NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Sameer Callahan It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Falconeer The 1980's saw the release of a lot of silly and trashy movies, that were heavy on style but light on substance. "Mike's Murder" is not one of those films. This is a very well constructed mystery thriller; a "film-noir" in broad daylight,if you will. Los Angeles provides a deceptively bright backdrop for this story, which is quite dark and sinister. The fact that we get to see into a dark, seedy L.A. Underworld of drugs and prostitution, through the eyes of a "normal citizen," like Debra Winger's 'Betty,' makes everything so much more believable. Betty's tennis coach and sometime lover, Mike, is living a double life. By day he is a tennis coach to rich older ladies, but by night he deals cocaine, and at times sells his body to both women and men, in order to maintain his flashy, drug fueled lifestyle. The viewer is along for the ride, finding out bits and pieces of a sinister puzzle, alongside Betty Parish, after she is told that her lover was violently murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. Being a normal, law abiding girl, with a straight job as a bank teller, Betty quickly finds herself out of her league and terrified at what she is discovering about her lover. The great thing about "Mike's Murder" is how well it is constructed; the story unfolds slowly, but deliberately, and keeps it's audience truly on the edge, waiting to find out just how far it will go. It helps if the viewer has a fascination with the lifestyles depicted here; others might just be lost, and wondering what the point of it is. This is not a flashy film, that relies on impressive camera angles or quick cut editing. Instead we have an old fashioned style movie, that tells a tale with facial expressions, and music, and a masterfully told story. I imagine the critics of this gem must surely have the attention spans of children; I just cannot understand how anyone could consider THIS a bad movie. It isn't really a commercial film, and it's no surprise that it did poorly at the box office; films like this rarely become "blockbusters." Still, it seems to have stuck in the memories of a lot of people, including mine; I saw it as a young teen in the mid 80's; and I never forgot it. I found the world of Mike to be fascinating and terrifying; and I still do. And I've known a few guys like Mike, and they are all no longer living. I recommend this exciting film to those who can appreciate a good mystery.

rusoviet ...anything but - Smart industry personnel be they script, directors, producers, actor/actresses, set-property, agents, scribes - know the reality of the myth of ease per Los Angeles. The weather is the primer for the pump that has made the myth fact. LA is a very dangerous place for that very reason and this film does a great service in depicting what the naive step into to their own peril in assuming anything but that.Paul Winfield sympathy is so evident here for Debra Winger. The only real mystery is why she would be pulled to Mike to begin with - our boy Mike is a real fool who hangs with others because of the choices he's made already - got make some more scratch and I don't want to work hard for it.Great movie as noted the draw isn't so much 'Who dun it' as 'Don't be a fool, you've no idea who you are messing with!'

NORDIC-2 For some inexplicable reason, critics find this film hard to follow. Actually, it's very coherent and surprisingly powerful. Debra Winger plays a bank employee who falls for her tennis coach, a young stud named Mike. When Mike is brutally murdered by drug dealers, Winger's character, Betty, is drawn into the L.A. underworld in her quest to find out why he was killed. What makes this film so great is its quiet realism. Most latter day noirs suffer from over-the-top plotting, mega-violence, and cartoonish effects. Moving by indirection and inference, MIKE'S MURDER skirts a hellish world rather than diving in, a narrative strategy that makes it eerily believable and deeply disturbing. Check it out.

subcityii Last night, Debra Winger spoke about this film at UCLA. The campus theatre that shows films to the general public was renamed the James Bridges Theatre in honor of the writer and director of Mike's Murder. Debra said that Bridges was an actor's director. The scene in the film where Debra's character checks her phone messages and we hear a voice say it's mom-that was Debra's real life mother Ruth-Debra didn't know she would hear that voice until the moment the scene was shot!That example really highlights the strength of the film, the acting. All of the performances are first-rate. I was touched by Debra's quiet strength in the face of some sad and even bizarre discoveries by her character about her dead lover. A very underrated film!