Media Club Plus Bonus 7 - Goodfellas
Transcriber: Jay (8325)
Introduction        1
Goodfellas [02:10]        3
[1:45:00]        63
Introduction
[“Shame About It” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]
Sylvi: Welcome to Media Club Plus, a podcast about diving into the media that interests us and the stories that excite us. As always, we are brought to you by Friends at the Table and our lovely patrons over at friendsatthetable.cash, which presumably you're one of them. Welcome to our first bonus episode for our Sopranos season. Uh, you can probably tell by the title, but I figured I'd let you know. We watched Goodfellas, directed by Martin Scorsese. You ever heard of him?
Darcy: [silly voice] No.
Sylvi: Uh, I'm Sylvi Bullet. You can find me most places @sylvibullet. With me as always is Keith J. Carberry.
Keith: Hi, my name is Keith Carberry. You can find me online at carberry.deals. You can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com/runbutton. Uh, and if you're listening to this, you're already on the Friends at the Table Patreon, so why don't you check out the Run Button Patreon where we're restarting our Shenmue 3 Let's Play and also starting a weird sort of FMV game called Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. Uh, a point-and-click adventure game that takes place before the Titanic movie came out. And I fucking know for a fact that James Cameron played this game.
Sylvi: Oh, okay. I love that. Um, also here, uh, Darcy Swan.[1]
[strange balloon-like inhaling noise]
Darcy: Ah, hey, what's up, man?
Sylvi: Are you, are you good? Oh!
Darcy: Yeah, no.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Guys, we gotta be careful. I think Darcy might go into witness protection.
Darcy: I'm a good fella.
Keith: Sounds like Darcy doesn't know what blow is and was blowing up a balloon thinking that that’s what—
Darcy: No, I was, I was inhaling through my nose, but it didn't come out good.
Sylvi: It sounded like you were doing whip-its, I'm not gonna lie. 
Keith: It sounded like you were blowing up a balloon.
Darcy: [sighs] I'm not good at doing coke. I'm sorry.
Sylvi: That's okay.
Keith: That’s okay. You're forgiven for that. And only that. [laughs]
[Sylvi laughs]
Darcy: Harsh but fair.
Sylvi: And of course, also here, Art Martinez-Tebbel.
Art: Hi. Um, you know, thanks for being here.
Keith: You're welcome.
Sylvi: Yeah, no problem, man. I’m happy to.
Keith: Yeah, any time. I love this movie, so it was actually— it was my pleasure.
Goodfellas [02:10]
Art: Are we all— Are we all non-fools on this one?
Sylvi: I think—
Darcy: No.
Sylvi: I think so. I had definitely seen this before, but I had— So my thing with this movie, I guess we'll go down the line. 
Keith: Yeah, let’s go, let's all do our things.
Sylvi: My thing with this movie is I had— I, I'm a big, I'm a big Scorsese girlie. I love, I love my friend Marty. Um, but I haven't seen this in forever, and specifically I haven't seen this since watching The Sopranos.
Keith: Wow.
Sylvi: Um, which was a very fun exercise in, oh my gosh, that's that guy, I know him.
Keith: There was so many that guys already. Yeah, just from season 1, I recognized like six guys.
Sylvi: Yeah. Uh, and then I look at the IMDb cast and then there are some guys that I didn't recognize and then I go, oh, come on, that guy's in this? Um, in a negative way.
Keith: Oh, brother.
Sylvi: Yeah. Oh, real oh, brother. Um, I mean, I can stop saying—
Keith: Not the Cohen one! 
Sylvi: Fucking Vincent Gallo's in this movie and I went, oh, brother. Um, I don't know if that means anything to anybody else, but fuck that guy.
Keith: No.
Sylvi: Uh, shout out to Big Pussy for assaulting him one time.
Darcy: Shout out!
Sylvi: Genuinely happened.
Keith: And by the way, of course, RIP to Big Pussy.
Sylvi: Also, yeah, this is our first recording since—
Keith: Yeah, since he entered the big pussy in the sky.
Sylvi: Vincent Pastore, right? I believe. Yeah, Vincent Pastore passed away since our— We haven't recorded anything since that happened. RIP to the big dog. Really fun actor. And I've seen him in— I've mostly just seen him in The Sopranos, but in the other stuff I've seen him in, it's a nice little treat.
Art: Great in this movie as Man with Coat Rack.
Sylvi: Yeah. Another guy that I— This is a really fun point-at-the-screen movie. I'm not going to lie.
Keith: There's some really big ones. 
Sylvi: There are.
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Who else wants to go next about their relationship with the film Goodfellas? Keith, do you want to go next or last?
Keith: I'll go last.
Sylvi: Okay.
Darcy: Uh, I can go next. It's easy. I've never seen it before.
Keith: So you are the fool, okay.
Darcy: I am the fool.
Sylvi: I'm really glad that someone is, uh, watching it for the first time.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, did you have any thoughts about this movie before seeing it?
Darcy: Um, I mean, I knew it was like a mobster movie and I knew it was like, a very beloved movie. Um, but I didn't know like— I knew it was based on a true story. I didn't know much of the specifics or plot beats or anything.
Keith: Have you seen a lot of Scorsese or not a lot?
Darcy: Not a lot.
Keith: Hmm. Because I think maybe his other most famous crime movie was like a near follow-up. I don't think it was immediately after this, but then he went and made Casino, again also with Joe Pesci, which is like—
Sylvi: And De Niro.
Keith: And De Niro. And De Niro.
Art: Um, and based on another Nicholas Pileggi book.
Keith: I forgot, I forgot that.
Sylvi: It's interesting you go to Casino. I mean, we can talk about this more. I was thinking a lot about how like, he basically just remade this movie when he did Wolf of Wall Street in a lot of ways.
Keith: I literally was talking about that with Jack today.
Darcy: Including crazy ways to laugh with your face.
Keith: Because Jack has also not seen this movie. And, uh, I— here's what I said at, uh, here's what I said four hours ago. It's funny that Martin Scorsese had to make Wolf of Wall Street, which I assume was like, no one got my metaphor about capitalism, so I'll just do a no-metaphor version. People maybe still didn't get it.
Sylvi: Didn't get it.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: The audience is mid.
Keith: The audience may— Mid is maybe too generous.
Darcy: Yeah, it's way too generous.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: The audience is worse than mid, frankly.
Darcy: I think my other, like, association I had with Goodfellas was that it seemed like it was a movie that some of the most annoying people all were like, oh, that's the, that's the fucking movies, you guys.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah.
Keith: There's just no escaping that. Yeah.
Sylvi: And I am kind of one of those guys sometimes.
Keith: I think, I mean, frankly, I think both Martin Scorsese and this movie are underrated. I know that's how crazy people are about highly rated movies.
Sylvi: But I think it, I think it, the, at where we are in, in time and space, I think that is true again.
Keith: That he's underrated?
Sylvi: That he's underrated. Yeah. Like, I think that the, the, the— 
Art: This movie might be underrated.
Keith: Yeah. Um, yeah.
Art: All right.
Sylvi: Yeah. Art, what do you think?
Art: It's interesting watching this sort of like, this movie fade in that way. Um, I've seen this movie several times. I think we can get into it a little later, but I definitely saw this movie the first two times I saw it on basic cable.
Keith: Oh, that's gonna cut out some stuff, huh?
Art: when I was too young to understand some of the illusion that there is, right, that remains when you put it on basic cable, right? So when I saw this movie for real for the first time, I was surprised to find out that he was on a lot of cocaine in the second half of the movie.
Keith: Yeah, he's sweaty. He just thought that the '80s were warm.
Sylvi: He's so anxious.
Art: And he's— His nose is red. But if you didn't show me the cocaine, I didn't, I didn't get it at that age. [Keith: Right.] And so it's like the, the, the back end of this movie is really weird. The characters change a lot.
Keith: Yeah. Though, well, obviously it's just the stress is getting to him.
Art: Yeah. Yeah. That is what it seems like.
Keith: Robert De Niro gets first billing, by the way, in this movie, which is kind of weird to me, but whatever.
Sylvi: I think that makes sense. He's probably the biggest star of the movie.
Keith: He is, but Ray Liotta is the obvious main character. He has quadruple the screen time and he's the narrator.
Sylvi: I wish that was how it worked, Keith.
