I just saw Martin Scorcese’s “After Hours.” Shlubby New Yorker “Paul” gets stranded in SoHo and encounters a zany cast of freaky NYC characters while trying to get home however he can. He sees a murder, a suicide, performance art, bad sculpture, a punk club, and a vigilante mob led by an ice cream vendor all while trying to escape back home. While charming, it is ultimately plotless.
As with many of Scorcese’s works, it should be watched on as large a screen as possible with the lights low. If you have to, watch it on a laptop in the dark with the screen 6 inches from your face. The atmosphere is important.
A 27-year-old Linda Fiorentino is super damn hot, super sassy, arty, and mean.
After Hours is sort of the best-of-genre whose name I don’t really know, so let’s call it the Urban Bullshit movie. People in New York are so crazy!! They are so so crazy. Their zaniness is endearing at first but ultimately hostile and eventually life-threatening. One of the hallmarks of this kind of story is many of the “problems” would melt away if the protagonist grew a spine and asserted himself to irrational behavior. Another hallmark: the protagonist is from somewhere “safe” (generally the suburbs) and is trying to get home, and the plot happens almost entirely in one single night. Other examples might include “Adventures in Babysitting” and “Detroit Rock City.” Maybe the second Babe movie.
Scorcese describes Allan Dwan’s movies “Brewster’s Millions” (1945, I’ve only seen the Richard Pryor remake!), “Getting Gertie’s Garter,” and “Up in Mabel’s Room,” all movies with implausible but still non-fantastical frantic happenings. Also by Dwan “The Inside Story,” which sounds like a 1940s version of “Twenty Bucks” (1993). Scorcese mentions that the very fast pace is essential to these kinds of movies.
Back to After Hours for a second: it’s definitely worth watching, but actually the best thing about the DVD release is Martin Scorcese’s commentary. He tells the entire history of the project, and what he’d been doing before that, and how the movie industry was changing at the time (1985). Scorcese is a true film historian, and I learn more about film and film history every time I listen to one of his lectures or commentaries.
In an aside, Scorcese describes lecturing in Beijing, with Shirley Sun, director of “Iron and Silk,” and Peter Wang, an actor in “Chan is Missing” (Wayne Wang), who later directed “A great wall” (also written by Shirley Sun). Peter Patzak (sp?) was in there somewhere. Anyway, he realizes in retrospect that the audience contained the budding “5th Generation” filmmakers in the audience, including Zhiang Yimou, Chen Kaiga, and Tian Zhuangzhuang.
After Hours is lit very sparingly, using mainly available light, sometimes only camera light. They reached a pace of 16-18 setups a day, which is insane (usually a Hollywood movie does like 7). The elaborately descriptive shot list was provided to the crew, so everyone knew what they were doing.
A cool trick: a couple scenes have Paul running as fast as he can, but the production didn’t have a track or a stabilized truck mount. So they had him run in a big circle around the camera (30 feet?), with things in between him and the camera to create depth and the impression he is running under and behind things (a scaffold and traffic easels, etc). The camera simply pans in a circle.
One thing no one in the commentary mentioned: there’s a Kafka reference in After Hours… it’s the “Before the Law” segment from “The Trial.” Except the guard is now a bouncer at a club.