A Perfect Movie

I've mentioned my favorite band (Ween) and if you're interested I thought I'd mention my favorite movie: Goodfellas. In a word...perfect. For my money it is far superior to The Godfather, which follows all the tiresome rules and styles of Old Hollywood. Goodfellas broke new ground, with regards to editing and storytelling, yet the essential element of classic narrative remains the same. We meet Henry Hill, and the film follows him as a teen into his downfall. Shakespeare, O'Hara, Hemingway and everyone in between have written about greatness that gets corrupted, and Hollywood loves the story. In 1990, with nine decades of movies telling this story, Scorese came out with pathos and handguns blazing, and it was completely fucking fresh. As I watch the DVD right now, the same film I've seen almost a hundred times, I'm still completely enthralled and moved to tears. The film never drags, and at 145 mins. that certainly says something. The music, which ranges from Muddy Waters to the Sex Pistols, serves as a background score to murder, drugs, and drinking, and the scope of America throughout four decades. The music never calls attention to itself, but functions as a pulse while the hoods small-step their way through their own sense of greatness. In the denouement, which is simply the greatest twenty minutes ever committed to celluloid, we roll with Henry through the ugly first days of 1980. The Stones "Monkey Man" and Mott the Hoople narrate, along with Henry, the hyper-tweaked day of coke dealing and gun smuggling (complete with hour-by-hour) time-frame of a man trying to swim and drown at the same time. We witness Henry careen between friend and foe, coke line and F.B.I helicopter, and the audience is taken on a visceral joyride as the system breaks down. With the shattering outbreaks of violence, never exploitive, the viewer witnesses brutality as if it were an act of neccessity. For Henry and his crew, along with their inflated egos, it was. These were real people, as Nicolas Pileggi's book details, and they lived like Hollywood gangsters: Marquee icons who had the gaul and the power to whack anyone who got out of line. Scorsese nails the idiosyncratic routines and the minutaie of white-trash boys who reached for the golden ring, and got slammed in the process. It is a perfect film, the reason cinema was created, and when you see Morie and his wife dead in a Cadillac, with the piano coda to "Layla" playing, you know you are alive.