Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/24/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

Griffin Dunne and Teri Garr in After Hours

Cast: Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Tommy Chong, Linda Fiorentino, Teri Garr, John Heard, Cheech Marin, Catherine O'Hara, Dick Miller, Will Patton, Robert Plunket, Bronson Pinchot. Screenplay: Joseph Minion. Cinematography: Michael Ballhaus. Production design: Jeffrey Townsend. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker. Music: Howard Shore.

Martin Scorsese's dark farce After Hours puts protagonist Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) through all the wringers that 1980s New York City could provide. It's often described as "Kafkaesque" with reason: Scorsese borrowed from a Kafka story in the scene in which Paul tries to persuade a doorman to let him into a night club. But it also reflects the director's feelings about being given the runaround by the bureaucracy of the movie business as he tried to get The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) under way. There are those who think After Hours has a misogynistic edge, given that most of Paul's troubles stem from his interactions with women, starting with Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), who flirts with him and sets the whole fantastic plot in motion. But Paul's frantic inability to seize control of events -- some of which, like the loss of his money, are pure accident -- is also to blame. He's an Odysseus blown off course by fate, with the occasional Circe or siren to make things worse.