Goodfellas -- 1990 -- R

Ah, the inspiration for Animaniacs "Goodfeathers." I laughed at several points during this film for that reason alone, but I digress.

I'm not sure to what to make of this one. We're mostly cheering for the bad guys -- our hero being a boy who grew up wanting to be a gangster and dragging his family into the business with him. It runs like a series of tableaus of his life starting from when he was young and moving through his life until the end of his relationship with the wiseguys. One the one hand, we have great character development, and know very well who is who and why they act the way they do. That being said, on the flip side, the voiceover does 90f the explanation of why stuff happens. Maybe that's my beef. As soon as we get into the film, the voiceover reminds us that we're watching one.

It does give us some solid characters that we do feel for on some level, and it does give us the life of Henry and his family to follow as he winds through his trials and pitfalls working for Paulie and the rest of the crew. Through the latter part, it just becomes him working to support his family, and at some points it is very touching.

I do have some difficulty feeling very sympathetic for him or anyone else though. Business aside, he places the business before his family at many points and even has a few girls on the side that he supports as well.

It ends well enough for how it ran, and it does make sense. I understood this to be a contrapunctual film to the romantic mafia The Godfather presents. This one is more of a gritty, down to earth kind of film that says "this is how it is; deal with it." On that level, it works well.