just to be clear i wasn't saying "mean streets" is better than "goodfellas"

Pretty much spot on.

Goodfellas.

I'd rate Cape Fear, Raging Bull and even The Departed above Taxi Driver.

GF

i'm not terribly interested in this poll. i had a fab weekend, though.

I agree with both of these





Taxi Driver feels so much more European in it's style. Like something Antonioni or Herzog would've made. Goodfellas reachs a high watchability factor because the lifestyle (suits, food, women, money, music, respect, comradery) becomes a likable character. The identification in Taxi Driver with Travis Bickle might be there (loneliness, failed love life), but there's no way his lifestyle becomes a likable character by any sane person that sees that movie.

Pesci, as despicable as his character is, also provides a lot of comic relief. I think a character that funny in Taxi Driver would look out of place. So we end up some funny characters & funny scenes in Taxi Driver. It just doesn't match Pesci since Bickle is so removed from these charcters. Every scene with them feels like an internal battle. Physically he's sitting next to them, but mentally he's in that glass with the Alka-Seltzer. This is tougher to watch.

Both great... Goodfellas is entertainment, Taxi Driver is art.

taxi takes too long to build.

i think goodfellas is both entertaining and art, which is why it's my favorite movie ever made.

Amen.

Shawshank.

But between the two in the poll, give me Goodfellas.

i bought the goodfellas disc on DVD when it first came out - and its a FREAKIN flipper disc. i need to buy an updated version (IMHO its dumb that i have to do this in the first place, but oh well.)

Goodfellas.

I've got the 2 disc editon. Luckily, I never bought that first one.

Of all the BS pretentiousness that flies on this board, this simple statement might be the worst.

Goodfellas is entertaining, but it is also high art. Not denying that Taxi Driver is not art as well, but to dismiss Goodfellas like this is insulting.

As Dumpjack said, the little things in Goodfellas (DeNiro's arm swinging, the look on Carbone's face when they find him in the meat locker, little Tommy calling little Henry "Hendry) are all almost perfect, none of them are accidental, and they all add up to the best movie of all time.

Just because Taxi Driver is a slow burn, and all you molos wanna fuh a young Jodie Foster, doesn't make it better.

No way, man. She was completely vile and unFUHable until many years after she first picked up the baster. She had TEH UGG well after the Hinckley era. She's one of the very, very few actresses who got more attractive with age. The only other significant examples that come to mind are Andie MacDowell and Christine Lahti.

Jodie Foster is unfuckable. She seems like she'd be frigid.

Yes, but she's much less unFUHable here during the past 5-10 years than she was before.

For some reason I can't stop laughing at this.



*VOMIT*

Have fun, necrophiliac.

You short-sheet my intellectual bed. Taxi Driver is unquestionably "high art" with its visuals, its Hermanesque score, its Hitchcockian deconstruction, its languid pace to horror. IT is pretentious, often to good impact. Good Fellas is a great, great movie. Not self-consciously trying for the "depth" of presentation that TD is.

Doesn't make one better than the other, just makes them different. Like Led Zep compared to Stravinksy. I almost remember Pauline Kael's review of Last Tango in Paris... "the first shots of Brando walking are like the first notes of Rite of Spring in 1914 (or whenever it was)... music was forever different. Cinema will be forever different."

Some might well like Zep over Strav... I often do.

I've seen both of these double digit times, and while I love them both, I've got to go with Goodfellas. I always had a bit of a problem with the ending of Taxi Driver (not the shoot out, but the parts after that). Goodfellas starts to drag a bit in the second half but for the first half is absolutely unfuckwithable.

It's not Hermanesque--it IS Herrmann.

Incidentally, Herrmann agreed to do the score due to the scene where Travis eats bread (I think?) with peach schnapps.