Contemporary Film Journal

The best contemporary film I have seen lately is Steve De Jarnett's Miracle Mile.  It was made in 1988 and was brought to my attention by a piece Eddie Muller wrote about it in "Noir City, number 23," in which he said "It may not be noir, but in many ways Miracle Mile is pure Cornell Woolrich -- one of his wrong time, wrong place, dark night of the soul specialties -- reconfigured by a guy [De Jarnett] who grew up under the threat of annihilation."  In the film Anthony Edwards has just found the girl of his dreams (Mare Winningham) but oversleeps when he is supposed to pick her up after midnight as she gets off from her waitress shift.  It's 4 in the morning when he arrives at her diner and when she is no longer there he goes to a phone booth to call her.  The phone in the booth rings and it's a wrong number, a guy in a missile silo in South Dakota trying to call his father to tell him that missiles will hit Los Angeles in an hour and fifteen minutes.  Nobody in the diner believes this is real until Denise Crosby checks with someone on her primitive cell phone and finds out it's true.  Then the panic starts and spreads, as Edwards is trying to find Winningham and get a helicopter to the airport.  The movie starts out as a romantic comedy and gradually the comedy turns to fear and horror, a delicate balancing act that was often successfully carried out by classical masters such as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks but is rare in contemporary films. The film is very much of the 80's in its candy-colored style and plot, but transcends its time in today's political atmosphere.

Two other films I have seen lately not only look as though D.W. Griffith never lived, but also as though John Ford and Charles Chaplin never lived either.  The Florida Project, directed by Sean Baker, is something of a remake of Chaplin's The Kid (1921) with humor, emotion and beauty replaced by cheap irony, as kids run around on their own while their mothers try to scrounge for money to pay for the rent on their cheap motel rooms on the fringes of Orlando's Disney World.  The one redeeming virtue of the film is the effectively low-key performance of Willem Dafoe as the manager of a motel, the Chaplin to Brooklynn Prince in the Jackie Coogan role. 
Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk is typical of contemporary war films:  one never knows where one is, who anyone is, or what exactly is happening at any given time (there is very little context).  William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver (1942) gives us a much better understanding of what Dunkirk was all about and John Ford's They Were Expendable (1945) gives us a better idea of the melancholic difficulties of war; I also recommend D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) for its violent but  intelligible battle scenes.