Art: He should have won Best Actor for another mafia movie before making this if he wanted top billing, I think is the—
Keith: Fair. I guess that's fair. Yeah. Um, uh, okay, so I've, I've seen this movie at least half a dozen times. I love it. It's one of my all-time favorite movies. Definitely top 10. Um, I just think it especially— I think this movie has like the best first hour maybe of any movie. Like, the first hour of this is electric to me. Uh, the— It's one of the only times I can think of like, yeah, narration, give me— Just pile on. Weirdly, also Hunter x Hunter, another movie, uh, full of narration that I'm like, for some reason this is perfect to me. Uh, normally I'm not like, yeah, hell yeah, get a narrator in here to tell me what's going on. Um, but I, I just think it, like, really kind of perfectly pulls you into who Henry Hill is and why he, he idolizes this life, uh, the life, which they call it multiple times.
Darcy: Yeah.
Keith: Um, and, um, how he ends up being, like, a key figure in its perversion. Um, it's so funny to me that people watch this movie. This is— I think this has always been true, but it's been a special phenomenon the last like, four or maybe 10 years. Uh, but people criticize this movie as being like, there's Martin Scorsese loving crime and criminals again.
Sylvi: It's fucking crazy. 
Keith: And I'm like, why are you just— Are you the fucking dumbest guy on earth? What are you talking about? This is, this is like, such a movie about like, abuse and like, like, falling into abuse by trying to escape it. And also about like, the evil of capitalism and—
Sylvi: The fucking allure of it all, of wanting to be the guy in charge.
Keith: Yeah. And the greed of it. I mean, it's so good. This movie is so good, guys. Watch this movie. It's so good. I just love every second of it.
Art: If you haven't watched this movie and are on the fence, go watch the movie and come back.
Keith: Like, I can't even—
Darcy: It's, it's really good.
Keith: I've been, I've been given like, a unique gift in life, thanks to doing this podcast where I get to like, compare every movie that I ever watch going forward to how I felt watching all of the M. Night Shyamalan movies in a row.
[Sylvi hysteria]
Keith: If you watched even one—
Sylvi: That season's worth it.
Keith: If you watched even one of those movies, you gotta watch this movie. I mean—
Sylvi: Yeah, that's true.
Darcy: Yeah, this one's better than Old.
Keith: This one's actually— it's a stretch, but I do think this one might be better than Old.
Sylvi: Wow, that's really brave of you guys to say that.
Darcy: The movie about the beach that makes you old?
Keith: Yeah, the movie with the beach that makes you old. Um, this one is about the powder that makes you sweaty.
Darcy: The powder that summons helicopters.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, I just want to talk about, like, the big picture of this movie, but maybe we should get into the summary first because it's— I did a very high-level summary because I just want to talk about all the bits of it as they come up. [Sylvi: Yeah.] What do we think about that?
Sylvi: I'm fine with that.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvi: I am— I, I'm, I'm taking a little step back from, from steering this week. I'm happy to.
Keith: Yeah. Okay. 1990's Goodfellas, directed and co-written by Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi, based on the 1985 nonfiction book Wise Guys: Life in the Mafia, also by Nicholas Pileggi, chronicling the career of famous mafia associate and later FBI informant Henry Hill, edited, of course, by longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker and also by James Kwai. Uh, DP, occasional Scorsese collaborator, Michael Ballhaus. Uh, Henry Hill is in an abusive household, uh, spent his time alone, desiring the respect and authority and freedom of even the small-time mafiosos running the cab stand across the street, or whatever it is. It's not— I know it's like a— It's like a deli that's across the street. The cab stand is down the street.
Art: Uh, yeah, the book gets— I, I guess another thing to say, I read the book that this movie was based on before we started this season. And the book makes all of the geography a little clearer, and I see why they didn't really feel the need to get into that for this.
Keith: But taking advantage of his father's disdain for children and his mother's natural loyalty to Sicily, he gets in early doing small jobs, then small crimes, then big crimes, then really big crimes for the Mafia. Getting into the life during a moment of flux, attitudes that secured the rise also secured its change, then downfall. Uh, this movie is full of, like, colors and music and cars and attitudes and drugs that, like, are changing from the, uh, is it early '60s or late '50s to the—
Sylvi: I think late.
Keith: Late '50s?
Art: I think we're in the late '50s.
Keith: We're in the late '50s to the '80s. Um, something I really love about this movie is how the music kind of lags behind the— What's on screen. Like, we live in the early '60s for a while because the, the, the guys in the life are kind of like, stuck there.
Darcy: Yeah.
Keith: And then as we get into the present, it sort of zooms ahead in a way that I found really interesting and fun. Attitudes and drugs, American greed. It's a capitalism of capitalism. It's like a corruption of a corruption. Uh, after getting everything he ever wanted in a life that demands more, his closest friend and his surrogate father, Tommy and Jimmy, they team up on various crimes. Uh, stealing from— Stealing $500,000 from an airport, murdering a made guy, stealing $7 million from an airport, uh, murdering Michael Imperioli, um, starting a drug empire.
Sylvi: Yeah...
Keith: Uh, the carelessness and recklessness that became normal, uh, starts to eat away at Henry Hill's security until there's nothing left to do but become a rat.
Sylvi: Yeah, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Good fucking movie.
Keith: Good fucking movie.
Sylvi: And that's all, folks. Thanks for listening.
Keith: That's all. Uh, Darcy, what did you think? First time watch. What did you, what did you think about Goodfellas?
Darcy: Uh, God, people are acting their ass off in this movie.
Keith: People are really acting. You remember actors? Remember when actors did acting?
Darcy: I didn't know faces could look the way that Ray Liotta made his face look. I have the— I don't know if I've seen someone laugh like that.
Keith: Oh, it's beautiful. I love it.
Sylvi: You've heard someone laugh. I said that to my— I said this to my partner while I was watching this. I was like, when I laugh really hard, I think I make this exact face.
Keith: There's no way. He has the face of a, of an absolute deranged Grinch.
Darcy: Yeah. Can you unhinge your jaw? Because it looks like he unhinges his jaw.
Sylvi: He like, he like— His chin like, presses into his neck in a way that I know I have done when something makes me laugh really hard.
Darcy: He's not quite Jim Carrey Grinch face, but he, he's, he's getting there.
Sylvi: It's crazy because he is also very pretty in this movie. 
Darcy: Oh, God, yeah.
Keith: Oh, yeah. Even when he's, uh, when he's clearly in his 30s playing a 21-year-old.
Sylvi: Yeah. Honestly, especially then. They style him really well there.
Keith: Ray Liotta has this, like, lunatic magnetism to him that is so well utilized in this movie. He has the ice-cold blue eyes of a serial killer. Uh, it's unbelievable. You look at him and you're like, this guy would, would murder. And casting departments agree, this guy will kill you. Even though he doesn't really want—
Sylvi: No, he's the most hesitant about the actual violence of it all.
Keith: Because he's the smartest one. He does— He knows as things are going wrong that they're going wrong. But he's so tied in— I was thinking of World War I while this movie was on.
Sylvi: Okay...
Keith: I was thinking a lot about this sort of cascading, unstoppable descent into war, where you had sort of liberal institutions talking about how war is impossible because, of course, it's the modern world and we have all these alliances and everything is set up so beautifully. And meanwhile, like, the dominoes are already falling. And, you know, once your buddy says, all right, it's time for war, that's it. It's time. Like, you know, the part where— There's a part in the movie where Tommy, played absolutely perfectly by Joe Pesci, who is— You know, a psycho in his own right, um, is insulted by a made guy of another, um, another family or just another branch of the family?
Sylvi: I think same family.
Keith: Billy Batts, we’re talking about.
Art: It's not quite the same family. Billy Batts. Billy Batts is a Gambino guy, and these guys are not in the Gambino family.
Art: Oh, okay.
Art: That's even worse.
Keith: So Billy—
Art: This is again not clear in the movie, is clear in the book. And I think it's important in both the movie and the book to remember that you were saying like, oh, Henry Hill, he's the smartest one of the people here. He is the one who's giving the briefs.
Keith: He's the narrator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and again, this is a movie based on a book based on a liar's word. That— So just so that we're all on the same page.
Art: Um, I mean, there is some— There are like— The guy who wrote the book has written a lot of mafia books, and he's like, I was really impressed with Henry Hill in that he was like, literate in a way that—
Keith: Sure, sure. Yeah, that's a good bar.
Art: A lot of guys I've talked to in this life are not. But again, this movie is pretty self-serving to—
Keith: Yeah, but—
Art: Sure. Yeah.
