By LINDSI HEBERT, Staff Reporter.
Released in 1990 and directed by Martin Scorsese, Goodfellas is a story about wise guys. Particularly, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), oldest son and half Italian, half Irish. At a young age, Henry makes his first connection with the Italian mafia through Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) by parking cars and taking coats for Paul’s restaurant.
There, he meets up with other mobsters and mafia aficionados and starts a fairly successful network of good fellas that he uses for the usual reasons, like hanging out and insurance fraud. During this “business venture” Henry makes some interesting friends, Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). Together, they pull off one of the biggest robberies in history. With the robbery successful, Tommy and Jimmy start bumping off all of the other guys that were involved while Henry slips slowly into a life of drugs. Soon, it all comes down to Jimmy, Tommy and Henry, and it’s one bloody run to the finish.
Goodfellas is one of those movies that just gets better and better the more you watch it. Yes, it’s predictable, yes mobster movies have been overdone. That doesn’t matter. Goodfellas is such a classic, and it’s inspired so many other movies. If you’re looking to watch a mob movie that isn’t Godfather or Scarface, this is the one you turn to.
Let’s start with the production quality. Goodfellas has a famous long shot where the camera follows Henry and his girlfriend Karen (Lorraine Bracco) entering a really popular restaurant. It takes the viewer through the back door, through the kitchen, out in the back of the restaurant and shows the workers setting up another table for Henry and Karen. It’s over two minutes of unedited awesome, while you see Ray Liotta interacting with parts of the staff, ad libbing his lines until they get, finally, to the end where he sits down at a perfectly set table and start watching the show.
For those of you that don’t know what a long shot is, it’s when the camera tracks either actors or objects through an entire scene. There’s no breakaways, no transitions, just one, smooth consecutive shot. What makes the tracking shot in Goodfellas impressive is that not only is it over two minutes long, but the background is so busy with other things that you really get this feeling of being overwhelmed and dazed, because like Karen, you’re seeing this for the first time.
One other big part about why Goodfellas is so good is the soundtrack. There are some movies that have good soundtracks that you’d listen to on occasion, there are the soundtracks that get you pumped up for the rest of the movie, and then there’s the soundtrack to Goodfellas. Every song on that soundtrack was painstakingly picked out for a specific part of the film, mixing well with what’s happening in that particular to that scene.
For example, at the end of the tracking scene Henry is having a conversation with Karen about what he does for a living. He tells Karen he’s in construction, further specifying that he is a “union delegate”, which is a joke referring to the mafia. Right after that you get the “ba dum psh” of the drums that you hear after somebody hits the punch line of a joke. It’s remarkably well timed and perfectly done.
On a scale of one to five gummy bears, with five being the highest, Goodfellas shoots it’s way to five gummy bears.
