Film - After Hours

Released - 1985

Writer - Joseph Minion

Director - Martin Scorsese

Stars - Griffin Dunne

Supporting - Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Cheech and Chong, Teri Garr, John Heard, Bronson Pinchot, and a slew of others (including "Rockets Redglare", whom you may remember from The Star Spangled Banner, as part of the angry mob).

Here's the thing about After Hours: We've all had times like this.

You're in a hurry, so you jump in the car, step on the gas and find yourself behind a bus. When you can pass it, there's the guy on a moped who wont move over into the bike lane. Then it's the street worker with a Stop sign, Etc.

Paul's ordeal is the same, except that it involves a corpse, mohawk night, The Monkees, papier mache', burglars, and a guy who's "never done this with a man before".

This film is bent. Maybe I'll come up with some little icons I can stick in here, but for the moment just understand that my frames of reference will be "Legit", "Skewed", "Bent", and "Twisted". Anything beyond that and I'll have to come up with something else. In any case, this one is bent.

As I watched this movie, I kept thinking it was more like David Lynch than Martin Scorsese. It seems very like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, in as much as its driving characteristic is macabre humor combined with a string of surprises that kept me watching.

There are no powerful performances in this piece. In fact, I cant think of anything powerful about it at all. What is has is "persistence". There's no time to get bored with a character because, apart from the protagonist, we arent exposed to any given character for more than ten or so minutes.

The premise: Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) meets a girl (Rosanna Arquette) who just had a fight with her boyfriend (John Heard). They spend some time together in Soho, but when they go back to her flat things get too weird, so he bails while she's out of the room. His plan is to just go back home, get some sleep and forget about it.

Not so fast there, ya nozzle. One by one, events and circumstances conspire against him until, finally, he winds up pretending to be a statue so that the people of Soho dont tear him apart.

Dont look for a lot of plot. Instead, look for coincidence. After Hours is not too far removed from Franz Kafka's The Castle. It's dreamlike, in the sense that one thing leads to another, but not in logical fashion. This absurdity is part of what I enjoy. After finding his date dead from an apparent overdose of prescription drugs, and after losing all his money, Paul is pushed more than led through the streets (and apartments) of Soho by a string of characters that I will just let you see for yourself.

The film is also kind of Hitchcockian, reminding me a bit of North by Northwest (sans Eva Marie Saint). Thanks to some home made wanted posters, Paul is blamed for a string of burglaries. This leads to his flight before angry neighborhood vigilantes, led by an even more angry woman driving an ice cream truck (complete with music box).

Okay, that's all I can tell you without spoiling it for those of you who might watch it.

My thoughts? After Hours is nothing special. It's redemption lies only in the fact that it doesnt try to be. It rocks along like Phil Connor's car on the train tracks. We stay in because we're moving too fast to jump out and because it might be interesting to see what happens next. When it does happen, we lean forward a bit but we never really get to edge of the seat.

Did I enjoy it? Sure. You know me, though.