After Hours
(Martin Scorsese 1985)
Alice Doesn't Live Here AnymoreBringing Out the DeadThe King of ComedyKundunThe Age of Innocence "Overlooked Masterpiece", "Underrated Masterpiece", "Ignored Masterpiece"... poor Scorsese. It seems all his lesser known films are being unfairly shunned! Could After Hours be another under-appreciated masterpiece? Once again, let's look to imdb for the definitive answer.
Oh the humanity! Shame on you film loving world! SHAME!
Okay, serious review time. Is
After Hours really a masterpiece? Well lemme put it this way, if you called it a 'minor-masterpiece' I wouldn't call you crazy.
To me After Hours felt like Scorsese was challenging himself... trying to see how much he could do and how little he could do it with. The film has no major names in it (well, nobody on the "De Niro" level anyways), it didn't have a big budget (4.5M), and the locations are simple and there's not many of them. A small scale production with big ambitions.
It's one of those films that starts simply and gets more and more twisted as it goes along, and it's up to Scorsese not to lose control... and he doesn't. It's a comedy with a mad intensity to it. Funny and suspenseful at the same time. Paul Hackett meets a woman one night at a coffee shop, he get's her number, and later that evening he joins up with her at her apartment. The next few hours of his life are like some zany nightmare. And yet somehow this movie more than just a spectacle. I was really wrapped up in what was going on, crazy as it got.
Now that I know what to expect from After Hours if I were to watch it again I think I'd like it even more. One this is for sure, it's not some stupid acid-trip freak out movie that doesn't make sense. It weird sure, but accessible too.
Who Killed Vincent Chin (Christine Choy & Renee Tajima-Pena, 1987)
This academy-award nominated documentary is about the murder of Chinese-American citizen that occured at a strip club in Michigan. At that time there was a recession in the country, and Japanese automakers were flooding the market with cheap cars. It was taking a toll on the local workforce. An argument broke out in a bar one night, and Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat because his attackers thought he was Japanese. Or at least that's the way some people tell it.
What's true for sure is that Ronald Ebens, a white family man working for Chrysler at the time, plead guilty to manslaughter and served absolutely no jail time whatsoever and was fined $3000. The Chin family and supporters took the case to the federal level, and after initially receiving a guilty verdict in their favour, upon retrial Ebens was found not guilty. Again, he has never served any jail time for his crime, which he admitted to.
This documentary covers many different sides of the story. You hear from Ebens himself, his family, Chin's Mother, the judge who gave Ebens a slap on the wrist, reporters, eye-witnesses, police. It's very thorough, AND very well put together. The whole thing just makes you shake your head as you watch it. What blew me away was that Ebens didn't seem to be the least bit remorseful. He admitted he did it, he says it never should've gotten that far, he admits he was drunk... and yet, I got no sense that he was sorry. The guy murdered a man... he should be in jail but isn't. What more can you say about it? It's bullshit!
Very good documentary.
| IMDB link |
Verdict: Who Killed Vincent Chin is an excellent doc, but also very straightforward. If you've seen it once, you've seen it enough. It's unfortunate that I'm going to have to kick it out, while being forced to advance films like
Bird and
Power & Water. Such is the bracket life. *sigh*
After Hours is neat. I could see it having a pretty good run in the brackets, lest it runs into a powerhouse film. For a cinephile I think it has a lot to offer.
After Hours moves on. My apologies to the documentary genre.