Big Brother & Gooodfellas

When Big Brother was first announced, it was described as a social experiment, with psychologists commenting on the behaviour of the inmates. It wasn’t supposed to be tabloid TV, but what you might expect to see if Radio 4 were on television…..It’s interesting to watch people. With the “celebrity” versions, we are saved some of the initial time investment – we know the characters. there’s an added level of intrigue “why would so and so want to do this show?” “Did they not realise cameras were on them all the time?” Unfortunately the tabloid side took over and we were left with people screaming at one another and being racist enough to obscure anything else that happened on television that week… so I have instead watched Goodfellas. I was interested to watch it because I really like gangster films, and Brighton Rock, Get Carter, and The Long Good Friday are in my top 100 films. A lot of people whose views I respect think this is a great film. But this was not that enjoyable. Overlong at nearly two and a half hours, it is the story of one gangster from his life as a teenager to his rise in the gangs of America and eventual retirement. This film seems at first glance to differ from the Godfather in that these are not Mafia gangs, but in fact they are, and this makes it a little like a copy of that film. There are killings which are shown as casual and brutal, but because no sympathy is built for the characters being killed, the deaths seem incidental, more like the behaviour of the gangsters is being described in documentary fashion, rather than a moment of dramatic impact. Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro turn in good performances as the main anti-heroes in the film, and there are some nice bits of cinematography (the cinematographer won the LA Critics’ Award for it). There are major problems with the performances of most of the actors at several stages in the film, where it feels like they are improvising their dialogue. This is distracting and occasionally feels as funny as Joe Pesci’s miscast performance (yes, he’s funny like a clown), though Joe won the film’s only Academy Award, so some must have welcomed the comic relief.