Miracle Mile evokes the fear its protagonist is feeling by making the experience of watching the movie congruent with Harry's plot arc. As he flails around looking for a loophole in
the end of the world, you're flailing around trying to figure out what kind of movie this is and how to watch it. The normal plot components from a zombie
movie—the vehicles, the weapons, the hyper-competent Denise
Crosby—are shown and then taken away. Landa (Crosby) leaves our
protagonist in the dust and Harry spends the rest of the movie trying to
catch up with her. Of course, it doesn't work, and even if it did,
it's far from clear that Landa will live much longer than Harry. This
is the nightmare where you try things and none of them work.
It is also my personal nightmare. I grew up in the Los Angeles of
this movie and my
father's postcards: Wilshire Boulevard, Fairfax, the La Brea Tar Pits. It's a
place of bright lights and high contrast: malls
frosted in neon, sunsets
and fountains. Film
noir shows the corruption beneath this bright facade; Miracle
Mile allows us to believe the facade, shows the blossoming of
love, and then just blows it all up.
This is what to be afraid of
in 1988, and now. This thing we've built could just go away, forever,
in moments, for no reason at all. The bad things in
other movies are just metaphors for this.
The worst part in Miracle Mile isn't even the nuclear
explosions; those are the gravestone on a civilization that has already
collapsed. It collapses in minutes, like, when Harry's in the bathroom
or something. There's a pretty good comic miniseries called "Memetic"
which covers the same ground but also introduces a lot of body horror,
so YMMV.
In a normal emergency people will band together and help each
other, but Miracle Mile says that in the apocalypse all bets
are off. This Prisoner's Dilemma will not have any further iterations,
so you might as well go out with one last Defect. Despite it all, a
few people choose Cooperate. It does no good, but at least they die
well. That's what passes for hope in this movie.
Wed Jan 03 2018 09:01 Film Roundup Special: Miracle Mile:
Way back in June I saw Miracle Mile (1988), and loved it, but didn't really review it because my recommendation is that you go in knowing nothing except that it's a very dark
horror movie. Now it's been six months and I'm going to talk about it, so skip this post if you want to try going in cold.
Film
I saw fifty-three films in 2017, and twenty-six of them (plus one short) were good enough to be immortalized in Film Roundup Roundup. Of movies I saw for the first time in 2017, here are my top ten:
In particular, Get Out and Miracle Mile are just what we need right now: rom-coms that turn into horror movies.
Literature
The Crummy.com Book of the Year is Democracy for Realists by Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels, a survey of the political science literature that aims to figure out what is actually going on in peoples' heads when they vote.
Other highly recommended books I finished this year:
Games
Not a lot of games played this year. I think the only new board game I played in 2017 was season 2 of Pandemic Legacy. We're not even halfway through the year and at the moment I'm really angry at the game, so not the best time to ask me for my opinion.
The Crummy.com Game of the Year is "Streets of Rogue", obtained through a Humble Bundle. It combines the combinatoric item explosion of Nethack with the immature mayhem and actual explosions of "Grand Theft Auto". It feels like the best possible VGA DOS game.
Also highly recommended: "Flinthook", "Oxygen Not Included", and "XCOM 2" (but only with the War of the Chosen DLC, which makes it an expensive proposition). I played "Frog Fractions 2" for a few hours, loved the creativity and the ZZT framing device, but when I stopped playing it I didn't pick it up again.
Bots
The 2017 bot situation is complicated. I put all of my bots on botsin.space, a Mastodon instance devoted to bots. (I also moved my main social media presence to botsin.space, using Twitter only for announcements.)
To help me out with the move I wrote a really neat framework called botfriend, which makes it easy to run some bot code on a schedule and publish the result to Mastodon and/or Twitter. I ported all my bots to this new system and got rid of a ton of duplicate code.
I even wrote three new Mastodon-exclusive bots:
I think botfriend is really useful if you manage a lot of bots, and pretty easy to get set up if you're familiar with Python, but I haven't polished it or done a big promotional push, because my big initial impetus was to stop the situation where each new bot I create makes Twitter a more interesting deathtrap. Once I got to that point, I decided all of my spare time should be devoted to finishing Mine. So there haven't been any new bots for a while, and doing a proper rollout of botfriend is a project I'm putting off until after this novel is done, just like other fun things like buying a Switch and playing a bunch of Mario.
Other accomplishments
I gave a couple talks early in the year at Penguicon but I think my best talk of 2017 was Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten... at Roguelike Celebration.
The Library Simplified team and I made a lot of progress towards creating a new library ebook ecosystem, though not as much as I'd hoped. There are now libraries in Maryland and California in the SimplyE system, and we've got code contributions coming in from outside NYPL.
I wrote four short stories in 2017: "Plain Sight", "Two Spacesuits" (probably the best one), "The Unicorn Cleanse", and "Continuity". No sales!
Situation Normal is still out to publishers. Mine is well past the halfway mark and I hope to finish a draft in the next few months, after which, botfriend, Mario, etc.
I saw the solar eclipse from Nashville, which was a lot of fun.
I kept my weight more or less under control in 2017, with the happy result that I recently bought a heavily discounted topcoat to deal with the winter chill, and unlike what happened eleven years ago, the topcoat looks pretty good on me. However, yesterday I wore it with a light-colored sweater and just like in 2006 I looked like a slob who had stolen someone else's topcoat. The difference being that I'm now in my late thirties and I don't care as much. Wed Jan 10 2018 09:38 The Crummy.com Review of Things: 2017:
For many years now I've published a feature titled "The Year in 2017" and come up empty. But I'm happy to report that we've just completed a year that was chock-full of 2017. Enjoy, and here's to a 2017-ful 2018!
