Please tell me how having different main stream songs every minute (for at least the first 60min) helps this film. I only got 60 minutes into the movie because the song selection was so much in the forefront of this movie it was too hard to focus on anything else.
shareFor me, the soundtrack is an effective background character, but it's very typical for a Scorsese film. If you watch Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, After Hours, The Aviator music is a huge part of the narrative tone.
The movie itself is pretty self explanatory so I'm not sure how you were distracted.
How exactly do the Rolling Stones and Dean Martin, among others, make for an effective storytelling device when thrown at you one after the other? I'm not sure what you mean by "background character." The music has no presence to me other than Scorsese being like "hey, this is a popular one, let's put it in my movie."
It's distracting in the fact that they are used to distinguish different scenes or montages, but we can already ascertain that information by the story that's being told or the change in setting.
Don't be a film snob.
You may very well have a mental condition that doesn't allow you to grasp abstract concepts, in this instance music and songs used as a narrative device. It's not just in this movie either. Countless classic movies from the past have used background music as part of its setting to create a certain mood or sense of time and place.
shareI understand the concept. What I am saying is that the songs used and the amount of them were not beneficial to the narrative.
shareif you found certain uses of song as a non-beneficial to the scene then that's your opinion of it. Case closed.
I myself really can't stand movie musicals that take place in a real world setting (ie - Singing in the Rain, West Side Story, Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc.) but I can tolerate them as stage performances because I feel like my suspension of disbelief is more genuine than it is when watching it in a 3 dimensional movie setting. That doesn't mean that the concept of a movie musical fails. It's all about personal taste.
Scorecese said that the songs can give the viewer an emotional blanket from the violence shown on screen.
The killing of Joe Pesci's character W/O any soundtrack,just the sound of the wack of the baseball bats (did you make it that far?) shows you how much this is true.
That said, I can't explain why a Devo song is in this film.
Thanks for that info. From hearing that Scorecese thinks that the viewer needs an emotional blanket makes me think that he is trying to appeal to the masses. In that same vein, everyone planning on seeing the movie is probably already expecting to see crime and brutality... So, what? He doesn't think they can handle what they expect to happen? Does that make sense?
shareTo truely appreciate the difference just watch these two scenes.
1) Billy Bats getting the shit kicked out of him in the bar in Goodfellas, while a Donovan hit plays (actually louder once the beating starts)
2) Cornfield scene in Casino without any music.
He uses mainstream music because he's trying to evoke a time, among other reasons.
shareYes music can be used to do that. So can clothing, attitudes, language, possessions etc. I think the amount of mainstream music is annoying because it distracts from the actual story of what is going on. As a viewer, we should be able to establish a time or mood just by looking at a scene. How is it lit, body language, what is the dialogue. Having a different mainstream song every other scene is just overkill.
shareAnd I'm not saying music can't be used to evoke a time. I think in some instances it enhances a scene, but for Casino, it did not.
shareThe soundtrack was great! I wasn't that impressed with the film, but I really liked the soundreack.
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