You're a pisser. Really funny. Really funny.
What do you mean I'm funny?
It's funny, you know? It's a good story. It's funny.
You're a funny guy. What do you mean? You mean the way I talk?
What? It's just, you know, you're just funny.
It's funny, you know, the way you tell the story and everything.
Funny how? I mean, what's funny about it?
Tommy, no, you got it all wrong. Oh, Anthony. He's a big boy. He knows
what he said. What'd you say? Funny how?
What? Just, you know, you're funny. You mean— let
me understand this, 'cause maybe it's me. I'm a little fucked up, maybe.
But I'm funny how? I mean, funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you?
I make you laugh? I'm here to fucking amuse you? What do you mean funny?
Funny how? How am I funny?
Just— you know how you tell a story? Well— No,
no, I don't know. You said it. How do I know? You said I'm funny.
How the fuck am I funny? What the fuck is so funny about me?
Tell me. Tell me what's funny.
Get the fuck out of here, Tommy. You motherfucker!
I almost had him! I almost had him! You stuttering
prick, you! Frankie, was he shaking? I wonder
about you sometimes, Henry. You may fold under questioning.
It's Two Dads,
One Movie. It's the podcast where two middle-aged dads sit around and
shoot the shit about the movies of the '80s and '90s. Here are
your hosts, Steve Paulo and Nick Briana.
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Two Dads, One Movie. I'm Steve.
And I'm Nick. And today we are moving from the 1980s into the 1990s in
our Two Dads, Two Decades exploration of both decades.
And for the year 1990, we have chosen the Martin Scorsese crime
classic Goodfellas, starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe
Pesci, and a bunch of other people. I mean, it's almost like this cast is
just loaded. Absolutely ridiculous. So this was my pick
for us. And, you know, I'll say I remember how old I was when I
first saw this because I think it was sophomore year of high school, so it
would've been right around maybe 1996. I got into a kind
of a funk, not a funk, but I got into like a phase of like
watching a lot of Quentin Tarantino, you know, a lot of Martin Scorsese,
a lot of Francis Ford Coppola. Like that's the year that I first saw like
Reservoir Dogs and I saw this, I saw The Godfather for the first time.
And it was just kind of in that like era for myself of discovering
these movies. And Goodfellas was like my favorite kind of mobster crime
movie for a long time. It, so much in this movie is just, Absolutely classic.
This is one my wife loves. She actually, we were just talking about last night,
a couple years ago she decided she wanted to watch, look, listen, watch this movie.
And then every time a song came on, she would add it to, she would
figure out, you know, find it and add it to a Spotify playlist. So she's
got this huge, 'cause there's so much music in this movie. Oh, a ton of
songs in this. A huge playlist of all like '50s and '60s, like Motown and
doo-wop and kind of that stuff that, you know, is from this movie
in a single playlist, which is fantastic. But yeah, Goodfellas is just,
You know, it's gonna be kind of hard, I feel, in a lot of ways
to like, quote, review this movie, 'cause it's Goodfellas, for God's sake, you know?
So what's your experience with Goodfellas, Nick? Yeah, I think I got into it around
the same time. And it was during that like, oh, Pulp Fiction's out,
you start caring about what's a good movie, what are the classics, you know?
What's the stuff that I was a little too young for when it came out?
And catching up on that. But this was great. I remember watching
this with my brother a bunch and watching it with my parents. I think
we got a tape of it at some point. This was like,
early, like mid-'90s, '90s. Yeah, probably around '96.
So Blockbuster, I was starting to buy some used tapes and all that stuff.
Perfect. Um, so quotable. There's, there's so many
things about this that I think about. Like, this is one of those few movies
where I think about the characters outside the context of the movie sometimes.
Like, so many things just really tend to come alive with this film.
And, uh, it's just, it's been a while since I've revisited it.
Yeah. And, uh, I'm really glad I did, and I'm psyched to chat about this
one today. Absolutely. Let's jump into the facts on Goodfellas
because there's a lot of good stuff in here. All right. The movie Goodfellas came
out on September 19th, 1990, with an R rating,
obviously, and a running time of 145 minutes, which might be the
longest movie that we've covered on the pod. I'm not positive, but it's up there
for sure. Directed by the incomparable Martin Scorsese,
written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese,
starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, and Joe Pesci. Scores on Rotten Tomatoes,
a 93%. Not even sure how anybody didn't
give a positive review to this thing, but apparently 7% of reviewers did. Yeah,
weirdos. On IMDb, an 8.7,
which is astronomical, is the 17th highest rated movie
on IMDb. Of all movies on IMDb, it is number 17,
which is pretty wild. And then Siskel and Ebert with two thumbs up, which again,
not a surprise. Awards. This movie,
I'm not going to go into all of them, but this movie won 44 total
awards. 44 awards this movie won. It won— there
was at the 1991 Oscars, it won Best Supporting Actor. Joe Pesci won Best Supporting
Actor for his role in this movie, but it was also nominated for Best Picture,
Best Editing, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best
Supporting Actress for Lorraine Bracco. They did not— none of them won, though.
At the— Rough to not win Best Picture. Yeah. Looking back, like,
you know, me and the boys always hanging out quoting Dances with Wolves to each
other. That's a great movie, too, though. But anyway, at the '91 BAFTA
Awards, however, which we know are sort of the British Oscars, it did win for
Best Film. Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Costume Design,
and Best Editing. Whew. It was also nominated for a pair of Guild Awards,
the DGA Award for Best Director. Scorsese was nominated there and
the WGA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, nominated there as well.
No wins. It was also nominated for 5 Golden Globes with no wins. And like
a lot of the movies we cover, was added to the National Film Registry in
the year 2000, which is one of the earliest, I think. Yeah, relative to when
it came out for sure. On a budget of $25 million.
It made $47 million at the box office, which is kind of a disappointment.
That's just under 2 times what it cost. That is in our disappointment category.
And I think interesting to note, the movie we watched last week,
Roadhouse, which, you know, let's, let's face it, is not exactly a work
of, of great cinema, was able to pull in a little bit better, you know,
kind of like relative numbers at the box office, which kind of surprised me.
But yeah, $20 and $25 million to do a movie of this scope for
$25 million is impressive as hell. And it all went into like technical things
that made this look so good, you know? And wow,
what a job. I will never forget the look of Tommy DeVito's
face cutting off near the end. That effect was fantastic.
Okay, so this is Goodfellas. Let's jump into
it. I'm going to go ahead and get us started. Boy. Okay,
so this movie starts, we are driving down the highway in a Pontiac
Grand Prix owned by one Mr. Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta.
Next to him is Jimmy Conway, played by Robert De Niro. And in the backseat
is Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci. So the three of them are driving along
and there is a banging racket coming from somewhere in the car. And at first
they think, God, did we hit something? Is it a flat? Like, what's going on?
So they pull off the side of the highway, off into the woods it almost
seems. And, you know, they have to sort of like, you know, there's noise coming
from the trunk. And so Tommy's got a knife and,
you know, Henry's got the keys and they kind of gingerly open things up
and there is a man in the trunk of this car struggling and
yelling or trying to, but he's like, oh my God, almost senseless,
whatever. And Tommy is like, This motherfucker won't die! And he
starts stabbing him over and over again, at which point we get a little bit
of like a freeze frame, and Ray Liotta's voice, Henry Hill's, goes, as far back
as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. And it might not
be literally the first thing said in the movie because they talk a little,
you know, in the car, but for like a real opening line of a movie,
one of the best ever. And then going right into the music,
and like, it's beautiful,
and it drags you right into it. So now we're in a flashback
into like the '50s. This said it was 1970. Yes, right now we're going back
to like 50, 55, or something like that. And, and the first hour of this
hour— of this 2.5-hour-long movie is in flashback. We don't
get back to that moment on the highway for a full hour. So for the
next hour, we are getting backstory that leads us up to this. It's almost
in a way like the longest cold open in the history, but not quite because
we do get the title card and stuff. But yeah, yeah, uh, so we get
a flashback and we get young Henry, uh, great casting by the way. Like a
lot of play, uh, places in this film, the young version The young Pesci
is perfection. Beautiful. Yes. Yeah. So the young Henry is
great. And, uh, you know, kind of talking about where he's growing
up and stuff, and, you know, they're in a poor area in New York,
and they're Italian family. His dad's Irish, his mom's from Sicily.
That's right. And there's like some Italian kind of mob type guys across
the street. Uh, Tootie Cicero has like a cab stand or something, and so
there's always some activity around That's right. And one of the first we see Henry
sort of watching out the window, he's learning about these guys. He says he always
wanted to be with them. Yeah, they were clearly like, they ran the neighborhood.
Nobody messed with them. They could double park in front of a hydrant. Nobody would
bother them. They'll get no tickets, whatever. So he always starts from an early age
just idolizing this group of men down at the cab stand, one of whom we've
seen, as we have seen many people in this movie, in the film or in
the series The Sopranos. So I noticed right away the actor Tony
Sirico, who played Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos. I don't know if his name might
have been Tony as well in this. I'm not 100% sure. Yeah. But the thing
that I noticed that made it clear to me that who that is, is that
he points with both the index and pinky finger like
Paulie Wolnitz does throughout the series, The Sopranos. And this guy points the same way
and it's like, oh my God, that's Tony Sirico. But there are how many— I
mean, you look this up too, Nick. How many people were in this movie and
at least one episode of The Sopranos? 27. That's insane. That's crazy.
That's wild. This— I mean, this movie is one of those movies with a ton
of actors in it because there's a lot of characters and there's characters at different
stages. And during the credits, I mean, the cast is incredibly large
in this movie, but This isn't just like side extras. This is people
with speaking parts in this movie for the most part who had like significant roles
in The Sopranos. Absolutely. So yeah, really cool to see that. Yeah.
And God, I mean, the scene of the glamorizing this because where
Henry lives, you know, he's in a little apartment that's very small for his family.
Yeah. His dad seems to have, you know, not that great of a job.
He's taking it out on the wife and kids and everything. So he's looking for
something better. He's inspired by these guys who seem to have a little class and
get a little respect in the neighborhood when everyone else, including his dad, probably is
shit on. As he's observing. Yeah. Do we know what neighborhood they're in? I don't
think we ever quite got— is this like Staten Island, Bronx, Brooklyn? Like, I can't
actually tell. Queens? I don't know where they are. Yeah, I don't remember off the
top of my head. I mean, it's not Manhattan. I feel like that's the only
thing I feel confident about. They're not living in Manhattan, but you know, it's one
of the outer boroughs. Um, but yeah, so this is, uh, so we get
introduced, uh, because basically Henry starts working like a day, a job after school initially
at the cab stand, making a little money. You know, he's parking guys' cars and
like doing whatever. But over time, it seems like even quickly he just stops going
to school. And the cab stand is like not just an after-school job. It's an
everyday, all-day job because he wants in on this life. And he knows that
by being good and doing what he's told, that he can get that. We get
him introduced to a couple of very important characters throughout the movie. One, Jimmy Conway,
who's Irish. We say, you know, we hear, right, that Henry is half Irish.
His mom's Sicilian. His dad's Irish. Jimmy is just Irish. He's an Irish-American,
but he's got connects and he's got ins and he's willing to do things.
And so he sort of acts as an associate a soldier associated with,
uh, this, this crime family here. Um, he's played by Robert De Niro, and even
the young version of Jimmy is Robert De Niro. He just like, he kind of—
I don't know if they use makeup, whatever, they darkened his hair, whatever, but it's
like he's a younger Jimmy. Scorsese loves pretending that De Niro is way
younger than he really is. It's true. Um, but the other person that
he gets introduced to, Tommy DeVito, who as an adult will be played by Joe
Pesci, but here is this, yeah, young guy. I don't know the actor, but not
only do they got a guy that looks a lot like Pesci, and really you
could say, yeah, that guy will grow up to look like Pesci, but he sounds
like him. He He sounds like him so
much. And, and I love him. He says Hendry.
He says Hendry instead of Henry. I really enjoy that.
Um, so, so Henry though, like, like you said, like he was being
truant from school and his mom got a letter. His dad beat him up,
you know, for him not going to school. And he takes that to the mob
guys and their solution is, okay, we're gonna intimidate your mailman and
tell him he can't deliver another letter to your house.
And, uh, you know, there's a couple lines from Henry here, like his dad's
beating him up and during the voiceover he's like, yeah, the way I see it,
everybody Everybody takes a beating sometimes, right?
