The Fourth Annual James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films – Door 2

Door 2 of The Fourth Annual James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films brings us Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece GoodFellas.

It would be foolish for a hack like me to try and offer any critical insight into a film as universally acclaimed as this one, but it truly is extraordinary.

Although probably one to avoid if you’re at all squeamish. Most of the violence is implicit rather than explicit but the few on-screen scenes depicting violence quite literally don’t pull any punches.

The cast is phenomenal and all appear to be on their A-game, but Joe Pesci manages to stand out from the crowd as the positively unhinged Tommy DeVito. Indeed, so good is Pesci that arguably this performance is even better than his seminal work in the first two Home Alone movies (I’m sort of joking but I do love those films…)

I watched this film a lot in my younger days but it had been a while since my last viewing and it had lost none of its brilliance on this outing.

Although this is the first time I noticed Samuel L Jackson was in the movie. To be fair he’s not in it for very long, his last scene being among the aforementioned violent scenes but it seems strange I missed him on all those previous viewings.

Score for Christmasishness

It would be ludicrous to attempt to pass this off as a Christmas movie, but there is a bit of the film that is set at Christmas time and it’s really quite Christmassy for that bit of the movie. It isn’t at all Christmassy for the rest of the film, but in honour of the brief period that it is, it would be fair to describe GoodFellas as a bit Christmas(ish).