Keith: I mean, I would say, is it self-serving to Henry Hill? Maybe. But is it also self-serving to have the most interesting possible character be the star of your movie.=? And I think that that's also what's hap— Like, whether or not the Henry in the movie is the Henry of reality, I think we could say definitively no by definition, and also that we've got to take the movie as it is because that's the— That's what we watched.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: But I'm always happy to hear about what the book says that's different, and what— If anybody read anything about Henry Hill, who I know devolves into— Devolves— He is an extremely sad and fucked up and evil figure for probably his whole life, but definitely after this book takes place and until his death. You know, selling like scam pasta sauce online. He’s like—
Sylvi: Keith, did you know there's a movie— I just found this out 'cause I was looking up Henry Hill, that there's a Nora Ephron movie where Steve Martin plays a character based on Henry Hill.
Keith: No. What movie?
Sylvi: My Blue Heaven.
Keith: Oh, I know My Blue Heaven. I haven't seen it. That's one of my Steve Martin movies I haven't seen.
Sylvi: And here's my other fun fact. I just found out Nora Ephron was married to Nicholas Pileggi, so.
Keith: Oh, that's really interesting. I did not know that.
Art: Yeah, small world.
Keith: Very small world. Famous. The famous world.
Sylvi: I wonder if they're in the same industry.
Keith: Um, the, uh, 'cause it's a, 'cause My Blue Heaven is a comedy. So 1990— In 1990, there was a comedy and a drama about the same guy.
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: One of them written by the guy who wrote the book and one of them written by his wife.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: That's so weird. I love that.
Sylvi: I'm not gonna lie. I love that.
Keith: I gotta watch My Blue Heaven now. Okay, what was I just saying before? Oh.
Sylvi: You were talking about how Henry Hill is kind of like a both evil and kind of tragic character, I think.
Keith: He's evil and he's tragic. He's obviously tragic. He's, I guess also he's obviously evil. But yeah, he has— There's always this sense that he's got one extra toe in reality that when, you know, when Tommy gets absolutely destroyed by one comment by some fucking guy, that he's like, I've got to kill this guy, even though it is a sin among sins to do so to this made guy of another family.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: It's the worst possible thing that he could be doing. You can see on his face, I don't want this to be happening. But when they go for him, they're like, well, we're here. We're in it. We have to do this now. We can't just like— Because you can't stop Tommy because then Tommy could kill you. And might.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: So I'd rather try to cover up this one murder than maybe get murdered by Tommy. So this is why I was thinking of World War I. There's a lot of like I'm getting dragged into this, uh, you know— I'm getting dragged onto this thing that is like only downhill in the bad way. It's funny, downhill can be bad or good, but this is the bad one.
Sylvi: This is the bad one, yeah. Um, oh my gosh, where should we start? 
Keith: I have one other really big picture thing, please. And then maybe we can start at the beginning with, uh, Henry and his parents, the young Henry, um, who also great.
Art: There is the in media res.
Keith: There is the in media res. Yeah, we'll see. We can start with the in media res, which is— And I have a little bit of that. Uh, God, I just couldn't help but clip things, especially from the first half of this movie.
Art: Uh, yeah, weirdly this movie is very good before Ray Liotta [Keith: Even shows up.] Even shows up.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah.
Keith: Um, the primary relationship in this movie is a triangle between— By the way, Jimmy Conway.
Sylvi: Jimmy Conway. Yeah.
Keith: What is Tommy's last name?
Sylvi: Tommy's last name is Tommy DeVito.
Keith: Tommy DeVito. Okay. By the way, if you look at the IMDb, there's like 7 guys named Vito who acted in this movie. Go figure.
Sylvi: Can you say that?
Keith: Yes!
Sylvi: I'm joking.
Keith: Um, uh, okay. Henry Hill, he's dedicated to the lifestyle. He sort of represents a desire for, like, an institutional normalcy. Uh, he's loyal to the family, to Paulie. He, he wants to do things, you know, quote unquote, the right way. To him, doing something the right way is doing a huge crime, leaving no traces, and giving some of that money to Paulie Cicero. Uh, yeah, the, the, the, the Junior. He's, he's Uncle— He's Uncle Junior in this. That's the, that's the level that we're at.
Sylvi: Uh, Paulie Cicero, played by Paul Sorvino, who I love.
Keith: He's so good in this.
Sylvi: Classic role for Paul Sorvino too, of the crime boss guy.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: It's either that or a cop. I feel like those are the— Flip a coin and that's the role you see him in.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Uh, or Juliet's father in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.
Art: True.
Sylvi: That's kind of a— He's kind of got, uh, mob boss aesthetics going on there though.
Art: Sure does.
Keith: Uh, and then, then you have, uh, Tommy DeVito, who is like— He's like a totally manufactured person in order to like claw his way towards some sort of stature. He's— I think that they try to make him self-conscious about not being masculine enough, self-conscious about not getting enough respect, self-conscious about being kind of a small guy. Um, he becomes like, best friends with Jimmy— Or I'm sorry, with Henry, because they're just like two kids working their way up in the family. Like kind of a—
Sylvi: Jimmy introduces them.
Keith: Jimmy introduces them, and Jimmy is a psycho who is in it for the love of the game.
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: His dedication to the mafia lifestyle aesthetics is only a means to the end of continuing to be a violent psychopath. Uh, he— The quote is that, uh, Jimmy was the kind of guy who rooted for the bad guy in movies. But the other thing that he was was a surrogate father to Henry, who hated his own father, resented his family life. And then, like, Jimmy was the dad who stepped up. He like, is there to comfort him the first time he gets arrested. He hands him a wad of cash. They throw him like, a get-pinched party. It's very cute.
Sylvi: It rocks how much they're laying on the like, we're so proud of you, you did this the right way thing at the beginning when you know where this is going.
Keith: And this is the sort of like, culty grips that that this family has in people is that like, it gave him a home when he hated his home. It gave him the idea that he could be respected and free, and that being in a family would absorb the consequences of that, those choices, the choices that he makes. And then also like, a factory that like, manufactures normalizing bad behavior, by sort of denying you access to the outside world at all.
Sylvi: Clocking in for another day at the violence and masculinity factory.
Keith: It's so good. And so— Oh, and so the point in highlighting these three characters is that Jimmy and Tommy both represent a sort of perversion of Henry's idealistic, um, notions of the mafia family. They both, like, um, are— They're like an implicit challenge to what he believes that the mafia family is. And then also they warp his perceptions about like, what's happening around him. And then the three of them together sort of change and destroy the— What truth there is in the things that Henry values about being in the family. And I just think that's great. As a movie. It doesn't seem so great for Henry as it's happening.
Sylvi: No, but as a story to watch, I had a lovely time.
Keith: As a story to watch, it's so good. And so that is like, it is such a well-constructed house of cards, the relationship between those three and how it kind of implodes and explodes, um, all of their lives. Uh, and that's all I wanted to say before we start in earnest.
Sylvi: Hell yeah.
Keith: In media res, Art, do you wanna talk about the in media res? Famous.
Art: Yeah, we start with, um, Henry, Jimmy, and Tommy in a car. They're driving, it's late at night, and they, they hear a noise, and Henry's like, what, did I hit something? The noise continues, they pull over, and it's a person in the trunk of their car who seems to be surprisingly still alive, I think is fair to say.
Sylvi: Especially when you see this back later. Very surprising.
Darcy: Yeah.
Art: And then they, they murder the crap out of him. Tommy reaches in his coat, I think everyone would've assumed for a gun, and instead takes out a large knife that he starts to stab this man in the neck with. And then Jimmy takes out a gun and shoots him. It looks like— Just in the opening, it just looks like he shoots him in the crotch. But I think later it looks more like he shot him in the— In the leg or something?
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: [voiceover] As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States. Even before I first wandered into the cab stand for an after-school job, I knew I wanted to be a part of them. It was there that I knew that I belonged. To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies. They weren't like anybody else. I mean, they did whatever they wanted. They double-parked in front of a hydrant, and nobody ever gave them a ticket. In the summer, when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops. 
Tony: Good, good, good. 
Keith: It's Paulie Walnuts there on the screen right now if you're watching this. 
Tuddy: Tony Stacks, how are you?
Henry: [voiceover] Tuddy Cicero.
Tony: All right, good, good.
Henry: [voiceover] Tuddy. Tuddy ran the cab and La Bella Vista Pizzeria, and a few other places for his brother Paul, who was the boss over everybody in the neighborhood.
Tony: Come on. Come on.
Tuddy: Oh, Paulie. Hey, Paulie.
Henry: [voiceover] Paulie might have moved slow, but it was only because Paulie didn't have to move for anybody.
