Immaculate and Villainous; it is singular in its own way.

Rating: 10/10 (26 November 2006)

Having seen this film almost every other week for approximately five years, I think its time to express my true opinion on one of Martin Scorsese's finest finest film. In this iconic mobster film, Martin Scorsese idyllically illustrates the corrupt, avaricious and precarious lives of three mutual, malevolent partners who orchestrate brutal acts of irrational violence to procure money, take on business ownership, and establish naval and trucking deals to generate gargantuan sums of money. The first scene is imperative, because it brings the entire film into a whole new perspective. The word "mafia" is used scarcely in the film, if not used at all, because the first scene sums up the identity of the protagonists in such a sublime way. It begins with an opaque image of an old vehicle rambling along a recently paved road out skirted with dead, scraggly trees. An audible thump, followed by the revelation of the blood deluged man whose lying in excruciating pain in the trunk and the beginning narrative along the lines of "wanting to be a gangster" set the entire saga in motion.
We learn that the narrator has always wanted to be a gangster and followed by this want comes scenes of his early childhood life where he personally ran errands for smalltime mobs located in various fronts ranging from pizza parlors to restaurants. The first jobs were banal.. Innocuous store owners who refused to relinquish their businesses to the mob need only have their car windows smashed before their minds were changed. Periodically it would require more effort, such as the immolation of their vehicles altogether but they would give in sooner or later. This is where the narrator played his role. The insignificant errands, the parking of cars, the dismembering of cars and the conflagration of cars were all atrocities executed by him, but overall orchestrated by the mob. The narrator's childhood life plays an imperative role to his participance in "real mafia business" because it shows how ultimately necessary this life was for him. As directly quoted: "For them(the narrator's parents) the cabstand was just a part time job, but for me it was definitely full time." That's all I wanted to do. Manipulated by the propaganda that mob life was his destiny he isolates himself from the face of reality and follows his own fabricated truths. Due to the fact that working for the mob and being a gangster was so essential to him, he began disassociating himself from his parents at an early age and following his own whims and paths to success, until finally he had grown so attached to the strictures of mob life that he returned home to his mother one day in a stately suit, tie and considerably opulent formal shoes only to be remonstrated by his mother for "looking like a gangster". Another moral factor which eventually dies within the narrator in his childhood life is sympathy. When a man runs along the sidewalk, erratically vociferating that he has been shot, the narrator who is, at the time in the mob's pizza parlor, succors him, due to the fact that he had never seen a person shot and bleeding before and he "felt bad for the guy". In his adolescent life, the narrator meets and becomes very affable with James Conway (Robert de Niro) who is one of the main mafia mob leaders right under Pauline. Again his involvement increases and by the time he is an adult, the narrator is executing trucking heists on an underground market near the airport, a very lucrative underground market where Pauline gets the most for his "protection" the mobsters get their cuts and the trucking companies are deprived of their earnings.
Later the narrator marries and becomes involved more in more, in heroin deals, a bank heist and the assault of a certain man who lands both Jimmy and himself and prison.
Followed by the memorable and comical histrionic performance of Joe Pesci as Tommy deVito and the interesting classical music which arbitrarily plays during scenes of the narrator's early childhood and later in softer tones throughout the villainous executions of mobster deals and altercations, Goodfellas is an iconic classic which is categorized with other timeless classics such as The Godfarther part I and II and Pulp Fiction.