Some Thoughts About After Hours (1985)

This one’s Martin Scorsese’s weird one, apparently made when he had his Last Temptation of Christ project yanked out from under him just before shooting was supposed to begin, and before he had found a new home for it. Obviously, the next logical step when confronted with the failure of a project of particular personal importance is to make a bizarre comedy about white collar worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) visiting a pretty woman (Rosanna Arquette) in Soho only to drift into the bizarre dark comedy version of a Hitchcock plot about an innocent man hunted for something he didn’t do. There’s a bit of suicide and the threat of a lynching to make the stakes high in a way that does remind of Jonathan Demme in this stage of his career a bit, but predominantly this is a film about utter confusion, our protagonist having stumbled into a night world whose social cues he just isn’t able to read, and whose godhood (I’d bet on the good old cruel humorous universe) really has got it in for him tonight.

Paul gets stripped of money early on, and bodily safety quickly follows. Every offer of help only leads to another cruel twist that slowly begins to erode his sanity too, with the obstacles he encounters becoming in equal parts increasingly absurd and threatening.

What makes After Hours special – and a rather difficult film to actually enjoy watching – is how much effort Scorsese puts into making the audience feel just as violently ripped out of the world they know and – presumably – understand as Dunne’s character is. While this is a comedy, it is very much one that’s out to disquiet and unroot the viewer, and as such, it’s not the kind of fun you’d usually seek in films called comedies. The trick Scorsese uses is to film the comedy with all the stylistic elements of a classic thriller (poor old Hitchcock comes to my mind again), using the genre assumptions certain ways to edit, pace and stage scenes carry against the audience’s sense of security until, just like Hackett, every situation feels wrong, potentially dangerous, and impossible to understand.

In short: Gangs of New York (2002)

For quite a few people (particularly those that didn’t already throw their hands up in disgust over Casino, which I rather love), though certainly not all, this seems to be the film where Martin Scorsese lost it. Me, coming to it after a decade or so of thinking they were right, think these people, and therefore yesterday’s me, are dead wrong, and this just might be one of the man’s masterpieces. Fortunately, we still can look down on The Aviator.

There’s no need to go into technical accomplishments, I think, but it seems rather important to me to emphasise how much this is the perfect, horrifying, pretty damn apocalyptic epos of how the US look from over here: a place divided by tribal lines of race everybody is always on about but only wants to change by kicking other people in the dirt, and by lines of class everybody pretends don’t exist; a place that channels its guilt and its pressures into horrifying outbursts of ritualistic violence that also just happen to distract the people involved in them from what’s really going on around them. Not that Europe 2015 and our willingness to let people just die at our doorsteps and to only ever take an interest in our own catastrophes looks much better there, mind you.

Gangs takes this basic fact about America and rams it home in exhausting, sometimes exhilarating, generally operatic and often terrifying ways with a combination of highly stylized yet pretty perfect acting performances, the technical accomplishments I’m not mentioning, and an often surprising streak of compassion that’s never undermining the horrors of the film (as a film about systemic horror, this is as much a horror film as Halloween is, just about a different kind of horror) but helps to avoid cynicism and provides humanity in places where you’d least expect it. And while Marty’s at it, he also deconstructs a classic tale of revenge (or rather, crushes it under the boot heel of history), and breaks every thinking viewer’s heart.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,drama,crime,martin scorsese,leonardo dicaprio,daniel day-lewis,cameron diaz

Three Films Make A Post: One Cop. One Vigilante. Alone, they're unstoppable. Together, they're invincible!

Hugo (2011): Now, it would be quite easy to put on my cynical hat here and treat this as your typical Oscar bait movie, seeing as it contains children, is a heart-warming hymn on the art of film making, and has a very self-conscious happy end where everyone and everything wins. However, that’s not at all how Hugo feels to me. Instead, I see a heart-felt film made with all the love Scorsese so obviously feels for the history of movies and specifically Georges Méliès, created with a loving hand primarily for the eyes of his daughter. It’s a film whose happy end incorporates the sides of life that aren’t happy at all, a film that implies one of the things that makes us love art is its ability to fix the wrongs and injustices of life in it, seeing cinema’s happy ends as a way to push us into making happy ends in the world too.

Out of the Dark (2014): Director Lluís Quílez’s attempt to crack the US market is certainly a technically accomplished film but for a movie featuring the basic creepy menace of ghost children with rags on their faces, it feels surprisingly harmless, with little content that could actually disturb. That might be on account of the highly basic nature of its characterizations (seriously, could Julia Stiles and Scott Speedman be any blander?), and the obvious and predictable nature of every little thing that happens in it.

While I don’t exactly need everything grim and gritty (as my appreciation of Hugo shows), I’d also have wished for the film’s resolution to have felt less like an afternoon special and more like something with actual emotional impact, but then, that would – again – have needed some actual character work or depth, and that’s not something this particular film seems comfortable with.

The ABCs of Death 2 (2014): As a concept, this anthology movie series really is difficult to beat, because while you won’t like everything in here, the shortness of each single piece makes it difficult to become too annoyed by the ones you don’t like. Among the 26 short films here, there’s the stupid, the silly, the misanthropic, the clever, the disquieting and the gosh-darn bizarre, mixed via the awesome powers of the alphabet, and created by directors from all over the globe. To my tastes, there’s a lot more to like than to dislike here. At least, I found myself in turn laughing, shaking my head, looking puzzled and feeling mildly disgusted, and what more could I ask from a project like this?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,colombian movies,drama,fantasy,comedy,horror,martin scorsese,ben kingsley,lluís quílez,julia stiles,scott speedman

Three Films Make A Post: Some Things Shouldn't Be Disturbed…

No Such Thing (2001): Hal Hartley's movies are always problematic. On one hand, the man has a fantastic, personal sense of visual poetry and the ability to let actors shine doing non-naturalistic, yet deeply human feeling acting (just look at how fantastic, glowing Sarah Polley is here and compare with her performance in Splice!). On the other hand, he is a purveyor of the sort of clichéd and hackneyed culture (and worse media) critique certain art house directors (see also the insufferable Wim Wenders) confuse with depth. In No Such Things both sides of Hartley collide with a vengeance, but the director's better nature wins out for long enough stretches that I don't regret having watched the film. Still, thinking about what Hartley could accomplish if he'd apply his talents to the exploration of more interesting ideas than he usually does makes me a little bit sad.

 

Salt (2010): This is an ultra slick, competent and theoretically extremely entertaining big costly Hollywood spy action movie that has a plot as ridiculously unbelievable as any Bond movie with Roger Moore (just more complicated), although it's trying its hardest to pretend it's as clever and down to earth as a Bourne movie (and what does it say about Hollywood spy movies that the Bourne movies are as down to earth as they come?).

So far, so fun. Unfortunately, Salt is also a morally bankrupt hymn to the idea that the end justifies the means (quite unlike the Bourne movies who have a moral backbone) as probably befits a film coming from a country with government sanctioned torture. Which sort of ruins the fun. Completely.

 

Shutter Island (2010): Following the line of mediocre films Martin Scorsese had churned out this century, I had mostly given up on the director. Turns out that I was like one of those guys hating on Bob Dylan during the 80s - not wrong, but way too pessimistic.

Shutter Island is quite brilliant - a film that takes a preposterous plot (especially once the final reveal comes around) and makes it work through a peculiar combination of a sense of history (public and personal) and Scorsese's own private brand of operatic artificiality. It should be ridiculous, and yet it's pretty damn great.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,hal hartley,phillip noyce,martin scorsese,spies,arthouse,thriller,sarah polley,angelina jolie,leonardo dicaprio,in short