After Hours (R)
"8% is a bitch!"
A yuppie in New York working a dead end job gets a promising phone number from a young lady in a diner, setting off a bizarre chain of events in Soho that keeps him up all night amidst a paranoid nightmare in Martin Scorsese's funniest black comedy After Hours.
Featuring an all star cast of character actors, heavily featuring beautiful 80s actresses all playing ding-bat nutjobs like the stunning Rosanna Arquette (whom he'd feature in his masterpiece part of New York Stories a few years later), with lead Griffin Dunne (American Werewolf in London) pinballing between skirts in the early hours of the morning on a desperate chase for poon-nanny and subway-fare home. The freaks come out at night, as do the paranoid, the psychos and the vigilante neighborhood watches apparently. The unfortunate chain of events keep getting weirder and darker as the denizens of this New York City burrough stay up later and later. If you ever wanted to see a Scorsese film featuring a weasle of a protagonist running for his life from a merrily tinkling Ice Cream truck, this is it. It's light, it's dark, it's funky, it's also a Scorsese flick featuring a weaselly protagonist running for his life from a merrily tinkling Ice Cream truck, so big draws all around.
Meanwhile Scorsese's signature camera moves are turned up to eleven. The complicated tracking shots, swish pans, push ins and zooms are in mass effect, almost a comedic echo of Hitchcock's nervous noir lens. Comedy has never been his strong suit, but seeming to learn his lesson from The King of Comedy, the script and visuals sail through the zany lives and oddities on screen with an unconventional abandon and tightly edited. The whip crash never leaves a dull somber moment, the dialogue's twists and turns veer from wry amusement to laugh out loud absurdity. It all balances out and works, with its lovely quick pace and short run time, into one of Scorsese's most successful and efficient, yet overlooked, pieces of cinema art. After Hours is his deepest foray into the surreal yet funny world of his favorite city; woe unto those who stumble into that world of artists, thieves and degenerates. The Night Owls that stalk those streets don't suffer trespassers lightly.
8.5 Rat Traps, Beehives & Cream Cheese Bagel Paperweights out of 10 (GREAT)
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