Weird Old New York Movie Club

This week on Weird Old New York Movie Club:

After Hours, a minor work from the lean place in Scorsese’s filmography between The King of Comedy and The Color of Money.

Our hero’s early masterpieces were behind him, and he was an angry young man, trying and failing to get funding for The Last Temptation of Christ, which must have felt impossible. He ended up making some great movies in this period, but after watching again my feeling is that After Hours is not among them. It’s currently on offer on the Criterion Channel, and definitely still worth a watch, resting right in the Venn diagram of two of my favorite things:

After Hours also has a plagiarism issue.

The first thirty minutes of the film, in which Griffin Dunne has an encounter with Rosanna Arquette in a diner, loses a $20 in the back of a speeding cab, and finds himself in a SoHo loft with a partially dressed Linda Fiorentino, was lifted from “Lies,” one of the fascinating radio monologues by Joe Frank. Frank successfully sued, and the screenwriter’s career seemed to end shortly thereafter.

It’s also the best part of the movie, which eventually gets tedious despite regularly recurring flashes of brilliance, like a sequence where punks shave Dunne’s head to the tune of my favorite Bad Brains song.

My friends and I were smitten with Joe Frank in college. Mix tapes were compiled and passed around, and I made my own attempts at aping his style. Below, some of the tapes my friend Noel made, which we would listen to driving around the country on our summer road trips.

Noel lives in southern California and had live access to KCRW in Santa Monica, where Frank, originally a New York guy, was stationed for much of his career. If I hadn’t known Noel, I would never have known about Joe Frank. That’s how life was then. Living in flyover country literally limited the available content.

There’s a documentary about Frank’s work called Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There, but I can’t really recommend it. Instead, if you’re interested, there’s a lot of content on YouTube, and joefrank.com is still there as well. Below, find Lies, the show that inspired the screenwriter of After Hours.

Next on Weird Old New York Movie Club, assuming there is one: a legendarily unwatchable adaptation of a celebrated parody of 80s greed-head culture, so fouled by studio influence and general ineptitude that it somehow backslid into unwatchable conservative jeremiad.

Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee

From the still extant Pitchfork: “Nothing about the presentation of Diamond Jubilee, which they self-released with no promotional campaign, signals a change from that outsider ethos. Aside from its demanding length, there is the question of how to hear it: As of this writing, the only officially sanctioned methods are to download WAV files from a Geocities website in exchange for a $30 suggested donation or cue up a single 2-hour YouTube video with no track breaks.”

This album is playing hard to get, and is worth the effort.

Hey, do you like to read good words?

If so, look into a subscription to Flaming Hydra. The cockeyed kids in this writer-owned collective may not save journalism from the predations of big tech, but goddamn it if they aren’t gonna give it a shot.

Start here, with Jonathan M. Katz’s review of The First 42 Minutes of Oppenheimer, which perfectly sums up the issues with this genre overall.

“Oppenheimer opens with a melancholy shot of rain splashing in a puddle. Next there’s an upward shot of a young-looking Cillian Murphy staring intently, then a slash cut to SFX shots suggestive of the inside of the sun, followed by a quote about Prometheus, which is intelligible only if you know the source material coming in. Finally, we see an inexplicably older-looking Cillian Murphy. All this is set to a soundtrack of discordant strings that sounds like it was written by Hans Zimmer (but wasn’t), and it all communicates the movie’s primary message: that it was written, directed, and produced by Christopher Nolan.”

It just gets better from there.

Ripley on Netflix

Part of what I love about Patricia Highsmith’s fiction is how realistically specific and low-key her plots are. So much depends on getting to the American Express office in Milan before it closes early on a Friday afternoon, or on the unpredictable schedule of the bus on Crete, or the fact that one is required to leave a passport with the concierge when checking into a French hotel. There is occasional violence and scant sex, all handled in a neat little paragraph or two, followed by entire chapters about getting bloodstains out of a carpet, or the discrete disposal of a rented motorboat on the Italian Rivera. Crime procedural isn’t usually my thing, but it’s thrilling in Highsmith’s books because it’s so well done. You can understand what it must be like to be these one of these characters, especially Ripley: brilliant, manipulative, and amoral in an analog mid-century Europe where a talented enough sociopath can get away with quite a lot.

Lesser filmmakers find all of this technical Highsmith stuff anti-cinematic, and have to invent a lot of business for their adaptations. The jazz scenes in the celebrated Minghella version, for instance.

But the new Netflix adaptation gets by on mood. Ripley’s life is solitary, and the soundtrack is mostly echoing ambient room noise. You can positively smell the black mold in the Manhattan SRO where he lives at the beginning of the show, and can hardly help rooting for him to improve his miserable station. By the time he gets to Italy you’re fully inside his head, and surprised to find yourself still sympathetic as you watch him scheme and lie. The series nails what makes the book so readable, and it’s a real pleasure to watch.

I’ve only seen three episodes of the new series, simply titled Ripley, which implies that they could follow up with later books as well, assuming this thing is successful. I hope it is. The New Yorker reviewer found it pretentious, so who knows.

Speaking of Ripley adaptations, have you seen the French entry? No? Well merde, mon frere, I guess it is time for an emergency meeting of the:

Weird Old French Movie Club

Plein Soleil (also known as Purple Noon, Delitto in pieno sole, Full Sun, Blazing Sun, Lust for Evil, or Talented Mr. Ripley) came out in 1960, five years after the publication of the novel. Alain Delon is Ripley in this one, and the role made him a star. You’ll notice from the trailer that this is a more, how you say, hétérosexuel version of Ripley, although when you watch the entire film you’ll find him more of an asexual reptile, more interested in getting into wallets than pants.

The version on the Criterion Channel is gorgeously restored, partially by Scorsese, in fact, with a Technicolor palate that make the Minghella version pale. It leans hard on mismatched passports, easily-distracted hotel inspectors, and credulous bank managers. There’s a forgery tutorial which makes you feel like you could pick up the skill yourself. The ending comes as a surprise if you know the story well, but that’s part of the fun of adaptation: all the artistic choices stand out for consideration.

Again, highly recommended.