#92 Goodfellas (1990)

I only saw this one for the first time a year ago, so it counts as one of my 31 previously viewed, but only just.

Plot summary (with spoilers): All his life, Henry Hill wanted to be a gangster.  He began working for gangsters as a kid at the cab stand, parking cars while guys like Timmy Two Times and Bobby No Nose would gather at the local watering hole and chat about the daily ins and outs of mob living and how glamorous it all was.  The leader was Paulie Cicero, on account of him being the fattest, but Henry idolized Jimmy Conway the most because he was always flashing the dough around and got respect from everybody he met.
One day, Henry's Irish father got a letter from the school saying that Henry had been truant for three months and so Henry's dad beat the shit out of him.  (Shockingly, Henry had an unpleasant home life).  In response, Jimmy and some of the other nudniks threatened to kill the mailman if he ever delivered any mail from the school to Henry's house ever again.
A short time later, Henry got pinched for a minor crime, but even though the cops pressed him, he didn't snitch on anyone, he was no rat, and the guys got him acquitted anyway.  This was his unofficial initiation into the life full-time.
Cut to twenty years later or so, the 70's, Henry now looks like Ray Liotta, back when that actually meant something. Henry's at the watering hole with a bunch of good guys, including the diminutive Tommy Devito, who is in the process of telling a really funny story.  Funny how, you may ask?  Aw, it's not important.  Boring scene, moving on.
Tommy wants Henry to go out on a double date with him, with some lady named Helen.  Henry goes, but is extremely uninterested in his date, and she in him.  Tommy pressures them to agree to all go out again next week.  Henry agrees, but then stands her up when the time comes.  Helen drives around the neighborhood like a crazy person, looking for Henry.  When she finds him, she bitches him out for standing her up, and because fictional men (or in this case "fictionalized")  in movies always find shrill and unpleasant women appealing, he is suddenly in love.
He takes her on a date to a club to see the hilarious stylings of Henny Youngmann.  It's one of those thrilling long shots as they enter the kitchen and walk through the whole club, that always take me out of the movie due to their showy, high-wire act nature, but I love them nonetheless.  Yes, Henry is living the good life on top.  And when you're on top, there's no where to go but...higher?  Is that the expression?
Henry, Paulie, Jimmy, and Tommy pull off a robbery that nets them $400,000.  In the meantime, Helen's neighbor tries to sexually assault her, so Henry beats the shit of out him in his driveway with a gun.  He then later asks Helen to hide said gun.  That's when she knew she was in love. Soon after, they get married.
Search warrants become a regular part of Helen's life as a mob spouse, as well as lots of women named Marie.  She's totally fine with it all, even offering the cops coffee when they come over.
At the bar, another mobster named Billy Batts just got out of prison.  He's chatting with Tommy, Jimmy, Henry, and some other guys.  He mentions that the last time he saw Tommy, Tommy was a shoe shine boy.  Tommy thinks he's getting mocked, but Billy assures him that he's just being jovial.  Tommy accepts the half-apology, then--pause.  "Now go and get your fucking shine box!"  Tommy's livid, and has to be pushed out of the bar by Henry.  Jimmy says to Billy that he "insulted him.  A little bit.  A little bit," doing his best Robert DeNiro impression. But Jimmy wants to make it all better with another round on him.  Jimmy and Billy talk all night until they're the only two left in the bar.  Suddenly, Henry and Tommy come rushing in.  Tommy and Jimmy beat the shit out of Billy while Henry stands guard.  They dump his body into their car, and then stop by Tommy's mother's house to pick up a shovel (???). She is awake, and invites them in for dinner.  After long and filling meal, they then continue on with the murdering.  They bury Billy out in a field somewhere after shooting him a few times, and then pose for a Norman Rockwell painting.
Paulie is asked by the Gambino mobsters about the disappearance of Billy.  Paulie has no answer for them, but is suspicious of his boys.  Six months later, they learn that the land where they buried Billy is going to be renovated and turned into an apartment complex, so they dig up Billy and move him.
Alas, poor Spider.  Spider is the innocent who is too slow to get Tommy a drink one night when they're all playing poker, so Tommy playfully shoots at the ground by his feet.  A bullet playfully rips through his metatarsal and Spider must playfully be taken to the hospital.  A couple weeks later, Spider is limping around, still serving the boys.  Tommy mocks him for limping, and Spider respectfully tells him to go fuck himself.  Bye, bye, Spider.
Because his life is not nearly interesting enough, Henry begins cheating on Helen with a girl named Janice, and even gets her an apartment. Helen learns of this and first goes to the apartment building, children in tow, and sanely and rationally buzzes the intercom of every resident in the building, screeching to every one of them that  Janice is a WHORE.  She later pulls a gun on Henry while he's sleeping.  He wants out, but Jimmy and Paulie convince him that he can't divorce her without the risk that she'll turn him in to the feds, and to be much more careful when cheating in the future.  Paulie assigns them to go down to Florida and beat on some guy that owes them money.  Unfortunately, the guy in question turns out to be the brother of a woman who works as a secretary for the FBI, and when she learns out what happened, she turns everyone in, even her own brother.  Henry winds up with a several year sentence.  However, when you're a made man, prison life isn't so bad.  Paulie cooks dinner for them every night, and there's always music and soft lighting.  You need only bring good conversation.  After several years in jail, the Hills are more or less temporarily cut off from the rest of the mob family.  Helen's panicked because they're getting low on funds, but Henry assures her that this is temporary until he gets out of jail.  He decides to sell drugs, because why the fuck not?  Even Paulie thinks this is a bad idea, so Henry does it on the sly.  When he gets out of jail, he continues to sell drugs, and secretly brings Tommy and Jimmy in on it.  Together with a bunch of other mobsters, they plan the Luftansa Heist, and steal about three million from the JFK airport.  However, the guy that was supposed to hide the truck afterwards was late, so Tommy shot him.  The completely unforeseeable consequence to that is that the truck is discovered by the cops.  Jimmy in particular becomes paranoid when this happens and eventually murders each and every mobster involved in the heist (besides his BFFs Tommy and Henry) to prevent the cops from catching them.  Meanwhile, words comes down from the mountaintop that Tommy is going to be into a boss himself.  All three are elated, knowing that they'll be on easy street after that happens.
Two goombas take Tommy into a room and...oh, that's not good.
Sometime later.  Henry is now sampling the merchandise far too often when he goes on drug runs, and is a paranoid wreck, convinced a helicopter up in the sky is following him and the cops are listening to his every world.  This fails to stop him from selling drugs, though.  And indeed, he is caught on that very day.  When the police show up at the house to arrest him, Helen hurriedly flushes 60 grand worth of cocaine down the toilet.  Henry gets out on bail, and goes back to the house, telling Helen they need to sell the rest of the cocaine and then get the hell out of town.  Helen breaks the news that she flushed the cocaine.  He screams at her for a while, and then together they collapse onto the floor, clutching each other and weeping uncontrollably.  She doesn't say, "where is your Janice, NOW?", but I might have.  Henry goes to Paulie for some money.  Paulie is furious at Henry for selling drugs, and even more angry at him for getting caught.  He gives Henry 3200 dollars and tells him to get out of his life forever.  Henry is even more despondent, as 3200 won't get you to be able to spend the rest of your days on an island in the south pacific.  He sees Jimmy.  Jimmy is warm and friendly to him, and Henry interprets this as a bad sign.  Jimmy wants Henry to come with him on a job in a couple days.  Hmm...
Henry's no fool, and knows Jimmy's gonna whack him.  He goes to the cops and offers to do what he refused to do as a kid...snitch on his friends.  The feds offer Henry and Helen immunity and entry into the witness protection program if they squeal on Jimmy and Paulie.  They do so.
As Paulie and Jimmy are hauled off to jail, where they would eventually die, Henry bemoans his new life as one of the average joes, the square, the chump.  But Henry's still young, maybe there's a chance he'll turn his life around?  Ah, fuggetabouit.

