Sometimes you need to sit down and watch a movie you know it was going to be good. Because you just spent the better part of the day watching an awful Winston Churchill movie. So you look around and realise that Goodfellas is there.
I know that was an entertaining movie to watch, it's not all that entertaining to talk about. Because it's like every other Mafia film ever made.
We get a back story of some random guy's childhood as he grows up working for a monster doing really remedial work. We get introduced to all the other main characters who will be prominent throughout the film including some of his closest friends and colleagues.
Then we have the realisation that a mafia film is framed very similarly to that of a slasher flick. All the characters get introduced, half of them have no characterisation and then we watch as they each get picked off one by one by unfortunate circumstance.
The only difference is that instead of a slasher villain it's just one of the local Mobsters going around and killing everybody. In this case it's ''Joe Pesci'' who's more horrifying than just about any slasher villain.
It's just such a solid movie. Everything fits into place so well, which is funny because from an analysing point of view it's kind of difficult. I only know about the famous camera shot* because so many other people's brought it up. Otherwise I never noticed anything in the movie. You get sucked into it so easily, You don't really want to critique anything because I can't pay attention to the little details.
Except for this one weird part where Robert De Niro's characters talking and you can see this a weird line going down the screen. It's a shot that came off of one of the film Wheels. But it's on no other part of the movie. So it kind of sticks out.
Am I the only one that's weird it out by that ending. Where Ray Liotta character turns to the camera and starts talking directly to the crowd. It felt like something out of Blazing Saddles.
Also Samuel Jackson is in this movie. I never realised that before. I don't know why, he's not a prominent character but he's there enough that you should be able to notice them.
So there's the great debate; ''Is this movie better than the Godfather?''
Personally I think the Godfather still wins out. Both films are technical marvels in the film world. Both movies utilise some of the best actors in their field. But I think the Godfather wins out over all because it has a more iconic score. That's not to say that it makes it any better than Goodfellas, I just happen to think that's one point in its favour. At the end of the day Goodfellas utilises a lot of commercial music. I never feel right about giving a film points for somebody else's work.
Look at Apocalypse Now. It has an impressive film score to but a lot of the music remembered in that film comes from other popular artists. And I'm always more impressed when they can make their own score as opposed to using someone else's.
I also prefer the slightly more romanticised version of the mob depicted in The Godfather as opposed to this film. Although neither one ever betrays the mafia and a more realistic light.
One thing that always bothers me about Mafia films is the reluctance to talk about the drug trade. Now they all make the same statement. ''The mafia never 'legitimately' touched drugs.'' Which is completely wrong.
They're one of the main instigators into why heroin became so prominent in America to begin with. Now a lot of them gave it up after the Feds started cracking down on them and they realise that they could get away with murder easier than they could get away with drug trafficking.
But that was only officially. Every single Mafia Family push drugs. And they used every other ethnic gang to do it.
So whenever that scene pops up in Goodfellas when one of the Mobsters tells Ray Liotta off for selling drugs, there should have been a little monologue expressing how Paul Cicero (played by Paul Sorvino) was probably running his own drug operation and keeping a secret from his boss. With the exception of one Mafia Family** everybody else pretended as if they never touch that trade. It was something of the black sheep of criminal Enterprises in the mafia world. Which is a ridiculous thing to say given that were talking about crimes and they should all be labelled as horrid. But what are you going to do?
*It's that one shot with a main character and his girlfriend are walking through the restaurant and it's all done in one take.
** The Bonanno gang
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