Miracle Mile [DVD]

MIRACLE MILE is above all a love story; boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boys runs frantically around L.A. trying to get heavily sedated girl on an airplane bound for the antarctic. But perhaps I should start at the beginning as Harry Washello does when he tells his story of how he came to meet his perfect girl after 30 lonely years on planet earth, and I'm not kidding--he really goes back to the beginning. To the very dawn of creation in fact, 15 billion years ago when a tremendous burst of pure energy spread swirling clouds of star stuff that eventually formed the galaxies. I'll skip the next few billion years of planet formation, evolution etc to get down to the real business at hand--the day Harry met Julie Peters at the La Brea tar pits' museum. It was love at first sight, and it was in some ways both the best thing and the worst thing that every happened to them both.They spent the rest of the day together doing the type of things that only people falling in love in movies do; riding a carousel, liberating lobsters from a restaurant tank, and so forth. Later that night, when Julia got off her job at Johnnie's Diner, they planned to go dancing.Harry goes back to his hotel to get some sleep before their big date, and before lying down he casually tosses a cigarette off his balcony. This one insignificant act will change the course of the rest of his life and hundreds of thousands of others. A bird carries off the still smouldering cigarette to use in its nest which then catches fire and knocks out the electricity in Harry's building. By the time the power is restored and his clock finally goes off, he is 3 hours late for his date with Julie. On the off-hand chance that she might still be there, he races off to the diner. His car bumps into a palm tree in the parking lot eeriely dislodging four or five rats onto the hood of his car. Out front of the diner the neighborhood psychotic is raving about whatever those guys rave about. The phone in the phonebooth is ringing. Julie is nowhere to be seen. She long ago went home to the condo she shares with her grandmother and took a nice heavy dose of valium.In another one of those life altering twists of fate Harry winds up answering the ringing pay phone, and what he hears on the other end of the line sends him staggering into the coffee shop. The man on the other end of the line, Chip, was nearly hysterical. He thought he was calling his father, but it was obviously a wrong number--he had dialed the wrong area code. He had said that we had fired our missiles in a pre-emptive strike and that we would be getting it back in an hour and ten. He was talking about nuclear war! "Tell Dad I'm sorry about that summer!" And then there was a commotion, gun fire, and another voice came on the line and said, "Forget everything you just heard and go back to sleep." Only one person in the coffee shop takes what Harry has to say the least bit seriously, a regular patron named Landa, a woman who obviously has a bit of money and whose opinion everyone seems to respect. She asks Harry to repeat exactly what he heard, and its more than enough to convince her. She makes a few telephone calls of her own and then then announces that "4 out of 5 of her friends are in transit to the extreme southern hemisphere" which she finds more than a mere coincidence. Before you can say "make a plan" Landa is making one. And anyone who can keep up with her is welcome to go along. The plan? Meet at The Mutual Benefit Life Building and take a helicopter to the airport and then a plane to the antarctic where there will be plenty of snow for water, rainfall is negligible, and fallout will be at a minimum.With Landa's acceptance of the phone call as fact, chaos and panic breaks out in the diner.Not everyone is buying all of this however. The local drag queen points out Los Angeles is crammed full of actors with insomnia and nothing better to do than pull elaborate pranks. Just exactly who is Landa, we and some of the characters wonder? Could she just be another part of a highly involved prank? Are we supposed to take her word as gospel because she dated a guy who worked for the Rand Corporation? It doesn't matter, everyone else believes her. She even has two people making a list of "great minds" who should be contacted in order to make the trip with them. Their highly dated list includes "Tom and Jane. Danny Berrigan and his brother, Bobby Seale, Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, and Oprah. Say, has anybody got their phone numbers?" They've all crammed into the diner's catering van, promising Harry that they'll pick up Julie on the way--which, of course, is a lie. So Harry bails out as they slow down on the freeway ramp and heads back in the general direction of Julie's condo--he can't leave his one in a million girl to die in a nuclear holocaust.MIRACLE MILE is very simply the most frightening, touching, funny, thought provoking, romantic,(did I say frightening?) movie you are ever going to see. Writer/director Steve DeJarnatt has crafted a nearly perfect film that keeps you wondering up until the very end whether Harry is truly the harbinger of doom or the first victim of a horrible prank, a real life Chicken Little whose unwitting participation in a very sick joke will cause the death of countless numbers of innocent people. He's aided by a cast that can't help but elict the audience's immediate sympathies. Anthony Edwards plays the likeable, good natured Harry Washello who is very much the everyman, unable to control the events around him but determined to at least be with the woman he loves now that he has finally found her. Mare Winningham has that sort of oddball vibe that is needed for the role of a woman who can fall in love at first sight, and she is charmingly kookie as Julie. The only other characters of any real consequence are Julie's embittered grandparents (played by John Agar and Lou Hancock) who haven't spoken for 15 years but are as much in love as ever, and Mykel T. Williamson as a petty crook who named Wilson who gets caught up in Harry's nightmare via a chance meeting on a freeway ramp. Even the film's musical score by Tangerine Dream, which is something I ordinarily would never even notice much less mention, is exceptionally effective. It deserves special recognition for creating the tense and eerie mood that enables the film to succeed in hitting us where we live.SPOLIER SECTIONThe ending of this film is beautifully constructed, it takes us right back to the beginning in every sense. Not only are we back in the La Brea tar pits, not only are we seeing the end of our own species as we saw the end of the dinosaurs and the mammoths portrayed earlier, we are also back to the beginning of Harry and Julie's relationship--back to the place where they first met, and maybe we are also back to the dawn of creation in a sense as well.Trying to calm Julie who is hysterical as the helicopter sinks into the tar pit Harry says hopefully, "Maybe we'll take a direct hit! It'll metamorphosize us. Superman, he can take a lump of coal, he can squeeze it and make a diamond."Julie: "Us, diamonds?"Then there's a tremendous burst of pure energy.