Review: As I said before, the first time I saw this was about a year ago.  I remember enjoying it quite a bit, but regretted that most of the best bits ("funny how, like a clown?" "Go and get your fucking shinebox!" etc) had long since been spoiled for me and rehashed and parodied on every other movie and TV show in the last twenty years.  I had seen half the movie through osmosis, and it cheapened it a bit.  This time around however, after having seen the whole movie through actual watching, I enjoyed it a helluva lot more.  I could appreciate the utter hypnotic insanity of Joe Pesci as Tommy, one of the greatest characters in all of film.  Was the "am I a clown to you?" scene merely Tommy just having fun with Henry, or was there something darker and grosser there?  An assertion of dominance that, when acknowledged, turns into "oh, I'm just fucking with you!" He's this incredibly powerful mobster that's so insecure he must kill a waiter for talking back to him.  A waiter, by the way, who had every right to be a little bit peeved.  The relationships in this movie are all incredibly strong.  Ray Liotta really can't quite compete acting wise with DeNiro and Pesci, but that actually works in the movie's favor, too.  The overriding theme is that Henry, the half-Irishman, never really did quite fully fit in with these people, even though he spent his life trying.  The bond between Tommy and Jimmy was always stronger than his bond with them.  It made sense, ultimately, that his last act of betrayal confirmed that all the intervening years had just been desperate playacting.  And Lorraine Bracco, who I always thought was pretty weak and bland on The Sopranos, is more than awesome here.  So often the token girl in these types of movies is either a vapid slut or a saint, and Helen is just a dirty, desperate, and unhinged whirling dervish of a mess, who never stops being fun to watch.
The whole movie clicks nearly perfectly on every level; writing, directing, and acting.  It's a fucking masterpiece, and I'm gonna slide it in there right under Pulp Fiction as the second best movie on the list so far.  It's another one that needs to move way up.

Stars: Five out of five.

Does it deserve "best 100" status: Fuck you for even asking.

Next up, "Sophie's Choice", and then "Swing Time", which already makes me want to cry.