By John Carucci
NEW YORK (AP) --The Tribeca Film Festival ended Saturday night with a bang — a special 25th anniversary screening of the Martin Scorsese gangster flick "Goodfellas."
On the red carpet, star Ray Liotta recalled something Scorsese told him before filming began that made him believe he was going to be part of something special.
"He said, 'I want to shoot this like a gangster,'" Liotta told The Associated Press. "'If I want to freeze frame, if I want to voice over, if I want to whatever …'. And that's what he did. It gave him a lot liberty to just be him."
That mindset paid off. Many regard the Oscar-nominated mob tale as more than just a great film of the genre, but also one of the greatest movies of all time. Scorsese used a compelling narrative with strong visuals married by a powerful rock soundtrack to reinvent the gangster film.
"I don't know if he reinvented it as much as he just created his own version of it," Liotta said.
Paul Sorvino, who portrayed Paulie, the mob capo that takes Liotta's Henry under his wing, thinks Scorsese went beyond reinventing the genre.
"It's not even part of a genre; it's like tearing off that wall and taking a look inside to see what it really is," Sorvino said of the gritty depiction of life as a low-level mobster.
The 76-year old actor expressed gratitude to have a part in the film.
"It's part of the iconography of American film," Sorvino said. "It's one of the three or four greatest movies ever made, and if you get to do that in your career, you're pretty lucky."
Based on the nonfiction best-seller "Wiseguy" written by Nicholas Pileggi, the story traces the life of Henry Hill — a mobster-turned-informant — from his childhood and life of petty crime to rise and fall in the underworld. The film also stars Robert De Niro as James "Jimmy The Gent" Conway.
De Niro is one of the film festival's co-creators.
"The fact that he helped put it together right after 9/11 and bring Tribeca back as well as New York — that was just honorable in itself. And to sustain it for so long now, it represents a great thing in movies, that's great for movies, and a great thing for the city," Liotta said.
De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002 as a means of stimulating the lower Manhattan neighborhood after the Sep. 11 attacks.
But Lorraine Bracco, who played Henry's wife, Karen, thinks the festival did more than revitalize the city.
"It's for the world to see that we're still standing strong," Bracco said.
Scorsese couldn't make the screening because he was out of the country, but he recorded a message introducing the film to the audience at the Beacon Theatre. After the screening, outgoing "Daily Show" host Jon Stewart moderated a panel discussion with the cast.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More