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Miracle Mile
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June 3, 2003 "Please retry" | — | 1 | — | $11.51 |
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July 28, 2015 "Please retry" | — | 1 |
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Product Description
Newly Re-mastered in HD! What would you do if you knew you only had an hour to live? This intense, eerily euphoric romantic thriller stars Anthony Edwards (Top Gun) and Mare Winningham (St. Elmo's Fire) in a frighteningly plausible story that yanks you by the lapels and draws you into a high-velocity roller coaster. After 30 years of searching, Harry (Edwards) has finally met the girl of his dreams... unfortunately, before they even have a chance to go on their first date, Harry intercepts some chilling news: WW III has begun and nuclear missiles will destroy Los Angeles in less than an hour! Not sure if this is a prank or an omen, Harry races through L.A., fighting angry mobs of terrified people in desperate search for Julie (Winningham). Steve de Jarnatt (Cherry 2000) stylishly directed this cult-classic that features a stellar cast that includes John Agar, Lou Hancock, Mykelti Williamson, Kurt Fuller and Denise Crosby.
Product details
- MPAA rating : R (Restricted)
- Product Dimensions : 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 ounces
- Item model number : 1651
- Director : Steve DeJarnatt
- Media Format : Multiple Formats, Anamorphic, Color, Dolby, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Widescreen
- Run time : 1 hour and 27 minutes
- Release date : July 28, 2015
- Actors : Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar, Kelly Minter, Robert DoQui
- Studio : Kl Studio Classics
- ASIN : B00X99BQMA
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #91,023 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #8,911 in Action & Adventure DVDs
- #15,635 in Drama DVDs
- Customer Reviews:
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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 SECTION
The 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.
The film centers on two main characters, how over the course of a day and a night (and into the early hours of the next morning) they meet, fall in love, and the world ends. We meet Harry Washello, played by Anthony Edwards, a jazz musician in a traveling band, and Julie Peters, played by Mare Winningham, who works in a diner. Meeting at the museum at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, they instantly hit it off. For the first twenty minutes the film is a slickly filmed and endearing romance, not quite a romantic comedy but definitely light without being campy. The filming was so well done, both characters so likable, I would have watched that movie without what happened at roughly the twenty-minute mark.
Harry was supposed to meet Julie at her place of work after she finished her shift at the diner (what they both label a second date, interrupted by Harry napping and Julie working) but Harry oversleeps, not getting there till 4am. Julie is gone and Harry hangs around for a bit, trying to reach Julie and deciding to order something to eat. After calling Julie on the payphone just outside the diner Harry walks away for a minute to get a newspaper (hey it’s the 1980s). The payphone rings, Harry answers it.
The person on the other end of the line isn’t Julie returning Harry’s call, no, it is a frantic airman named Chip with apparently the wrong area code, wanting to apologize to his father and warn him that a nuclear war is about to happen (in an hour and ten minutes). Harry doesn’t get to talk to Chip long because it seems that Chip is shot dead (Harry hears gunfire).
Harry goes into the diner, populated by a rather diverse group of people, relating what he heard. Dismissed as crazy or a drunk at first, one person in the diner, a well-dressed businesswoman named Landa (played by Denise Crosby of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ fame), a woman with a cell phone (a super rare thing in 1988 when this film was shot), quickly confirms after hearing what Harry heard from Chip and making a few calls that yes, nuclear war is imminent.
Thus starts the slow building chaos, as the sleepy city gradual awakens to the terror, at first confined to a few people but gradually building till it is absolute pandemonium. Harry gets caught up in the drama of the diner patrons and employees seeking a way out of the city and trying to find Julie and save her as well. Harry and eventually Julie have a series of adventures in the very early morning hours of LA trying to save themselves, all while growing closer together.
I really liked the film. The change in tone from romance to apocalypse thriller was one of the starkest changes in a film I have ever seen, but it was well served by grounding it in a real Los Angeles with relatable protagonists (at least with Julie and Harry) so when things finally start to get from a little manic to outright insane, it is that more jarring. As embroiled as the film got into the apocalypse, it was still a romance between Julie and Harry and I liked that. I liked the music, the setting, even Harry’s snazzy 80s outfit. It was exciting, when there was action it was believable (no one suddenly became a marksman or was able to shrug off some sort of killing blow), and at no point did I stop caring about Harry and Julie. Not to give anything away but the ending had excellent symmetry with how the film began and I really appreciated that.
A really good film, after reading the effort it took to get the movie made I can see why people were so passionate about it. It has to me stood the test of time.
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Reviewed in Mexico on May 30, 2023
Outre son message clair sur l’épée de Damocles qui régnait encore sur les années 80 , ce sera la dernière occasion de voir à l’écran le Pan Pacific Auditorium avant qu’il ne flambe un an plus tard.
Ce chef d’oeuvre art déco avait notamment servi de cadre à la comédie musicale Xanadu.
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.