miracle mile - The Screengrab

Summer of '89: "Miracle Mile"

Each week last summer, we flipped the calendar back thirty years to spotlight a movie that was new and exciting back in...the Summer of '78. In the last installment, I made this vow: "Thanks for joining us for the Summer of ’78! If we’re all still alive a year from now, tune in for the Summer of ’89!"

Well, we're still alive, but our venue is gasping its final breaths as we enter this last week in Screengrab history. But I'm a man of my word! I was looking forward to spending this summer re-evaluating the Summer of '89, which I spent driving across country with a friend, seeing America...and seeing a lot of movies. Anytime the weather turned against us, or we just couldn't bear the thought of spending another second cramped inside our tiny Subaru, we'd hit the multiplex in whatever town we happened to be in and spend the day sneaking from theater to theater, killing six to eight hours at a pop. So as it turned out, I saw an awful lot of movies in the summer of '89 (and a lot of awful movies). Obviously, I won't get the chance to fulfill my obligation here, but following this inaugural Screengrab installment of Summer of '89, you can catch new episodes every Monday at my blog, conveniently entitled Scott Von Doviak, at least until I can come up with something snappier.

As it happens, I did not see this week's movie upon its release in 1989, which gives me something in common with almost everyone else in America. I've seen it now, however, so let's kick this sucker off with...

In Other Blogs: 100% Watchmen-Free Edition

It’s enough already! I blame myself for piling on, but surely we can find some intriguing blog entries out there on subjects other than the movie that rhymes with Blotchmen. For instance, Arbogast on Film is looking back at an apocalyptic fantasy from the olden days. “Maybe the world did come to an end in 1988. I don't want to be glib but I'm hard pressed to think of anything that has surfaced in the interim that really is something to tap dance about. There was an electricity back then, a crackle in the air that's missing now, the void filled by buzz, which isn't the same thing. None of us knew the backstory of MIRACLE MILE (1988) at the time of its release; we didn't know that the property had been kicked around Hollywood for the better part of a decade or that its author, Steve DeJarnatt, had written the script for Warners but had bound himself to the project as a director, which queered the deal. We didn't know DeJarnatt (well, we didn't know DeJarnatt) had bought the script back from the studio for $25,000 and that Hemdale stepped in with an offer to produce for just under $4 million, which got the ball rolling. Nope. All of this happened while we were sleeping, and when we woke up MIRACLE MILE had happened.”

At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells speculates on rumors that Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life will feature…dinosaurs?

Separated at Birth: "Cloverfield" and "Miracle Mile"

The apocalyptic monster movie Cloverfield, with its Camcorder-eye view of Manhattan being flattened by an aggrieved, bellowing beastie from the sea, was already well defined in the public mind as "Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project" long before it opened. It used to be that this kind of mixed-marriage pitch was a staple of Hollywood satire, an easy laugh at the industry's blatant embrace of unoriginality. By now, after a few decades of Entertainment Tonight and Entertainment Weekly teaching lay people to think of movies in terms of grosses and big weekend openings, even ticket buyers are conditioned to think of a movie's resemblance to other movies as some kind of come-on. J. J. Abrams, whose Bad Robot company produced Cloverfield (and who is probably the creator most strongly associated with it, even though he neither wrote nor directed it), has also taken credit, in a roundabout way, for the most striking image featured in its trailer, that of the head of the Statue of Liberty being used as a bowling ball, by saying that he'd always felt gypped that there was no such image in John Carpenter's Escape from New York, even though that movie's poster showed the Statue's head lying discarded in the street. But there's another movie that in its structure bears a striking resemblance to Cloverfield: Miracle Mile, written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt and released to nothing better than mildly cultish appreciation back in 1989.