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, Art, I didn't want to cut you off, but I did want to emulate the in media res opening that cuts to— 
Art: No, I think it was great. I think you did a great job. You didn't recreate the really weird credits sequence, but—
Keith: It is a kind of weird credits sequence. The credits sequence is so weird. Yeah. Yeah, each credit rolls past as a car, but then has to come back so you could read it. It's very strange.
Sylvi: It's really funny.
Keith: It whooshes. I just think Ray Liotta absolutely demolishes these narration sequences. They're so good. I love also, you know, you rewatch the movie especially, And you get a sense for, like, he wants the freedom, he wants the respect, and he looks at Paulie as the guy who has that respect. And the like, ultimate expression of that is that he moves slow 'cause he doesn't have to move for anybody. And then you watch who Henry Hill is in the early '80s, and you're like, well, if his goal was to move slow 'cause you don't have to move for anybody, then he fucked it up entirely because this guy's moving 1,000 miles an hour for everybody. So he did not do a good job becoming Paulie Cicero.
Art: Well, that's sort of his tragedy, right? He can't because he's excluded from the—
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. But he could have been—
Art: The membership.
Keith: He could have been someone else if he had taken it easy, if he had not fallen in with Jimmy, if he had taken Paulie's advice, like, be careful around Jimmy and Tommy. Paulie tried to warn him, don't hang out with them. He was going to the Copacabana twice a week, hanging out, getting front row seats. People were buying him cars and apartments, and he had it. He had it. The amount that he was working for what he was getting, it seemed like a really fucking good deal until he couldn't help himself.
Art: Yeah. I mean, and yeah. Mm-hmm. Uh, me shaking my head so people I know— So people know that I think crime is bad.
Keith: I think crime was— It seems awesome. I think it looked really good. They should— He should have just done a little bit less crime. This movie is so in favor of crime. You can't, you couldn't even believe it. 
Sylvi: Shut the fuck up. [Keith laughter] This motherfucker.
Keith: So we go back in time to the cab stand days. He's cutting school. He's working all day at the cab— He's getting a taste of like— He's like, I'm a kid. I'm parking Cadillacs for wise guys. I can barely see over the steering wheel. There's a gaggle of girls watching him drive a Cadillac as a 14-year-old boy or whatever. He's getting a taste of what he wanted, and the only price for that is occasionally getting the shit beat out of him by his father for not going to school. [reading] My father was always pissed off. He was pissed off that he made such lousy money. He was pissed off that my kid brother Michael was in a wheelchair. He was pissed off— Oh, he was pissed off that there were seven of us living in such a tiny house. But after a while, he was mostly pissed off because I was hanging around the cab stand. He knew what went on at that cab stand. And every once in a while I had to take a beating, but I didn't care. The way I saw it, everybody takes a beating sometimes. [stops reading] You know, if we're taking adult Henry Hill at his word that that's how he felt as a kid, he's already not thinking like a normal kid.
Sylvi: No. To be fair, it's hard to think like a normal kid when you're in an abusive household.
Keith: Yeah, totally. That's my point. Yeah, totally.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Sylvi: Okay.
Keith: Kevin Corrigan plays his kid brother Michael, who just came up in a recording of Perpetua yesterday. We were talking for a really long time about Donald Logue and Kevin, and I was like, he was in a sitcom with Kevin Corrigan. This is the first thing I ever saw Kevin Corrigan in is as Michael Hill. Yeah, he only has a couple lines, but he's so good. He just like kills his lines. Everything Kevin Corrigan is in, I think he's electric. He's so good to me. Um, love Kevin Corrigan, shoutout.
Sylvi: He stirred that sauce great.
Keith: He stirred that sauce great. Annoyed that he's, you know, being taken care of by his brother. It's good. He's good.
Sylvi: Like, his brother is super coked up.
Keith: What do we think about these early sequences here with, uh, kid Henry?
Sylvi: I love this. I mean, like, hey, like, stop me if you've heard this before, uh, I love the way the camera moves in a Scorsese movie.
Keith: It's really good, and it just gets better and better. I love the way that the, the method of filming changes as the story changes.
Sylvi: It's really cool.
Keith: It's really cool. Every era has its own style.
Art: The camera like, tells you how Henry feels.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvi: Yeah. Um, I really— I think it, like, the first time I, like, really, really, like, locked in on it was during the introduction of Jimmy, um, where the camera just like, doesn't stop for like, that and like— Basically that whole sequence. And there's a couple sequences like this, the like, one where he's introducing all the different mob guys at the club also is like that. But there's like this real— There's some really good like, crash zooms and stuff and things that I think people think are like, corny now, but like, it looked great.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, and Lorraine Bracco, of course, who we know very well from, uh, The Sopranos at this point as, uh, Lauren Hill— No, Karen Hill. Uh, she, um, she's narrating um, like, feeling drunk, feeling dizzy, feeling like she's in a dream as the camera's like, spinning around, like you're seeing people. It is like, uh, it's, it's like an undream sequence where, uh, like—
Sylvi: Ooh! I know what you mean by that.
Keith: You know what I mean?
Sylvi: Yeah, where it's like, it's reality, but it feels that way.
Keith: Right, and she's, she's also— And, and it is mirroring what she's describing as her reality. Which is great.
Sylvi: Which is also like, a really fun sort of like, filmic way to get across her being swept up in everything. It's also like the camera literally feels like it's getting like, pulled around in a twister.
Keith: I highly recommend— And by the way, this is all like, set against the backdrop of like, you know, Karen is just awful. And I know that in real life, Karen Hill is also just awful. And— But, you know, the movie does such a good job of, like, showing you the sort of garden path that she's walking down to loving this life the way that Henry does.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Like, the trust, the closeness, the intimacy, the insularity of it. And, like, you know, when they're handing her had to be thousands and thousands of dollars in wedding gifts. And she's worried about it getting stolen. And he's like, no one's going to steal it here. Don't worry about it. And mixed with the higher tension stuff of her being like, when he was yelling and screaming and being violent, that I found him at his most attractive. Like, this sort of like, dual thing of like, the love and the affection and the attention and the money and the drugs and the sex. This is all, like— And you can see how there's other women that that has an effect on in the movie also. Like, when later he's got— He's at his girlfriend's apartment and his girlfriend's friend is like, obviously into the extremely threatening way that he's walking towards her.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, uh, you know, being in this life where crime and implication and threats and danger are the language, Henry Hill speaks the language really well, and it's not a surprise that in a lot of the movie he's finding people that are attracted to that— The language that he speaks, which is not a very nice language, by the way.
Art: Yeah, I hadn't seen this movie since—
Darcy: Or who are like dependent on him in that way. Sorry, Art. Sorry. Yeah, but his last girlfriend strikes me as more of just like, she's dependent on him being able to speak that language and to live in that world in a physical way because she's addicted to cocaine.
Keith: Yeah, but she only becomes addicted to it because she's interested straight away.
Darcy: That's true. Yeah.
Keith: Sorry, Art, what were you going to say?
Art: I hadn't seen this movie since I had read the thing about— That Lorraine Bracco refused to audition for Carmela, and that's who they wanted her for. And I think I agree that, that I don't think that Carmela could survive in the shadow of this—
Sylvi: I— Yeah.
Art: Performance. 
Darcy: Yeah. They're different too.
Sylvi: They're very different. And it, like, because Carmela's a much more, like, subdued role a lot of the time, I think it would've compared unfavorably for her. I think it's a really smart decision. Also, like, obviously the desire to not be typecast as a mob wife, I think, was a big factor.
Darcy: Mm-hmm.
Keith: There's a sort of, um, kind of sick way that like, Henry is attracted to the way that she stands up for herself, um, in the beginning, that, uh, kind of destroying that version of her, um, uh, but she never sort of loses the like, ability or desire to like, scream in his face, call him a liar, figuring out what he's actually doing. She's not like the other mob wives, you know, trademark.
Darcy: Um, and ironically, uh, it is her character here who, if we were discussing a, a textbook case of borderline personality disorder [Keith: Sure.] It is Karen Hill in this movie, not, not Mama Soprano, in my opinion.
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Keith: The, the— But the Carmela role, so far anyway, doesn't have a lot of that energy. She's a different energy. But Melfi does kind of embody like, she's the one who can kind of say, even with consequences, can say the truth to Tony Soprano and have him hear it. Which, in a weird way, it's like, makes her closer to Lauren— Lorraine Bracco's role in this than Carmela would be… If that makes sense.
Sylvi: I think that makes— I think, I think I got what you mean.
Keith: Yeah. Um, what the fuck is this clip that I have?
Sylvi: I don't know. We're like, all over the place.
