Goodfellas

The real DeSimone was considered crazy, even by the other mobsters. He would shoot and kill people for no reason, while the others only did it if they had to.

The real Jimmy the Gent wasn't always so nice either. Supposedly, to get people to pay up for things, he would lock their kids in freezers until they paid.

 

Liked how on the 30 for 30, the US attorney mentioned Hill also had two girlfriends outside in the waiting area that he wanted to bring into the witness protection arrangement as well.

And I didn't realize that attorney actually played himself in the movie.

 

Goodfellas is one of those movies you can watch over and over again. Of course, it's extremely hard to resist a good mob movie. It's also fun looking at some of the actors in it (like Imperioli and Samuel L.) who gained greater fame in other projects.

Playing for the Mob was excellent also, and gave me a great one to put in the "he/she was in that" thread. They were interviewing the US attorney in the point-shaving case and I was wondering where I saw him before, and it turns out he was essentially playing himself in the movie as the guy explaining to Henry and Karen that the witness protection was their only option.

EDIT: Kirk beat me to it on the attorney.

 

It's a deeply felt movie. After years and years of kind of circling around these singular, bizarre, almost inscrutable characters -- Bickle and LaMotta and, well, Jesus -- Scorsese rooted this film in "one of the guys" and, even though these men are pretty much on the verge of madness in cultural terms... I think it's Karen who says "these were blue collar guys" in the movie. Somehow, it seemed like a life, as hellish as it was, that a person could (and did) live for awhile. And it's not really about the boss. I think that's the key. It's about a guy who's not made. He'd just as soon no one died. It's the movie, really, about Scorsese himself; the watching the gangsters from afar as a boy, the charm of being the man, that want to belong, the eventual drug problem, fooling around with scandalous women. The "Copa" scene. Is there is a more defining scene about middle class American manhood in the last half of the 20th Century? Walking in the back entrance to the best table in the house all while impressing a beautiful, classy girl on your arm? All of Henry's rotten life, could it be worth that moment alone?

And it really uses pop music as a character. That's overdone now, especially since MTV does it with everything. Scorsese himself overdoes it. But it was fresh in that movie.

I've rarely seen a movie so alive as that one. The first two Godfather films are "better," I know they are, they're better art, filmmaking of such beauty and elegance that it's canonical to the industry, like Citizen Kane or The Third Man or 2001. But neither are alive like Goodfellas.

I know a guy whose two favorite movies - ever - are Goodfellas and The Sandlot. Odd couple, right? But the way he put to me years ago, why those two, I'll never forget: "One's about having a bunch of money in your pocket, the other's about baseball, and if I'm honest, just about everything I've ever liked in life involved those two things."

 

It's almost criminal how overlooked it was come Oscar time. I think Pesci accounted for the film's only Oscar. Of course, people say the same thing about Raging Bull.

I don't think I've ever met anyone who would rather watch Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas.

 

Dude, Dick Tracy won more Oscars than Goodfellas. DICK FUCKIN' TRACY.

Dances With Wolves was overrated at the time, though I'd argue it's quite underrated now. It really was a treat to watch that movie. That said, I think Goodfellas was the best film that year.

The worse snub, though, was that Ghost, Awakenings and The Godfather Part III were all nominated for Best Picture over The Hunt for Red October.

 

Was sitting there watching it and thinking to myself, man, they did a good job casting the attorney role....

 

Joe Pesci introduced Tommy DeVito to Bob Gaudio helping launch the Four Seasons. Pesci played a guy named Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. And now the real Tommy DeVito works for Pesci.

 

I saw Dances with Wolves in the theater when it came out. I liked it, but never had any desire to sit through it again. I've seen it lumped with movies like Forrest Gump as Best Picture winners that don't hold up. Not sure if that's fair or not.

 

My brother-in-law's brother-in-law (my sister's husband's sister's husband, if that makes it less confusing) was on the drug task force that arrested Henry Hill in 1980. Guy did two tours in Vietnam and worked as a cop on Long Island for 20 years, then dropped dead of a heart attack on a golf course in his late 40s.

 

I remember reading the book and thinking how much better the movie made Henry Hill look. Aren't there a couple of murders Hill was responsible for that other people/characters commit in the movie?

 

Academy Award winners are a reflection of the tastes of the voters. A lot of voters then didn't much care for the venality and lurid violence of the movie.

It'd win in a heartbeat now. Hell, the Departed won, and it's pretty average by comparison, a bad knockoff.