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Goodfellas Paper

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Paper on “Goodfellas” movie Martin Scorsese does an exquisite job of making this film real. When Henry is still young, his innocence is displayed so subtly, but with profound clarity. The same can be said for all the scenes in the movie. The characters often seem to live in a different world, with their frequent killings and the absence of emotion that they display. Then all of a sudden, you'll find yourself identifying with the character, and they will seem so classically human. The Gangster, as Robert Warshow puts it, is a “quintessential 'tragic hero', a character whose very nature and deeds ultimately condemn them to a short and fruitless existence, outside of the boundaries of normal society”. The Gangster's place within cinema is …show more content…

When I was broke, I'd go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking.” -Henry. In essence, these guys were extremely powerful. “There was an appealing bravado and swagger to these men” - and Henry wanted it all. It was “intoxicating” for him. By 1970 Henry achieved the position of great importance in the organization. He is teamed up with two of his closet associates, the hotheaded of violent-tempered Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci, never more charismatic and never more fever-pitched) and the no-nonsense Jimmy Conway (Robert DeNiro, equally confident and authoritative). In the end, Henry soon realized that he had to break two cardinal rules of the mafia (never rat on your friends and never say anything to anyone) in order to save his life. ''Goodfellas'' looked at the mob without making any apparent comment of its own. As it adopts the flat tone of Henry, its principal narrator, it also reflected Henry's jittery and driven concerns. It moved from sequence to sequence with slightly crazed speed, as if anticipating one of the cocaine highs that, finally, were to be Henry's undoing[6]. Scorsese brilliantly uses freeze frames as "snapshots" as transition from one scene to the next. What was interesting though, was the fact that each snap shot were memories of great times shared at: children's' birthday parties, baby showers, births, weddings, and

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