Keith: It’s okay, it's okay. I think it's great so far. I think this is great so far.
Sylvi: Oh, I agree. I just like, we're not really doing— Again, you got to watch this movie now because we're not doing it linearly— Linearly.
Darcy: Yeah, you got to.
Keith: Yeah. The way that they pull Henry like, deeper into the, the like, the stuff that he's doing is really interesting too. Like, he's parking cars at the cab stand, first of all, and then he's like, talking about, hey, they taught me how to hustle and like, how to find like, scrape extra bucks together. And then he's kind of lighting cars on fire for insurance money. Like, he's selling— He's stealing and selling cigarettes, and then he's committing arson. 
Sylvi: Uh, it's a slippery slope. 
Keith: It's a slippery slope. Well, and it's also, you know, it's easy when you're— When he says he describes how he's making more money, uh, than all the adults on the block as a 14-year-old or whatever, however old they said he was, 13, 14, I can't remember. Um, you know, that's like a— That, that— Kids are not adults. I think we can all agree.
Sylvi: What?! Yeah, no, we can.
Keith: But even an adult has a hard time being like, oh, you're handing me huge stacks of money and all I have to do is burn down these cars that everyone who owns the cars all agrees they want to get burned down anyway. Yeah, it seems like not that much of a— Yeah, I'll do that. Sure. Why not? Yeah, it sounds great. Huge stack of money. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody's—
Art: A victimless crime.
Keith: Yes, the victim of the crime is the insurance industry, and who gives a fuck?
Darcy: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: Wow.
Art: I mean, it's hard to generate compassion for the insurance industry.
Keith: Yeah, and may I suggest not even trying? Don't even try. Don't even try to be empathetic.
Sylvi: It's not worth your time.
Keith: Not worth your time, frankly. I remember, and I'm just trying to find— I just have to get my screencaps open so that I can— Oh my God, I have to go and delete these. I've got months and months and months of screencaps in here that I don't fucking need. There's a cut. There's a cut that I really like. If you listen to Thelma Schoonmaker talk about her editing process and like, the collaboration— The collaborative nature that she has with Martin Scorsese. She's so interesting. I highly recommend going and just watching interviews with her. And she always talks about how the content of the film determines how present the editing should be. And that sometimes people might say that editing should be invisible, and she's like, I absolutely don't think that's the case. Like, sometimes you want editing to be invisible, but sometimes you really, really want it to be really visible.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: This movie has such good editing. It's unbelievable. There's a scene where, um, he goes like, home to his parents' house, and like, he's dressed in a— He looks like a gangster. He's in a suit. He's in a suit like a gangster. And his mom's like, you look like a gangster. And immediately it cuts to another way a gangster can look, which is full of holes and bleeding out on the sidewalk because he's, uh, working at the deli or whatever, and some mafia guy has gotten shot, and he's like coming to the deli to be like, fix me up, please, I've been shot, help me. And, uh, Henry's like running to get napkins and towels and aprons. Um, uh, and the— What's it— What's, uh, Paulie's brother's name? Uh, Tuddy?
Sylvi: I don't know.
Art: The guy who runs—
Art: Are you sure?
Keith: Yeah, Tuddy. Yeah, Tuddy. Tuddy Cicero. Tuddy's like, don't come in here, don't let him in here. And he's like, what are you, a fucking jerk wasting eight aprons on this guy? Like, he's like, yeah, he's like, you gotta toughen up. Uh, and this is like the two— I don't wanna say two natures of Henry, like the helper and the mafia guy, but it's sort of like this kind of undercurrent of sympathy that he never— It's not that he never quashes, it's that it's like, it's in like, one— If the rest of his body is in the mafia, he has one toe in the boy who wants to help the bleeding guy.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: It's just enough to be, like, a beautiful mix. It’s so good.
Sylvi: There's a real aversion to the, like, actual violence versus just being like, the guy who lets the violence happen behind the scenes, or, like, to— Or, like, there's a hard limit, I guess, 'cause, like, we have a scene later on where Jimmy starts, like, choking Maury out with a telephone cable. And if I'm remembering—
Keith: Fucking Maury.
Sylvi: Yeah, if I'm remembering right, um, uh, um, oh my God, why am I blanking on the main character? Henry.
Keith: Henry, yeah.
Sylvi: Is like, he's not like, that upset by that. But when it comes to the stuff with, um, I mean, maybe it's more that he's worried about the consequences when I— Now that I'm thinking about this out loud, when you get to, to, um, the trunk incident, the stuff with Billy Batts. And he looks— He looks like he's gonna vomit the entire time. And then he does vomit eventually. Uh, when they clean it up later. Definitely.
Keith: I think definitely it's not the killing, it's the consequences. 
Art: When they're re-digging up— I think anyone would— Any reasonable person would—
Sylvi: For sure.
Keith: But then— But he's with two unreasonable people.
Sylvi: That's the thing I was gonna say, is like, he is not in— He's not in— Reasonability is not the norm for the, the, uh, the social circle he runs in, you know?
Keith: Yeah, it's not a safe space to be, uh, to be—
Sylvi: It's the normal mafia, not the alphabet mafia, you know what I'm saying?
Keith: Um, and, uh, oh, by the way—
Art: No, what are you saying?
Sylvi: I don't know, something about gay people. Um, um, it's fine. I've had a— I got blood taken today. I'm like, I'm blaming it on that. I’m like— Yeah.
Keith: I'm gonna play a clip Just another clip about what young Jimmy feels about the mafia that immediately precedes two big, potentially traumatic moments of blowing up the cab stand and having the guy bleeding out at the pizza parlor. It's a pizza parlor! That's what it is.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: It's La Bella Vita Pizza Parlor. The guy bleeding out of the pizza parlour.
Art: That's why they have aprons.
Keith: Yeah, that's why they have aprons. I thought it was a deli. 
Art: Many similarities. 
Keith: They're at a cookout.
Sylvi: There we go.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: [voiceover] For a guy who moved all day long, Paulie didn't talk to six people. If there was a union problem or, say, a beef in the numbers, then only the top guys can meet with Paulie to discuss the problem. Everything was one-on-one. Paulie hated conferences. He didn't want anybody hearing what he said, and he didn't want anybody listening to what he was being told. Hundreds of guys depended on Paulie, and he got a piece of everything they made. It was tribute, just like in the old country, except they were doing it here in America. And all they got from Paulie was protection from other guys looking to rip them off. And that's what it's all about. That's what the FBI could never understand, that what Paulie and the organization does is offer protection for people who can't go to the cops. That's it. That's all it is. They're like the police department for wise guys.
[audio ends]
Keith: That's all it is.
Art: And the movie will make clear that this is bullshit. And I want you to know the book makes it very, very clear that this is bullshit.
Art: Right.
Keith: And you see— I mean, there's so much that's good here. Casting forward into the rest of the movie, pulling out again this sort of controlling of information, isolating people, setting up systems to obscure accountability. It's extremely culty, which is a theme that runs through the whole thing. And it sort of— It's the system that allows Paulie to maintain this control that he has over like, a whole neighborhood and maybe thousands of people. He calls it hundreds, but then those hundreds of people have their own people. And so eventually it kicks up to Paulie, uh, who I assume also has his own guy above him that we never even hear of. Um, because fundamentally, this is a— This is a movie about Brendan Filoni.
[long pause]
Sylvi: God.
Keith: You know what I mean?
Sylvi: Like, yeah, kinda. You're not wrong.
Keith: Yeah. And so what the fuck does Brendan Filoni know about Uncle Junior's boss? You know?
Darcy: Hmm.
Sylvi: What a beautiful sentence.
Keith: Um, and, uh, you know, so this— But just like the like, Paulie doesn't have to move for anybody, you know, this sort of controlling information, one of the problems with Henry Hill later in the movie is that he's, he's led— He's got terrible ops. His, his, his OPSEC is bad. Information is spinning out of control. He's got too many guys. They're talking on the phone.
Darcy: Well, because nobody will listen to him.
Keith: Well, that— I mean, frankly, if they listened to him, he might have been okay. Uh, but also like, you roped in this like, girl who's like, kind of a shitty— Like, she's like, not good at this. [Sylvi: No, she's not.] He talks about multiple times about one of the things that he's got to do is deal with that she's going to give him shit. And it's like, well, why are you working with a teenage girl that's going to give you shit when you're trying to sell cocaine across state lines? He's trying to spin up his own mirror mafia and can't do it because he doesn't do what Paulie does. He does way more, too much. He Filonis it.
Darcy: And he's on blow the whole time.
