Rhapsodies

For this week’s selection of film I went with two very strange, but very different love stories.

The first Miracle Mile, is a film I probably one I wouldn’t have watched when it came out in 1989.  As a child of the cold war inevitable nuclear armageddon was a frequent subject of my nightmares and with a few notable exceptions, like Watchmen, I did not like being reminded.

Miracle Mile is very much a product of it’s time and is full of just about every cliché that the eighties and the nuclear war genre have to offer. Sometimes it almost feels like satire. What was the most interesting thing about it for me it wasn’t really about the doom of oncoming nuclear strike but the fear of it. As the hero desperately tries to find and rescue his love in time, he spreads the rumor that the world is going to end in the next hour and it snowballs causing chaos like an invasive meme. By the end of the film San Francisco is in flames even before the strike. In a way I would have been interested to see what the movie would have been like if it had turned out to be a false alarm instead of ending with the… well… end.

The next film Wristcutters: A Love Story   is road trip comedy about love and suicide set in a bleak colorless afterlife where all the victims of suicides go, a place “just like here only worse”. Despite the fantastic premise Wristcutters is wonderfully low key and realistic to the point that you almost have to be reminded about the fantastic elements.  It presents the feeling of otherness through a muted filter and other elements so subtle that they have to be pointed out to us by the characters. Even the most blatant magical bits like a black hole underneath the passenger seat in the protagonists’ car and actual miracles are taken in stride with the characters so you find yourself ignoring them with them.  All in all a fascinating film I look forward to watching again to catch more of these nuances.