Miami Blues (35mm)
20 St Georges Road, Avondale, Auckland
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Bar open: 7PM
Trailers & shorts: 7:40PM
Main feature: 8PM
1990 / 97 min / R16
Director: George Armitage
Cast: Fred Ward, Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh
"Break-ing, ent-er-ing
The dark and lonely places
Finding a big gun"
Alec Baldwin plays fresh-from-the-slammer sociopath “Junior” Frenger, who leaves destruction in his wake from the moment he touches down in Miami.
Junior falls for Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the lost girl from Okeechobee who he meets as she’s hooking her way through Dade Junior College, and drags her into his banditry-financed white-trash fantasy of upward mobility - paralleling another superb Reagan/Bush I-era snapshot, Raising Arizona.
The only thing that stands in their way is lumpen blue-collar Detective Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward, giving the lone and definitive interpretation of the most famous literary creation of Charles Willeford, the king of Miami crime fiction.)
The funny thing about Miami Blues is that the homicide investigation is over before it starts: Hoke only has a shake a couple of trees before he finds out where "Herman Gottlieb" lives, and he spends a delicious pork-chop dinner toying with poor Junior like a cat with a ball of thread.
But Junior isn't one to be toyed with: Rather than wait for the hammer to drop, he hunts down Hoke at his apartment, beats him within an inch of his life, and takes Hoke's badge, gun, and precious chompers for good measure. Now this thug is not only on the loose, he's also out on the streets impersonating a police officer. And for added humiliation, Junior inadvertently solves a murder case that Hoke had been working for 15 months!
Peppered with a host of character actors, Miami Blues captures the crazed prose of Willeford in a tale that turns the detective trope on its ear.
Tight, hilarious and - in its final shots - strangely moving, "Miami Blues" is a marvellously invigorating piece of work.
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