Scorsese's funniest movie, this dark comedy follows meek New Yorker Paul (a brilliant Griffin Dunne) as he ventures for a night outside his safety zone in an unknown neighborhood to a date with a cute young woman (Rosanna Arquette) he barely knows. Soon enough events take a dangerous turn: his date is a creepy disaster, he meets increasingly weird individuals, an angry mob mistakes him for a criminal and chases him through the streets as he desperately tries to go home.
The book Paul reads enraptured at the beginning is Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a picaresque novel full of seedy sexual encounters and drunken escapades - that's obviously what Paul was dreaming of, but expectations clash with a dangerous reality he isn't prepared for. Scorsese, Dunne and writer Minion successfully play it for laughs, but Paul's nocturnal adventure has the uncanny quality of a nightmare - it's no coincidence a scene with a nightclub bouncer mirrors Kafka's short story Before The Law. Dunne even kind of looks like a yuppie version of the Czech author.
The ending is a little gem. Through the use of religious imagery - Paul's "resurrection" after getting out of the statue, the bells, the great gate... - the movie ironically implies that Paul, after his disastrous attempt at a new life - which turned out to be a hellish experience - returns to his own personal heaven and benevolent "god", his computer in a pleasantly dull office. Josef K actually finds salvation in bureaucracy this time.
8,5/10
The book Paul reads enraptured at the beginning is Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a picaresque novel full of seedy sexual encounters and drunken escapades - that's obviously what Paul was dreaming of, but expectations clash with a dangerous reality he isn't prepared for. Scorsese, Dunne and writer Minion successfully play it for laughs, but Paul's nocturnal adventure has the uncanny quality of a nightmare - it's no coincidence a scene with a nightclub bouncer mirrors Kafka's short story Before The Law. Dunne even kind of looks like a yuppie version of the Czech author.
The ending is a little gem. Through the use of religious imagery - Paul's "resurrection" after getting out of the statue, the bells, the great gate... - the movie ironically implies that Paul, after his disastrous attempt at a new life - which turned out to be a hellish experience - returns to his own personal heaven and benevolent "god", his computer in a pleasantly dull office. Josef K actually finds salvation in bureaucracy this time.
8,5/10