Uh, the voiceovers in this film are great
to just move the story along, but when it gets to explaining kind of how
these guys are making money or how it is that like the mafia is working,
it's so instructive and it's so like efficient. Yeah, throughout this
movie, this is an adapted screenplay. This was based off a book that was written
about a real set of events that occurred surrounding, mostly surrounding, um,
this, this heist at the end of the movie called the Lufthansa Heist, which is
one of the biggest airport heists in American history at the time. And so what
What Scorsese obviously and Nicholas Pileggi chose to do is like,
rather than trying to show us all the detail that the book contains,
let's use narration. And for the most part, it's Henry Hill, Ray Liotta doing the
voiceover from Henry Hill's perspective. But for a chunk of the movie, we get his
eventual wife, Karen, played by Lorraine Bracco. We get her perspective
on stuff and her voiceover is there. And it's so fantastic, the different feel
throughout the movie of when Henry is narrating versus when Karen is narrating
and the differences there. Is really impressive. And just— and again, another reason
frankly why, why Bracco should have absolutely won Best Supporting Actress. Like, uh, because she
plays the role and she does the narration and it's just like so good in
both. And I'm shocked. I don't— you know what, I should have looked up who
won in that year. I can bet— I bet it'd piss me off if I
do. Um, but yes, so, uh, so this kind
of whole operation is run by Paul Cicero. That's right, Cicero.
And, uh, that's Paul Sorvino. That's right. And we see him, and some of the
things about him is that, you know, Paulie, he would only talk to one person
at a time and he wouldn't have a phone in his house or a TV,
you know, he, he kept everything, didn't want people
to hear what he was saying, you know, didn't even want other people to know
who he was talking to. Yeah, the whole thing. Yeah, good opsec by Paulie,
honestly, like knowing what we know about the FBI and the mafia
and how they'd spy on it. Um, so, uh,
the explanation of it is, you know, what, what Paulie does, what people don't
understand about the mob, is Paulie offers protection to the people who can't go to
the cops. So this is how they justified it themselves, like, well, hey, yeah,
there are the cops, but there's certain people who can't go there, and that's where
we step in. We're just, you know, a benevolent force in the neighborhood. We're the
cops for the people who are breaking the law. Yeah, that's what we are.
We're the cops for the lawbreakers. We're the cops who arrest the cops. That's right.
Um, uh, but he's talking about like all the things that he sees these guys
getting and how he was getting these benefits. You know, I was getting to go
to the front of the line at the grocery, uh, line, and people were being,
you know, respectful. And somebody carried my mother's groceries
all the way home. You know why? Just out of respect. And while he's saying
all this stuff, What he's doing on screen is pouring gasoline
on a whole, like, parking lot full of cars and lighting them on fire.
So he's doing a James Caan thief. That's right. And the
justification of the acts and the sort of mental
dissonance between the thing that's being done and the explanation
for why it was necessary is one of the most interesting sort of elements
of this movie, because there's so many things that are like, well, that is just—
there is no moral ground for that. Yeah.
Unless you believe that all is permitted, that nothing is illegal. And so the only
justification is sort of revenge versus, you know, like, like, like you do
to me, so I'm going to do to you. Like, then you justify it.
But really, it's like they're just breaking the law constantly and they're destroying property and
they're just being awful. But there's all this like, yeah, well, that's the way it
goes. Like, it wouldn't, it wouldn't go that way if you didn't do that.
Like, and he is— I mean, speaking of this very matter-of-factly, yeah,
we're doing a service to the neighborhood. We're just a business like anybody
else. And so when he's
talking about Jimmy, Robert De Niro, Jimmy's thing is that he like
hijacks truckloads of stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he'll like hijack merchandise and
then go, you know, sell it real cheap. Give a bunch of it away even.
Yeah, give a lot of it away. And they say that, you know, Jimmy,
we call him Jimmy the Gent because everyone, like the way he explains the scams,
it's like, yeah, we're robbing this truck, but really us and
then the truck driver's in on it and then the dispatcher's in on it.
And like, all these people are involved. So really, like, we're all part
of the scam and insurance covers it or whatever it is, you know, like somebody
is paying who we don't care about. It's the classic sort of criminal justification for,
for stealing things, especially when they belong to a company and not an
individual. It's like, well, look, they're insured, they're covered. Like, what? It doesn't matter.
And so we're going to pay the delivery driver, we're going to pay the security
guard, we're going to pay the district. They're all going to get their beak wet.
They're all going to get a piece. They're all going to be better off than
they were before. And we get a shit ton. Of either money or
loot or whatever. And so that's how they justify that. But well, yeah, so Jimmy
steals a bunch of cartons of cigarettes and stuff, and then Henry and Tommy
are selling them out the back of a car. Look like to me like a
bunch of factory workers or something, you know, selling for cheap Pall Malls, Lucky Strikes,
whatever. And some guys walk up, you know, cops or whatever, and they
arrest Henry. And I love— he's so innocent still at this point. He's like,
no, no, no, it's okay, it's okay, guys, it's okay. And they're like, what are
you talking about it's okay? You're selling stolen cigarette cartons. Like, it's okay.
And, uh, and that's just Tommy busts off and goes tell Paulie, hey, Henry got
pinched. Um, and they go to— that we see Henry's, you know,
court hearing or whatever it is. Um, and I don't remember what sentencing he got
or whatever. Nothing. I think they let him off because there was kind of a
scene of his lawyer who seemed like a great two mafia lawyer, kind of like
grinning and winking at the judge. And then Henry was just walking out. Exactly.
And he thought he was in trouble. So Jimmy walks up to him, he's like
stuffing cash in his pockets, like, you did good. He's like, I thought you'd be
mad. Mad? Everybody gets pinched. But you followed the two rules. You never rat
out your friends. You never take— you never say shit or something, right? Oh,
the two best things in life. Yeah, yeah. Never rat on your friends and always
keep your mouth shut. And it's kind of like a subset of a set,
you know? The second one covers the first one. Number 2, never draw
squares. And number 2, number 2, never draw rectangles.
Like, the fuck out of here. Um,
so, uh, so I think we have an idea now of,
uh, a heist, like So we're kind of grown up
now. Yeah, not like fully to the present at the beginning of the film,
but like— but it's now Ray Liotta and Joe Pesci. Yeah, yeah. And they're
stealing trucks coming out of the airport, so they're doing Jimmy's type of
work. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, again, this all works. Like, these guys
know, they see us coming and everything, and they steal this guy's truck in front
of a diner. Of course, this guy has to come in and he blames it
on two Black guys, who he doesn't say it that— no, he doesn't. And,
uh, but I This is probably realistic. And one of the things that Henry says
is that if the truck drivers complain and
they try to like bring the cops into it, we also control the union so
we can threaten the company with the strike. So they have all these ways to
protect their rackets. It's very interesting. Also, this reminds me
the reason that they hit up the airport constantly. They say, we lived right by
the airport. This is our neighborhood, this is our turf. So that means since they're
talking about JFK, they live in Queens. That answers that question. There we go.
Neighborhood. But yeah, so, so they're doing all that and we
now cut to Well, we've got, you know, still more Ray Liotta sort
of like narration, and we're at a restaurant called the Bamboo Lounge, and it seems
like it's, you know, this is like Vesuvio in Prada, right? I love this place,
by the way. It's so cool. I want there to be one in town.
I like that lighting. It's like a tiki bar, but it looks like they sell
Italian food. I mean, this looks like the most wild place, but he's introing all
the characters, and this is like all the different names for people, and like,
you know, Tommy Two Times, I'm gonna get the papers, get the papers. Like he
said everything twice. It's just very funny introing like the whole group. And then in
the back of the, uh, of the restaurant, they're bringing in stolen goods or
kind of using it as like a staging area maybe, or like whatever. And there's
a bunch of fur coats on a rack coming in. And of course, if you
get another Sopranos reference, this is Vinnie Pastore. Big Pussy is the guy.
Very— yeah, like, don't, don't search this
wrong in the transcript, but a very young Big Pussy. That's very young. That's true.
Yeah. He looks like he's maybe 26 or something. I don't know how old he
actually was at the time, but he does look young. Um, so one of the,
um, one of the guys, Frenchy, who we've seen in, uh,
Dumb and Dumber— he's right, the gas man, one of the guys who's pursuing them
in Dumb and Dumber. And he's telling, uh, Henry and Jimmy about
this like plane with cash on it, this Air France plane. That's right.
You know, like, hey, I'm the security guard at the airport, like, this is a
piece of cake, $400 grand cash and everything, right? So he's bringing him into some
scams here. Exactly. Uh, and now we end up with kind of one of our
best, uh, one of our best scenes. One of the earliest scenes that,
that and almost all of this is a good reason why Joe Pesci won the
Oscar for this. So many of the, like, most memorable scenes in this movie revolve
around his character Tommy. And this is one of them. He's telling a story about,
like, you know, I don't remember the exact details of the story, but it was
just like this thing where he's like, like, you know, I kept telling the guy,
like, you know, leave me alone. He's like talking back to the cops. Yeah.
Beating them up. Boom, bang, whatever. His onomatopoeia,
man. And he keeps— and everybody's laughing. Everybody's belly laughing,
just dying laughing. And as he wraps the story up, Henry goes,
God, you're funny, Tommy. You're so funny. And Tommy looks pissed at this. He goes,
Funny how? What do you mean I'm funny? Funny how? What do you mean?
What do you mean? What do you mean? You said it. I don't know.
You said it. Yeah. What do you mean funny? Funny how? What am I,
a clown? I'm here to amuse you. Funny how? And initially Henry's
laughing at him, whatever. But like Tommy looks really pissed. And for a moment Henry's
like, what are you talking about, Tommy? You tell a funny story. Like, what do
you mean? You know, he's like getting real mousy. But then he goes, get the
fuck out of here. And Tommy's like, I almost got him. And it's clear that
like Tommy's the kind of guy that is dangerous
enough and will fuck people up for little enough that when he
screws with you, you can't be sure. Even if you're like his best friend,
right? Number one brother in the world is still at danger of
Tommy DeVito. It is crazy. Ray Liotta's laugh
is iconic. I love the way he laughs. Nobody else laughs
that way. Uh, so right after this scene, Tommy is approached
by the owner of the Bamboo Lounge who's telling Tommy like,
hey, oh, you're gonna settle your check, you owe me, uh, 7 grand,
right? Yeah, bad move. I mean, if this guy knows him, that is a
terrible move. And this guy's a real— look, he's been wronged by Tommy, but he's
a very unlikable character. He's very like whiny and shitty and
everything. So, uh, Tommy basically breaks a bottle of
champagne over that guy's head and shoves him away, and then, you know, threatens this
other server, and he says, oh,
you talk about funny. So everyone's still laughing at all this stuff, you know.
He's like, oh, you want to, you want to know something funny? Last week this
guy asked me to christen his kid, and I didn't— when I was younger,
when I first saw, I didn't get the joke. I didn't understand the joke.
Like, you christen a boat by breaking the champagne bottle. Like, Jesus. In the moment,
man, that is a great joke. I read that a lot of his, like,
funny how, that was all, uh, it was improv. Oh really? At least it was
like loosely scripted. And stuff. Wow. So just knowing that so much
of that was just let Pesci cook makes me appreciate it more. So good.
And of course, Henry finishes this scene by going, you know what, Tommy,
you're a funny guy. And that's just like, oh, you bastard. Like, it's very— it's
such good, like, bro kind of humor, you know, with each other, even though Tommy
pulls a gun on him. Yeah, jokingly pulls a gun. That's always fun. Um,
but basically, the owner of the Bamboo Lounge is now like— he's at his wit's
end. He goes to Paulie through Henry, basically. And Henry's like, look, come talk
to Paulie. Maybe he can help you And the guy's like, look, Paulie, I need
some help. I need somebody. He's like, what do you want from me? What do
you want me to do? It's Tommy. Like, he's wild. I can't control Tommy.
It's like, oh, if you told him to stop, he'd stop. Yeah, but like,
I'm not going to tell him to— like, basically Paulie's saying, like, I'm not going
to babysit even my guys. Like, fuck you. Like, deal with him. Yeah.
You know, you're an adult. Deal with him. But that's when he goes, well,
what if you came in on the restaurant with me? Come in the place.
It's a great place. You're in there all the time. You already know how great
it is. Because this way Tommy's not going to act the same when it's Paulie's
place. He's going to be a little more respectful. And that's what this guy I
don't remember the character's name, but he's looking for it. There you go. Too late.
I wrote it. This is what Sonny's looking for, is just like, get Tommy off
my back. So Paulie goes in on him, and now we get the, the narration
of Henry explaining like, yeah, now that Paulie's your partner, you got a problem with
the cops, go to Paulie. You got a problem with Tommy, you go to Paulie.
You got a problem with the distributor, you go to Paulie. He's going to take
care of everything, but he's also going to take everything. Yeah.
And, and his explanation of how kind of the bust out of the business
goes, where it's like, well, okay, we're going to order a bunch of booze on
your credit line sell it out the back door at a discount because we're never
going to pay that credit line. Pure profit, you know? And then once we're out
of credit, we can't borrow anything else, like, we burn the place down, we light
the place on fire. Yeah. And this is also the famous part where it's like,
you know, every single week you got to pay— you got to pay Paulie his
money. Oh, oh, you had a bad week? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, your kid's
in the hospital? Fuck you, pay me. Like, everything is fuck you, pay me.
Yeah. Ended up living far beyond this movie as like a cultural thing.
That's fuck you, pay me. Oh, for sure. Especially in rap music and stuff.
I mean, that was like big time there. Yeah. So Tommy and Henry are
kind of sitting outside of this restaurant that they've just like lit on fire
with a bunch of like little kerosene rags and stuff. It's so detailed.
