After Hours

In the late-'70s, Martin Scorsese buried the stress of his work and a series of critical disappointments in a mountain of cocaine. When he experienced setbacks in the early '80s, he made After Hours. I'm still trying to figure out which response is more wild. After Hours exists to prove that Taxi Driver actually displayed some restraint. Its vision of New York crosses that Rubicon into madness and never looks back.

After delving into the psyches of his characters for a decade, Scorsese created a screwball version of his work, expelling his anger over Paramount's shutdown of The Last Temptation of Christ mere weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. Sometimes, it's all you can do to laugh. That is not to say, however, that the film is without meaning. At times, it dips into unexpected poignancy, and even when it's being madcap and disjointed, the subjects it broaches are too severe to be considered mere farce.

If After Hours is "about" something, it is a frenzied visualization of the truth that entirely different worlds exist just outside our set paths. We tend to get trapped in routines; Thoreau even gave up his natural experiment at Walden when he realized he'd managed to create a pattern of familiarity in the wilderness. For someone like Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), a word processor who moves solely from his cushy but dull office job to a clean apartment in a nice part of town, a reminder that one used to be able to get a decent place in New York for less than an arm and a leg before the place was scrubbed down with bleach.

After Hours very much captures the manic world just outside the "safe zones" of '80s New York; though it never references crack or poverty, the film visualizes the outlaw nature of the town that put off so many outsiders but gave its residents a badge of honor. But not everyone deserves it, as Paul demonstrates: he's never had to deal with the so-called "real New York," and the taste he gets in one crazy night ensures he'll never seek it out again. Hell, considering his night starts when a woman (Rosanna Arquette) chats him up in a diner, Paul might swear off ladies for a while, too.

The lady, Marcy, woos Paul with the promise of paperweights designed by her sculptress roommate Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino). Who could resist such a girl? Paul, being a man, agrees to go back to her place after midnight, but when he arrives at the spacious, dingy loft and meets the kinky Kiki and starts learning things about Marcy that made the head tilt involuntarily, he recognizes his mistake. For the rest of the film, Paul simply tries to get home, but he soon finds himself trapped in the mire of the undercity, running panicked through a nightmare one would call Kafkaesque even if it didn't quote from some of the author's works.

As in Taxi Driver, the streets spew steam from sewer holes. I have been to New York only one time in my life, but my favorite sight by far was not Broadway or the Statue of Liberty but a burst bit of concrete from which steam billowed. Everyone gathered around that urban geyser, tourists not weaned on Scorsese's acid visions of the city completely flummoxed. The natives had a look on their faces of a memory struggling its way against the current to get to the tip of the tongue, as if these people were meeting a friend they hadn't seen in so long they couldn't quite recognize him. Those steam vents feel like portals to some ancient, dormant but still alive force below, giving the city an almost European feel -- Paris has its catacombs below the surface, London buildings are made in the ashes of centuries-old architecture that vanished in an inferno at some time or another.

Where this hellish vision was more obviously Travis' view of the city's filth, Paul's perception of the streets is trickier: a skittish man, Paul regards his surroundings with paranoid suspicion long before anything happens. But that opinion appears justified when he winds up losing his money, witnessing a suicide, being mistaken for a burglar and ultimately chased by a mob. However, it's possible that Paul's view of these events is his unconscious escalation of every occurrence to match the expectation of danger he places upon them.

After all, the only reason any of the disparate events are connected in this film is because they happen to or around Paul, and he begins to suspect they're all linked in some supernatural conspiracy against him. That's the thing about a big city: you're never really not being watched by someone, and some people can't take that kind of pressure.

Around Paul moves the camera, which almost never stops and showcases the fullest extent of the director's abilities. He times an absurdly fast crane shot to follow a set of keys falling to the ground, follows a $20 bill flying in the wind, circles around Paul like a predator stalking its prey and uses fast motion instead of the lingering slow-motion of Taxi Driver. It makes sense: Travis soaks in his hate, while Paul's heart races and he looks for an escape.

This frenzy allows Scorsese to whip up tangents of sexual confusion and confidence, introversion, even a blindness to class relations. This is a twisted movie intended to evoke some bitter laughs, but just as The King of Comedy displayed a wickedly satiric edge to Scorsese, so too does this movie root its comedy in real feelings that make the bile stick. After Hours contains elements of most of Scorsese's films to that point, from the empty bar that resembles the hangout in Mean Streets after everyone finally stumbles home to sexually insecure paranoia of Raging Bull. It's a palate cleanser, something that allowed Scorsese to figure out where he was at during a tumultuous time and to find the way forward.

That desire to keep moving is reflecting in one of the film's few moments of calm in the eye of the storm. Paul mentions to a male prostitute (who believes Paul wants his services) that he just wants to go home. "Why can't you?" the man asks. Paul tries to relate all that's happened to him, but the camera edits over him. There's no sense in dwelling on the past. Or maybe the story's so damn ludicrous even Scorsese can't think about it. And to reinforce the dark comedy of it all, Paul speaks in front of a brick wall as if delivering a comic routine. When the circular punchline comes, you get the feeling you've just watched someone try to make a movie out of the Aristocrats joke.

Machete

When first announced, Machete, the full-length adaptation of the fake trailer Robert Rodriguez placed before his Grindhouse entry, it seemed but the latest in a slew of projects the director proposed whilst wearing his Bad Idea Jeans. Everyone wanted him to finally get down to Sin City 2, the sequel to what is to date Rodriguez's sole work to be completely successful from start to finish, and instead he seemingly went out of his way to bore his fanbase with projects no one cared about.

