steven@ism70.UUCP (09/30/85)
AFTER HOURS Starring Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette and Linda Fiorentino. Also starring Verna Bloom, Thomas Chong, Teri Garr, John Heard, Cheech Marin, Catherine O'Hara, Dick Miller and Bronson Pinchot. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Joseph Minion. Produced by Amy Robinson, Griffin Dunne and Robert F. Colesberry. Photographed by Michael Ballhaus. Production Designed by Jeffrey Townsend. Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker. Music by Howard Shore. From Warner Bros. Pictures (1985). New York is to Hollywood as "After Hours" is to "Into the Night." And it says something about Hollywood, I think, that "After Hours" is a much better work. Griffin Dunne plays normal guy Paul Hackett, a word processor living in New York City. He wasn't asking for much out of life. All he wanted to do that evening was meet the nice girl (Rosanna Arquette) that he saw in the coffee shop. So she said, "Come over, I live in SoHo." So he did. But then he found he couldn't get home... That's the setup to this hysterically funny pitch-black comedy. The joke is that the harder Paul struggles to get out of what he's gotten himself into, the more the intricate web of circumstances and coincidences close in around him. Scorsese and Minion have created a dreamy world in the after hours night of the artsy SoHo district wherein you with your cable tv lifestyle are the weird outcast. Kinky Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) and moody Marcy (Rosanna) are least of Paul's problems after he stumbles his way out of the aborted date. Scorsese handles a great cast with perfect aplomb. He uses star names the way Hitch used to in his audience pictures. If a character isn't going to be onscreen for a long time, you want to cast a familiar actress/actor so that the audience can immediately "know" the person based on their screen persona. That's how Teri Garr, Cheech and Chong, and Catherine O'Hara get their work done. Dunne, Arquette and Fiorentino don't strike one false note (the two ladies are more, ahem, remarkable than I've ever seen them). And doesn't Dunne look remarkably like Dudley Moore when his hair is wet?? Scorsese shows up in the picture in Club Berlin; you see him in a Russian commisar's coat manning the spotlights from on high. That's just what he does in this picture: run things full steam, on high. Michael Ballhaus' camera prowls restlessly. We go from extreme close-ups quick cutting to a point of view that barely stops moving the whole flick, and sometimes moves really fast. The directorial style is incredibly kinetic; there are zooms and tracks and swirls in all sorts of interior dialogue scenes where you really don't expect to see that kind of camera work. It all fits beautifully. Telling montages of sound and image by Thelma Schoonmaker (the rattrap, the paperwork stacking up in the office as Bronson Pinchot talks in the first scene). One of the best pictures of the year. Four stars out of four.