They almost did like individual Christmas lights of kerosene. I wonder
if you do that because then there's no single ignition point. Like, it doesn't look
like there's a single ignition point for the fire. It looks like it all kind
of spread quickly or something. Maybe it looks less like arson that way. I'm not
sure why they did that much. You know, why not just douse the thing in
gasoline and just throw a match, you know? But that's how they did it.
It was— and it looks like it really smokes before it burns, you know?
Like, so interesting. There must have been a very specific reason why that was the
method chosen. Yeah. And I mean, gave them a lot to do. And, uh,
and then so they have to sit outside and like make sure that it caught
properly. And, uh, during their, uh, time out here, Tommy is
telling Henry, he's like, hey, I want to date this lady, but she said,
you know, she's not going to go with me unless I bring someone for her
friend. She wants to bring a friend along. Will you come date this girl?
Yeah, because she's Jewish, but she's prejudiced against Italians. She Italian guy.
Can you believe that? A Jew brought President Prejudice against Italians.
Great line in that. Um, so yeah, so this
is Karen here, and Henry wants nothing to do with
it. So he's got like a job to do that night, like he's got somewhere
to be, he's supposed to meet Paulie or something, and he's just preoccupied. He's disinterested.
Exactly. Um, so he gets dragged on the date, and this is kind of where
we get the switchover of the voiceover. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And now we get—
Karen is just, again, great. I don't know how many movies have done like the
multiple voiceover to this point, but I really, really love this. He does
it in Casino as well. Yeah, yeah. Um, but super effective. Absolutely.
And Karen, we get her perspective that like Henry was just uninterested and, and kind
of, you know, it was so rude and it's like whatever. And but, but basically
Tommy and Karen's friend, they convinced the two of them to double date again even
after a terrible first date. And so they agree, but then Henry stands around,
doesn't show up. So it's, it's just the three of them at dinner and she's
super embarrassed and humiliated. So she tells— she gets Tommy that,
you got to take me to wherever Henry is. He's at the cab stand because
of course he is. And so she gets out and is like yelling at him,
and all the guys are laughing at Henry, and he's
kind of like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, I thought it was next weekend, like what
are you talking about? Like, you, you were bored, I thought you'd stand me up.
Like he's trying to like play it back at her. And his voiceover comes in,
is kind of like, she was yelling at me, she was so angry, but she
was so sexy. Like, that's when he starts liking her. And that takes
us to their, I guess technically, second date since he stood them up— stood her
up on the, on the what should have been the second date. And it's one
of the kind again, classic scenes of the movie.
Yeah, one of the best single-take tracking shots
in movie history. For 3 full minutes, a little over 3
minutes, we are a single shot following Henry and Karen through the
back door to the Copacabana. Yeah, uh, and, and I
wonder how many individual actors there were in that scene because it's like, it's not
just going through a facility, there are people everywhere, their interactions
happening the entire— well, there's a huge crowd out front that they're going past,
right? And then he's saying hi to everybody, he's throwing $20 bills at everybody.
And this is, you know, every time you— yeah, I would just go into places
and start saying that. This is like the mid-1960s probably at this point. And he's
throwing $20 a pop at people. That's a lot of money, right? And so,
and there's still stuff. And like, you know, he gets in and there's people waiting
to like get actually seated once they're inside the place. He and Karen come
up and they're lift— they're carrying a table over to a blank spot
in front for him to sit down and watch Henny Youngman for all people,
which is like— I reference Uh, the, the carrying the
table and just producing a new front row seat out of the ether. I referenced
that probably monthly. I think about that all the time. It's so good. Uh,
it's really good. I mean, that, that shot is so immersive, like walking
through the Copa in the back of the kitchen and just how long it
takes. It's just— and then it makes the arrival to the actual
venue just seem so magical, you know, like, whoa, like This
is the place to be. And we like took that route there. And I love
it. Karen asks him, what do you do? Yeah, what do you do? And he
goes, I'm in construction. And then she does the hand check, the check.
Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, you have soft hands. I'm a union delegate.
That's right. Uh, so they're watching Henny Youngman, and the Henny
Youngman audio is happening. Yes. So we
get Henny Youngman telling his jokes while it's showing this Air France kind of robbery.
That's right. So they're going and stealing the money, $420,000 they got from Air France.
Again, mid-'60s. The Henny Youngman jokes going over it.
I like that, uh, I like that juxtaposition there.
Oh man. Okay, so then we get a scene where Karen has apparently brought—
it looks to me like Karen has brought, uh, Henry to like her family's,
uh, country club or something, tennis club, you know,
something like that. Um, I don't know if they also live in Queens, it's a
nicer part of Queens, or like what, you know, but they're somewhere in, in New
York and, and clearly members of this country club. And there's a guy who says
hi to Karen, this guy Bruce or whatever, kind kind of not hits on him,
hits on him, but he's clearly like, does not consider Henry at
all. Like, it's just kind of like, okay, whatever. Hey, Karen, he looks very swimmer-ish.
Yeah, a little bit. Also a lot like a couple of the guys in the,
uh, Delta Chi or whatever from Trading Places, the, the fraternity.
He looks like a couple of those guys. Oh yes, together. Yeah. Um, but you
know, and it's— and I literally wrote in my notes, Bruce, don't hit on Karen,
this is gonna go bad for you. Um, yeah. And Karen's voiceover
here, she says about Henry, like, why she likes him, you He was, he was
exciting. He was nice. People wanted to be nice to him and he knew how
to handle that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting. Yeah. She kind of knew
he wasn't fully like, she didn't believe that
he was a union delegate at that point. It's clear that she is suspicious
of sort of like where all his money comes from. Why do the seas part
for him wherever he goes? But she's also like totally having fun being
along for the ride. And so she's not asking too many questions, at least not
at this stage. And then we see Maury's Wigs, an ad for
Maury's Wigs. And Maury is a new character being introduced to, who's obviously
somebody that, you know, again, is sort of like involved with the crew. He's not
in the mafia. He's a, he's a, what they call civilian, right? But he's
obviously very involved. And he has, you know,
like Jimmy owes him money and there's like stuff. I think like he was maybe
involved in figuring out the Air France thing or something. Like he's involved in a
lot of the heists as like an information guy, it seems like. Like, um,
and then he also seems to have a gambling problem and gambles
through Jimmy. That's a good point too. So there's, so there's all kinds of stuff
there. And he, but he is like very brazen. Like Maury from
the jump is like, you know, fuck Jimmy. And it's like, and Henry's like,
don't say fuck Jimmy. Fuck him in the ear. Fuck him in the other ear.
You're gonna— that's bad. Like, go tell him yourself, like, you fucker. Like,
uh, and then yeah, they end up getting in a little
bit of a scuffle and Maury's, uh, wig falls off and it makes everyone start
laughing. Thank God for toupees falling off. I wonder how many lives have been saved
moved by just like a toupee falls off and someone's, I'm gonna laugh too hard,
I can't rip your throat out now. She's literally like strangling with a telephone cord
at the time. Uh, so now we get Henry gets
a call, uh, from Karen, and he goes to pick her up,
and she's very upset. Yeah. And she tells him his story
when he picks her up, that Bruce the neighbor, you know,
basically sexually assaulted her, tried to,
you know, push it really far, and then kicked her out of the car.
Yeah. And, uh, and you know, Henry's just like fucking furious,
takes her home. Bruce is in front of his car with his other Theta Chi
dipshit buddies, like polishing a Corvette or whatever.
And Henry, just no words, like, all right, are you okay? Gets out of his
car and walks across the street and starts pistol-whipping him in the face.
Very satisfying. It's not even pistol-whipping. I mean, he's got— he's holding— it's like a.38
Special. It's a little pistol. He's holding it where he's just slamming the side of
it into the guy's head over and over. I mean, 10,
11, 12 times. I mean, something like that. And then as the other guys,
you know, they're in shock, they're not gonna, whatever. He kind of points the gun
at them like, "Fuck off." Goes back over and just hands it
to Karen and goes, "Hide this." And her voiceover kicks in. It's like,
most women would've run the first time their boyfriend asked them to hide a bloody
gun. Like, but instead we
cut to the wedding. And then it cuts right to the wedding, which at
first is like showing them having like a religious, like a Jewish religious ceremony.
That's right. Like a mazel tov. Kicks off and very modest, you know, and Henry's
family's there and her family's there and stuff. And then it goes to like the
mafia wedding, which is just the mafia people, and it's this big
ballroom and everyone's in, you know, black tie, beautiful place.
Yeah, yeah. Uh, Karen's voiceover
here, we're going around, we're meeting the family, and she's like, I went around and
just what a whirlwind it is meeting all the people for the first time.
And everyone had a son, everyone was named Petey or Paulie, and they all were
married to women named Marie, and their daughters were all named It's, it's legit.
My family's not even Italian, but we're Catholic, and the number of Marys, Maryanns,
Mary Ellens, Marians that are in my family, it's like ridiculous.
It's a ridiculous number. But yeah, like everybody is Pete or Petey
or Paul or Paulie or whatever, and Marys and all this stuff. And they named
all their kids Pete and Paul. Yeah, Marie and whatever. And they're getting
envelopes full of cash as their wedding gifts. So I love the scene of them
just receiving these little window envelopes where you can see Ben Franklin Joplin's face sticking
out the front there. And again, still, we're still in the '60s, so just trying
to think about exactly how much money— amazing— is, is there. And she even says,
like, what about the bag? They're dancing like their first dance. Yeah, whatever. She's like,
what about the bag? The bag with all the money? He goes, nobody's stealing that
here. Yeah, this is the safest place in the world for a bag full of
money that belongs to you, you know? Like, yeah. But they're still living with Karen's
parents at this time. Yes. And, uh, we get Karen and her parents sitting
there, you know. Her mom's like, you know, where's Henry? You know, he's out late.
A married man shouldn't be out this late. What kind of people are these?
Uh, Carmella's mom in The Sopranos, who Great actress.
I mean, always plays a character that I would never want to spend Thanksgiving
with, but very good at it. Absolutely. Yeah, love to hate kind of thing.
Yeah. And, uh, and Henry finally pulls up when it's like
starting to get light out, and they both spring up, and immediately
he gets to the door and Karen's mom is yelling at him, and he just
like turns around and gets back into the car. He starts laughing, he's laughing his
ass off. Tommy's in the car, and I love because Tommy's like goaded enough to
go, yeah, Henry, what kind of people are you? Henry, why are you You up
all late, Henry? Come on, Henry! Correct response
from a grown man. I'm sorry, like, that's— it's unacceptable behavior for you to
get screamed at when you walk in the door. Oh, they didn't have kids yet
or anything. I mean, I think— I do think they're like newlyweds though. It is
pretty fucking wild. Yeah, when you're newly married.
Um, but yeah, and so then we get Karen, and we're still in kind of
her voiceover world. Yeah, you know, zone. And she goes to this sort of hen
party with all the mafia wives. Right? And so her descriptions
here are so good. And you got these women that, yeah, like they've got bad
makeup, they got like, you know, there's one who's got like a cold sore or
something on her lip. I think one or two of them's got like a black
eye. Like it's just, these are these. And then she says, and they're talking
about like hitting their kids and how they're— so it's all like negativity and grossness
and stuff. Yeah. And she's talking about, she says, you know, they're, uh, they're dressed
cheaply, thrown together outfits, they wear too much makeup, they got bad
skin, bad hair. Like it's just, it's all kind of a nightmare. So then when
it cuts back to to, uh, you know, her at home with Henry, where they
got their own place now. They're not living with her parents anymore. You know,
she's complaining. She's saying to him like, what, what's going on? Like, like, God forbid
you go to jail. Like, this is awful. Like, what happens? He goes, nobody goes
to jail unless they want to. Yeah, Mickey went to jail to get away from
his wife. Like, this is not— like, don't worry about it. Like, this is not
gonna happen kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Or there's never going to be a consequence.
That's the best part. No one's ever gonna get caught.
And she is explaining how everything we did, we did
together. There were never any outsiders. So we only went to each
other's houses. Every birthday, every wedding, everything. It was just us.
And, you know, they're kind of showing some of the excesses they have now.
They have their nice house, the closets, like crazy amount of shit in there.
And, and Henry breaks off. He has this big, like, stack of hundreds.
He has, he has 2 inches of money. That's right. And he breaks, he breaks
a little off for Karen, and she immediately goes down to to give him head,
which is nice. I like his like, oh, oh, all right,
I'll stick around for a moment. Sure,
twist my arm. Um, but yeah, then there— we do get
a scene where Karen sort of shows us a little bit of the, the sort
of less fun side, which is, you know, the cops show up, we got a
search warrant, and she's just like, whenever they came, you know, like it would happen
every once in a while, really they were looking to get bought off. They were
looking for, you know, money. Uh, if they did find anything, no big deal,
we've— we kept money for that. That, you know, and she said, I would always—
I was always nice to him. I'd offer him coffee, bring— let him in,
like, whatever. She's like, Mickey Conway, Jimmy's wife, would spit on the floor and
curse at them. She would spit on her own floor. I never understood that.
