Goodfellas (1997, DVD)

Let me start by saying that 'Mafia Movies' are my absolute favourite films. Coppola and, in this case, Martin Scorsese is absolutely brilliant. The Godfather, The Godfather II, Casino, and Goodfellas top the list of my all time favourites. Andy Garcia is awfully nice to look at in Godfather III as well, but the movie is essentially flawed in that it was completed in the wrong generation and just cannot compare to the first two. I am proud to say that we finally joined the land of DVD. I visited Blockbuster recently for the first time in a year and I was shocked to find that most of the...

My grandmother, rest her soul, could tell stories of the gangsters she knew from her neighborhood. Her era was that of "Legs" Diamond and Dutch Schultz and could tell us stories about what it was like. I have to say that as a young child, all that did sound terribly glamorous and wonderful. It was only as I got older that I understood better what being a "gangster" meant and it didn't look as good as the stories she told. Goodfellas is a story told after her era, in the era of my parents and their generation of relatives. By this time, being a gangster was well beyond just protecting those...

While some people call Goodfellas the greatest mobster movie of all time very rarely do you hear them talk about the plot. When you boil it down there is a huge jump in them from Henry Hill's youth to his adult life of crime. It also jumped too far into the future for me when Ray Liotta's character is bending over a table snorting coke. Other than that there are too many mistakes in filming. Don't believe me? Pull out your copy of Goodfellas and fast forward to the scene where Henry Hill is in prison and his wife is visiting with the kids and she makes a scene about Janis visiting. Look...

"Goodfellas" is Director Martin Scorsese's contribution to the gangster genre. It concerns itself with an inside look at a crime family in New York City. Much like the original gangster movies starring James Cagney and Paul Muni, it showed the rise and fall of the main characters. Ray Liotta plays the protagonist, and the movie mainly follows his viewpoint, which possibly makes it more hard-hitting since he basically plays a milquetoast in this graphic story of modern day hoodlums. Oddly, Liotta is cast as an Irish thug, Henry Hill who can never be a true member of the Mob. Robert DeNiro and..