Now don't we all look foolish?

Somehow, Machete is by far the best film Rodriguez has made since Sin City, and even a sizable improvement over the Grindhouse contribution that helped spark this movie. Where Planet Terror contented itself to slop red corn syrup by the bucket, Machete takes advantage of the hilariously stilted politics of old exploitation movies to get across a pointed attack at current fearmongering regarding illegal immigration without having to bother with anything so inconvenient as subtlety. Rodriguez wants us to know that the true enemies are within, and they have access to a lot more capital and resources than a day laborer just looking to make a new life for himself. Naturally, the director proves this point with a machete-wielding ex-Federale who destroys half of Texas to enlighten it.

Danny Trejo always makes an impression, with his pockmarked face opening up crevasses for untold pain to pool and insinuate itself onto an audience. He's a fearsome looking man, yet one feels instant sympathy for him, a sympathy that he can then subvert and pervert until he projects an intimidating aura that overpowers even his striking appearance. When we first meet him, he's still a cop in Mexico fighting the drug cartels (led by Torrez, inexplicably played by Steven Seagal, who is so hammy that he seems to have put on weight from his own overacting). Despite being a lawman, he's already a legend and nothing short of ruthless when confronted by criminals, but when a rescue goes awry, Machete watches Torrez kill his wife and say that he did the same to the Federale's daughter before leaving the heartbroken man to die in a burning building.

Of course, the elements of nature are no match for Trejo's leather hide, and he makes his way to America, where he works quietly as a day laborer until being picked up by a shady businessman (Jeff Fahey) and receiving a large sum of money to assassinate State Sen. John McLaughlin, who is tragically not a jazz guitarist but an open racist who promotes a zero tolerance policy on illegals. Machete doesn't seem too thrilled, but he knows that, despite the payment, he has no choice in the matter, and he also does not seem all that surprised when he learns that the assignment is a setup that frames Machete in order to sway public support for harsh immigration law.

Plot twists continue to pile up, but Rodriguez clearly intends this 15-minute chunk of setup to represent everything you really need to know about the story. All that comes later is just icing on the expository cake, designed mainly to show off a packed cast of mainly Latino actors, as well as a few surprise heavy-hitters. Michelle Rodriguez plays Shé, a revolutionary who has organized a network of immigrants and those sympathetic to the cause in preparation for the inevitable race war. By day, she runs a taco truck, constantly visited by an immigration control officer, played by Jessica Alba, who suspects "Luz" of being Shé. Jeff Fahey reprises his role from the trailer as the businessman and election manager who orchestrates the failed assassination to ensure the senator's reelection and the building of a border fence, and Robert De Niro, of all people, plays the senator. Even crazier, it's probably the most committed he's been to a role in years, taking to the affected twang of the rich Ivy Leaguer posing as a good ol' boy (sound familiar?) with a relish for character acting that's been so absent from his contemporary work. Most interesting among the casting choices is the deliberately unmarketed appearance by Lindsay Lohan. She plays a young woman with a spiraling drug problem and a penchant for exposing herself on the Internet, thus proving that Lindsay Lohan is more dedicated a method actor than Daniel Day-Lewis.

Everyone knows exactly what this movie is, and they're decent enough to still pretend to take it seriously without lazily winking at the audience. Only a gag involving guards letting Machete past them because he claims to be a gardener comes off as an openly acknowledged moment of metafiction. The rest is just glorious madness, with such audacious bits as a cleverly hid cell phone on a nude woman to a seemingly pointless bit of dialogue about the length of the human intestine shortly before Machete improvises a rope to rappel down a hospital building. The violence is broken up by stilted speeches about tolerance and political strife, delivered almost to the camera in tried and true exploitation fashion. Still, the old exploitation movies were so open about their politics because they came out in times of uncertainty, and with the Tea Party twisting the Republican party even more into an entity that worships the rich and stokes the fires of xenophobia and racism, maybe the sight of a senator shooting illegals and burning DVDs of it for his biggest corporate donors does not seem so absurd after all.

But let's get real. The draw of Machete is the action, cartoony yet well choreographed, from gritty close combat to blood-splattering machine gun assaults. How can you hold back raucous laughter when Machete leads a convoy of low-riders, all of which bounce, to battle against a Minutemen-like group of ultra-racists who patrol the border shooting anyone who so much as has a nice tan? And who doesn't admire the goofy wit of a director who would stage a death involving impalement with a meat thermometer followed by an explosion that leaves the poor man charred as the mercury in the thermometer rockets upward?

Rodriguez has always aimed for the middle ground between intelligence and lowbrow, but he usually hits the lower mark. Machete, like Sin City and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, finds just the right balance, paced well and endearingly quirky while still amounting to little more than a series of explosions, hacked-off limbs and popping squibs. Rodriguez will never approach the level of his friend Tarantino as a silly-serious filmmaker, but films like Machete remind me why I still look forward to his new movies every now and then. It does not break the fourth wall as often as the last neo-exploitation movie, Black Dynamite, and because of that it works better as an actual film, even if it's just as absurd as Michael Jai White's vehicle. The silliness only makes the gore go down more smoothly, and Machete surely ranks as one of the bigger surprises of the weak mainstream offerings of the year.