I'm like, this is a woman with her head on straight. Like, like, why are
you going to, like, do that to your own home just to be, like,
mad at the cops? Like, they're just doing their jobs too. Everybody's getting a piece.
Yeah. It's so important to the movie that we get, like, Karen's point of view
on her culture shock of being a part of this. Yep. Coming from a
very different world. It just makes her character just, yeah, so much better. We kind
of zoom forward into the future now. Yes, we do. So we're in 1970 Queens,
and we're at— we're not at the Bamboo Lounge, we're just at a different one
of the other bars that somebody owns. I don't know if we see this.
Henry owns this bar. I can't remember the name. It's like the Sweet Spot or
something like that. It's something like that, but it's Henry's bar. Okay. And there's
a little party going on for a guy named Billy Batts, played by— I can't
remember— Frank Vincent. Frank Vincent. Yeah, there you go. Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos.
And this is another one of the kind of most memorable classic scenes from the
movie. He's there celebrating he got out of prison. He was in prison for 6
years. He's out. He's ready to, you know, get back on the street, do what
he's gonna do. He's drinking, you know, Henry's saying hi, Jimmy's there, like, whatever.
They're all kind of having a good time. And Tommy walks in with a date,
and when Billy sees Tommy, he's like,
Tommy, get over here, I'm back, whatever. And Tommy, right off the bat,
it's like, oh, this fucking guy. Like, it's like he never— it's like Billy always
gave him shit when he was younger. Yeah. And now he's like not looking forward
to seeing him. Him. And he goes, oh, we used to call this guy Spit,
you know, Spit Shine Tommy. He'd make your shoes look like mirrors. He was so
good with his shine box, whatever. And he goes, hey, I don't know if they
told you, Billy, you've been away for a long time. I don't shine shoes anymore.
You don't use them anymore. You gotta stop breaking my balls. And he goes,
well, if I was gonna break your balls, I'd tell you to go get your
fucking shine box. And it's just— he's really pushing buttons
hard. And I get that. I mean,
obviously Tommy's an overreactor, but is that— sometimes you have that situation where
if you have a friend who you were friends with in middle school and they
had a sibling that was a few years older, they see you as like,
oh, my little brother's friend, even if you're in your 20s. Yeah, right. Like,
fuck yeah, I'm not getting my shine box anymore. I'm sorry, you're literally
a year and a half older than me, dude. Like, yeah,
uh, yeah. So Tommy, Tommy leaves. He's like,
keep him here, keep him here. Takes his date home. Yeah. And,
and when they're talking about it, uh, he's like, I didn't insult anybody.
And, uh, De Niro's saying, you insulted him a little bit. A little bit.
Insulted him a little bit. Drinks on us. So they Hey, treat him drinks on
the house. What a bad party for coming home from jail after 6 years.
Hey, I'm gonna just hang out at a bar with the same henchmen I got
arrested with. Yeah, right. Yeah, there's like nobody there. Like, here's the thing,
I don't think Billy's part of Paulie's crew because there,
there's a scene later where Paulie's talking to Henry and it's sort of like clear
that he's not one of his guys. Other guys are, because I think, uh,
Paulie and all them, they're part of the Lucchese family. I think, uh, they say
Billy's with the Gambinos, so it's like a different one of the Five Families.
Why would they be at Henry's bar? I think it's maybe because it's in the
neighborhood. Like, I mean, I guess there's probably at least some crossover where people actually
live or grew up or whatever. I don't know for sure, but yeah, apparently that's
where Billy is. And Billy knew Tommy when Tommy was younger, so there's obviously some
crossover, you know, some mix-up. Exactly. But Tommy comes out to be a bad idea.
Yeah, Tommy comes back, uh, and basically,
uh, there's nobody in the bar now except for Henry and Billy and
Jimmy. And Tommy just goes in on him and starts beating him with
the— with a gun, I think, right? Like kind of the way, uh, Henry came
at Bruce. Does he start stabbing him? Yeah, no, because he gets the knife later.
Oh, that's right. Yeah, so they're beating him up, they're kicking him while he's on
the ground. This scene of Jimmy De Niro's— his face
as he's kicking, it doesn't show him doing the kicks, but it just shows his
face looking down. I love that so much. He— it feels like
Jimmy wanted to beat Billy's ass for Tommy more than Tommy wanted to
beat his ass. Like, that's the thing. Yeah. So, so Billy,
you know, obviously this guy is done for, so they're wrapping him up in
aprons, and Tommy is like still in psycho mode.
He's just like— and you know, Henry, I didn't
want to get blood on the floor. Yeah. He's like so concerned for his buddy's
bar, you know. He's like, so sorry, it's your floor, man, there's blood on it,
I'm so sorry, you know, kind of thing. But yeah, so the plan is
to go, we're gonna, we're gonna take the body, we're gonna bury him. I gotta
shovel at Tommy's— Tommy has a shovel at his mom's. Exactly. So they're gonna go
to his mom's house and get the shovel, and they go there, and they're— it's
middle of the night, they figure she'll be asleep. He's even saying, oh, let's be
quiet, we go in, whatever. But of course she's up because she heard them drive
up or whatever, and you know, she hasn't seen Tommy in a while. And of
course this is— this actress is Martin Scorsese's mother. And so she does a great
job sort of just being the old nonna and like talking to them, whatever.
"Gotta feed 'em." "What happened? What happened? How you doin'?
What happened?" "You got blood on you. Where'd this come from? What's going on?" "Oh,
Jimmy will tell you." And they go, "Jimmy—" "Oh, don't worry about it. It's okay."
And they eventually tell her that, okay, they're eating some food and it's really good.
And they tell her, "Oh, we hit a deer. That's where the blood came from.
So I'm gonna borrow this knife 'cause I gotta hack it up. The, what do
you call it? The paw, whatever, the foot, like gotta think." And they go,
"The hoof, the hoof. Yeah, the hoof got stuck in the grill. I gotta hack
it off." Oh, sorry, Mom, it's a sin. I can't leave it there. Like,
you know? Yeah. Jimmy, the way— this always
killed me— the way he puts ketchup on his plate where he's like rolling the
ketchup bottle sideways in his hand. I've never seen anyone do that. And we would
say Goodfellas style to put your ketchup on that way.
One of the things that Mom shows him, she's like, oh boy. And it's just,
it's such a great scene of visiting
a parent that feels like they don't see you enough because they're busting out everything.
I got to tell you about everything. Anything. Did I ever show you my painting?
And she shows them the painting. Tommy says, I love
this one. Uh, it's a guy on a boat with two dogs. One dog goes
this way, one dog goes the other way, and this guy's looking at me like,
hey, uh, what do you want from me? For me? And then Jimmy goes,
he kind of looks like somebody we know, doesn't he? Go, oh my God,
you're right! You take off the beard, it's a spitting image! It's him! Because they're
saying he looks like Billy Batts. Yeah. Uh, so,
so Henry's explaining as they're kind of taken out Billy Batts is
that, you know, he was a made guy and what the concept of that means,
right? Now it's dangerous for them. The idea about being made is that you're
in the books, you're officially a member of the family, and therefore you're— no one
can act against you except for somebody who's at your level. Exactly. And there you
basically have to get cleared. Any made— any, anytime you're killing a guy, you gotta
get a boss to clear that, like really high, probably even higher than Paulie,
it feels like, right? Really high up person's got to okay the take— the
killing of a made guy. And made guys can kill anybody who's not made,
and that is all good. Nobody gives a shit. They can do whatever they want.
So this is bad. Like Tommy— no, none of that. First of all, We learn
a little bit more details later, but I'll say it here. Jimmy can never be
made because he's Irish. Henry can never be made because he's half Irish, even though
his mom's Sicilian from the same part of Sicily that Paulie
and his family came from. You got to be— it doesn't matter. Got to be
100% Italian. That's the only way. Now Tommy is 100% Italian, but he's
never been made. So the three of them are not in the category of person
within this world that Billy is. So the fact that they killed him is a
big problem. Yeah. Uh, and, and the problem they need to sort of, you know,
keep on the wraps or whatever. Um, but yeah, so he was a maid guy.
We get that whole explanation. And the next scene is, uh,
you know, uh, Henry says, you know, Saturday night was for the wives,
Friday night at the Copa was for the girlfriends. And so it's all of them
hanging out, you know, Jimmy— because Tommy's not married, but Jimmy and Henry are.
Yeah, these women are not— it's not Karen and it's not Mickey. These are not
their wives. And I like that they can do that every Friday and it's the
same group of girlfriends who know, oh, I know this is like your Friday
night girl. Yeah, right. You know, but you also have a wife who I,
you know, I'm not supposed to know, but, uh, I think the girlfriends all
know about the wives. The wives just don't know about the girlfriends, right? But I
mean, they don't like know them in real life. They know that there is one.
Uh, but yeah, I mean, seems like a hell of a time, I gotta say.
I mean, uh, morally, uh, not great, but geez,
seems like a heck of a time. And Tommy is really upset that his lady,
uh, is complimentary towards Sammy Davis Jr. So it does show like
these guys are deeply— I mean, it's racist enough to say we
have this club that you have to be 100% Italian to be a part of.
So it's not really surprising that they're racist against Black people.
They're into the whole pureblood thing. Yeah, yeah, nasty. But yeah,
um, so, uh, Paulie, uh, they're at Paulie's
house now. So after we're at the Copa for a bit, we have this conversation,
and Paulie pulls Henry aside and he's like, hey,
you know, I don't know if he asked directly about him, but he's hinting at
who it is, asking about Billy Batts. Like, did you know what happened to this
guy? Like, a friend from the other side of town, you know? Yeah, what happened
to him? And Henry's like, uh, he came into the bar and then left,
and that was it. Yeah, yeah, just like, don't have anything. There's over— you hear
from— you hear something, you're gonna tell me, right? So, yeah, yeah, Paulie, of course
I'll hear something, you know. And so there's that. And so then, uh, Henry and
Jimmy are then talking, uh, you know, in a different scene when Jimmy says,
we gotta— we gotta— you know that thing we did? We gotta go deal with
it. We gotta go move it. We gotta go. What do you mean move it?
I mean, it's like they're sold the land that it's sold, and they're gonna build
like condominiums. Like, we gotta move it. Uh, dude, it's been 6 months.
Oh my God, in, in no kind of preservation to the body, in the
ground for 6 months. Crazy. Oh, that's foul. Yeah, so they have to go dig
him back up. The lighting of this scene is so good.
It is just like hell. Yes, you know, it's all red from the
headlights from the car, basically. Like, oh, it's, it's really good.
And they're throwing up and they, you know, and then it does show like a
consequence to the family because Henry now, he's got kids and everything, and Karen
and the kids are walking by as he's hosing out the trunk of the car,
like covering his mouth, like She's like, oh, what is that? You know, I hit
a skunk. I hit a skunk, Karen. Get out of here. Uh, there,
there are several scenes in this movie where it shows like some really bad act
that he's committing as a member of the, the organized crime, and then it'll show
kind of an effect on his family. Yeah. Um, so yeah, the kids have to
smell the, the disgusting 6-month-old decayed body. Yeah.
Um, so, so he's gotten an apartment for his girlfriend Janice.
That's right, he's got an apartment, uh, downtown, I think he says, or a little
bit further away, not, not near the house, but he's there a lot. And there's
like a party going on there, and you've got Janice is showing her girlfriends around,
you know. And one of those girlfriends is Debbie Mazar, who's in Entourage and a
bunch of other stuff, uh, whose name's Sandy. She comes back later, but basically like
they're all kind of looking around. And there's a point where, uh, you know,
Henry sort of tackles Janice playfully on the bed, like, oh, whatever. But like
as they're leaving the room, he and, he and Sandy have a little moment,
and there's clearly like a mutual interest there. So maybe he's gonna have have,
you know, the side piece of the girlfriend while he's got a wife. Like,
he's got to have multiple girls in play here, but it doesn't quite
happen yet. But yeah, he's shopping for the replacement girlfriend at the housewarming party
for his current girlfriend. Or maybe it's shopping for the girlfriend that he'll get
when he leaves Karen to marry Janice. Maybe that's his plan. It's like, you know,
stacking them up or something. Uh, and they were talking about
how, you know, now Janice is kind of protected by him, and,
uh, her boss complained that wasn't, you know, doing enough at work.
And then it cuts to, oh, so we had to straighten up her boss.
And then it's the guys just beating the shit out of this guy, like,
from now on Janice can do whatever she wants.
You gotta keep her on staff and pay her, but don't expect her to do
anything. Yeah. Um, and now we're at another cool little,
uh, card game in the basement. Yep, exactly. And we've got,
uh, you know, all the kind of all the, the crowd. We've got, uh,
a couple people that we've seen before. This guy Carboni who's got like the big
afro head, and he's going— Tommy's there, Henry's there, Jimmy's there. It looks like maybe
it's the back room at Henry's bar, I'm guessing. Maybe, but kind
of manning this little back bar or whatever is also another one of our Sopranos
folks, Michael Imperioli, who played Christopher Moltisanti,
is here as the character Spider, who's sort of like— he feels very much like
who Henry was when Henry was like 16. It's kind of what it feels like.