Just watched MIRACLE MILE for the first time in about 34 years. My memory of my Seattle Film Festival screening seemed hazy. It turned out to be anything but. I remembered everything, something rare for me after so much time has elapsed. The reason it took up permanent residence in my memory was timing.It's about a guy who falls in love at first sight with a young woman and they plan to meet later than night to go dancing. Then chance messes things up by causing him to oversleep and miss the date. THEN he picks up a ringing phone in a phonebooth to hear a frantic young man in North Dakota think he's telling his dad the nukes are on the way. This is Los Angeles in the wee hours. Lots of stuff happens as the news spreads about the city by osmosis. More than anything, though, people realize, if the world is ending, they want to see it end along with someone they love. Estranged, elderly husband and wife. That son desperately calling his father. A homeless man raising his hand when asked if he's a deep down real Christian. A brother and sister. A couple in a late night gym -- hard to say which one is more ripped. And, of course, our recently met cute stars. There are clocks everywhere in this movie, constant reminders that you never know how much time you have left. Don't get caught sleeping. Never take a loved one for granted.Oh yeah. That timing thing I mentioned. Shortly after seeing the movie, I met the love of my life and married her nine months later. Over the 33+ years that have ensued, I know I've taken her for granted. And the relentless ticking of the clock, made obvious every time I look in a mirror or get the latest bit of unwanted news during a wellness exam, certainly submerges this story of young lovers who live a life together in a few hours deeper into my subconscious.While writing my memoirs, I often thought about chance. So many times did the dice tumble just right for my wife and I to meet. If any roll had landed differently, who knows where I'd be? But I didn't think much about the finite nature of time. I think I felt we'd always be together -- and in a way, I suppose, we always will be. If I'd rewatched MIRACLE MILE while I was writing, my dang book, THIS DATING THING: A MOVIE BUFF'S MEMOIR would've become even longer with one more influential movie sharing the pages along with E.T., OFFICE SPACE, THE JERK, THE WIZARD OF OZ, FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH, and MY LIFE AS A DOG.One other note and I'm not sure what it means: my wife has long wanted to visit the La Brea Tar Pits, but I've always resisted during our Southern California vacations. I know this sounds like a random way to end this review, but give this enjoyable hidden gem of a movie a watch sometime and you'll know why I did so.

Neon drenched streets. Check.Gym wear. Check.Tangerine Dream on the soundtrack. Check.It must be another '80s film, and it is but one thats getting its first release since the days of VHS.Miracle Mile is one of my favorite films, I long ago wore out my old copy taped from terrestrial TV, so its great to finally have a region 2/B friendly copy. Its basically a love story set during an imminent nuclear holocaust, a bleak but wonderfully engrossing film that defies easy pigeon-holing.Arrows Blu/DVD combo has a nice booklet with liner notes from the mighty Tim Lucas and the usual reversible sleeve art and for once I prefer Arrows new artwork on the cover.Extras are good with features, interviews with the cast and director, although the alternative ending is a letdown.Grain is present and correct and the picture is beautiful with vibrant colors, blacks good etc. However there is very slight print damage, back and white specks, evident more or less the entire run-time. You can go 20-30 seconds without seeing damage but some will find it unacceptable. Arrow must have looked at the figures and known full restoration costs would not be recouped in the UK.Its a price to pay I suppose just to have this long overlooked film in my collection.

