For the week of July 28th, Kino Lorber is bringing Steve De Jarnatt's Miracle Mile to Blu-ray. This picture remains one of the most unsung thrillers of the 1980s, even though De Jarnatt starts things off in a decidedly minor-but-wholly engaging key as introduces viewers to Harry Washello, a jazz musician living in the titular LA neighborhood. Harry's sweet and more than a little awkward, but so is the young woman (Mare Winningham) he meets at the La Brea Tar Pits; it's a credit to both De Jarnatt and Edwards, who has never been more winning on-screen, that we get so invested in these early goings we wouldn't mind a nice little relationship drama about these two misfits. However, the film takes a sharp tonal swerve when an aborted date between the two young lovers leads Harry to discover that a) the US is heading towards total nuclear annihilation b) in about seventy minutes. The rest of Miracle Mile plays out in real time, with Harry rushing about LA as the clock ticks down, and while this form-meets-content conceit wasn't fresh in 1989 - the ghosts of Rope and High Noon linger over this one - De Jarnatt gooses it in a number of striking ways. Having his countdown be apocalyptic in nature certainly distinguishes the film in a big way - as modest a feature as this is (under $4 million), he and DP Theo van de Sande are able to conjure up a pervasive air of doom and chaos, particularly once those around Harry begin learning of their shared fate. That is, of course, if the threat is real, a notion that De Jarnatt keeps ambiguous until Miracle Mile's final moments: his twisty script suggests that nuclear war could simply be some paranoid delusion of Harry's (brought on by lack of sleep and his missed date), and Edwards is so affable that we're well into the movie before we realize we might be dealing with an unreliable narrator. Harry causes some very bad things, yet his goal in the face of the end is so human-scaled we can't dismiss him as a protagonist. The only thing that matters to him is finding Winningham's character and spending more time with her, even as everything seems to spiral out of control. Given the glut of end-of-the-world movies, each more histrionic than the next (Knowing, 2012), it's a relief to find one that pivots around one guy trying to get to know one girl a little better. A real gem.
Michael Reuben wrote that "the terror of nuclear holocaust is more often associated with films of the Sixties (e.g., Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove), but the standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that ultimately led to the collapse of the latter in 1991 rekindled a similar underlying dread of global annihilation. It's easy to look back at history when one knows the outcome, but the people who are living it don't have that luxury. Americans of the Eighties could hope, but did not know for sure, that the aggressive strategy pursued by their government against the Soviets would ultimately prevail. Anyone who was raised on nuclear preparedness drills at school or who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis could not help but feel a deep unease as the two heavily armed powers threatened, bluffed and strutted. De Jarnatt has said that he suffered from nightmares of nuclear war, and his achievement in Miracle Mile was to make that nightmare erupt into the middle of what at first seemed to be an everyday, small-scale romance and then resolve it in a way no one ever would have expected - and anyone who has seen Miracle Mile will never forget."
From Warner Home Entertainment comes The Water Diviner, the big directorial debut from Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe. And I mean big: our most expansive contemporary actor, Crowe does nothing by half-measures in his day job - for better or worse, the ghosts of Lawrence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Marlon Brando fuel Crowe's ambitions - so it stands to reason that for his first time at bat behind the camera, he'd take on no less a subject than World War I. Crowe plays a rugged farmer and water diviner who, still grieving over the loss of his three sons in the Battle of Gallipoli, heads to Turkey to retrieve their bodies and ends up becoming embroiled in post-war violence and conspiracy. The film's relatively slight length (just under two hours) belies its scope - this is a Melodrama-with-a-capital-M, and that synopsis allows time for epic battle scenes, family secrets, and to-the-rafters Emoting from Crowe: he gets to play sensitive, he gets to play action hero, he gets to romance Olga Kurylenko's beautiful war widow, and all under DP Andrew Lesnie's gorgeous widescreen cinematography (this was his final film before his death last April, and visually, it's more than a fitting sendoff). However, as handsome as Crowe's work is, it's also not very good. For a guy with as much experience acting in the epic genre as he has (think Cinderella Man with Ron Howard or Gladiator and American Gangster with Ridley Scott), he has no sense of pace or momentum crafting his own. Cinderella Man and especially Gladiator allowed for ebbs and flows in the action, while The Water Diviner is all histrionic grace notes, and the cumulative effect is wearying. I'd liken it to a talented blowhard loudly exclaiming his greatness for an extended period of time - you might believe him, but after a while, you just want him to shut up. Plus, it doesn't help that the picture lives in the shadow of one of the greatest WWI movies ever made: Peter Weir's 1981 classic Gallipoli, which is as terrifying and subtle (and lovely, and strange, and sad, and a whole bunch of other superlatives I don't have the time to list here) as The Water Diviner is hammy and over-the-top. That earlier film understands the fundamental mystery at the heart of war and is brave enough to let it remain so, but Crowe just wants to provoke easy uplift and sentiment.