Yeah, kind of like the— yeah, he's the gopher, whatever. But Tommy asked
for a drink, and I don't think Spider hears him, or he says like,
oh, I thought you said I was okay, or whatever. He brings a drink for
Jimmy, but Tommy's like, where's my drink. And he really lays into Spider about just
like, what the fuck? Are you— you got me on a no pain, no mind
list, kid? Like, what are you— like, why didn't you bring me my drink?
And Spider's like— there's— he's either like a little slow, or he's just
so intimidated by Tommy that he's stammering, or both. But he's not
like getting— you know, there's a way to just be like
right away, I'll get you your drink. But he like kind of gets stuck on
this conversation with Tommy. I think he's I think he
is too much like Tommy. If this were somebody his
age saying this to him, he would have already thrown hands. Spider, like, I feel
like it's a thing where it's like he knows he's not gonna— he can't attack
Tommy. Tommy could fucking kill him, right? Like, whatever. But he's pissed that he's being,
you know, sort of questioned in this way. Like, he legit didn't hear him.
It's like, like, quit breaking my balls. I legit didn't hear. But he can't say
that to a guy, right, of Tommy's stature, right? So it's like he's stuck in
this— in between his own sort of like machismo and like the reality of the
situation. But basically Tommy decides to make Spider dance.
Uh, he talks about— he's talking about some old western. Oh, was that that movie
Bogart did where he shot the guy's foot and made him dance and everything?
Well, he didn't shoot his feet, and then he shoots at his feet and the
guy dances, and he never actually shoots him. But like, but they— yeah, but that's
what Tommy tries to do, except he actually shoots Spider in the foot. The poor
kid knocks him down. Henry runs over to help him. And like, the, the worst
part about— they're like, the most kind of brazenly sociopathic part of all this is
that Tommy Tommy is then yelling at Spider as they are carrying him out
to take him to the doctor up the street who can fix him up without
going to a real hospital, yelling at him not to make a big deal.
Don't, don't bust my balls over this. This is no big deal. Don't act like
this is a big deal. Yeah, this is on you, you fucking mutt, or whatever
he says. You know, he calls everybody a mutt. That's a big— he was mad
that Spider was like, my bones are all shattered, and he's like, shut the fuck
up, you're making too big a deal out of it. Like, it's just happened.
Shout out, Tommy. Sociopath. Crazy. Yeah. Um, yeah,
and so far, like, Henry's been, been kind of normal, but yeah,
I mean normal as far as like violence towards— in his relationship,
he's not popping off on people. But him and Karen are now at home fighting.
Yes. And I think Karen knows what's going on. She's like,
you know, you're going somewhere. Yeah. She doesn't know exactly about Janice,
but she knows there's somebody— that something like that is happening. Yeah.
And, you know, they're fucking throwing lamps and shit. So it gets the
domestic arguments that they have and the fights that him and
Karen have are really, really intense and they ramp up fast.
Yeah. Like you really feel those. Yeah.
And again, as they're having this big fight and I
think she tries to throw his car keys out the window, he's like, I'm still
gonna go out. What are you doing? Pick up the car keys. But it does,
the camera then goes down the hall to their little daughter standing in
the doorway of her bedroom. Fighting. So Karen's shouting, I hate you, I wish you'd
fucking die. Yeah, we cut back to the same little backroom,
card room, whatever. And now Spider's got his foot all bandaged up,
but he's back working and all this stuff. And they're basically like
Jimmy and whatever, they're kind of giving Tommy a hard time a little bit.
And Spider is feeling a little empowered. And so, you know, Tommy's like, oh,
look, see, he's back, he's faking it. Like, it's not even that big a deal,
whatever. And Spider, not even under his breath, like full-throated, is like,
why don't you go fuck yourself, Tommy? Everybody goes silent. And then Jimmy,
I think, makes the situation 1,000 times worse by just
laying into Tommy. Oh, you're gonna let him talk to you like that? Look at
the balls on Spider. Like, totally joking, but you could see Tommy,
like, he's like, even if there's a 2% chance
that this does hurt my rep by not doing something right now, I gotta do
it. And like, what a fucking psycho. Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, he basically— he pops
up and blasts Spider. 3 shots to the chest,
kid's dead. Yeah, like wild, wild stuff. And Jimmy's pissed.
He's like, what the fuck are you doing? Like, I was breaking your balls.
Like, are you kidding? Like, why are you doing— killing the kid? Like, Jesus Christ.
So— and he's not like, poor Spider. He's like, well, you dig the hole.
I'm not digging the hole. Like, I can dig a hole. First hole I ever
dug. It's the first hole I ever dug. I can dig a hole. Oh man.
Um, so Karen and the kids have now found Janet
Janice's apartment. So they're at, uh, the buzzer for Janice's apartment. She's trying to buzz
in. These two poor little kids, one with like a pacifier. I mean, just,
it's just heartbreaking. And I mean, for Karen too, and she's just
smashing the buzzer, just talking to everybody in there. You have a whore
living in apartment 21, Janice Rossi. Like, really going,
uh, going nuts. Rightfully so, you know. Henry has really
been— because Karen, from the very beginning of their relationship,
prone to like impulsive behavior.
Yeah, say, yeah, like she's not a perfectly calm like,
you know, Mormon fucking, uh, prairie wife type
character. Like she made, uh, Henry— or she made Tommy drive him
to go yell at Henry at the very beginning after their failed date. So like
she has this fucking fire in there too. Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, and we see
that right after that scene as the next thing is we get a
gun in our face as the audience as Henry is waking up. Karen is lit—
he He's, you know, obviously was just like taking a nap. He's like dressed,
but he's like on the bed and she is straddling him and is pointing a.38
right in his face. I mean, the gun is cocked. This is not good trigger
discipline. Her finger is on the trigger. It's not on the trigger guard. Like a
slight squeeze and brains everywhere. I mean, it really is that thing. And,
and, and, and Henry's very calmly like, Karen, put the gun down.
I only love you. 'Cause she's like, tell me, you know, tell me like,
what do you love her? Like what's going on? I know all about her.
I know all about Janice. Like, all that stuff. And he's like, she's just a
girl, like, I only love you, put the gun down, let's talk about this.
He's trying to be very calm. And he's trying to be a cooler.
That's true, he is. Um, but as soon as she sort of lets her guard
down slightly, he smacks the hell out of her and is like throwing her to
the ground and putting the gun in her face. How do you like it?
Like all this stuff. It's really fucking scary. And, and the, the craziest part
of the scene, and again, like, I cannot believe Bracco didn't win the Supporting Actress
Award, but, but she is doing that
silent choking sob where you can't hear anything, but it's like
very visceral. And he gets up to leave, and as she leaves— as he leaves,
she lets the sob out and is screaming, "I'm sorry." Yeah,
so she's apologizing to him, which is just like,
oh, amazing. In her voiceover too, is really
like heartbreaking for her character. She says, um, you know, no matter how bad
I felt, no matter what he did to me, um, I was still attracted
to him, and I wasn't gonna gonna like end this with him and let somebody
else have it. Yeah, like I wasn't gonna let somebody else win. It's just like,
fuck, dude. Wild. Yeah, uh, yeah, really just amazing,
amazing Lorraine Bracco there. Um, so now Henry's
like out of the house for a little bit, you know, living at Janice's.
He's living with Janice, her insanely decorated apartment.
Once again, we've had so many films in a row, I think, with like really
wild decor, and I think it's part of it is the years we're existing
in. But also, even for that time, like, get out of here. When you compare
like the Beetlejuice, the, the Deetz's house after it was decorated,
to like, you know, Ben Gazzara's house in Roadhouse, and then now this,
and we're not even to the final one in Wall Street. That's true. Oh my
God. And then we're not even to the sec— the most ridiculous house in this
movie hasn't even shown up yet. We haven't even gotten to Karen and Henry's next
place. So that's wild. Really crazy decorations.
Like, um, so, so Paulie and Jimmy show
up to Janice's place to tell Henry, like,
yeah, it doesn't work for you to be separated from your wife. You gotta go
home. Part of the mafia thing is, is that's your family and that's just how
it is. And it's keeping up appearances. Yeah. Also, like,
this is a disruption waiting to happen. Like, this is gonna fuck with our
business. Like, yeah, figure it out. Go home. First, why don't you go to Tampa,
uh, with Tommy and, uh, Jimmy and,
and, yeah, and then, uh, and then come on back up, you know. So it,
it immediately cuts to him in Tampa. Yeah. And they're like smashing
this guy's face against the dashboard of a car.
Really crazy. And they're about to feed him to the alligators. They're at like the
Tampa Zoo, or the Lions. That's right, the Lions. Yeah, the Tampa Zoo. They're gonna
feed them to the Lions. And the guy cracks and then calls in like,
whatever, yeah, they're serious, they do need the money, whatever. Problem is,
it's like that guy's sister or something, right? Works for like— she's
like a typist for the FBI, they said. Fucking desk jockey, kind of, you know,
not an enforcement officer but works for the FBI. So she spills everything she knows
about, you know, about his stuff and about what happened and about who Jimmy and
Henry are. And they get pinched and they each get 10 years for,
um, it's all sorts of— I'm assuming aggravated assault and like all the kind of
different stuff, battery, whatever. But yeah, they get 10 years each.
Um, and so then we cut to another kind of the main kind of famous
moments in this movie, which is Paulie's garlic. We learn that Henry is in jail
and Paulie is in jail too. And it's like Paulie had a special way of
doing the garlic and he would use a razor blade and cut it cut it
so thin you could see through it. It would melt into the sauce.
So good. I've never had the patience to do it that way. I know,
I can't. I slice it thin sometimes and I'm like, oh, I'm kind of like
Paulie slicing this garlic. But yeah, I gotta try the real razor blades. I'm too—
I'm way too metagon for that. Like, I absolutely put it into the crusher
and just like squeeze it through the little holes. Like, you know. So, so Henry
is a little far gone at this point too, right before he goes to jail.
I mean, off of this fight with his wife that had.
So he's going directly. He hasn't been home. There's been no reconciliation.
And now she has to support him and his kids while he's in jail not
earning any money. Uh, and it shows how rough things are
going for him because he takes a bunch of pills without water. That's right.
That's how you know. That's always how you know. But yeah, okay,
the scene of the prison is just beautiful. And, you know, from reading
about it, it's like, yeah, this is possible. Like, if you think about,
well, Well, in Mexico, would you imagine that the cartel bosses have a favorable
thing? It's like, yeah, they probably do. So why the fuck wouldn't we here?
Yes, there are ways to bribe your way into better situations. If you've got enough
money and the people that are in control of things are willing to take bribes,
then that's what happens, right? I mean, that's just how it works. And they're
eating like absolute kings, right? Lobster. They get lobsters delivered.
They got all these different kinds of meats and salamis and fresh bread and
booze. And wine and all this shit. Oh, they're talking about the sauce. It's got
veal and beef and pork. Oh, you got the pork for the flavor.
Like, it's like, it's as if they— nothing changed. They just gotta— they're just sleeping
on twin, you know, twin-sized cots instead of their big king beds, you know.
Like, and this is what, what Henry says about jail.
He says, uh, it wasn't that bad except that I missed Jimmy.
Because he was— that's right, Jimmy was in some other— his kids— doesn't miss
his wife, doesn't miss his girlfriend. Yeah, just missed Jimmy. Um,
so then Karen comes in with the kids to visit, right? And, uh,
she looks at the, the sign-in list for the visitors and notices,
oh, somebody else visited Henry. Who was it? And sees Janice Rossi's
name on there. She freaks out. She blows up his spot. She's obviously been smuggling
stuff in for him because she's got like baguettes and like, you know, all this
kind of food and booze and stuff. And she's like, and I don't know why
it doesn't get taken from him. I mean, even with a couple of the guards
on the take, it can't be all just to make it look good. Yeah,
they should take something. Yeah, but they— but she kind of tries to blow his
spot up and basically is just like, don't ever let her visit again. He's like,
I'm in here. Like, what? How am I supposed to control who comes visit me
or not? Like What are you talking about? But she's like,
let her sneak this in. Like, like, I'm doing this, like,
nobody's helping me, everyone's ignoring me and stuff. Yeah, I told you that was how
it was going to be. But I'm trying to get us set up. So she's,
uh, one of the things she's bringing is some pills for him to sell,
and he's got some drug dealing happening. And he's talking about, well, I have this
connection in Pittsburgh who's going to help me when we get out. Exactly. And then
we cut to 4 years later. Uh, we're now— I don't know exactly what year
we're in now, but it's getting to the mid-'70s, late '70s. I think it's point.
