After Hours (1985)

Hank_Jones

Just wondering if anyone has seen this?

Watched it last night and thought it was fairly awful.
Fantastic camera work (Scorsese directs), but it seriously lacks a good storyline.
The lead actor (Griffin Dunne) is also quite poor imo.

Opinions?

delbertgrady

I think it divides viewers. The first time I saw it, about twenty years ago, I thought it was awful, and utterly pointless, with a very frustrating and unsatisfactory ending. Now I think it's an underrated classic, and one of Scorsese's more interesting films. After the commercial and (at the time) critical failure of The King of Comedy, he was keen to shoot something quick and for a very low budget, so in that sense it owes more (from a production point of view) to his very early films. The kamikaze style also suits the material. It's almost like a surreal French black comedy from the late sixties/early seventies.
I think Griffin Dunne is perfect for it. He has a sort of everyman quality. Also, there is a pretty good in-joke when Teri Garr starts dancing around, asking "Do you like the Monkees?", since she was in their superb 1968 film, Head.