Goodfellas: Best Movie Ever

GoodFellas is a masterpiece. Yet, I still rank it behind Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Casino and After Hours.

I think Goodfellas is one of the most entertaining movies ever made. But it doesn't move me, it doesn't offer me any particular perspective that sticks with me or makes me contemplate it at all once it's over.


It honestly not even close to my favorite Scorsese, which is Mean Streets, and in my estimation, that's the greatest mob story in film history.


'You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it'


Now that's how you start a mob picture.


The rest is bullshit

I also prefer Miller's Crossing, just to start.
It's hard to say why I don't like it. But it's about liking or enjoying the experience of watching a movie, and I just don't with this one. It feels like a technical remake of the much more enjoyable The Color Of Money, but instead just following sleazy people around through their sleazy days. I know I didn't like the third act much. And the rest of the movie is just sleazing around with sleazy people. I actually thought Casino was a more effective take on the Sleazing Around With Sleazy People sub-genre, at least compared to Goodfellas.
Also, I never liked Ray Liotta as an actor. He always feels like he's acting to me never like he is the character.
All that said, I was clear I think it's a very good movie, I just really don't LIKE it. Sleazing around with sleazy people is ok for 90-120 minutes maybe but at 146 it's just too many sleazy minutes. And, as I said, I thought the third act had very little gas outside of Pesci's comeuppance.
Yeah, just not my cup of tea but I wouldn't speak badly of it.

I think what makes GoodFellas so great isn't the subject matter, particularly, or who or what the characters are and do. It's the visual storytelling, which in many ways represents peak Scorsese.

This video has some good examples of how the camerawork and editing are so important, and the ways in which they are so uniquely well-matched to the story being told:

If you want to know a film's flaws, make a thread titled "Best film ever."

I agree but I think he actually used all of this in The Color Of Money which, to me, is a much more interesting film.

>I think Goodfellas is one of the most entertaining movies ever made. But it doesn't move me, it doesn't offer me any particular perspective that sticks with me or makes me contemplate it at all once it's over

I'm not seeing the problem here. I don't think it's required for a movie to "make me think" and I often get tired of movies that are clearly trying to do so. I'm at the point where I'm not going to change my perspective because of a movie's message anyway. If a movie entertained you then it did its job. The whole "makes me think" thing is entirely in the head of the audience.

>If you want to know a film's flaws, make a thread titled "Best film ever."

Seriously. I'd be just fine if I never see phrases like "best ever" or "of all time" ever again. It's the most annoying trope of all time.

>I agree but I think he actually used all of this in The Color Of Money which, to me, is a much more interesting film.

A strange comparison since I feel Color of Money is one of the more Un-Scorsese-like films in his collection. And by that I mean I don't feel this movie has the usual flourishes with quick camera cuts and music drops and way of speaking that are usually in all his films. It feels like he went out of his way to film it as a "normal" movie. You could watch it and not even realize Scorsese did it.

An even stranger comparison, since no one I know of has ever - even jokingly - suggested that it is the "best movie ever"

>since no one I know of has ever - even jokingly - suggested that it is the "best movie ever"

I'm not taking any of the "best ever" talk seriously. It's just a millenial phrase sprung from the internet's obsession with exaggeration for the sake of attention. I assume no one means it literally anymore. I'm just talking about a great movies here.

I have a greatest ever movie. Or I have 2 to chose from.
The Naked Island and Late Spring.
For me it's one of those.
It's not Goodfellas, I know that.

A movies "job" is not only to entertain. A movies "job" is to do whatever the artist who made it intended it to be, or whatever the audience member who watched it was looking for.


You just care about entertainment. That's your deal. Not mine. If a movie can make me feel something or if it makes me understand the world or others in a deeper way, that's when it does it's "job" for me. That's a better movie than something I watch, am entertained by, and never think of again.


And don't even get me started on the if it makes the audience think it's only 'all in their head' bit, as if thinking is just some secondary or completely irrelevant or imagined element to the quality of a film for some people. Because its not, full stop. And I'm sick and tired of people acting like thought and film are mutually exclusive things. That thinking is some kind of terrible chore that gets in the way of entertainment. So, if that's what you are getting at there, be aware that at this point I've gone completely rabid with boredom on this topic. I don't want to hear it.

Interesting take and I agree with a lot of this. I watched Casino before I had seen Goodfellas, and while I think Goodfellas is slightly the better film, I empathize and enjoy the Sam Rothstein character far more than any character in Goodfellas. His character is more dynamic than Henry Hill and is a character who is wanting to set things straight and has a code, but he can't outrun his associates or tendencies for corruption and criminality is his casino operations. And the stuff with his wife, despite being material that might fit at home in a Jerry Springer episode or something, is so well done.

While I do love Goodfellas and I don't have the issues with Ray Liotta that you do, I find his character, while completely entertaining to be very dry and shallow. A gangster junkie who wants to have his cake and eat it to and while the narration shows he has a conscious, he's not particularly a very introspective or dynamic personality to the point where the character challenges me as a viewer or leaves me with a sense of feeling intrigued by this person. Goodfellas is great, but it's all so very surface level great and a piece of craftsmanship and technical brilliance and paced at an insane breakneck speed to cowitness the characters' lives which spiral out of control. Casino however just seems more interesting and dynamic and I love the atmosphere and setting of the early days of Las Vegas.

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Goodfellas is a seduction. It's a stroll for the Id. What if? Haven't we all wanted to be a pirate from time-to-time? It's not deep, because we're not supposed to question the experience so much as enjoy it. A Beef Wellington that makes you question the ethics of meat production probably isn't a very good Beef Wellington. "Let's be bad guys." Works for me. Shiny.

I mean, it has all of that. There's a great one where Newman breaks and the camera whips up from the collision into a zoom onto Newman's face that, to me, kinda defines the Scorsese Camera Way. And the music is constant, "Werewolves Of London?" I mean, it's like the whole scene. I feel literally the opposite about it as you do, I think it is textbook Scorsese without the usual well-worn narrative content. A much richer character study than many of his movies with a much more human conflict but with all the Scorsese techniques.

Yeah, I mean, I'd still prefer After Hours but if I was left on a dessert island and the only Scorsese movie I got was The Color Of Money, I'd be perfectly happy.

I hear this.

I was like, "Oh, I don't have an opinion for this thread because I haven't seen it."

Then, "Wait . . . did I watch Goodfellas semi-recently?"

Yes, yes I did. I gave it a very high rating, but I could just barely write three little paragraphs about it.

And I literally forgot it was a movie I watched.

Obviously it does a lot of things well, but for a movie that was on my radar for decades, I'm surprised at how little impression it made on me.

To have watched this movie when you were just starting to become a movie buff, in a cinema, having never seen anything quite like it before, is to truly have your eyes opened as to what cinema can do, the amazing narrative possibilities, the spellbinding abilities of a talented DP like Michael Ballhaus, the richness of Kristi Zea’s production design and the top-notch editing of Ms Schoonmaker.

Even if I don’t consider it “the best movie ever,” it’s still a dazzling, eye-opening demo of what an amazing filmmaking team can accomplish.

Oh please, it's Woody Allen's Radio Days with gangsters.

Yeah, seriously.

I get this because I was a 17 year-old movie-lover when this came out and I went to see it in the theater in L.A. with a bunch of USC Film and Theater students. And it did kinda hit us like pow. Not as much as Pulp Fiction did four years later, but still. But, even though I've watched it at least half a dozen times since, I never really like the movie. I appreciate it as Scorsese really doing his thing but that's what I like about it not the story not the characters none of that. That's really what I'm getting at.