Um, Henry gets out, so he got out maybe after about 5 years, it looks
like, altogether. And, uh, he gets out and they go to Paulie's for dinner,
and it's like a whole big thing, and they're, you know, everybody's super happy,
and it's like Henry's back and they're chitchatting, whatever. But Paulie has to go take
Henry aside and have a chat with him, like, in the backyard. And he's basically
saying— he doesn't use the word drugs or whatever, but he calls it
garbage, and he's like, you stay off of that stuff. I don't want any of
that stuff near me. And he names this other sort of boss. He's like,
he's, he's going to die in prison. He's 7 years old, he's going to die
in prison because he got 20 years just because he talked to somebody that
sold drugs. I can't have that. Like, you can't be like that. You gotta,
you gotta stay out of it or else I'm in it. Yeah. It's basically saying
like, there is no way for you to do this and it doesn't blow back
on me, so you can't do this shit. I don't want anything. And this is
so funny because, you know, The Godfather had a very similar kind of plotline,
right? Where Don Corleone didn't want to get involved in the drug dealing and stuff.
Funny fucking mythology that is completely fake. Yeah.
That the mafia draws the line at drugs. Get the fuck out of here.
They did it though. The idea behind it is that there were elements who
were high enough up that they didn't need to make more money.
Exactly. They're the ones saying, what we've got is going so good for us
that if you guys bring drugs into the picture, it just raises the risk on
us. Yeah, you know, and then— because I think in The Godfather— maybe it was
in The Godfather and Casino, one of the movies— they mentioned how, uh, when drugs
came in, everybody started getting worse sentences. So it wasn't like you were racketeering,
you were running numbers, you were maybe beating guys up, you get 3 years,
you get 5 years. That's— you can do that time. Yeah, but you go 20,
30 years. Yeah, what the fuck are you gonna do in jail for 20,
30 years? You're out of the game, like, completely. Your life's ways.
And that's the thing. But all the like street-level guys are like, fuck that,
we're trying to make more money. So they were no problem bringing drugs into the
picture. But I do think the bosses, maybe even like the kind of captain-level guys,
you know, they did not want to bring drugs in just because it raised— it
changed the risk profile. Yeah. And for them, they were getting enough money off all
the shit going. They got their fingers in everything. They got everything going on.
So they don't want the extra risk. But everybody below them is like, yeah,
but I fucking want more. Yeah. And this is the fastest, easiest way,
guys. This is the fastest, easiest way to do it. And if you don't want
to know about about it, that means I'm not paying a tribute on it.
So the guys doing the drug running lower in the system are not kicking money
up because they can't let the bosses know they're doing it at all. Right.
So, so that's a violation on its own. It is a violation on its own.
Kicking up on earnings. But it also means that they're keeping more. Yeah. You know,
so it's just, it's all, it's all kind of, it really fucks up the whole,
you know, what do they call it? There's, I can't remember, there's a term.
It's like La Cosa Nostra, but it's like, you know, it fucks up the
deal. You know, the pact gets all fucked up by drugs being involved. Is it
omerta? That's the word. There we go. Good job. Um, yeah, and the other
thing Paulie says to Henry is like, watch out for Jimmy and Tommy.
Like, Jimmy takes too many risks and Tommy's temperature, it can't
be controlled. It's like, oh, thank you, Paulie, for introducing me to these two concepts.
Uh, but you know, Henry's fine. He's set up. He has his drug plan.
He's got his new girlfriend Sandy, who we saw earlier, and, uh,
she's helping him cook up coke and, uh, it's kind of like
Yeah, what a fun time going to Sandy's apartment. That looks like a hell of
a visit there. Oh God. Oh Jesus.
Um, but now that he has money coming in, they're not— because when he first
got out and he looked around the place, the place that Karen and the kids
were in looked like maybe it was a studio or one, but because
there were just bunk beds loose, like the bed and everything there. So, and he
takes one look around, he's like, pack this shit up, we're moving out of here.
Because they had to sell that. She had to sell the house they were in
when he went away because they weren't getting help from Paulie anymore. Anymore. So she
moves them into an apartment, her and the girls, just that's what they could afford
or whatever, right? And he's just like, no, none of this, this is not going
to work. But now he's selling drugs through this Pittsburgh connect that he's got,
and so he's bringing in money, you know, left, right, center,
whatever. And this is when we get yet another kind of, yeah, wildly decorated
home, you know. And it's Karen taking Mickey Conway
around showing her like all the different stuff, like, oh, this table came from Italy
in two pieces that had to be put together here, like whatever. Like it's just
all this crazy stuff. They've got like a moving bookcase, she's got the most ridiculous
remote control that opens up. It's the most ridiculous remote control she's holding. It's a
huge thing. It looks like something Data would have had in The Goonies. And it's
like she flips a switch, a big old, you know, it's like arm
the bombs. Like it's that level of a switch, right? Detonator looking thing. And then
she opens it and it's like the hi-fi with the record player with the TV
that's like maybe 19 inches, right? Which at the time, yeah, it was fantastic.
Like 1975, this is incredible, you know. But yeah, so it's a lot
of Japanese stuff like that. The way that you would kind of picture
Steven Seagal's house would look, there's lots of that stuff.
Um, really good, really good. Uh, so Maury,
uh, the wig shop guy, yeah, he's got some info now. So he's
got some tips and he's talking to Jimmy and, uh, he's talking about the job
that ends up being the Lufthansa heist, which is another airplane cash theft.
But this is way bigger in scope. This is more than 10 times bigger than
the previous one. Exactly. Um, so this is the crew for the Lufthansa
heist. We got Jimmy, we got Maury, we got Tommy, we got Carbone,
the kind of afro-looking guy, we got Frenchie, the guy from Dumb and Dumber,
we got Joe Buddha, who it doesn't really show much of. We've got Johnny Roastbeef,
who I love, and then Stax Edwards, who is Samuel
L. Jackson. I completely forgot he was in this movie. Yeah, completely forgot he played
Stax. Like, because he's like young for some reason. And I know this isn't like
the early— we saw him in Trading Places. I just think Trading Places was like
8 years before this movie, and he looked more like Samuel Jackson to me than
in this movie. He's something about him looks different. Yeah. But anyway, yeah,
so he's in it, and Stax is, you know, involved as well.
And so yeah, there's the whole Lufthansa heist that goes down. And it's like the
kind of thing where Henry's really only involved, I think, to like help get the
crew together. He's not part of the heist, right? He's not— he doesn't get like
a proper cut. Yeah, he's not getting a full cut because he's not actually involved.
But he hears on the radio— he's like taking a shower and he hears on
the radio about how there's this like, you know, the largest like heist from an
airport in American history has taken place. And like, you know, like NYPD says $2
million is missing, the Port Authority says it's $4 million, and he's just like,
I love him slapping the wall of the shower
to celebrate. I— it's such a great— soapy, like, oh, and he's so exciting.
And, and yeah, so he's very excited for them. And the thing that he's doing
is his coke smuggling to Pittsburgh thing involves their old babysitter,
who's kind of like bringing a baby back and forth on plane flights
and like putting the coke in the diaper bag and all that kind of shit.
Yeah, yeah, Lois. So we have a Christmas party. Is Goodfellas
a Christmas movie? I don't know. We got a little bit of Christmas here,
uh, more than Rocky IV. Great soundtrack selections here.
I think we have the Bells of St. Mary's from
the Phil Spector A Christmas Gift to You album,
which is just fantastic. And so the Christmas
party's happening at the bar, and Johnny Roastbeef, who is one of the Lufthansa
crew, shows up and he's showing Jimmy this new car that he just
bought. He's like, Cadillac, what the fuck? I told you not to buy it.
And his new wife, which looks like he just bought, you know, because they were
like, who the hell is this? He's like, oh, we just got married and I
bought her the car. Like, this thing is a gift, right? It's a wedding gift.
And he keeps saying, it's in my mother's name. It's not mine. It's in my
mother's name. And Jimmy's like, I don't give a fuck whose name is it.
Yeah, you're driving around a brand new car. Like, what? How do you think this
looks? Like, what are you doing? What'd I tell you? What did I tell you?
Yeah, so don't buy anything. So Jimmy's, you know, and then Carbone
walks in with his wife and she has this big mink coat on and they
refer to it as a $20,000 mink. Now, I don't know if that's an exaggeration
or accurate, but that is fucking wild. That's true. And so he takes
that. My one thing about that though is that earlier they're just lifting trucks of
fur coats. So wouldn't you think that's a good gift to like kick one down
to your wife, it wouldn't raise as many, uh, red flags. It's a white mink.
None of the ones on the thing were white before. Maybe that's more rare,
more expensive, and it's going to draw more attention. Um, but yeah,
so then we get, uh, we get this whole scene and Mori is pissing off
Jimmy. Mori keeps asking, where's my cut? Where's my cut? Because Mori, again, not a
full share probably because he wasn't like in the job,
but he did bring the idea to them. Yeah, he gets like a finder's fee.
It'd be more like a, you know, a smaller percentage cut, but like, you know,
thing. A couple hundred thousand dollars, right? Yeah, they end up selling big
time money. They do end up saying it was $6 million in cash was stolen.
So crazy, the number of people involved. If it was an even split, there— if
all the people involved are probably getting $700,000,
$800,000, $900,000, something in that ballpark.
And then what's left over for guys like Henry and Maury, who were like sort
of involved, hundred grand, right? It's definitely a lot of money. And we know Maury's
got gambling debts, like probably some of them to Jimmy, but probably to other people
as well. So he really needs money. He's like pressing. He's like, I need the
money, the money. And Jimmy is fucking close to the edge with Maury. Like,
he is not cool. He doesn't do anything yet, but he is really fucking close
to the edge. But Maury again does not act like a guy who's ever been
around these guys in his life. The way that he's act— it's like,
I know you want your money, but you have to know your approach is terrible
here, Maury. I can't imagine being a civilian associated
with these people. Not even really a soldier, but like somebody that's on the
outside and just associated with with them and acting like that towards people like
this. Like, it does not make any sense to me. Like, you know, that's the
thing. If I bring you this and you steal these things and you kick me
down anything, that's good. Cause that means I'm in your good graces,
right? If you didn't kick anything down to me after a heist like that,
I'm going to just, I'm probably gonna leave town. Cause now I feel like you
probably want to clean up some loose ends. That's why you're not kicking money down
to me. That would be my first instinct. It's like, this is not going to
go well for me if I stick around. You've seen this happen how many times
before? And you feel like you're the exception. I don't understand that.
Yeah. And for Henry's part, he said, you know, he just got a little
taste. I love referring to a little bonus as just a taste. And what he
did is I just bought my family the most expensive Christmas tree they had,
right? Which is this real shitty looking artificial white tree.
It's real bad. It's not even flocked. It's just white. It's really terrible.
But now we get back to Stacks briefly because Tommy, you know,
he wakes Stacks up, uh, knock at his door, and Tommy and Carbone are there.
And he's like, oh, you want some coffee? He's like, no, no, yeah, sure,
put some coffee on. Carbone, whatever. And, and, you know, they're basically talking about how
they got to get going somewhere. And so Stacks starts putting his shoes on,
and Tommy's just behind him with a gun with like a suppressor on it and
just blows his brains all over his apartment. We hear from the, from the narration
voiceover from Henry is basically, instead of putting the truck where Stacks was supposed to
put the truck, it was like a really important part of this deal, he ends
up like driving it to his girlfriend's house and getting high. Yeah. And like leaving
there and forgetting about it. So the cops, like, they, they hadn't found
Stacks yet, but they were like on the general trail of this, like it was
gonna lead to him. Exactly. So yeah, so they had to take him out.
And again, during this whole time, uh, this playing— this Bells of Saint Mary's song
is playing in the background, which is really effective.
Um, so we find out that, uh, that Tommy's
gonna get made. Huge deal. That's big news. Huge deal. So they're extra happy because,
uh, because Henry goes and he sees Jimmy and Tommy at this place and they're
just a little extra hop in everyone's step. Because for them, you know, because they
can't— like you said before, this is as close as they're ever going to be
to being in it. It's like the closest guy to us is in it.
Exactly. And if— and the idea would be, right, if Tommy's made and Tommy's a
made man and he makes it clear to everybody, hey, like, Jimmy and Henry are
my guys, it's not the same as being made themselves, and it doesn't give them
carte blanche to do what they want, but it probably gets heat off of
them in a lot of ways. Like, there's probably elements where
where it's like, eh, I might have beef with Jimmy Conway or Henry Hill,
but Tommy's a made guy and he says that they're his guys.
Oh, I don't want to fuck with Tommy, so I'm not going to fuck with
those two. Like, I'm sure there's a lot of like extra protection that just comes
from being that close to a made guy. Um, so they're super excited. Jimmy especially,
because he's— he's 100— he's the Irishman. He's 100% Irish. This is something that's
nothing like whatever he's going to get, but he's also been instrumental as an associate
of the Lucchese family. Like, he is a hugely important member. Family, but there's— good
earner, as they say. And there's— oh, that's always hanging over his head though,
that like he's not one of them, and that's an issue. So having Tommy be
made is such a big deal, uh, such a big deal for— for— because he
is like a father figure to both of these guys. Absolutely. He's a little bit
older. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, so we get an appearance of Sunshine of Your
Love again, which I think is just interesting because we saw it in Breakfast Club
with Bender like singing the riff, and then we saw it in True Lies with
a cover version. So it's just funny that song's like sneaking around on us.
