SISTER ACT

Happy Friday to everybody! Check out my review of the revenge yarn Is God Is...

...now in theaters, online at Phoenix Magazine.

THIS MOVIE IS THE BOMB

On this date in 1989, Steve De Jarnatt’s film Miracle Mile opened. I saw it the following afternoon, at a shopping mall multiplex in Greenbelt, Maryland. I loved it, but because it potently dramatized certain morbid scenarios that have long haunted my imagination, I could never bring myself to see it again. Yet scenes and details from the film stayed in my memory through the decades, more vividly than many films I’ve seen multiple times.

Recently I was urged, by the director himself, that it was time to revisit the film, so I acquired the fine Kino Lorber Blu-ray. I hadn’t misremembered; it was at least as spellbinding this time as it was three decades ago.

For the uninitiated, Miracle Mile starts as a wistful meet-cute romance. Harry (Anthony Edwards), a trombone player passing through L.A. on a gig, meets Julie (Mare Winningham), a waitress who lives in Park La Brea, while they’re touring the Page Museum and gazing at the tarpits.

Whimsical circumstances make Harry oversleep for his big date with Julie; he shows up after three in the morning at the diner where she works, in the title neighborhood, but of course she’s long since gone home. He answers a ringing phone in the booth outside the diner, and on the other end of the line hears a frantic young soldier (voiced by Raphael Sbarge) in a missile silo, who claims he’s misdialed trying to reach his father to tell him: World War III is on, and the U.S. has a little over an hour before the missiles hit.

From there on, Miracle Mile is a headlong real-time nightmare, as poor Harry tries, first, to convince a bunch of strangers in the diner to take his story seriously, and then to find Julie and get her out of town. Even without the threat of nuclear devastation, things do not go smoothly.

Not only by bringing to woozily plausible-seeming life a threat that many of us spent the Reagan years fretting about, but also from Theo Van Sande’s queasy-yet-beautiful pastel/neon L.A.-hangover cinematography and the brooding score by Tangerine Dream, Miracle Mile seems very much an ‘80s movie. But it doesn’t seem dated; especially in our current weird times, the feeling of plausibility very distressingly remains.

I should also note that, while the movie is scary, it isn’t a downer. Edwards and Winningham are almost achingly lovable, and the supporting ensemble is tough to beat: Mykelti Williamson, Denise Crosby, Lou Hancock, John Agar, Robert DoQui, O-Lan Jones, Kurt Fuller, Alan Rosenberg, Danny de la Paz, Earl Boen, Brian Thompson, Claude Earl Jones, Howard Swain, Diane Delano and Edward Bunker, among others.

There’s a surprising amount of grim but hectic and effective comedy, and while De Jarnatt shows us horrifying rioting in the streets near the end, he persistently balances this jaundiced view of humanity with touches of human tenderness and integrity. Indeed, the overall sensibility with which De Jarnatt—who hasn't made another feature since, though he’s written and directed copious TV—imbues the film is warm and generous-hearted, and gallantly romantic.

One specimen of this romance may be found in the extensive and entertaining special features that come on the Kino Lorber disc: De Jarnatt’s alternate “happy” ending—two sweet extra seconds.

ALL OF PITTSBURGH'S A STAGE

Merry Christmas everybody! Here’s part of what Santa brought you: 

Fences—Denzel Washington directed and stars in this filming of August Wilson’s 1983 Tony and Pulitzer winning drama. He plays Troy Maxson, an African-American garbageman in 1950s Pittsburgh with a soul full of unresolved fury.

A superb baseball player as a youth, he was too old to make The Bigs by the time Jackie Robinson had broken through. He resents both his older son, a musician, and his younger son, a high school football star, for pursuing their dreams. Preemptively certain that the racist deck will be stacked against him—or maybe just envious—he works to scuttle the younger kid’s prospects of playing college ball. Troy is also keeping a wounding secret from his beloved, long-suffering wife Rose (Viola Davis) which leads to further heartache.

Working from a screen adaptation that Wilson completed before his death (reportedly with an uncredited rewrite by Tony Kushner), Washington doesn’t try to conceal the material’s theatrical origins. He only expands the locations a little from the play’s back-yard setting, and he certainly doesn’t tone down the heightened language and acting style. And as is often the case with movies made from one-set, small-ensemble plays, this was a shrewd move—the result is a highly satisfying focus on masterly performances.

There is fine work from the supporting cast, notably Mykelti Williamson as Troy’s brain-damaged brother, Russell Hornsby as the elder and Jovan Adepo as the younger son and Saniyya Sidney as Troy’s youngest child. Stephen McKinley Henderson is particularly solid as Troy’s devoted, worried friend.

But they’re all secondary to Washington and Davis, who played the roles opposite each other on Broadway in 2010, and who clearly haven’t lost their rapport. They’re able to get across the ways in which grief and bitterness can become so ingrained in a person—or a marriage—that it can coexist quite comfortably with humor, civility, even affection.

Though polished and skillful, this movie is in no way groundbreaking as cinema, and it’s maybe a hair longer than it needs to be. But it’s a chance to watch, quite simply, two of the greatest actors in America, in their prime, in roles worthy of their abilities. The quiet, steady intensity of the stars makes Fences, at its best, almost hypnotic.