Keith: And he's on blow the whole time.
Art: He's not on blow the whole time.
Keith: Well, the whole time that he's trying to spin up his own mirror mafia. Art, do you want to talk about the ways that the book shows that, that that clip is bullshit?
Art: Um, 'cause it's the— They— We get into this in the movie a little bit when the guy's like, you know, Tommy's causing a lot of problems at the restaurant. What— Can you help me? And the end of it is like, yes, I will help you. And now I own this restaurant and you will go bankrupt.
Keith: This is a—
Art: They do this like, big bust out where it's like, I'm your partner now. And it's like, It's private equity. He could come to him if he had a problem with a bill. And also, we put everything on his credit, stole all the stuff, and then he went bankrupt.
Keith: He's describing exactly the mechanism of offloading debt, private equity firms offloading debt onto acquisitions and bankrupting, profiting off of destroying businesses. It's like literally a one-for-one. I mean, I have the clip.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: [voiceover] Now the guy's got Paulie as a partner. Any problems, he goes to Paulie. Trouble with the bill, he can go to Paulie. Trouble with the cops, deliveries, Tommy, he can call Paulie. But now the guy's got to come up with Paulie's money every week, no matter what. Business bad? Fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? Fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? Fuck you, pay me.
Jimmy: What if I get one of those TVs? 
Tommy: Nah, I'd be stuck with them breaking all over the place.
Henry: [voiceover] Also, Paulie could do anything, especially run up bills on the joint's credit card. And why not? Nobody's gonna pay for it anyway. And as soon as the deliveries are made in the front door, you move this stuff out the back and sell it at a discount. You take a $200 case of booze and you sell it for $100. Doesn't matter, it's all profit. And then finally, when there's nothing left—
Tommy: Fucking shame.
Henry: [voiceover] When you can't borrow another buck from the bank or buy another case of booze, you bust the joint out. You light a match.
Tommy: You look like you're decorating a Christmas tree, you fucking prick. You don't know what you're doing.
Keith: I extended this clip a little bit because we get a beautiful— What Tarantino wishes he was.
                Henry: Who?
Tommy: This new broad, Diane? I was telling you about her size. Trying to bang this broad.
Keith: The building is currently burning down while they're outside chatting.
Tommy: She won't go out with me alone, you know?
Henry: No.
Tommy: No what?
Henry: No.
Tommy: No what, Henry? Who the fuck asked you anything? I didn't even ask you anything. At least wait to hear what I'm gonna say. 
Henry: All right. What?
Tommy: Okay, what? She don't want to go out with Italians alone. She's prejudiced against Italians. You fucking believe that? In this day and age, what the fuck is this world coming to? I can't believe this prejudice against— A Jew broad. Prejudice against Italians. Anyway, she won't go out with me alone. Unless her girlfriend comes with us. So I figure you come along and go out with her girlfriend.
Henry: See, I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.
Tommy: You knew what? See what? What the fuck is wrong with that?
Henry: When is this?
Tommy: Tomorrow night.
Henry: I can't tomorrow night. I gotta meet Tuddy.
Tommy: You could meet Tuddy. You could fucking come early and then still go.
Henry: Tommy, Tommy, why do you always do this to me?
Tommy: Get rid of that fucking Tommy shit. What the fuck I asked you for, Henry? I'm asking you for a favor. I do a lot of fucking favors for you, don't I? I'm trying to bang this fucking broad. You wanna help me out?
[audio]
Keith: God, Joe Pesci is unbelievable in this movie.
Sylvi: So— I fucking adore Joe Pesci.
Keith: Unbelievable, he is so good. He's— First of all, he's got cowboyitis.
Sylvi: He does have cowboyitis.
Darcy: Oh yeah.
Sylvi: It's a pretty clear case.
Keith: They name it. They say— They call him a cowboy in the movie.
Sylvi: They do, actually.
Keith: Yeah. He’s just totally out of his gourd. I mean, he is maybe the feeblest ego in the history of film.
Darcy: Mm-hmm.
Keith: He can handle nothing. Nothing that anybody says to him, he— Can he take. He will kill you for looking at him. He'll kill you for not looking at him. He's crazy.
Sylvi: It's what makes the very famous, uh, what, do I amuse you scene, uh, work so well, because it's, it's kind of like [Keith: Which we’ll play later.] It's the audience introduction to that sort of dynamic, but like, you kind of, you understand it like, fucking immediately. But then they, they do that, the, the ending manages to make it so you're not like— You're, you're worried about him like, blowing up, but you're not like, actively scared of him in every scene he's in.
Keith: No, 'cause he's fucking funny, which is why— 
Sylvi: 'Cause he's funny. Exactly.
Keith: Which is why it's so funny that he might kill Henry for calling him funny. Because—
Sylvi: I think that like— Oh no, go ahead.
Keith: Just because, like, you know, I don't wanna play it yet, we just played a thing.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: But like, Henry calls him funny because he tells a funny story. He on purpose knows that the story's funny. He even says that here's the funny thing, and then says the funny thing. And then when Henry calls him funny— He plays it off later like he was fucking with him. He really was gonna explode for real.
Sylvi: That's what it feels like.
Keith: That's what it feels like. Or it feels like he could, you know, maybe he was joking, but when, when you can't tell the difference, that's what's scary.
Art: My interpretation of that scene is that he was not, that he was fucking with him the whole time, but it only works as fucking with him the whole time because—
Keith: Because he, he could have not been.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, right. Yes. That's— I think that that's about where I come across too. But there's a— Because it's Henry who catches him, who's like, you're fucking with me, there's this, I think, potential that that was a sincerely defusing moment. Um, because, uh, one of the through lines that the— You know, that— It happens with Henry, it happens with Tommy, um, they can't be told what to do. They won't be told what to do. They will not be told what to do. But sometimes you have to tell them what to do. And so there's this great scene where, uh, Henry's cheating on his wife. Uh, Karen goes to Paulie about it. They're like, look, this is making us look bad. She's crazy. You can't have her being crazy. She's gonna talk to our wives. That would be bad. Like, you have to go back to her. But there's this acknowledgement that they can't actually tell Henry that he has to do it. So they have to front-load it with like, look, we're not telling you what to do. We won't— We can't tell you to do— You're gonna do what you're gonna do. You want what you want. You'll do what you're gonna do. But you have to do— Here's what you have to actually do.
Sylvi: Like, wait, hold on.
Keith: So you have to gi— I mean, this is the level of kind of... you know, refusal to accept an infringement in any way that they're dealing with. Even Henry, the more reasonable of the two guys, even him, they have to absolutely layer everything with 1,000 of the softest pillows. They have to treat him like a little baby. In order to be like, can you not? Can you move back in with your wife, please? Because she's gonna ruin our whole crime empire.
Darcy: Yeah, yeah.
Keith: Good fucking movie, honestly.
Sylvi: Great fucking movie. I love the— It's— There's something great about that scene where they sit down to talk to him too, because he is once again obviously coked out of his fucking mind. Yeah, yeah, it's like a real great, uh, like you can always tell in every scene that, uh, Ray Liotta's in in the like latter half of this movie, you can always kind of like, pinpoint how long it's been since Henry's last bump.
Keith: Well, actually, what— Had he started doing the coke at that point because he, um, he hadn't gone to jail yet, so he hadn't met his connections.
Sylvi: Oh, maybe I just— Maybe that this is just me then inferring that, maybe I just read the performance that way.
Keith: Yeah, well, that could be just a little bit of how Ray Liotta seems. [Sylvi: Yeah.] Um, although when he's— There's a— There's— I'll play it later, but there's— When he is going to jail, there is a line where he pops a pill and then goes, take me to jail.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's why I assumed it was happening before that.
Keith: Yeah, so he may have been, he may have been on something at that point. There's actually, there's a bit of ambiguity around that that I would love to talk about when we get to it. But actually, I would love to rewind and talk about like, the bits of Henry that keep him pulled into this like, obviously horrible life that is self-evidently bad for him and for everybody, uh, everybody involved, everybody not involved that they run into. Just a bad thing to be in. Uh, and it's like the moment where, um, uh, Jimmy, who we haven't really talked about much, becomes his father. Uh, he gets pinched for selling— You know, there's this whole— It's this whole thing about like how we've got the whole fucking neighborhood on lock. If you're a judge, you're paid off. If you're a cop, you're paid off. The moment you care about what we're doing, you've got $1,000 in your hand, or whatever. And again, the sort of structuring what Henry says is like not necessarily true or mostly true. He's— This is— We're back to young Henry. He runs into some detectives who don't give a fuck about, you know, he's trying to be like, no, no, don't worry, I've got your boxes. Like, who are you guys? Whatever. Just, let me get you some cigarettes. And they're like, no, you're under arrest. And he's on trial. And this is right after his— I don't think anything happens, but he's crying in this scene. They underplay it because he doesn't want to cry, but he really feels guilty and like he failed and that he let his family down. And they couldn't be happier with him.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Jimmy: Congratulations. Here's your graduation present.