Uh, so Jimmy lets Henry know So like,
Maury's too fucking annoying. I'm gonna take him out. I'm done with this
guy. And, uh, and there's a great kind of voiceover as they're going through like
having this hang and poker game, and Maury's there, and Tommy and Henry and Jimmy,
and like all the dudes are there. And Henry's kind of saying like,
well, I was hoping that I could get, uh, Jimmy to stop thinking about
it by hanging around, you know, get on his good graces and everything. Yeah,
yeah. And at a certain point, Jimmy looks over to Henry, is just like,
yeah, that thing, uh, it's not gonna happen. Forget about tonight. It's okay.
So good for Henry. And again, they, you know, maybe Henry's too innocent,
or maybe the guy who wrote the story never talks about how he
participated in murders. I don't know. I don't know which one it would be.
It's true. It does seem like Henry is only adjacent to like most of these
killings for the most part. Like, yeah, but they go— you would get a scene
where walking down the alley that same night is Jimmy and Tommy and Carbone
and, and Mori. And Mori's fucking getting at Jimmy again. He's like,
I need my money, Jimmy. Like, where's my money? He's like, all right, look,
look, fine, fine, I'll bring it to you. Let's go, let's go get it right
now. Come on, get in in the car. And this is the classic where,
you know, the, the classic mistake that, that Maury makes is getting in the front
seat. Never get in the front. Don't ever get in the front seat. You sit
in the back or you don't get in the car. Yeah. And so he gets
in the front seat, Tommy gets in behind him, Carbone gets in to drive,
and before they even start the car, Tommy's putting an
ice pick into this brain stem of Maury. He's done. And it's like one of
the cleanest kills. Such a good shot. Like zero sound at all.
I mean, it was like a no-splash dive of an ice pick murder. 10 out
of Absolutely perfect. 10 out of 10 from the Lithuanian judge. Yeah.
And you know, and then Maury's wife comes like super upset to Henry and
Karen's house, like, where's Maury? Like, we've been married for 27 years, he's never not
come home, something might have happened. And of course Henry, ah, he got drunk and
he felt— because Henry doesn't know, but he's starting to put pieces together.
He doesn't know it happened, so he— it's a surprise to him. But upon hearing
Mickey say— or not Mickey, that's, uh, Jimmy's wife— whatever, you know, Maury's wife
say say that, you know, she— he didn't come home, he knows right away why.
Jimmy told me he wasn't gonna do it, but he went through with it anyway,
and Maury's fucking dead. Like, nobody's gonna find him. Yeah, at that point. So,
God. And, and so, uh, Henry's talking about how,
you know, during— after this big heist, like, yeah,
Jimmy, Jimmy doesn't like giving money to people.
So even though the deal was we're gonna split it up these ways
because we all have vital roles in this operation, Jimmy doesn't like giving money
to people, so he just killed him. And Henry's so matter of fact the way
he's talking about this. This scene is amazing, and it's happening— this montage
happening with the piano part from Layla, yeah, uh, playing over
it, which is just so good and so much better than the rest of that
song. Yeah, it's like the saxophone part from Baker Street. There you go.
Yeah, listen to the rest of the song, you're like, this isn't up to par.
No. Yeah. Um, but the Layla thing— so we're seeing like
Johnny Roastbeef and his wife are both dead in the car, in the big Cadillac.
Yep. And, uh, with some bodies in the garbage truck. Yeah, that's Frenchy
and, uh, what do you have— remember the other guy? But oh, that's where French
and Buddha are there. Carbone is hanging in a meat truck, and he
was in there so long that they had to thaw him out for 3 days
before they do the autopsy. Him frozen in that with like his air— his
fro like frozen is just such a cool, uh, look.
And then we get another— I think maybe again one of the more famous scenes
for me at least, and one of the ones I think about a lot— is,
uh, we get Tommy going to be made. So he's at his mom's house and
she's like looking at his suit, oh, you look so nice, you know, be careful.
Wild collar, like whatever shirt he's wearing. All these— there's so many times the collar
so tight and like together, it's so weird looking. But it is very mobstery.
Like, to me it's very similar to like, oh, my tie is lighter colored
than my dress shirt. That's a very mobster look. Yeah. And I feel like that
kind of collar is always a mobster look. But basically he gets picked up by
Tootie and this old guy. I don't know who the old guy was, but these
two— but Tootie, uh, uh, uh, uh, what's his last
name? Sister? Yeah, sister. Yeah, Paulie's little brother ran the cab stand. He picks up
Tommy and the old guy. They pick him up, they drive to like— I don't
know who whose house this is, by the way, where they go. Yeah, pull into
the garage and they're going through, and Tommy's kind of chatting. He's like, oh hey,
how long ago did you get made? Oh, 30 years ago. I bet this brings
back memories. And the guy's like, yeah, kind of, whatever. And they go in and
it's an empty room, and it's so good the way Joe Pesci goes,
oh no. Yeah. And it's just this, this moment of resignation.
And then he's got the gun in the back of his head, and I mean,
they really— it is a visceral look. It's probably the best, like, special effect
in the is his— Joe Pesci's head exploding out
the front of his face. Yeah, and Joe, like, that gruesome
of a thing is something that the effect often looks really bad.
Yes, right. And yeah, it was just— it was so perfect.
I would have loved if they just had him slip on a bunch of Micro
Machines when he walked in there, but that's also a good
way to injure Joe Pesci. Paint can to the face. Yeah.
And then the thing about this, you know, the whole maid guy thing is it
gets around to— so Jimmy, they're waiting for the call to confirm.
Yeah, no, this is like them waiting for— to find out that their kid is
born. Like, it's so exciting to them. And Jimmy's at the payphone, he gets the
call, and it's just like, uh, yeah, it, uh, didn't work out. Yeah, we had
a problem, we had a problem, fix it. That's it, there's nothing we can do
about it. And Jimmy's scene, uh, De Niro's— this is like the greatest
De Niro scene, breaking down in the payphone. I love a phone with a receiver
because you can slam it against the phone when you're upset. With the cell phone,
you can't. You got to slam it against something else. You got to be able
to slam it against itself. Yeah, there was almost a moment here where I thought
Henry— and this is, again, this is a great acting scene for both De Niro
and Liotta— and I really felt like there's a moment here where Henry was debating
whether he should hug, like embrace Jimmy, right? There's this moment of like,
he looks like he might kind of reach for him, but like, I feel like
that would have— good call not to. I feel like Jimmy would have reacted very
badly to any kind of like sensitivity at that moment. But he is breaking down
over this. Because here's the thing, not only does it mean one of his best
friends is dead and his ticket in is gone, it means they're
in trouble now too. Like, not right away necessarily, and maybe not him, sure,
whatever. They're never going to be trusted by these guys because they don't even
have a full Italian to speak for them. That's right. But then also they were
associated with this guy that double-crossed them and went against the rules, and they're implicated
even if, you know, it's not like Tommy ratted them out, but they have to
know like who would have been with them, right? Who's most likely to know about
Tommy, or at least known about it. Exactly. And they make a, you know,
And they make it clear in, uh, Henry's voiceover that this was a— this was
in revenge for Billy Batts. Yes, this was because he killed Frank Vincent's character.
So this is why, you know, he said— and it's really— it's like, I guess
he did do the killing, but like, it's pretty wild for Jimmy
especially to not take some blame. And maybe he does. I mean,
that's why he's so freaked out that like, you know, his boot marks are all
over Billy Batts's face too, you know. Yeah, we did some forensics. I think we
could find some fault for Jimmy there, right? Yeah, Henry was more involved
in the cleanup more than the actual killing. Yeah, but yeah, and he owned the
facility, you know, he provided the venue for it. Yeah, so the end of this
is just Henry saying, and that's that. Yeah, exactly.
And then we go to 5/11/1980,
May 11th, 1980, 6:55 AM. Oh my God, this whole
sequence of this day is amazing. It's so tense and
it's so— and it's different from the way that the rest of the movie has
been, you know, where a lot of it is like, hey, let's kind of hang
out in mafia world and show you what it's like and let you feel what
it's like. And this is just like, and here are the consequences. Day in the
life of, and it's, and it's this important day. And, uh, so it starts off
where he, the whole day, he's got a few things to do. He says he's
got like a whole bunch of you. He's got to go pick his brother Mikey
up from the hospital, uh, and take him home. He's got to
go, uh, bring some guns to Jimmy that Jimmy wanted because he
bought some like silencers or whatever and he wants to fit them to him.
He's got to meet up with his Pittsburgh guys to get the shipment that then
has to go out to Miami. It's got to go down to Florida. He's good.
So then he's got to get that set up and ready to go and give
it to Lois and get her to the airport so that she can take her
flight. So there's all this stuff going on, and he's making— he's making the dinner.
And I love him referencing back, you know, talking about these
big, you know, well, I gotta deliver the drugs to this thing and I gotta
get back to stir the sauce. And he's telling— everything's on like
a level playing field. He's telling his brother Michael to keep stirring the sauce,
don't let it burn, don't let it stick to the pot, like all this stuff.
He goes to the hospital to pick his brother up, and the doctor there like,
you look like shit, dude, like you need help, whatever. He apparently gives him some
Valium and sends him on his way because apparently, you know, the 1980s were wild.
Just amazing. That doctor, did you recognize who that was? He looked familiar.
Who was that? I forget the actor's name. He just passed away. He was on
The Wire as State Senator Clay Davis. He was— that's right, yes,
I knew that was somebody. Good to see him. Yeah, so again,
we've got the family dinner intertwined with like all the crime stuff happening.
And Henry, as he's driving around, he's seeing this chopper overhead. Oh yeah,
keeps looking at the helicopter and looking up. And he brings, he brings Karen in
to the car with him. They have to go run an errand. And like,
yeah, you see this helicopter. It's funny, the type of people who they became
by this point in the movie would have been seeing helicopters like twice a week.
Yeah, exactly. So it's crazy that this is— was real helicopters.
Yeah. And Karen's clearly all in on the drug stuff. I mean, she's doing coke
with him, like she's completely bought into the whole system. They go and pick up—
they go to a motel and pick up drugs from there, connect or whatever whatever.
And we've seen this guy too. The guy who's the connect from Pittsburgh was in
The Sopranos as well. He was the guy that got crippled,
that Tony hit with the car. Yeah, Beansy. Yeah, Beansy is the one that's hooking
up the pickup from Pittsburgh. And so Karen needs a hit, like all this kind
of stuff. They end up getting back to the house, uh, and well,
before they get back to the house, he calls and he talks to Lois and
he says, before you make the call, you go to an outside line. I think
she's got to give the flight information to the people in Miami that she's flying
down to. She's got to make sure they know what flight she's coming in on
or something like that. So you leave the house and you make that call from
an outside line. Do not make that call from home, right? You know, whatever.
And sure enough, she hangs up with them, whatever, and she says fuck it,
and she makes the call from the house, right? So that's bad. So he comes
home with Karen, they're doing dinner, they're doing whatever, and Lois— he's got to get—
oh, he's got to go to Sandy's and like cut the drugs. So he goes
and does that, comes back and is like, all right, Lois, like, let's get you—
we gotta, we gotta tape this stuff to your legs so that you can like
get through security, you know, pre-TSA obviously. And, uh, and you know, like,
this is time, it's time. But she says I'm not going. I'm not going to
go on the flight. I need my hat. Yeah, I'm not gonna fly without my
hat. Lucky hat. And she lives in— it's like a Paddington hat that she wears.
That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she lives like in Rockaway, which is like
pretty far away, I think, from Queens, which is I think where they still are.
But like, yeah, so he's like, fuck, fine, all right, I gotta go. And he
stashes the drugs in like the kitchen cabinet and is like, Karen, I gotta go
take Lois home. She's like, for a hat? Like, what? But he's like, she's not
gonna fly. He's gotta have her fly. So there they go. They get into the
car and immediately— here's the Funny thing I noticed, and it looks like Henry doesn't,
but there are red and blue lights flashing off of the street of the house
across the street. The second they come out of their house, you can see a
faint flash of blue and red. Oh, funny. Off on the distance. But as soon
as he gets in the car, cops come up to, you know, hey, you know,
like, stop, like, freeze, or whatever, and all this shit. And he says in the
voiceover, as soon as they said freeze, I knew it was cops. Yeah, if it
were a wise guy, I would be dead already. Wouldn't have heard anything. It wouldn't
have heard anything. Yeah, it's very cool. Oh my God. Yeah, so he's,
uh He finds out, and Karen,
you know, is freaking out, and she's flushing all the
coke and stuff, which smart move, because it's not like it was hidden in the
walls of the house. It was like in the cabinet, you know, behind your DVDs,
in like a fanny pack. Yeah. So,
so Henry's in jail, and he ends up getting out on bail.
Yeah, like Karen's mom put her house up basically for Henry's
bail, and Henry's plan is like, all right, well, I still get these drugs I
can flip that, I can turn that into something to get us, yeah, you know,
out of here. Because Paulie's going to be insanely pissed now because now Paulie knows
I'm in drugs. Drugs is a problem. Yeah. So he's like, I gotta make it
right with Paulie, I gotta do this. So he goes home and that's when
Karen— you know, he's looking around for the drugs. He goes, Karen, where's the drugs?
