Unfinished Business

Too much of my writing goes unfinished. I start out with an idea, but then something happens. I fall into a writing lapse. I trick myself into thinking that the idea was a poor one from the outset. When it boils down to it though, it is not a matter of good versus bad, it is a matter of getting something done--having a sense of accomplishment.

Having said this I am returning to my series on all the classes I have taken in college, all 40 of them. I don't know exactly how many are left, but I don't think I am even halfway done. I list the course title and with it give a short story or observation from my time in that course.

I pick up with.....

English 4070 - Film: Kubrick and Scorsese - First, don't let the film class under the English heading fool you. English majors did in this class what we have always done in literature classes, analyze the text (in this case film) for themes, arguments, objective or non-objective portraits of a person, event, place, or thing, etc.

For me, Scorsese is easy to like. He writes movies about criminals, NYC, and the Mafia. What is there not to like about this material? Some of his classics I had never seen. Mean Streets and Taxi Driver had never made it as far as my DVD player, let alone my consciousness before this class. However, I had heard Robert De Niro's famous line, "You talking to me?", when I was much younger, but until this fall I never knew that it is from Taxi Driver. Enough with those movies, really, I apologize to the devoted fans of either one of them.

I can't get over Goodfellas. This movie is a classic. To enjoy the movie I think you have to temporarily accept some of the things you are going to hear and see on screen--cheating, crude language, and explicit violence. You can't blame Scorsese. All these things were, and still are, part of the Mafia lifestyle and Scorsese wanted his audience to be confronted with reality. No one could present this life in a more brilliant way than Scorsese did. It is not too far into the movie that we find ourselves thinking, wow, that would be sort of a fun lifestyle, but just at this moment you see Pesci shoot down a teenager just for saying the wrong words, you see friends kill friends, and you see families fall to pieces because of lies. It is at this moment when Scorsese is at his best. He glorified the wiseguy lifestyle in Goodfellas so well that we are left to grapple with our secret desire to live as one of the mobsters--a worry free life with money, friends, connections, and security--but with little concern of the consequences, and when we see them it is far too late.