[ad_1]
It’s Martin Scorsese in September at the Coolidge Corner Theater. Last Friday the night screening of his 1976 nighttime masterpiece “Taxi Driver” kicked off for a month. retrospective initially planned for April 2020. Eight more favorites will follow from America’s greatest living filmmaker, with “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” securing prime-time evening slots as part of Coolidge’s Classics on the big screen series and the other six that take place after hours in the “Marty after midnight”, A time of day perhaps best suited to spend with the director’s haunted night owls and nervous insomniacs. (Everything except “The King of Comedy” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” will be screened on 35mm film.)
Two of the lesser-known images of the Coolidge program actually take place after midnight. The dizzying, exasperating 1985 years “After hours”Is an anomaly in Scorsese’s canon in that it is a full-fledged, albeit extremely nervous, comedy following a tense yuppie (Griffin Dunne) stuck in SoHo after a bad rendezvous, enduring a surreal series of growing misfortunes. 1999 “Bring out the dead”Is one of the filmmaker’s most misunderstood and underestimated works, the moving and sickly story of a paramedic (Nicolas Cage) suffering from a nervous breakdown while working nights in early New York. of the 90s ravaged by the crack epidemic.
Scorsese was almost done in Hollywood when he did “After Hours”. Ballooning budgets and cocaine addiction had torpedoed his career, with 1982’s intensely alienating “The King of Comedy” arriving as if to signal its director’s mental and physical collapse, prompting Paramount to end weeks of pre-production on his dream project, “The Last Temptation of Christ. (This would be done years later at Universal, but that’s a whole different story.)“ After Hours ”was the spiritual reboot of a newly Scorsese. sober, returning to his roots at NYU film school by shooting a low-budget, guerrilla-style independent film on the streets of New York at night. The script was a class assignment for the college student Columbia, Joseph Minion, and the $ 5 million production was done for a fraction of the director’s usual budgets.
It’s one of Scorsese’s sleekest and most propulsive entertainments, with the camera circling Dunne’s cabin drone as it is drawn into the city center, siren-like, by the Rosanna Arquette’s screwed seductress. There is a precision of clockwork in the way things in the film go from bad to worse, not a line of dialogue that does not turn in on itself as our protagonist finds himself broken and deprived, every attempt to return to the thwarted Upper West Side until he’s finally mistaken for a neighborhood prowler, chased like Fritz Lang’s “M” through those eerily empty streets by a mob of vigilantes in an ice cream truck Mr. Softee.
Cruelest of comedies, “After Hours” makes me laugh so hard I can barely breathe. However, not everyone has this reaction. I knew a guy in college who couldn’t stand being in the room every time we watched him because the movie made him so anxious, and in his original four star review Roger Ebert nevertheless confessed: “There was a moment, two-thirds of the way, where I wondered if maybe I should leave the theater and collect my thoughts and come back later for the rest of the ‘comedy’. . the rig is programmed to stomp on your nerve endings, leaving you all coiled up for 97 minutes with no relief.
Some theorize that the film’s deeper meaning can be found in its paraphrase of a passage from Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”, with what researchers call the “Before the Law” parable now delivered by a distant bouncer preventing Dunne from hide inside a punk rock club on “Mohawk Night”. While it is true that “After Hours” shares the monolithic paranoia of the cursed Czech writer, when it comes to the explanations, I am a supporter of an image found inside this nightclub. Up in the rafters above a chain-link fenced mosh pit where neon-haired revelers dance and try to scalp each other, take a close look and you’ll see Martin Scorsese himself, wearing a general’s uniform and orchestrate mayhem with a handheld searchlight. Then he throws it into the lens, blinding us.
When I mentioned the Coolidge series to my old film school roommate, he told me it was ideal programming “because nobody should watch ‘Bringing Out the Dead’ before midnight”. Bringing together Scorsese with his screenwriter “Taxi Driver”, “Raging Bull” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” Paul Schrader, the 1999 release was one of the box office surprise bombs of the season, grossly written off by critics. more in love with silly movies like “American Beauty” and “The Cider House Rules”. (A writer for the newspaper where I worked at the time took great pleasure in pointing out how “washed up” Scorsese and Schrader were. Twenty years later, the two are still doing some of the most vital work of their careers, while I am I’m afraid the same cannot be said about this particular paper.)
Based on an autobiographical novel by former ambulance driver Joe Connelly, the film stars Nicolas Cage as Frank Pierce, a burnt wreck haunted by the ghosts of all deceased patients under his watch. Unlike his callous colleagues (a trio of stage thieves played by John Goodman, Ving Rhames and Tom Sizemore), Frank cannot cut off compassion, brimming with empathy for the doomed inhabitants of these wicked streets in spectacularly self-defeating conditions. fashion. He’s an adrenaline junkie, addicted to the divine complex of saving lives and then blaming himself when there’s nothing to be done. Frank calls himself “a mop,” and when we meet him he’s all wrung out.
This is perhaps Scorsese’s most manic film, with cinematographer Robert Richardson casting harsh halos of white-heated light over the top of the actors’ heads, cascading around their shoulders as neon lights blur in the puddles of water in the city streets. Schoonmaker’s cutout is as erratic as Frank’s POV, disjunctively doubling through crossfades so that we sometimes see things from multiple angles at once. Every now and then the camera flips sideways or upside down, with Van Morrison’s hissing and nauseating ‘TB leaves’ creeping over and over the soundtrack, his screaming harmonica replacing the siren of the soundtrack. ‘ambulance.
“Bringing Out the Dead” deserves its Monty Python derivative title with a gallows humor streak. (Cage even muffles the line “he’s improved” from “Holy Grail.”) There are some horribly funny musical clues, like when the camera slides over the remains of a tropical aquarium that was shot down during ‘a shootout, its former inhabitants collapsing to death on the ground to the bouncy beat of UB40’s “Red Red Wine”. My favorite is when first responders release a drug dealer impaled on a wrought iron balcony fence, sparks from their acetylene torch spreading across New York City skyline like the iconic fireworks display of “Manhattan. “by Woody Allen. Scorsese even debuts a preview clip of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” on the soundtrack to hammer home the gag.
Schrader’s script emphasizes religious references, with characters named Mary and Noel unfolding the action over three days, like the stretch from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. This mix of dark comedy and the Bible sometimes gives the impression that Scorsese is trying to do a sequel to “After Hours” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” at the same time. But, of course, the main text referenced here is “Taxi Driver,” with Scorsese and Schrader reunited 23 years later to tell the story of yet another case of insomnia rolling around New York City late at night, except this times instead of an avenging angel, he is on a mission of mercy.
It’s a touching attempt by two guys who hit their mid-50s trying to rework the model that made them famous from an older, more compassionate perspective. (It’s worth noting that this time around, their hero saves the life of the drug trafficker pimp instead of blowing it off.) In Frank’s absolution at the end, we can see the advice that Scorsese and Schrader likely wish they could. go back and give their youngest myself. “Nobody asked you to suffer,” he was told. “It was your idea.”
“After hours“Screened at the Coolidge Corner Theater on Saturday, September 11.”Bring out the dead“follows Saturday September 24.
[ad_2]
Source link