And she goes, well, I flushed them down the toilet. And he's like, why would
you do that, Karen? And this scene is probably Ray Liotta's best acting. So intense,
the meltdown of it. Like, you can feel his agony so much and and
it's like more than anything that's ever happened. Like, if one of his kids was
killed, he wouldn't have reacted that deeply. And, and the way— the
number of different ways you can say, 'Why would you do that, Karen?' And he
says that line like 8 or 9 times, and every one of them hits a
little different. Yeah, it's the range that Liotta's got in the scene is amazing.
And it's all this different depth of just, yeah, like despair and whatever. And he
finally crumples into a corner, right, of the room, and it's just freaking— he's like,
'I got nothing now. There's no way to like like, fix this. Yeah. Which is
just, you know, so yeah, so then Karen goes— oh no, so then I think
he goes— he goes to Paul. Yeah. And, and I don't know if this is
like for a last resort. I mean, it might be for a last resort bailout.
Yeah. Um, but yeah, he goes to see Paulie, and Paulie said,
here you go, like, I'll give you the, the money in my pocket, inch and
a half of cash that's in my pocket, and that's it. After this, I have
to turn my back on you. That's right. So he's like, there it is,
an entire life for $2,200 or whatever. Exactly, not much.
Oof. Oh, $3,200 for a lifetime. Not even enough
to pay for the coffin. That's right. Which I was curious about— whose coffin?
Like, I'm not sure what he's referencing. He's probably feeling at that point in the
story. But yeah, it is funny. But yeah, so then, then Karen goes to see
Jimmy and is just kind of like chatting with him, whatever. And like, you know,
he's like, oh, everything's gonna be okay, everything's gonna be all right, we're gonna figure
this out, whatever. And they go to leave and he goes, you know, I got
some new dresses, some Dior. There's, you know, if you want them, you should just
take some. Like, they're gonna fit you, they're gonna look great, you should just take
them. Oh no, no, they're not up here, they're down around the corner here.
Where'd you go? And so Jimmy goes out and they're out on the street and
she— and he's like looking and going, yeah, go down to the corner, go in
the corner. She goes down and he keeps pushing, but he's
not walking that direction at all. And she looks in at one point and I
can't even tell what's going on. It looks like a couple guys working on,
on a place, like, like doing construction or something,
remodeling or whatever. But she's got all the fucking bad vibes.
And luckily for her, where she was walking to was towards her car. And so
she gets all the bad vibes over and goes, uh, I gotta go, Jimmy.
No, no, never mind. I'll go. And she goes and he goes, no, no,
no, no, no, no, go in there, go in there. And she knows,
like, she was about to get whacked. Like, that was it. Crazy, crazy creepy.
And the way that Jimmy approaches, just, you know, kind of very
like Silvio and the Sopranos, just like, hey, I'm still your friend. Like, right until
you're never gonna see this, uh, never gonna see this coming. Yeah. Um,
yeah, so, uh, they go and they end up talking to—
oh, so Henry goes to meet Jimmy. Yeah, so that's kind of the last— yeah,
the last tempt for one of his crime guys to maybe help him,
or just to see what's going on. Because Jimmy's also been asking questions like,
what are they talking about? What's happening? When Karen was meeting him, he's like,
oh, what are they asking Henry about? Um, and they have this meeting at the
diner where Henry's explaining. He's like, you know, we're supposed
to meet at this time. I got there 15 minutes early. Jimmy was already there.
Like, he seemed nervous, he seemed different, and all this shit. So he knew,
like, Jimmy was gonna kill me. Well, and this is when then Jimmy says,
um, hey, I want you to go down, down to Tampa or
whatever, down to Florida and whack this guy. You're gonna go with— I don't remember
who he says— with another guy. The two of you are gonna go down there,
you're gonna whack this guy for me. And he goes, Jimmy never asked me to
whack a guy ever. And we've seen, right, Henry's never been the one to pull
the trigger on anybody. Yeah, he's not a mafia hitman
in any way, shape, or form. So he's like, that's when I knew I was
never going to come back from Florida. Like, he was going to go down there
with this other guy, that guy was going to kill him, out of town.
Like, that was the whole plan. Um, and so instead Instead, they go
to the FBI and they turn state's evidence. The witness protection— I love
that guy. Yeah, the guy who's talking to them, explaining how it works. It's very
matter of fact and everything. Oh, if you're legitimately bronchial, we'll see what we can
do. Like his stuff that he says. Um, and again, this does an
excellent job of explaining what— how the witness protection program works,
you know, where it's like, yeah, you're not— you have no contact with these people.
Yeah, you're not going to see your parents, you're not going to go visit or
any of that. Stuff and having to make that decision very quickly.
Yeah, yeah, uh, really, really intense. And I like the way— because Karen asks,
well, but they, they want you— they— she says,
you want Henry, not me. And he goes, yeah, that's right, we, we just want
Henry. We don't care if you come or not. I actually would prefer you didn't
unless it makes him a better witness to have you there. But yeah, we don't
care. But just so you know, when he's in witness protection and you're not,
they may not really actually want you, but you're going to be the only way
they have to get to to him, you're going to be in danger. Like,
yeah, you will get killed if you don't go into the program when he does,
and we need him to, right? Yeah. Uh, so, you know, really tough
decision. But then, you know, we're— what are you left with? You're left with nothing
else. Yeah, exactly. Uh, so now we're in
the courtroom. So Jimmy and Paulie have been arrested, so they're in the courtroom,
and Henry is being asked to, you know, could you identify this man? Points to
Paulie, points to Jimmy, and all that stuff. Yeah. And the other, uh,
lawyer is asking him something. It's like, you know, do you know what the concept
of a rat is? You know, it's like, say, I don't know anything about being
any rat. And then we get kind of a weird, like, fantastical,
like, fourth wall break. Yeah. Where he gets up from his
witness seat, so it just goes to him delivering to the
screen. Yeah. And saying, you know, after— and talking about his life after this all
happened. And it was— it's like the continuation of the narration has now been put
into the scene. And yeah, nobody else is paying attention to him as he walks.
It's not like they're frozen, it's not like that, but they're just not looking at
him as he walks by. Yeah. And kind of giving us the wrap-up, essentially.
Yeah. Of what his life is like now. Uh, it's really good, um, when he's
talking about his recapping, you know, oh, I used to walk into a
place and this would, you know, talking about the grandiosity of his life
in the mafia versus now, you know, I asked for
spaghetti and marinara sauce, I got egg noodles and ketchup.
To which my wife, when we were watching this, she was like, you were just
in jail for 5 years with a guy who was an expert at making pasta
sauce. You can't fucking make your own. Phone. Like, that sounds like a you issue.
That's fair. So he's an average nobody,
and then for some reason— this is the end of the movie— and
then it just— we get a quick flash of Tommy shooting his gun directly at
the screen like 5 times, and then it goes to the shitty version of My
Way by Sid Vicious or whatever, right?
It was a weird little— he was like, how badly can I land this for
the rest of it being so amazing? I want the last like 10 seconds of
this movie to be really confusing. And it didn't make sense. Tommy's dressed in a
way we've never seen him. He's got a hat on we've never seen him wear
like sunglasses or something. It's very strange. Yeah, I don't— I think it's— I think
the idea maybe is that we're— Tommy, or excuse me, Henry is going to be
haunted for the rest of his life by Tommy. Yes,
like in that life, something like that. Anyway, it really does open us up very
nicely to the sequel that I'm sure we'll do at some point, uh, My Blue
Heaven, which is clearly the sequel to this movie. Um, we'll get to that at
some point. So, okay, that, that is Goodfellas. That is right.
And God, it's, it's a lot to talk about, but I mean, the movie's got
so much, it's dense and packed so full. So this was my pick for us.
I'm gonna give my, my, you know, version of my review, I guess,
which just feels dumb. Like, I honestly— this is one of the movies we did—
I feel— I felt this way about The Silence of the Lambs too, where it's
like, what the fuck am I supposed to say about this movie? Yeah, Goodfellas.
Like, do you know the movie Goodfellas? If you don't know the movie Goodfellas,
you should go see it because it's fantastic. There's— there is nothing
I can ask for from a movie that has set out to be me
a story about real crime in America that
this movie does not give me. There is nothing I can ask for this movie.
There is not fat on the bone here, even at 2 and a half hours.
No, this is— it's solid. There's no piece of it where you're like, well,
we didn't really need that. They cut so— so much happens.
You cut from this scene to the next so quickly with those narrations. You know,
there are elements or segments rather of this movie where either Henry or Karen
is giving us significant amounts of information in the narration while we're watching
a relatively quick scene. Scene happen, but we just got as much info as would
have taken a true show-me-only movie would have taken like 10 minutes to show
us over the course of one instead. Yeah, this movie's fantastic. The acting is amazing.
The script is incredible. They're, you know, Scorsese at his absolute peak.
You know, the fact that he didn't win Best Director for this is like wild.
But, you know, it's— or did he? No, no, that's right. Pesci's the only
one that won out of this one. Yeah. For an Oscar. Yeah. It's 5 out
of 5. I don't have any notes to give to Goodfellas, and I would feel
like a schmuck for pretending I do. This is a 5 out of 5 movie
for me. And hopefully I didn't just call you a schmuck. That's not what I
meant to do. Ah, son of a bitch. Let me get to my notes.
No, like I said, I really think my only note is that Pesci
shooting at the screen at the very end is stupid. And then that
last song, the My Way, Johnny Rotten sucks ass. I think the
tone, I mean, you're going for a certain feeling at the end, so I get
that, but I would've liked it to end on like a smooth, like, you know,
hey, you're nobody till somebody loves you.
Or give us Frank's version of My Way or something, right? Or give us like
just Henny Youngman. Just saying jokes. Um,
but Jesus Christ, this movie is so enjoyable, so well cast.
Like, everything looks great. Uh, there's no effects
that they couldn't do that they tried to do. There's— so this movie is going
to stand the test of time. I don't know what's, what's gonna look,
uh, off about this movie. And of course, you know, there's language things,
there's, there's ways that the characters are, but that's the characters.
That's not a reflection of the filmmaker's ideas at the time and stuff
like that. Um, a couple things here. One thing is that I think this
movie, uh, with its explanations of the
mechanics of organized crime enhances your enjoyment
of other organized crime material. So like, if you've
watched this, you're gonna like The Sopranos more. You're gonna like even The Godfather,
like Donnie Brasco, all that stuff more. Um,
and the other thing that I, I didn't bring up, uh, Joe Pesci
put out an album. He did a music album in the late '90s.
And one of the songs that he did was called Wise Guy,
and he's rapping. It's a rap thing. Oh my God, dude. I think actually
that should be the closing music for this episode if we're able to do that.
Joe Pesci says, I'm a wise guy. I don't drive by.
I just stopped by with a couple of guys. So it's
really worth checking out. So I'm glad that that
exists here. Yeah. This movie is really perfect to me. I mean, I don't see
how it would be any better. Goodfellas is an absolute 5 out of 5 for
me. I love it. Should be the, the, the least amount of shock ever,
uh, from our podcast, but a 10 out of 10 from the two dads on
Goodfellas. Such a surprise. But that brings us to 1991.
And Nick, your pick to, to, to bring us further into the '90s in 1991.
What are we going to watch next week? Yeah, so I had a few different
picks for 1991 and went back and forth, but one thing I realized is now
coming up on our 58th episode, I think, uh, and one of
the bigger stars of the '80s and '90s who I remember just being kind of
everywhere and always talked about and stuff, we haven't seen yet. And I thought,
let's check this movie out. Uh, Julia Roberts is,
uh, is escaping some creepy dudes and dating some creepy
dudes, and it's, it's a really great fun thriller
from the early '90s, kind of a, you know, in the Cape Fear vein,
hopefully. Hopefully more in the Cape Fear vein than in the Pacific Heights vein.
But I want to check out 1991's Sleeping with the Enemy.
Nice. Okay. I have never seen it, so this will be good. The only thing
I know about Sleeping with the Enemy, we talked about it when we did Home
Alone. It was the movie that knocked Home Alone off the number one box office
spot after like 16 weeks or whatever. This was the movie that was the first
number one domestic box office movie after Home Alone came out that wasn't Home
Alone was Sleeping with the Enemy. So I'm definitely interested in seeing if it will
serve as a family fun holiday classic too. Well, I think, I think by the
time that happened it was like February or something, but like, yeah. Um,
so yeah, very cool. I love Julia Roberts. Yeah, surprising, right, that we haven't seen
her yet in anything that we've done. Uh, she's such a cornerstone of the decades,
but yeah, yeah, this will be great. I, and I saw this one the first
time a few years ago and I feel like it's too good to not be
better known. Okay, so hopefully we'll enjoy chatting about it. Sounds good.
That's a wrap. So if you like what you hear, please consider heading over to
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Once again, this has been Goodfellas, another episode of Two Dads, One Movie.
I'm Steve. And I'm Nick. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll catch you
next week. Thanks, everyone.