Best-of lists may be loved or hated or everywhere, but one more might be bearable if suitably condensed for carrying away. An enumeration totaling only three. The three most memorable movies from the end of the last age of innocence, otherwise known as the Clinton years.
Mike Leigh’s story of Gilbert and Sullivan, “Topsy-Turvy,” with its heartbreaking final scene, Shirley Henderson alone onstage in “The Mikado,” singing the film’s closing lines, “We are very wide awake, the moon and I.”
Also released in 1999, Woody Allen’s “Sweet and Lowdown,” in which Samantha Morton as Hattie, who cannot speak, informs Sean Penn as Emmet Ray, a 1930s jazz guitarist, by handwritten note that she has married since they were last together.
“Happily?” he asks, his face falling. He’s later seen smashing his guitar, screaming, “I made a mistake!”
And then why not “Gods and Monsters,” Bill Condon’s drama about the 1930s horror director James Whale (Ian McKellen), which ends with the object of his desire, played by Brendan Fraser, plodding off down one of those classic Los Angeles back alleys in the stiff-legged gait of Frankenstein’s monster, arms stiffly extended.
That one got a shot of currency, in a way, courtesy of the Sag Harbor Cinema on Halloween with its screening of Whale’s 1931 “Frankenstein” in, as they used to say, “glorious black and white.” Which was particularly true when it comes to the contrasting planes of dark and light across Boris Karloff’s sculpturally made-up face.
The German Expressionism would do “Nosferatu” proud, although we of a 21st-century sensibility could be forgiven for wondering if the filmmakers were content to simply hint at reality with the opening graveyard set, so constructed you expect to see a grip’s toolbelt stage left, or later among the outlandishly fake rocks as the monster is chased by baying hounds and angry villagers beneath lowering skies suggested by hanging fabric that could’ve used an ironing.
The genius twist of the screening, though, was the theater’s booking of Gary Lucas for live guitar accompaniment, with atmospheric reverb from an amp down in front and his regular glances up at the screen to follow along with the action.
He’s been doing this for horror movies since the beginning of the 1990s, about the same time he formed a band that turned some heads with the late, great Jeff Buckley briefly as singer — yes, Gods and Monsters.