Henry: What for? I got pinched.
Jimmy: Everybody gets pinched, but you did it right. You told them nothing and they got nothing. 
Henry: I thought you'd be mad.
Jimmy: Man, I'm not mad at you. I'm proud of you. You took your first pinch like a man, and you learned the 2 greatest things in life.
Henry: What? 
Jimmy: Look at me. Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.
Paulie: Hey, here he is, here he is! You broke your cherry!
[audio ends]
Keith: It’s so good. I love this. I love this scene, especially with Jimmy. being the one who tells him, you know, don't rat on your friends.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Let's see if that comes back.
Sylvi: Don't rat on your friends and keep your mouth shut.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Let's see if that comes back. Uh, because he— Because for a long time he doesn't fucking rat on his friends.
Sylvi: No.
Keith: Um, you know, there is— Art, you mentioned about how the movie is so, uh, is like— It is necessarily from Henry's point of view because he's a real guy, and he tells Nicholas Pileggi his story from his point of view in the most generous way to himself, I assume possible. And— But the movie is so… It it relies structurally on this idea that like, did he fuck up? Yes. Did— Was he sloppy? yes. But Jimmy forces his hand. Paulie turns his back on him, and Jimmy forces his hand. Like, and that is the— You know, like, if Paulie had given him more, and Jimmy hadn't seemed like he was gonna fucking kill him, would he have ratted? You know, that's— Henry's position is, I had to do what I did, or I was going to get killed. It wasn't— It wasn't— And I didn't give me the opportunity to not rat. They were going to kill me in a preemptive strike. I was going to be— I was getting preemptively whacked, basically.
Sylvi: Worst kind of whacking.
Keith: It's the worst kind of whacking, is preemptive. Is there— Is there anything else on young Jimmy?
Sylvi: You mean young Henry?
Keith: Young Henry. Fuck, it's all the same name. Fuck. Jimmy, Henry, and Tommy are the same name.
Sylvi: They're doing the, the, uh— Every guy is named Paul or Peter and they were all married to a woman named Marie is happening to you.
Keith: Yeah, it's true.
Sylvi: Um, let me think. Uh, I don't think so. I like— No, I feel like we've got— I, I do think we've covered the majority of the stuff that matters with that.
Keith: Good, because that was my last, uh, that was my last clip of young, uh, Henry. So I, I also felt like we had covered all of it. Uh, there's some really funny lines actually. Let me— I'm just looking over my notes. I think my favorite line delivery in the whole movie from Ray Liotta is when he's describing Jimmy and how much Jimmy loved stealing and how, you know, hits—
Sylvi: It's so good. It's so funny.
Keith: Hits are part of the job, and Jimmy didn't care about them. But what he loved was stealing. And he just lists all the different kinds of things that Jimmy liked to steal. And the last one was shrimps and lobsters. And then he goes, shrimp and lobsters were best. They went really fast. And I love that as a kind of like, almost a superfluous nugget of honesty in this whole movie. There's this like, one bit of like, knowledge about the world. This isn't about the mafia family, but people wanted to buy cheap, stolen shrimp.
Art: And fucking God bless.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, sure. More power to you. And just, there was such a perfect, beautiful, naturalistic delivery on, uh, they went, uh, uh, they went really fast. I just loved that. Um, so if you didn't catch that, go back and watch that scene because it's just a good, just a good little bit of natural acting to me. Um, God, I fucking— Okay. Can't read my own handwriting is my problem today. I wrote— I was writing too fast. The— Henry's an adult. We're in adult Henry. He's gotten pinched. He's hanging out with Tommy. They're at the airline diner. They love the airline diner because the airline is in their backyard and they love to steal from the airport. [Sylvi: Yeah.] Which is really funny. 
Art: Yeah, if you're looking for more content on this, let me recommend the book. The book does a lot about the mechanics of stealing from the airport. They also do a lot about— Not really covered in the movie— Stealing— Going down to Maryland to buy cigarettes and driving them back to New York to sell. That's what he gets pinched for. He's selling cigarettes. But like, there's just a lot of, and then I drove down here and sometimes I would get arrested in between. And, you know, it sounds so boring to be this kind of criminal. I understand it's not the movie they were making. They were making a movie about how interesting it is to be a criminal.
Keith: Right. And we see this kind of in The Sopranos too, where in the first few episodes, and they're like, people used to be okay with spending, you know, two, three, four, six months in jail. Like, that was just part of the gig.
Art: Mm-hmm. We sort of get into that later too.
Keith: Yeah, true. Yeah, that's a great— There's a great bit. This is related to a vagary in the movie that I'm interested in exploring and getting opinions on. But as an adult, we get to hear a fresh perspective on the resentment that builds against the regulars. A lot of this, a lot of resentment against regular people. We've actually already heard a little bit of it, but it's like, it's kind of the second half that makes this all work, because it's one thing to have an insular community of criminals who are hyping each other up to do crimes and to be part of this family and to show respect and to pay tribute and to be a community and to be there for each other and to not rat on each other. But then the other half is that you have to hate everybody that's not you. And, you know, Henry is not shy about being like, these people are sheep, these people are schnooks, these people— I mean, well, here, here are his words on that.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: For us to live any other way was nuts. To us, those goody-good people who work shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, worried about their bills, were dead. And they were suckers. They had no balls. If we wanted something, we just took it. If anyone complained twice, they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again. It was just all routine and you didn't even think about it.
[audio ends]
Keith: It's one of my favorite lines. They were dead. They were dead. That's good. That's good shit to me. I'm curious, Art, if you remember if that's in the book or not, but I just think that's such a good line. 
Art: Yeah, it sort of feels like it has to be, right?
Keith: It sort of feels like it had— well, Martin Scorsese is a writer.
Art: Uh-huh.
[Sylvi laughter]
Keith: Because you could take him saying they were sheep or that they had no balls, and you could put the spin on that. They're dead. They're zombies. They're not people. They're nothing. Like, I could take— Taking from them is like taking an onion out of the ground.
Sylvi: Whoa.
Keith: It's just there. It just grew on its own for me to take. And they don't even think about it. I love it. Oh God, this movie's so good.
Sylvi: It’s great. It's really good characterization. To be clear, I agree with you. I'm trying to think of more interesting things to say other than I really liked it. Because like, you're saying shit and I'm like, Hell yeah, brother, I agree. 
Keith: It's fine. Stop me when there's more to say. 'Cause I've got, I took a lot of notes on a movie that I maybe didn't even need to take notes for, although I simply enjoy taking notes.
Art: At some point I stopped taking notes 'cause it's just like every note is just like, this is very good.
Sylvi: That— Art, I did the exact same thing.
Keith: God. Okay.
Art: It's like my last note was, I think the characterization of Karen's parents is vaguely antisemitic.
Keith: Sure. Oh yeah, sure. You know, there's some antisemitism in this movie. You know, how many times does Joe Pesci say Jew broad? I think three.
Art: Maybe only the once, but—
Keith: He says it at least twice. I think he might've said it a third time. Uh, he says it twice in one conversation.
Art: Oh, he might say it again in the, uh, at the Copa in the—
Keith: Yeah, I think that— I think there's 3. Um, I'm gonna tie—
Sylvi: I mean like, race is kind of important about— In this movie.
Keith: Yes, they're really racist. They actually— They love to use Black people as scapegoats. They actually have a whole— Actually, right after the scene that we just listened to, or no, maybe right before it, Um, uh, you know, they're ta— They're talking about how they have this system and how drivers love to give up— Uh, you know, this is another plot point that we see in Sopranos. Drivers love to tell the mob what's in their trucks because it's like, give me a cut, steal my truck, give me a punch in the eye, give me a cut for the tip, and we collect the insurance money and everybody wins. You know, again, the only people that lose are the companies or the insurance. Who gives a fuck?
Art: You're right, it is a movie about Brendan Filoni.
Keith: It’s lit— Yes! And that's the thing, you know, in Sopranos they minimize him to the point of comic relief, but this is a movie about like, that's a big exciting world. And maybe if Brendan Filoni had been born 30 years earlier, it would have been a big exciting world for him too. You know, or maybe Henry Hill's just not a fucking idiot like Brendan Filoni was. 
