At the Movies

Scorsese is one of my favorite directors, although not infallible -- I thought Casino was about an hour too long and a pale follow-up to Goodfellas, couldn't make it through Age of Innocence, and oddly just never got around to seeing The Last Temptation of Christ.

But there was also one other Scorsese movie I had never seen, indeed wasn't really aware of, that apparently is seen as an overlooked classic by those in the know.

After Hours (1985)

(It's a 35-year-old movie, so of course there are spoilers.)

The premise actually sounds kinda promising, in a lighthearted '80s screwball comedy way:  office nebbish (Griffin Dunne) meets cute with a girl (Rosanna Arquette), gets invited to her place, and adventures ensue when he tries to return home. The cast looks promising. Teri Garr! John Heard! Cheech & Chong! Catherine O'Hara! Late '80s/early '90s babe Linda Fiorentino! Even Bronson Pinchot makes a brief appearance.

And it does start off promisingly, with Dunne as a bored office drone who catches Arquette's attention in a coffee shop while he's reading Tropic of Cancer. She gives him her number, he calls her later that night and she invites him over....at 11:30pm. Okay then.

Obviously, the plot of just about every screwball comedy turns on misunderstandings, implausibilities, and coincidences. Usually some combination of one or two larger ones, and maybe two or three smaller ones. Something to drive things along, and the audience just goes with it mostly because there's no movie without it.

But that's all this movie is, is a string of increasingly dumb implausibilities and coincidences. Dunne heads over in a taxi traveling at roughly Mach 1, and decides for some reason to take a $20 bill -- his only money, important plot point here you guys! -- and stick it in an ashtray, with the door window behind his head wide open, in order to suck the bill out of the high-speed taxi. Nutty, right?

Dunne arrives and goes up to the loft, looking for Arquette, instead finds Fiorentino, the goofy "sculptress" roommate hacking out her papier-mâché objets d'fart. Even though Dunne just told Arquette on the phone that he would be there in forty-five minutes, she decided to bail down to the midnight pharmacy, as one does, thus leaving Fiorentino the golden opportunity to come on to Dunne before falling asleep on him.

Arquette returns, decides to take a shower before beginning their "date" (by now it must be around 1:00am or so), which is weird and disastrous, with Arquette talking about being raped for six hours by an ex-boyfriend (again, as one does -- did I mention that these two just met a couple hours prior?). Dunne wisely ditches her and leaves, only to begin his series of wacky misadventures.

And it just gets worse, and stupider. Rather than pick through every thread of the narrative, I'll just drop a few of the remaining low points:

• Dunne finds his way back to Arquette's building only to find out she killed herself. Talk about a bad first date!


• After failing to jump a subway turnstile, Dunne then finds himself at a bar. The bartender offers to give Dunne a couple bucks (uh-huh) so he can catch the subway back home, but goshdarnit, the bar's cash register -- you know, where currency is stored for exchange with paying customers, like in a business -- suddenly won't open, and the only key is -- get this -- back at the bartender's apartment. Probably stashed way up the tight asshole of an erratic pet chimp, or an impenetrable safe with a combination that requires knowing pi to the thirty-second place.


• As assurance that he totally won't burglarize the bartender's apartment, Dunne leaves his own house keys as collateral. Again:  two in the morning in New York City, these people have never fucking met before, they're exchanging house keys so that one of them can spot the other one two dollars. Jesus Christ.


• Just as Dunne is about to leave the bar, Mister Bartender gets a call that his old girlfriend has just killed herself. In order to make sure Dunne and the audience know that it's the same weird broad, Bartender yells her name about a dozen times, Stella! style, while pounding the bar. Of all the bars in the naked city, right? There's a lottery-ticket coinkydink for ya right there, podna.


• Instead of just saying, you know, I can walk a hundred blocks back to my place after all, I don't really need the two dollars that badly, and getting his keys back, Dunne heads for Bartender's apartment all the same. There's wacky comedic misunderstandings, and there's borderline retardation.


• Did I mention that there's been a string of burglaries in the area lately? Reader, there has, and Mister Bartender's up-all-night neighbors are totally watching everyone like hawks, and see Dunne going in and out of the apartment. Keep that one in your back pocket for later. Foreshadowing!


• Let's see, what else? Dunne comes back to the bar only to find the distraught bartender has left for a few minutes (at 3:00am or so by now), so he hangs out with the oddball waitress (Garr) at her place across the street. Then he heads over to the punk club where Fiorentino and her S&M boyfriend are hanging, which makes you wonder who called Mister Bartender so quickly. He hooks up with yet another weirdo (O'Hara), who drives an ice cream truck and decides he's the burglar, which results in a vigilante mob chasing Dunne through the streets of NYC at four in the fucking morning, raiding businesses and apartments to search for him. Probably because the entire NYPD was taken up with getting Suicide Arquette down to the morgue. Who fucking knows?

Oh yeah, Dean Wormer's wife is in this thing too. What an incoherent mess it is. Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have had a field day with this pile of crap. It's tonally all over the place, every character is a complete idiot or an insufferable goofball, and none of it makes any sense. Who writes this shit?

I'm telling you right now that the only thing keeping people from rating this turd lower than Battlefield Earth is that it has Marty Scorsese's name on it. But because it's him, it's a "hidden gem" or whatever. Bullshit. It gargles rhino balls. I was thinking maybe he had some alimony to pay down or something, but apparently he took this project on after Last Temptation got cancelled, and he was pissed and frustrated and needed something to do. It had a budget of $4M and made $10M, so that's something I guess.

Fuck this movie. I want my two hours back. The only thing that didn't suck is that Linda Fiorentino has decent tits, but she only shows them for a few seconds early on, and for no fucking reason.

Grade:  F- (yeah, I know there's no such thing as F+ or F-)

P.S. I'm still looking forward to seeing The Irishman.