After Hours: The movie I would like to live in
Movies are often called the most escapist form of entertainment , or as I see it ,art.This reputation seems to me to be rather limited and , frankly, stupid. More than often people watch movies to have fun, and not to forget about problems and miseries. Granted, for this purpose people take drugs or alcohol ( please, they are NOT the same!), have one night stands, dance all night or apply for overtime at work. That is how one avoids confrontation: by not being there in more than one way.
Anyway, because I have not elected to escape from my grim reality , I love watching movies. I must confess, I stream pretty often, but I am trying to revert to my 3- times- a- week- movie- theater- going self , which is also another of my resolutions for this year. So, I happen to be on line for long hours and I came across this very small, yet interesting, article on The Guardian on the subjetc "in which movie would you live in".
People, this made me think (!), I swear to God!
At first, I thought about the "The Big Sleep" , the greatest of all Bogart-Bacall-Hawks projects ( okay, there were only two colaborations, as they had a falling out right after finishing this movie), based on Raymond Chandler. Bacall is a rich, sexy, and dangerous woman. Bogart is a cynic private detective involved in a complicated investigation. At some point you realise that the crimes are never solved and the plot is more than confusing, but you would not care less, as the atmosphere and characters are what matters. But even on my fantasies I cannot escape reality :I gues I would prefer something that actually resembles my real life, obviously in a more cosmopolitan, glamorous way.
It is such a confused mess, plausible if not only because it is absurd. The project is the brainchild of a demented b-movie author Joseph Minion, who was sued for plagiarism by radio host and bohemian guru Joe Frank. Of course I had to google who Joe Frank was, as I never heard of him, but I am higly impressed with what I found, must I say . And it gets better: it was supposed to be directed by Tim Burton- pre Johny Depp- , the great Michael Powell contributed with one of the best endings ever, Cheech and Chong have a cameo as burgles and the movie has all the flavour of a twisted Alice in Wonderland in New York tale.
Griffin Dunne plays a normal guy, with a normal job, that meets a rather attractive woman ( Rosanna Arquette) in a café. They talk, she gives him her address and he decides to go there that evening to pay a visit and to "buy" one of the artsy paperweight sculptures made by a punk artist ( Linda Fiorentino). He loses his money , cannot pay the taxi and ends up unable to go home for the remainder of the evening. It is not funny, it is not tragic, it is not surreal, it is simply a series of over the top situations combined together that at first do not make any sense at all, but hey, so if life. It is a must simply a must see.