User Reviews

This is the shortest, and arguably most useless, of the four documentaries found on the second DVD of the 2-Disc Special Edition release of Goodfellas. It starts with a brief text introduction, after which it starts The entire thing consists of nothing but film clips, with text and/or little drawings, apparently done by Scorsese himself, that depict and/or describe the actions/occurrences, either also on the screen along with the footage, or "ghosted" over, meaning, see-through, not invisible, to display how close they were to how it ended up in the movie. Of course, that's all this is good for: Showing how close he stuck to how he had envisioned it. That point is made in four and a half minutes in this, which you can never quite shake the feeling is really just something they wanted to do, and couldn't make fit in one of the three legitimate productions dealing with the title. Editing is reasonable. The language is strong, and with how short it is, it winds up being fairly frequent. There is bloody, disturbing violence in this. I recommend this only to those who really want to watch everything that comes with purchasing, borrowing or renting the flick. 5/10

Paper is Cheaper Than Film (2004)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

This is the shortest featurette on Warner's Special Edition of GOODFELLAS but it's one of the most interesting. If you know anything about Martin Scorsese then you know he likes to draw out his own storyboards as well as write certain notes on the screenplay that he will later use. This featurette runs about seven-minutes and features these various drawings. We will start off seeing the actual scene in question as it appears in the movie and then we'll see the drawing that Scorsese had done. If you've seen the TAXI DRIVER documentary, the cinematographer there talked about these various drawings that Scorsese would give him to work off of. We can see the same thing here as the drawings certainly aren't well-done or artistic but they just contain something that is so easy to pick up on. One of the best examples is the scene where Henry Hill beats the neighbor. Just take a look at the drawing and see the red traces that Scorsese put through it to show the violence. I think this featurette will be most appealing to fans of Scorsese rather than just general fans of the movie.