Miracle Mile (1988)
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:27:16 | 3,93 Gb (incl. 5%)
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: English, French, Spanish
Genre: Action, Drama, Romance, Sci-fi
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:27:16 | 3,93 Gb (incl. 5%)
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subs: English, French, Spanish
Genre: Action, Drama, Romance, Sci-fi
Miracle Mile starts conventionally enough, with bashful musician Anthony Edwards going ga-ga over waitress Mare Winningham. After a pleasant if somewhat quirky day together, Edwards and Winningham plan a tete-a-tete at the all-night restaurant where the girl works. While preparing to call her on a pay phone, Edwards intercepts a frantic call from a soldier stationed at a Midwestern missile silo. The message: nuclear warheads have been launched, and it's only 70 minutes to Armageddon! This unsettling news casts severe doubts over the future of Edwards' and Winningham's relationship….
IMDB
Miracle Mile may have been a box office flop, but the film has garnered a loyal cult following throughout the years, and with good reason. Mile is a clever and suspenseful apocalyptic drama, which just so happens to boast one of the ten greatest endings of all time.
Writer/Director DeJarnatt wrote the original draft of the screenplay in 1978 but it only began to attract attention five years later when American Film magazine listed it as “one of the 10 best unmade scripts” floating around Hollywood. The script kicked around for about a decade while DeJarnatt worked on other people’s movies trying to find a way to get his project made. The story goes that when Steve DeJarnatt sold the script to Warners, he also placed a clause in his contract that bound him to the project as a director. The studio perceived it as too risky, producing a depressing apocalyptic thriller with a no name director behind the wheel, so DeJarnatt decided to buy the script back from the studio for $25,000. Thankfully, he found someone willing to finance the pic for $4 million, and the rest is what they call history.
On paper, Miracle Mile comes across as a script pitched for a Twilight Zone episode with a nod to film noir, and rightfully so, since that was the original intent by DeJarnatt. However, as realized on the big screen, Miracle Mile is something so completely different. Although made at the end of the 80′s, Miracle Mile actually bears more resemblance to films in the 90′s, a bleak hybrid of romance and terror, populated by various discordant characters who only meet under strange coincidence.
Cinematographers Theo Van de Sande and Dennis Weaver deliver incredible steadycam shots following Harry through the citywide panic, pushing through a crowd of looters, up and over the automobiles jammed in traffic, crawling under the cars and footsteps of the hysteric civilians, and finally down a sewer, through a long twisting tunnel. The early widescreen images of empty streets in the early dawn, to the rooftop view of a city gone mad, to the unforgettable final shot inside a helicopter cockpit, will forever be etched in your memory. Jarnatt gets a lot of mileage from such a small budget, and Mile is a exciting, emotionally exhausting and outstanding piece of work. Tangerine Dream’s sublime score perfectly captures the dreamlike quality of the film, and the touching performances of its two leads will keep you hanging around for a nail-biting 90 minutes, curious to see their fate.
Opening on a love story, following up on some light action and eventually ending with a terrifying climax, Mile is best described as Grand Theft Auto under a nuclear cloud. Keep a lookout for De Jarnatt’s nod to Thomas Pynchon’s book Gravity’s Rainbow in one of the most memorable scenes. As far as suspense thrillers goes, Miracle Mile is one of the most overlooked films produced in the 80′s. Lovers run hand and hand with rumours spreading of the end of days, and for all its oddly misplaced humour and dated moments, it concludes as a heart-piercing assertion of love in the face of death.
1989: “Miracle Mile” screwed me up big time as a kid. You see, while my fellow early teenagers were out in the world either gathering critical life skills that would help to enrich their adult lives or at least trying to clandestinely slip into more obvious, smutty R-rated events at the multiplex, I was attempting to watch everything I could get my hands on. This meant routinely viewing material that was way over my head. “Miracle Mile” was such a picture.
The great thing about sneaking into art-house cinema with limited universal appeal is that the theater staff rarely takes notice. Try to “Mission: Impossible” your way into “Road House,” and there’s always going to be a snotty 18-year-old usher with a weird sense of professional obligation (rewarded with a blazing $3.35/hr wage), eager to toss out younger folks who would perhaps like an early glimpse of a female breast or two, and definitely some acts of extreme violence. Try to finagle safe passage into a low-budget screen affair with limited marketing and iffy distribution, and there’s not a theater in play that would hang around to enforce the restrictive rating. Really, what kind of nerdly kid would actively seek out challenging screen fare?
My appetite for forbidden fruit probably led me to “Miracle Mile,” along with my percolating paranoia/obscene fascination with nuclear war. The details of my attendance are too foggy these days to be exact, but one element remains as clear as day: the final 45 minutes of the film.
Playing with traditional, toe-tapping romantic comedy structure, writer/director Steve De Jarnatt creates citywide panic with only the bare minimum of screen ingredients. “Mile” is a fierce, terrifying picture that allows itself a few choice moments to play possum right before it unfurls a hypnotic wrath of terror, following Harry as he traverses the streets of L.A. in an effort to save Julie before the end of the world. However, to a soft mind like mine, the last act of the feature, where the reality of futility sets in and Angelino chaos is crowned, was a creepshow of astonishing power. *Spoiler alert* Ladies and gentlemen, Harry and Julie are ultimately reunited, but only to die together. The bombs go off. The world ends.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. The lovers were supposed to live. The bombs were going to be a hoax. “Miracle Mile” was one of my first interactions with a downbeat, sucker-punch ending, and the picture disturbed me immensely at the time. Partially because I kept waiting for De Jarnatt to flick the switch and reverse the intensity, but mostly because atrocious actor Kurt Fuller (him again!) developed a nasty case of melty eye once the missiles landed.
“Miracle Mile” knocked the wind out of me at a time when that type of sensation from the movies wasn’t exactly expected.
2009: “Miracle Mile” now stands as a slightly dated piece of ‘80’s nuclear paranoia, buffered by a successful tweaking of established romantic comedy formula. It’s the meet cute taken to its ultimate statement of devotion. The Tangerine Dream score and Ewok-sized cell phones aside, “Miracle Mile” remains as chilling as ever; it’s a uniquely accomplished nail-biter incredibly efficient with exposition and an absolute demon with scares. These days, with the Gaspar Noes and Lars von Triers of the world making hopelessness an art form, I’ve grown accustomed to exiting the theater emotionally thrashed and mentally shattered. Yet, “Miracle Mile” still packs a wallop, especially when everything goes to hell and our lovers are forced to confront their mortality. The gorgeous, unbearable feeling of doom that De Jarnatt (who, in a wicked turn of fate, went on to direct “Lizzie McGuire”) evokes is, well, miraculous.
“Miracle Mile” plays brilliantly fast and loose, relying on a frightening pitch of apocalyptic bedlam to hurl itself to the bitter end. It’s one of the finest thrillers/doomsday pictures of the 1980s, and if you’ve haven’t seen it, make a plan to. It’s truly a unique piece of suspense.
Special Features: Theatrical trailer
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