Gods and Monsters'' has justly placed McKellen in Oscar's front-runner position. But almost as good was the aged Nazi he played with such evil glee in the generally despised ``Apt Pupil.''

So, despite the official Sir in front of his name, McKellen proved that acting proper has nothing to do with great acting. He took enormous risks that led to sublime artistry.

- Bob Strauss

bob strauss' top 10

1. Saving Private Ryan: Don't believe the simplistic critique that Steven Spielberg's greatest film is merely a technical marvel. There has never been a better movie about men sacrificing not just their lives in the most necessary of wars but, almost as precious, risking the very essence of what makes them good.

2. Gods and Monsters: Symbolism and psychology are deftly blended in this fictionalized study of James Whale's final days. As the director of ``Frankenstein'' - unapologetically gay, insufferably English, brilliant but poignantly enfeebled by the aftereffects of a stroke - Ian McKellen is nothing short of majestic. And the way director Bill Condon weaves horror movie themes into the character study is ingenious.

3. The Truman Show: Our easy, even eager acceptance of television's bogus communal values is gently but viciously indicted in Peter Weir's exquisitely crafted, cautionary allegory. And Jim Carrey could not be better cast as the man whose every waking moment is a put-on.

4. The General: An absolute kick. Brendan Gleeson's portrayal of an Irish criminal mastermind is as multilayered as you could hope for, and no less exuberant for it. Another brilliant slap in the face of civilized authority from ``Hope and Glory'' director John Boorman.

5. Taste of Cherry: As a suicidal man drives around the dusty, depressing suburbs of Tehran, Abbas Kiarostami's minimalist masterpiece asks if it's possible to have an existential crisis in a theocracy. The answer, of course, is yes, but the Iranian filmmaker frames the question with such resonant humanism, the movie becomes genuinely, if ironically, life-affirming.

6. Fallen Angels: Director Wong Kar-Wei and cinematographer Christopher Doyle put on the best light show of the year with this hallucinogenic study of Hong Kong's underworld at night. That they got a touching, often wacky story of urban alienation in between the color bursts is even more impressive.

7. Shakespeare in Love: As smart and clever as it needs to be, considering what it is: a backstage farce about the creation of ``Romeo and Juliet.'' The literary references - and modern show-biz lampoons - fly thick and fast in this impudent satire of the Elizabethan theater scene. Meanwhile, Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes create the most romantic movie couple of the year.

8. Fireworks: and Sonatine: Two weirdly moving Japanese crime movies by stone-faced Renaissance guy Takeshi ``Beat'' Kitano. The writer-director-star-editor-painter has a storytelling rhythm all his own, a unique approach to violence that truly jolts and a fine feel for the toughest customers' tenderer tendencies.

9. Life Is Beautiful: Many find it uplifting, but watching Roberto Benigni's Holocaust comedy is a much more distinctive experience than that. For most of its length, you have to be asking yourself whether the Italian funnyman's light, goofy tone is at all appropriate for the subject matter. Fortunately, he strikes the right note of gravity just in time.

10. There's Something About Mary: Because, well, there just is.

CAPTION(S):

Photo, 2 Boxes

PHOTO no caption (Ian McKellen)

BOX: (1) Performer of the year (See text)

(2) bob strauss' top 10 (See text)