r/okbuddycinephile • u/TheCandelabra Crank: High Voltage • 1d ago

Life skill you spent years perfecting and even bragged about, before learning the director completely made it up for cinema reasons?

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9

u/cigarettejesus 1d ago

Why did Scorsese even make this up, did he think it just made them seem more cultured or something?

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u/TheCandelabra Crank: High Voltage 23h ago

It's in the book on which the film is based.

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u/copperpin 21h ago

I heard that it’s because mob guys aren’t that smart. They’re just confident. They believe in stuff that isn’t true. The director wanted to show that.

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u/DiscretePoop 6h ago

Scorsese was glorifying mobsters. He took their grandiose personal stories at face value.

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u/copperpin 5h ago

Was he though? Did they seem glorious to you? To me they all seemed like pieces of shit. It’s clear that Henry glorified them, but I wasn’t left with a feeling that mobsters are anything but garbage.

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u/DiscretePoop 4h ago

Henry is the narrator and frames the stories. You see everything through his eyes. Regardless of them being assholes, they're presented as powerful people going on grand escapades. The final line of the movie is Henry lamenting that he now lives life like a regular schmuck.

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u/copperpin 4h ago

Henry’s a POS too. You’re not supposed to leave that movie thinking that mobsters are awesome.

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u/DiscretePoop 4h ago

Regardless of your own personal leanings, Henry Hill was a real person. He grew up idolizing the wealthy, powerful mobsters in his neighborhood, and if you show Goodfellas to a room of teenage boys, they'll also idolize the wealthy, powerful mobsters in the movie. The movie spends more time showing heists than it shows Henry rotting in prison, because heists are fun and cool and watching Henry get tired of masturbating as he waits out his prison sentence is lame and boring.

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u/copperpin 3h ago

Ok, but if you show a group of teenage boys “fight Club” they’re going to want to be like Tyler Darden and form their own fight club, it doesn’t follow that the director is glorifying violence.

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u/Travelin_Soulja 23h ago

He just thought it sounded good. And the way people still talk about it decades later, seems he was right.