After Hours

Oooh! I haven’t seen that logo in a while…

Oh! And that’s that guy! Only younger!

Don’t recognise that guy…

It’s so odd watching movies from the mid 80s… there’s all these faces that seem immediately familiar, but I can’t place them at all? Looking at the imdb, that must be… Verna Bloom? There was no imdb in those days, so we never knew who anybody was…

This is so… is this really a Scorsese movie!? It’s really not something I’d guess was Scorsese. I’d guess… uhm… Coppola. Yeah. 80s Coppola.

So it’s good instead of sucking, is what I’m saying.

This is a really odd movie. The actors are playing this as if they’re in 1976, while the set decorator and hairdresser are going “YES BITCH THIS IS 1986!!!”. So it seems out of time…

This is a very charming movie. It’s all lower Manhattan at 3AM and not having enough money to go back home. (Because they increased the fare to $1.50.)

(Confusingly enough, home is East 91st Street, which is… walk able. I mean, just an hour and a half. I’ve walked longer. Hm… OK, it might be two hours. That’s a schlep. But it’s flat! Hm… I wanna walk that stretch sometime…)

It get more… allegorical towards the end, I guess? And that’s not as funny. But this is a solid movie. It riveting for the first half, and then it dips, but it’s still charming.

Scorsese’s best movie ever? Probably?

[time passes]

I’m listening to the commentary track now, and Scorsese says the he realised that an era was over and wondered whether his career was over (after The King of Comedy had bombed and his subsequent movie was cancelled). And this movie was made under that cloud: A smaller, simpler, cheaper movie to prove a point.

It’s not really a normal commentary track — they’ve interviewed apparently everybody involved, and drop in their voices at various points. It’s interesting — the cinematographer explains how much of the film was filmed in f2.4 etc just because he didn’t have the time or the budget to light it properly.

The commentary from Michael Ballhaus is especially poignant — he’s talking about doing Gangs of New York with a crew 10x the size, and being nostalgic for the days of Fassbinder and this film…

Anyway, this is really good.

After Hours. Martin Scorsese. 1985. ⚄