Miracle Mile is one of those unforgettable films that you watch and it stays with you for not just days, but years later. I remember being blown away (*ahem*) by it when I first saw it at the cinema on my university campus in 1990, I have watched it many times since and it still grips from the outset to the heart wrenching conclusion.Other posters have set out the plot, which gets more tense (and hysterical) as it goes, so I won't repeat it. There are so many things I love about the film: the wonderful, neon saturated LA architecture and nightscapes (similar to To Live and Die in LA); the amazing, pitch perfect Tangerine Dream score (it's just as great as their wonderful score for Risky Business); the kooky characters like the transvestite in the cafe, Wilson with his trunk of stolen radios, the ripped bodybuilder etc (it's very similar to another outstanding film that explores city life at night, Martin Scorsese's After Hours, which bizarrely has never been released on Blu Ray); but the best thing is how believable and realistic Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham are as Harry and Julie: they look like everyday people not plastic Hollywood babes and their relationship is so tender and touching. If I have a criticism, it's the way Harry and Julie - and may other characters - willingly get separated at times to fit the story, when in practice I am sure they wouldn't choose to be apart. I also wished it finished with them kissing, but that's getting picky.Miracle Mile is also surprisingly funny with some clever gags along with some very dark humour, and the film does become darker and bleaker as it evolves. The sequence when the TV reporters are shot during a live broadcast and Harry is shot at by fleeing Los Angelenos perfectly captures the terror and horror accompanying a breakdown in civil society. The Gerstead character (yuppie at the top of the skyscraper) is particularly unpleasant and his offensive language does somewhat jar, but he is a counterpoint to the decency of Harry and Julie.When Miracle Mile was released it was a flop, which is hardly a surprise given the lack of A list cast, bizarre story and very dark themes, but it's the perfect cult film.The Arrow Blu Ray release isn't the sharpest image, it's not as saturated as some releases and it's grainy in the early nighttime scenes, but it's still a decent and must-have release and the extras are excellent. The booklet makes for interesting reading too.

Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham have just met and fallen in love... right before the end of the world. Edwards plays a musician who meets and falls for Winningham.They set up a date for that night, but when a power cut zonks his alarm he arrives very late to the diner. He answers a nearby ringing telephone and speaks to a man in a missile silo who's trying to call his father. Turns out the birds are flying and the city is about to be destroyed. Fortunately one of the people in the diner knows someone who works for the government and can verify that this is true. Then begins a race for Edwards to find Winningham and try and escape the city in a hastily arranged helicopter flight out, as the city begins to fall apart.Budget limitations aside, the movie does exactly what it sets out to do and does it well. There is a feeling of tension from the moment the phone is answered to the end credits and you really feel invested in what happens to the characters. Not a big hit when it came out, but it's since gathered itself a deserved cult following for being one of those "Do you remember a movie where..." type of films that sticks in the brain not just because it's a good movie, but also because it's so unique.The DVD / Blu Ray release by Kino Lorber comes with commentary tracks (Director - no cast), new interviews with the leads, a 'diner reunion' with the supporting cast, outtakes, deleted scenes and bloopers, and an alternate ending.

Miracle Mile. R1 DVD R-rated. 1988.The picture quality's excellent, widescreen 1.85:1& fills all the screen on a modern T.V. L.A nuclear lovestory, a race against time & bodybuilders. How far wouldyou go to save the person you love?, it's an amazing film,beautiful to look at while fantastic Tangerine Dream musicplays in the background. A true classic...the countdownbegins now- 3 Mississippi...2 Mississippi...1 Mississippi...falloutRun time:1hr 28min 9sec. Extras: commentary's, deleted scenes,outtakes & bloopers, supporting cast and crew reunion, interviewwith stars, alternate diamond ending & trailers.MAY.CO 5900

Be aware that this is actually a region 1 dvd and will not play in Britain. If you want a region 2 for the UK then you need to buy the Blu-ray version which comes with a bonus non-Blu-ray disk that works. Amazon you are not making this clear at all - do better please.