I’ve avoided watching this movie for a long time because I was scared I wasn’t going to like it, and I don’t want to be that person who says they didn’t like Goodfellas. I say I hate gangster movies because I've seen The Godfather and The Irishman and hated both so much I didn’t even finish them. Mob characters are just kind of uninteresting to me and the stories feel unoriginal and over complicated. But I actually did find Henry to be an interesting character and the voiceover helped me keep up with the plot but I still got lost toward the end. I usually write about movies I've seen more than once on here because I find it very difficult to analyze a movie after seeing it just once. But I feel obligated to go out on a limb once in a while for this blog and try something new. So, I don’t have a lot to say about this movie right now. Again, I liked the focus on the character of Henry rather than the mob stuff, but there was plenty of that too. I’ve been watching The Wolf of Wall Street over the past week to refresh my memory for my midterm project, and I realized that Jordan and Henry are basically the same character placed in a different setting. Both saw a rapid rise to riches at a young age (due to illegal activity), like to steal millions from the government, have older mentors in the business, are unfaithful to their wives, and develop drug addictions that arguably lead to their downfall. The only big difference is white collar vs blue collar crime. Scorsese definately has his character types that he likes to recycle, but I’m not complaining. This movie had an abundance of those beloved Scorsese trademarks such as the character types and voiceover as previously discussed, as well as an excellent soundtrack, lots of slow-mo shots, and long tracking shots. The highlight of the film for me was the four minute tracking shot in the copa. I can’t imagine the logistics of shooting that. Another thing that stood out to me was the color red (as seen in the above photo) in this film. We all know Scorsese likes to manipulate color in his films, whether it’s the scaled back color palette of Taxi Driver to elicit a dream like state or Raging Bull’s complete lack of color to take the viewer back to the 1940s. Throughout the film I kept trying to figure out what red means beyond obviously blood, violence, anger. Given Scorsese’s tendency to include religious themes in his films, my best guess now is that it relates to sin and judgement as red is prevalent in the violent and courtroom scenes. Overall, I didn’t hate this movie. I’m going to have to watch it at least one more time before I can determine if I actually like it.
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May Featured Movie QuoteBarry B. Benson: Yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black, yellow-black... Oh, black and yellow. Yeah, let's shake it up a little.
Yeah, I have letterboxd now
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