Just rewatched this last night. My wife had never seen it, and I loved it as a teenager. It's not top-tier Scorsese, but it's really well made and a lot of fun. I think he once called it "an exercise in pure style." It's kind of the ultimate '80s yuppie angst movie -- Griffin Dunne's character is afraid he's missing out on life, but everything he does to try to be wild and free just ends up making things worse for him. I'd forgotten how actually dark it is, with a suicide at the center of it, but it keeps kind of a discordantly zany tone the whole way through.
Roger Ebert actually had a pretty good read on it, that it reflected Scorsese's frustration at the time with not being able to get "The Last Temptation of Christ" made -- every time in the movie that Paul thinks he's about to be able to go home, something goes wrong at the last moment.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Thursday, 7 December 2017 14:54 (eight years ago)