THAT'S ONE BIG EFFIN' GIANT...

Opening this weekend: 

The BFG—The title stands for “Big Friendly Giant,” and the title character is just that—a pleasant colossus (Mark Rylance) whose job is delivering pleasant dreams. A young English orphan girl, Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) ends up as his houseguest and friend.

“Big” is a relative term, as it turns out. The BFG’s neighbors in giant land are much bigger than he is, and the monstrous, thuggish brutes (led by Jemaine Clement) routinely bully him. They’re also much less friendly, especially to humans—in the grand tradition of giants, they’re eager to eat Englishmen/women (and presumably any other nationality). The BFG won’t do this—he maintains a vegetarian diet mostly consisting of a revolting-looking produce item called a snozzcumber. He’s also fond of a carbonated beverage with downward-traveling bubbles that induce epic intestinal activity.

Steven Spielberg directed this adaptation of one of Roald Dahl’s strange tales for children. The script is by the great Melissa Mathison, who passed on last year, and to whom the film is dedicated. Mathison wrote the scripts for such kid-movie classics as The Black Stallion (1979) and E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), as well as the underrated 1995 The Indian in the Cupboard. At her best, she was able tap into the subconscious power of such tales. I never thought she got as much credit for, in particular, the success of E.T. as she should have; the best lines in that movie carry an almost Jungian tingle, without the slightest pretension.

Her swansong was another script for Spielberg with, curiously, another initialed title character who befriends a little kid. I wish I could say that the result was another classic, but I think this one falls a little short of their earlier achievement. Visually it has the feel of a throwback, to the sort of fantasy movies made in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Some of these were by Spielberg himself, in the worst phase of his career—like 1991’s Hook, probably my least favorite Spielberg film—and some of them were by other filmmakers trying to imitate Spielberg and his command of the box office. Like Hook, The BFG is all painterly colors and delicate compositions of the sort that wins Caldecott Medals for book illustrators, and the music, by John Williams of course, has the same soaring, leaping manner that Williams seems able to muster in his sleep.

As for the story, it has the free-wheeling, sometimes slightly sinister absurdity that is the trademark of Dahl’s stories for kids, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The BFG goes in for a degree of kid-pleasing scatology, as well. The Queen of England (Penelope Wilton) samples the BFG’s favorite beverage, for instance, with predictably Chaucerian results.

But somehow the energy just isn’t there with this one. There’s something muted and melancholy to the atmosphere of The BFG that makes it feel heavy and slow and draggy in its first half. Things certainly pick up in the second half, when the more broadly comic stuff kicks in, but even this shift feels vaguely forced—the dream-logic of the goofy narrative doesn’t seem organic.

All that said, there’s a redemptive virtue to The BFG, and that’s Mark Rylance. Endowed via CGI with a long nose and enormous ears below his sloping forehead and swept-back white hair, this great actor, who justly won an Oscar this year for his turn in Bridge of Spies, dries any schmaltz out of the film with his quiet, matter-of-fact line readings. And his young costar Barnhill is impressive, too—she’s a cute kid, but you never see her being cute on purpose. 

The Purge: Election Year—Writer-director James DeMonaco’s Purge movies, of which this is the third, are dystopian chillers set in a not-too-distant future America wherein, once a year for twelve hours, law and order is suspended and all crimes are fair game. The supposed premise is that a wild night of unchecked murder and vandalism will exorcise everybody’s demons and society will be more stable the rest of the year.

This loathsome holiday is explicitly reactionary in origin. DeMonaco seems to think that it’s the natural extension of the hardcore Right’s gun fever and evangelical fervor and class and racial animus, if they ever decided to drop the self-righteous posing. I wish, in light of the current primary season, that I was more confident that he’s wrong about this.

But that doesn’t mean that the movie, set in Our Nation’s Capitol, isn’t exultantly stupid and disgusting. It’s also one of the more disingenuous films I’ve ever seen, inviting our contempt at a social outrage of its own invention, while eliciting bloodthirsty whoops of delight every time one of the “Purgers” gets flattened by the good guys.

Said good guys include a Senator (Elizabeth Mitchell, in the specs of a sexy librarian from an ‘80s video) who’s running for President on a vow to abolish the Purge, and her security man (Frank Grillo). These two, stuck on the street after an assassination attempt, are befriended by the owner of a D.C. deli (Mykelti Williamson) and his friends (Joseph Julian Soria and Betty Gabriel) who are trying to defend their store from vengeful Purgers. The whole gang gets swept up into a revolutionary movement against the creepy “New Founding Fathers.”

Ugly and satirically ham-fisted as the movie is, it would be useless for me to deny that I found it a perfectly well-made and exciting Jacobean bloodbath. The dialogue is a little stilted at times, but the actors are easy to sympathize with, the story is tightly constructed, and DeMonaco knows how to use horror shtick—scary masks, cheap shocks—to build an unsavory atmosphere of dread. Election Year—like this election year— may be improbable and revolting, but it isn’t boring.