genius, absolute genius

Rating: Null/10 (16 July 1999)

It is not often that I am lost for words after watching a film, indeed normally it is the infernal rage within me that makes me want to scream, notably after seeing Batman and Robin. However the first time that I saw Goodfellas, about 6 years ago, it as good as changed the way I look at movies. I was dumbfounded by the sheer speed of the action and the dialogue. The performances were almost faultless (how Dances with Wolves won the oscars I will never understand) and the most impressive thing that stuck with me was the soundtrack. The way that Scorsese used certain music to convey emotion was to an extent that I had not seen before. Indeed the growing paranoia encompassed by Robert De Niro toward the end of the film, is expressed effortlessly when the camera pans towards him in the bar and the guitars from Cream's "sunshine of your love," come into effect, this gives me the shivers every time I see it. OK there have been films with better cinematography (the Deerhunter par example) however this still remains the film that has had the most influence on my life, especially with the rest of the trash that we have had to put up with this decade.