goodfellas

And here's an on-topic question to loop it back around: Why did Scorsese pick Sid Vicious' "My Way" for the end credits?

-- Alex in NYC (vassife...) (webmail), August 18th, 2004 10:55 PM. (vassifer) (later) (link)

because both sid vicious and henry hill were self-destructive louts whose following their id only got them into terrible trouble? (also the ironic wink to sinatra--it's a mob movie after all.) it seems a beautifully appropriate choice to me.

btw this movie rules, but casino is even better.

There's an actual would-be-Sinatra character in Goodfellas, that singer at the nightclub.

I saw this movie for the first time in the early nineties, when I was a punk teenager. I immediately loved it and watched it again and again and again. It became the first DVD I ever bought, and will probably become the first DVD that I ever rebuy. The one I have now is a flipper!

I watched it six months ago, half expecting that some of the magic would have dimmed since I'm now a grown man in his thirties. I loved it even more. My favorite movie of all time. Fuck The Godfather.

And Good Lord, fuck After Hours at the same time. Is that all there is? He goes to work covered in paint, huzzah for metaphors.

Oh, and the deleted scenes. I wonder how much is on there? Dammit, I guess I'll have to get this tomorrow.

I can not like it because it's fucking horrible.

How about the mountain of blow scenes in Scarface? They should be up there too.

the obvious being that YOU'RE the dick!!!!

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).

crosspost

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.