Miracle Mile

This is one of those movies I treasure. Made on a small budget, didn’t get much of a release, I’d never heard of it when I happened into the theater one day … and I was blown away. It starts out to be one thing, and then it jerks you up as sharply as a hangman’s noose. You are lulled, artfully, into thinking you are looking at a simple love story, and then within sixty seconds realize that—while it is a love story—the stakes here are a lot higher. I won’t spoil it for you by revealing the plot turn, but rent this movie! As a bonus, it gets all the Los Angeles geography right, something movies seldom do. A large part of it happens in Johnies’s coffee shop, a now-defunct institution at the corner of La Brea and Wilshire—the beginning of the Miracle Mile—that is still there, and still available for film shoots.