Elizabeth FRANZ
In Broadway's smash revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Tony winner Brian Dennehy brought the house down, but it was Franz who made us feel we were seeing Miller's play for the first time. We always thought Willy Loman's wife was a meek helpmate desperately watching her husband disintegrate. We were wrong: Franz found the spine of steel in Linda Loman, who in this actress' hands became the play's bravest character. A radical reinterpretation? No--Franz's glorious work proves this Linda was always there, just waiting, for half a century, to come to life. --MH
Tom TYKWER
Run Lola Run starts like a shot. The cherry-haired, Doc Martened heroine (played by too-cool-for-school Franka Potente) has to find 100,000 German marks in 20 minutes to save her drug-dealing boyfriend from a murderous thug--then replay that frenetic race through the streets of Berlin twice more, until she gets it right. Written, directed and coscored by the 34-year-old Tykwer, Lola is nothing short of an adrenaline hypo to the heart, announcing computer-game-inspired filmmaking as art and its creator as the boldest practitioner of the form. --Dan Fierman
Pamela ANDERSON LEE
You're laughing, we can hear you. but anyone who's caught Anderson Lee's gleefully subversive turn on V.I.P. (given that it's America's No. 4 syndicated show, a lot of you have) knows the recently downsized babe is turning the action series on its pretty little head. As Vallery Irons, the head of a Beverly Hills bodyguard agency, she leaves the dirty work to her pulchritudinous cohorts, preferring to loll around flipping mags (like her fave, Open Toe Monthly), model new outfits for her secretary, or vamp it up in the badlands of L.A. nightlife. A sherlock in shtup-me heels, Anderson Lee oozes a bimboid sass that makes Charlie's Angels, Baywatch, even the wink-and-nod Xena look as sober as Dragnet. --MF
Marc SHAIMAN
Who'd have guessed South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut would turn out to be the century's last great movie musical? The only people savoring the merrily profane film more than Park's teen fan base were grown-up musical-comedy buffs who could recognize exactly which conventions of Disney, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Les Miserables, et al. were being so deliciously skewered. Trey Parker and Matt Stone's riotously right-on score came from a veteran source: composer Marc Shaiman (above right, with Parker and Stone), who helped make "Uncle F---a's" farting interlude an improbable Oklahoma! homage, and Satan's soaring "Up There" the perfect yearning-Disney-heroine ballad. --Chris Willman
The WACHOWSKIS
Sure, the heavy-breathing geek boys behind The Matrix out-Star Wars-ed Star Wars, showing George Lucas what sci-fi should look like in '99 (and revolutionizing the fallow action genre in the process). But brothers Andy and Larry Wachowskis' most impressive feat was far subtler. In an era of stomach-churning Bat kitsch and Spider-Man and Superman stuck in turnaround, they got us believing in gravity-defying, building-leaping, bullet-stopping superheroes again. And they coined the whupass phrase of the year, no argument: "I know kung fu." --DF
