goodfellas

This is the key point I think, no-one, other than say Jonathan Demme or Tarantino can use popular music as a plot device as well as Scorsese. Take the music away it's a fine, well acted, above average mob movie. Put the soundtrack in, it's elevated to a work of genius. Whenever I hear the piano coda of 'Layla' I immediately think of the corpse swimming through the trash (and what a duffer the rest of Clapton's catalogue is).

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And aside from my dislike of it on an aesthetic and emotional level, there's the whole rhetoric that surrounds it, which works on two levels. The first is the whole "oh but they're gangsters and cool and romantic and italian and just cool and it's such a cool film man I loe it when he shoves that thing in the back of the guy's neck" which is pretty easy to dismiss because it's utterly superficial. And then there's the level above that, which is what Henry's just wandered into, which is the use of film school technical talk to justify liking the film and take the film from being "a film I like" to "a great film", which then engenders a belief in the person delivering the rhetoric that it's absolutely impervious to criticism and that anybody who disagrees is just plain wrong and their opinion not worth considering. That whole "oh but the mis-en-scene is so great, and the lighting on the car outside the house and the way this shot cuts into the next and so on and the way blahblahblah", yes, technically it might be very well put together but that does NOT mean that everyone MUST necessarily like it. And that out-of-hand dismissal of someone else's opinion because you believe yours to be based in fact is total fucking rockism.

And I'm not saying that GF or TD are in themselves "lazy cultural experiences", because I'm not sure anything of itself it, but the way the rhetoric that surrounds these films directs the discourse of them suggests a lazy cultural experience on the part of many people viewing them, because they've already been canonised as 'classic' people simply sit and watch them and accept that classic status and repeat it by rote, instead of trying to actually engage with the film themselves. It's second-hand reactiosn to things, received wisdom masquerading as insight.

(Goodfellas, come on, it doesn't say "fuck you" to the old guard, it is itself the last of the truly clichéd self-satirizing stupid old mob movies unless you count Casino except Casino is great. Fuck it, I just hate most trad-mob movies I guess).

on review: Nick OTM esp. re: Pesci.

(I love heat too)

I would really like someone to point me towards any of these films where that ISN'T the case. I mean any story about mobsters spanning multiple decades is going to be shit at the end, there is nothing climactic about watching some wiseguy get old, lose his edge and get thrown in the clink / murdered by his own stooges / enter the witness protection program. This is why Scarface is the best one, it goes out on a high note, you don't have to sit through a bunch of Tony and Manolo's midlife anecdotes or a succession of pointless relationships with mousy gold-digging bitches.

I think I see what Nick is saying about Goodfellas, and that goes for a lot of other similar movies with me as well. At the end of the day it's still a story about an asshole and his asshole friends, I mean Ray Liotta as Henry Hill has to be one of the least compelling characters I've ever seen, the fucking rat should get beaten to death.

DeNiro and Pacino are great because they can play these asshole characters and make them incredibly compelling, Pesci less so but still about a thousand times better than Ray fucking Liotta. I guess since Henry Hill is himself a pathetic excuse for a human being it's appropriate to cast the most uncharismatic man this side of the Baldwin brothers to play him but that does not make it any more enjoyable. Then again if you are watching Goodfellas for Ray Liotta you need your head examined.

What I've learned from this thread: Gangster movies need more 80s music. Did you know Brian DePalma directed the video for "Dancing In The Dark?"

That's all you took from the film? You're a bozo.

"Goodfellas" is a great film, as I've said, but it's just yet another mob movie. Do we really need more of those?

Also Heat is a Michael Mann film, why are we talking about Heat at all, briefly?

xpost or lots of blood and drugs, see also Scarface!