Runtime: 88 minutes
Directed by: Steve De Jarnatt
Starring: Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, & plenty of familiar faces in small roles
From: Hemdale
Well, this film was a bummer.
The chaos that was the past several days with people visiting here on vacation... that has concluded. While it was great seeing them, “exhausting” is the main term to use & thus it is nice to return to normalcy. The reason for selecting this motion picture last night: as typical, discussion on a messageboard. Someone new to Los Angeles visited the most famous locations in the movie. As this found cult status in recent years, a review would have been done sooner... except that all the copies I know of for legal streaming are all in SD for cripes knows what reason. I'd rather test-drive the car then purchase it, you know; I imagine Kino Lorber did a nice job w/ the Blu-ray. Thus, to the bowels of the Internet for an HD copy.
The movie was quirkier and weirder than expected—not to mention some offbeat moments. That proved to not be a demerit once the action started. Seeing two free spirits purchase lobsters from a restaurant just so they can be freed from the ocean... no offense to anyone, but I roll my eyes at such actions. There should be no concerns about me not being charmed by the leads as played by Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham. The jazz musician finally finds love at the age of 30 and right in the embryo stages of the relationship, he accidentally receives a call in a random Los Angeles phone booth from presumably NORAD dialing the wrong area code & revealing that nuclear war will begin in 70 minutes.
I was able to stick with this due to a variety of factors. The escalation of the inevitable, the increasingly haunting visage of Los Angeles, the stacked cast (Kurt Fuller, John Agar, Denise Crosby, Robert DoQui, Kelly Jo Minter, James Earl Jones' dad Claude, Earl Boen, Raphael Sabarge, Edward Bunker, AND Jeanette Goldstein?!), the sweet late score from Tangerine Dream, and most critically, the relationship between Edwards & Willingham. It'd be a crime to reveal more of the plot; instead, it'd be best for viewers to let the plot unfurl in front of their own eyes.
One last note: it took a prominent Letterboxd reviewer for me to learn that in late 2021, Edwards & Willingham married IRL. Awwww.
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