Goodfellas and Jaws

I had my new friend Karyn over to watch these two with me. We discussed them, exchanged funny comments and so on. Its nice watching movies with friends, I’ve really missed it! Anyways, I’m going to use Karyn as an excuse for my reviews being short and crap because she distracted me from my note-taking!!! Both films neither of us had seen before which was good.

Raging Bull

A little warning before I start, most of my reviews from now on are probably going to be short and brief because of my limited time [I’m trying to watch 3 movies a day now]. So, in advance, don’t expect and awesome, in-depth review because I simply don’t have enough time now.

Robert De Niro is one of my favourite actors so I’m going to be a little biased and say that his acting in this is phenomenal, maybe not the best I’ve seen but it was still pretty damn good, especially all the breaking-down scenes.

Once Upon a Time in America

This movie is about the lives of a group of Jewish mobsters from when they were teenagers robbing the drunk to men stealing diamonds. Its very good but, in my opinion, could of done with a little more editing. However, I know this movie was edited without the director’s permission and turned out to be crap so I know that it needs to be longer to ‘work’ but I could see areas that weren’t needed.

The editing sequence at the beginning of the movie had me confused and a little frustrated. It goes backwards and forwards in time but it doesn’t quite work as we don’t know the faces well enough to make the connections. I don’t know whether this is meant to be or not but it didn’t leave me impressed, just confused. I do like it, however, when a movie starts with the audience asking questions. This movie had me asking “they’re looking for Robert De Niro! Where is he?! Where is he hiding?! Why are they after him?!”

There isn’t as much blood as Resevoir Dogs but there’s still a little bit of it. The bullet wounds are nasty but its ruined by the blood looking like paint and therefore laughable.

I hated a character in the beginning because he was a cold-blooded killer. Its remarkable that I felt so much towards character that I didn’t know the name of and who’d been on screen for less than 5 minutes. He gets shot and I was like “YAY!!!!!”

The make-up on the actors to make them look ‘old’ is incredibly good [better than this Harry Potter crap we’re getting… they’re meant to be 37 not 67… dumbasses…] but at the same time, I could tell where the makeup started and the real face finished.

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In my opinion, there was too much about the past, about them as teenagers. I know it is there to give us a true feeling of their history, ‘friendship’ and relationship with women but it could have been done in a shorter way. Its not bad, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t bored at all but I just found myself being picky [I want to be a film editor after college so is this a good thing?]