Also from Kino comes two films from Lee Marvin: Monte Walsh and Prime Cut. Long revered for his turns in such films as Point Blank and The Dirty Dozen, Marvin has justly earned his reputation as an iconic screen badass, but anyone who thinks he was only good at being tough needs to pay more attention. From the start, Marvin radiated a mix of laconic menace and striking vulnerability (I'm thinking of his garrulous robber in Budd Boetticher's Seven Men From Now or his unstable psychotic in Fritz Lang's The Big Heat), and his best works, of which Monte Walsh and Prime Cut definitely deserve consideration, allow him to play more than just a walking beatdown stick. Of the two, Prime Cut is the weirdest - while the setup, which finds Marvin's mob enforcer going head-to-head with a corrupt Kansas City businessman (a marvelously unhinged Gene Hackman), is the stuff of rote B-actioners, director Michael Ritchie and screenwriter Robert Dillon fill the picture with the kind of manic weirdness that wouldn't be out of place in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Hackman's slaughterhouse owner is putting human meat in his products, Marvin's character finds himself the unlikely champion of some literal sex slaves (including a very young Sissy Spacek), and the film has all sorts of psychosexual oddities that would make Sigmund Freud blush (the name of Hackman's character is Mary Ann, and Ritchie implies that he's interested in his own brother, who at one point tries to kill Marvin by stabbing him with a sausage), all while throwing in enough gunfire and - of all things - an extended reference to the great cornfield setpiece in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest. What Martin does that's so great is to indulge in these outré happenings without winking at them. He knows this cartoon-colored nonsense has already vaulted over the top, and so he uses his oft-impassive presence for greater comic effect: we laugh harder because he seems to take the mayhem so seriously. He's even better in Monte Walsh, a Western that was slightly atypical in 1970 but now looks like a burnished classic. Marvin and Jack Palance star as aging cowboys struggling to adapt to the encroaching realities of modern culture, and there's a flavor of something like Sam Peckinpah's elegiac Ride the High Country. However, that earlier film is far more conflict-driven than Monte Walsh is - here, the biggest adversary is time, with Marvin and Palance increasingly aware that they don't belong in it anymore. Director William A. Fraker (the brilliant DP of Bullitt and 1941) lets his movie play out at a leisurely pace, with long scenes of contemplative bonding replacing gunfights and action: he knows that like his heroes, those elements no longer belong. It's a true hangout film, and we're the better for it, since Marvin is so comfortable on screen, especially in his relationships with Palance (who's never been funnier or more relaxed) and Jeanne Moreau's weary prostitute. Still, Marvin brings genuine sadness, especially in his final scenes, which let his big, expressive eyes tell the story of a life fought and lost by little more than age and regret.
Of Monte Walsh, Brian Orndorf wrote that "mournful qualities in Monte Walsh take their time to arrive. The first act of the film is actually more of a comedy interrupted by darkness, displaying the high jinks of cowboy camaraderie, shaping scenes of bonding and mutual respect before passing years and desperation work together to tear down these friendships. Monte Walsh is scripted with care, making sure viewers are comfortable with partnerships as the main characters find love and hope for opportunity, with deliberate pacing employed to track turns of plot and the story's dissection of maturity. The feature is impressively made, with most dramatic needs met through expressive performances and Fraker's attention to detail, managing the bigness of the setting and the intimacies of its inhabitants."
Finally, Severin Films is bringing Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau to Blu-ray. This engaging documentary follows the story of a film that would not be: filmmaker Richard Stanley's long-gestating adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau. After the cult successes of his Dust Devil and Hardware, Stanley had just enough industry cachet to mount his ambitious version of the classic H.G. Wells novel, complete with Stan Winston monster designs and a cast that included Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando, the latter of whom would play the title role...but then the roof fell in, and Stanley watched his dream project curdle into something far more unpleasant. Lost Soul partially functions as a character study of Stanley, a brilliant, eccentric man (given his particular...belief system, it's not hard to sympathize somewhat with the studio's reservations about him) whose love for the material wasn't enough to steer him through the many challenges heaved at him, including actors who quit, unsanctioned script changes, and location boondoggles, all of which resulted in his ousting from production. In some ways, though, Stanley's eventual dismissal from the film was the least of the problems - at least he didn't have to preside over the trainwreck that resulted when John Frankenheimer took over directing duties. Luckily, while the focus remains squarely on Stanley throughout Lost Soul, the picture does not want for juicy details of the Frankenheimer shoot; people like Bob Shaye, Rob Morrow, Fairuza Balk, and producer Ed Pressman are not shy about revealing how bad things got, with the lion's share of attention going to Brando and Kilmer's efforts - unintentional and otherwise - at derailing the production schedule (short version: if Brando was a nightmare to deal with, Kilmer was worse). I'm not sure if Lost Soul deserves to be a standalone feature - it's less a towering chronicle of behind-the-scenes malaise as, say, Lost in La Mancha or Hearts of Darkness than it is a really good Blu-ray special feature (even though I'm not in the least surprised New Line and Warner wouldn't want this feature near their The Island of Dr. Moreau disc) - but it's never less than fascinating and often hilarious, as well as a potent reminder of how difficult big-budget moviemaking really is. As Stanley might attest, true creativity dares not enter.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "Stanley comes off as unapologetically eccentric but still at least relatively rational in the interviews with him included in the documentary, but there's a 'warts and all' aspect to this piece which, while fascinating, doesn't always paint a pretty picture of either Stanley or the rather convoluted (and ultimately downright chaotic) production history of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Some of the confusion seems to have stemmed from good intentions under extremely difficult circumstances, including Stanley's attempts to keep Val Kilmer in the film by shifting him to a secondary role when the actor (then at the height of his Batman Forever-fueled 'arrogance,' in the verbiage used in the documentary) insisted that his shooting schedule be cut by 40%. Other problems frankly seemed to issue from Stanley's own off putting behaviors (including his self admitted reliance on 'witchcraft'), many of which led to various crew members whispering 'uh oh' under their breath as things continued to spiral out of control. Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau is an object lesson in both the excesses and almost weirdly restrictive tendencies that seem to exist side by side in Hollywood at times. The documentary does an almost frightening (if often hilarious) job of depicting the seemingly insane power struggles that attended this particular film, but it's not hard to draw general conclusions from this specific example. Dr. Moreau may be a study in madness, but a cursory glance at some of the shenanigans taking place as this film got underway prove he's far from alone."