This week’s episode of Someone Else’s Movie is a little on the short side, since I could only get Ned Benson during a highly regimented studio press day.
But having gotten to know Ned when he brought The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby to TIFF back in 2013, I knew he’d pack as much of himself into a twenty-minute window as humanly possible — and when he said he wanted to talk about Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, I knew we’d be just fine.
That’s because there’s an inherent excitement to any conversation about Scorsese’s 1985 comedy of errors: The thing moves like a freight train, racing alongside Griffin Dunne’s hapless office drone, who heads downtown for a date and almost immediately winds up accused of murder, burglary and who knows what else, pursued through the urban wasteland of pre-Giuliani Manhattan by a delightful ensemble of character actors. So we hit the ground running.
Also, the press day was for Ned’s new film The Greatest Hits, a bittersweet magic-realist romance starring Lucy Boynton, David Corenswet and Justin H. Min, which I wrote about in Shiny Things earlier this month. It’s now streaming on Hulu in the US and Disney+ everywhere else, and you should see it.
For now, though, go listen to Ned’s SEMcast! It’s waiting for you at the usual locations — Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify — or download the episode directly from the web so you have something to listen to as you try to outrun your own angry mob.
And then catch up on your Shiny Things! This week I filed three thousand words on Scorsese’s The Departed and Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy, which came along just when I needed a hit of peerless commercial moviemaking. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next fun thing I write about!