Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 18

Goodfellas and Scorsese

Goodfellas was a seminal movie and my favorite for at least a year of my life, and that's more than I can say about most movies. I saw it at least twice in the theaters, and many more times on TV, and video, or dvd. I thought it was the penultimate film of Scorsese's career upon release, in what I want to say was 1990, or 1991. It was a mob movie but it was the first one for me that painted the mob as the coolest rock n' roll band in the world, or at least that was Henry Hill's position. Part of this had to do with the generational epic span that Scorsese took on telling his story, from the Fifties to the Eighties, and it was a real history lesson, in taste and more. Hill starts off as a kind of Sinatra dreamboat, and turns into a Rolling Stone, snorting coke dangerously to Monkey Man, and so the movie goes.

I wanted to be like the characters in Goodfellas when I saw it as a youth, on the verge of manhood, wondering what I was going to do with my life, and wanting to be a 'rock star' personality. I was Henry Hill sitting in the theater, laughing at all those schlubs stuck in their 9 to 5 middle class jobs, and somehow beating the system with charm and luck, because the violence was low key, or subdued, so that the marital story of Henry and Karen, not to mention the fraternal 'band' story of Henry and his fellow thugs, overshadowed the violence and extravagance. The reason for this was that Scorsese was still making "A" movies when Goodfellas came out, and was arguably the greatest American filmmaker alive, a true auteur spanning the Seventies and Eightes, giving us Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, not to mention about ten more films of beauty and valor. Goodfellas may have been Scorsese's last original "A" list movie with the exception of a few adaptations, and almost footnotes in his oeuvure (The Age Of Innocence, and Cape Fear, which I loved, but it was a remake).

I saw Goodfellas a couple of years ago in my early Forties, and while the generational tale was deep enough to sustain the story, I was befuddled by the young man I must have been to think these characters were anything to aspire towards, seeing them as dirty, immoral, and spoiled. Obviously, this change in perception had to do with a change in me, a maturation, because I think my 22 year old self really didn't care if I was living a rock n' roll lifestyle on the backs of others, plus there was a price to the mobsters lifestyle, and that was murder. The gangsters in Goodfellas were rock n' roll mobsters in almost Camus like way having gotten over the moral implications of murder, for some kind of earthly pursuit, or rationalizing life to infinity. Their lifestyle had an almost philosophical bend and it was tinged with the old world, and in a way was showing how the boomers took over the new world. But I just couldn't love these characters anymore, nor did I even like them. Henry Hill's narration that I used to find as illuminating as Martin Sheen's in Apocalypse Now, lacked any poetry to me, save the most banal, and I saw him as selling out the American dream to the people, in much the same way I look at the Wall St. crowd today. I was ashamed of myself for liking the movie so much, though even my 42 year old self, with all of his guilt and anxiety, had to admit that the art of Goodfellas was top notch, and the story well told. The last sequence when he's making the pasta for a family dinner, and going to his girlfriend's house for cocaine, followed by helicopters, was a classic.

Scorsese has been a "B" filmmaker ever since "Bringing Back The Dead," with Nicholas Cage in the late Nineties. He's a "B" filmmaker in an almost Cecile B. DeMille way, because, well, he's Scorsese and he has been given big budgets to work with, allowing him the best actors and crew. "Bringing Back The Dead" (?) was visually interesting and memorable, but it contained the seeds of what was to become the new Scorsese, and that was a man unable to tell a story in a clear cohesive manner, no matter how big or small, and yet the plots felt thick. Love him or hate him, Scorsese's movies always made sense, and were anything but surreal, or discombobulated. In fact, I'd argue for the Seventies, his films were rather tightly wound, with good clean scripts, lacking the free form quality of the Seventies found in a director like Robert Altman, and many others.

I don't think I've seen a Scorsese movie that has made sense since the 2000's, but I haven't seen them all, so I should just shut up, but I don't want to. I saw "Gangs Of New York" on New Year's day, and like "Bringing Back The Dead," it was a spectacle, with an absolutely drop dead horrificaly grand performance by Daniel Day Lewis, but the movie was a mess. To be honest, his movies come and go at this point, but I do think it's interesting that he has evolved, or devolved, as an artist, because he's not the same Martin Scorsese I fell in love with as the world's biggest movie fan. He has almost completely forsaken good scripts and editing for a sort of bombastic vision of America, that I think he's trying to romanticize, but instead makes vulgar, much like his generation.

At first, I didn't want to see "The Wolf Of Wall St." thinking it would be yet another paean to the grandeur of the K street crowd. But without a doubt it is the most talked about movie in America on January 6th, 2013, without a close second. I perked up today when I read online that Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jonah Hill, were both condeming the main character as a blackguard epitomizing everything wrong with America. Reading this astounded me, because I don't think ever in my life have I heard two movie stars publicly put down the film they were just in, and that was still out in the theaters, distancing themselves from it just like a party will sometimes distance itself from the President of the same party, if he's unpopular. According to polling, the people don't like the movie but the critics did before an Xmas opening, but I'm not so sure they do now.

In defense of the film, Leonardo DiCaprio said it was good of Scorsese to just let the actors and crew go on a wild ride with the characters, completely over the top, and I'd have to agree, actually, because that's freedom, and we're all looking for freedom in art. I have no doubt that DiCaprio got really into being a sleaze ball, capturing the character, and that Scorsese got into being the world's second biggest sleaze, after Woody Allen, and like Danny DeVito on "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia," directed a movie with midget sex and cocaine. I'm sure that the failed Catholic priest in Martin Scorsese loved it, seeing himself as the Devil's Advocate, and in no way intended to make the world's greatest villain.

I've got to see the movie, so maybe I will and write a post about what it meant to me as an American in the year 2014, driving pizzas.

First blog

Kurt Cobain wrote "I am not well read, but I red well," and the same can be said of me. I didn't really read books out of school until I was about 20 years old, as a reaction to the classic films I was watching, such as "The Seventh Seal," and "La Strada." I saw myself as a potential filmmaker but thought any good vision I had would be so compromised by Hollywood, and that I'd be better off writing, since I was learning that a great book had the power of a great film. Artistically, I am sure it was the right decision but it has taken a lot of work because a writer has none of the cover of a film crew and it takes a lot of intestinal fortitude to withstand criticism and failure.