Sylvi: That's definitely part of it.
Keith: That's part— Brendan Filoni was not a smart guy. What if Henry Hill was constantly telling Tommy, hey, shouldn't Paulie go fucking suck a dick? Isn't he a piece of shit idiot loser? And shouldn't we be moving up in the world? And then Tommy would be like, you know what? You're right. We should be. Why am I going to blah, blah, blah? But that's not what he does. He's trying to hold Tommy back, if anything. I mean not, you know, like when someone's trying to do something stupid, you hold them back, not he's dragging him down. Tommy's dragging himself down. He's doing a good enough job of that on his own.
Sylvi: Oh, very much so.
Keith: But yeah, so they show them stealing a truck. They're like, the guy is waiting for them to steal the truck. He goes into the diner, they steal the truck, and then he tells everybody in the diner that two black guys stole— Not what he says, he used the N-word, lots of N-words. Three times, I think they, uh, say the N-word in this movie? All white people. Only white people say it. Um, and he's like, these Black guys stole my—
Sylvi: Another thing that's like Quentin Tarantino.
Keith: Another thing that's like Quentin Tarantino.
[Darcy hysteria]
Sylvi: That's not true. He, he has everyone say it.
Art: It's true.
Keith: Um, and, uh, yeah, multiple, you know, multiple times they're scapegoating, uh, Black people. They're— I mean, Henry is like— In his description of why people get sent to jail, he's like, basically only Black people get sent to jail because they fall asleep from doing drugs before they can get away, is his position.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Which is, for a guy who ends up in jail several times, again, we'll talk about it.
Darcy: Get his ass.
Keith: Yeah. Anybody have anything to say about this period of time in Henry's life?
Sylvi: Specifically, like, him coming up? Like, after he— Like, I mean—
Keith: Yeah, sort of around the Air France deal, or— Oh, actually, yeah, so this is what I wanted to read. He's, he's, uh, they do a heist. They steal from— Basically, it's American servicemen sending home bags of money, uh, and so they want to steal bags of money from the airport. Uh, they do this easily. He says, Air France made me. We walked out with $420,000 without using a gun, and we did the right thing. We gave Paulie his tribute. I love this, you know, the sort of— The right thing for him has nothing to do with stealing or not stealing money. It's about making sure that Paulie gets his cut. And it reminds me of another one of my favorite lines later when they kill— So the in media res, they're burying Billy Batts. When they kill Billy in the actual timeline of the movie, and they're kind of trying to clean up and get him in the car, I think this is the murder that this happens in. Tommy's like, frantically getting him onto some sheets, and he looks at, at Henry with this like, really upset look, and he's like, I don't want to get blood on your floors. And it's like, that's what these guys care about. It's not like— He killed this guy, or he almost killed this guy. The thing that he's worried about is getting blood on his friend's floors. It's actually the, maybe the only genuine moment of of, uh, uh, like… I'm trying to think of the word.
Art: Like camaraderie, or—
Keith: Um, no, there's like a— There's like a— Tommy has such a mask, you know? He's always got this front of, you know, the guy you can't fuck with or he'll kill you. He has two moments where he drops the mask and is just like, genuine reaction, real emotion. Uh, uh, the— And it's when he's worried about getting blood on Henry's floor, and then when he realizes that he's about to get killed instead of getting made.
Sylvi: God. Yeah, I can't disagree with that. I think you're— I think you're right on the money.
Keith: And it's really sad. I mean, it's sad to see a guy whose whole psychology has been swallowed up by never perceiving an insult. You know, if I was fucked up, which I'm not, um, and I would snap anytime I perceived an insult, I would make sure that I was not good at perceiving insults. But, or at least, or not sensitive to it, you know. I would, if I couldn't handle it, I would make sure I wasn't sensitive to it. Tommy has accidentally made himself not able to receive an insult but also hypersensitive to them, which is a bad combination because you perceive a lot of insults, real and imagined. I would simply not perceive them if that was me.
Sylvi: Hmm.
Keith: I would find it really funny. 
Sylvi: Great advice, man. 
Keith: I would find the shinebox thing really funny.
Sylvi: That— It's a good bit. It is a good bit. Like, admittedly, good bit, wrong audience.
Keith: Yeah, until the last line that really was meant to hurt him on purpose.
Sylvi: It, it really did just feel like your uncle you haven't seen for a while.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: The one that taught you baseball. Yeah.
Keith: Do we, do we want to get the funny guy? Now that you're talking about Tommy a little bit, do you want to hear the funny guy scene?
Sylvi: Might as well. I think that's the kind of— It's also in this sort of era.
Keith: It is. Yeah. It's coming up pretty soon after this. What I don't—
Art: It's also a scene, if you have not seen this movie, and again, I told you like an hour ago. 
Keith: Yeah, you're fuck— You're fucking up.
Darcy: You should go see it. Yeah.
Art: But if you haven't, you, you know, you do know that this scene has permeated pop culture.
Keith: Yeah. And, uh, there's another scene that also has— With, uh, Michael Imperioli playing Spider, the, um, the hapless, uh, barback or bar or busboy or whatever.
Sylvi: Yeah. Kind of just like a gopher for their poker game.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Is the energy.
Keith: He's a poker gopher.
Sylvi: He's not a, he's not a trained bartender, like, is what I want to make clear. He's like a teenager.
Keith: Do you remember that episode where Bart joins the Mafia? That's what he is.
Sylvi: Oh, sure.
Keith: That episode of The Simpsons where Bart joins? Yeah, that's what Spider is. Um, I didn't clip this scene because I clipped the, the, this other scene, um, because, uh, it's our first real introduction to Tommy as an adult and how people handle him. Um, you just gotta watch this scene at least to look at how Ray Liotta laughs in this movie because it's unbelievable the way, the way he contorts his face into what reads to me as a totally not real laugh. I don't think that he's really laughing, but that's just me.
Darcy: No, the whole thing reads like everybody is just playing their part in a scripted performance. It's very bizarre.
Keith: It's very bizarre, yeah.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Tommy: What's really funny is the fucking bank job away in Secaucus. I'm in the middle of the fucking weeds laying down. He comes over, he says, what are you doing here? I said, I'm resting. Yeah, you're resting at a fucking beach in a park. I said, I'm resting. I know I'm resting. I'm resting. They pull me in, they start giving me all kinds of questions, you know, this and that. He says, oh, uh, so what are you gonna tell us, tough guy? I said, my usual, zero, nothing. I tell you? The fuck. He says, no, you're gonna tell me something today, tough guy. I said, all right, I'll tell you something. Go fuck your mother. Bing, pow, bing. I was up like this. So now I'm coming around, you know, I start to come out of it. Who do I see in front of me? This big prick again. He says, oh, what do you want to tell me now, tough guy? I said, bing, what are you doing here? I thought I told you to go fuck your mother. I thought he was gonna shit. Pow! Pee! Oh, you know, fuck his— Gee, I wish I was big just once. You're a big guy.
Henry: You're really funny. Really funny.
Tommy: What do you mean I'm funny?
Henry: It's funny, you know? It's a good story. It's funny. You're a funny guy.
Tommy: What do you mean? You mean the way I talk? What?
Henry: It's just, you know, you're just funny  It's funny, you know, the way you tell the story and everything.
Tommy: Funny how? I mean, what's funny about it?
Anthony: Tommy, no, you got it all wrong.
Tommy: Anthony, he's a big boy. He knows what he said. What'd you say? Funny how? What?
Henry: Just, you know, you're funny.
Tommy: You mean— Let me understand this, 'cause I don't— You know, 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?
Henry: Just, you know how you tell a story. What?
Tommy: 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. 
Henry: Get the fuck out of here. Tommy, you motherfucker.
Tommy: I almost had him. I almost had him. You stuttering prick. Frankie, was he shaking? I wonder about you sometimes, Henry. You may fold under questioning.
[audio ends]
Sylvi: Why would he say that?
Art: Uh, you're fucking funny, Sylvi.
Sylvi: Thank you. Oh, I like— I amuse you?
Art: Yeah.
Sylvi: Like I'm funny like what, like a clown?
Keith: Yeah, like a clown. You're funny like a fucking clown.
Sylvi: Thank you so much, guys. I'm really proud of that.
Darcy: Honk your fucking nose.
[Sylvi makes a honk-honk noise very badly]
Keith: Your nose needs a tune-up.
[Sylvi tries again, it’s still bad]
Sylvi: How about that? 
Darcy: Is your nose going through puberty? What's happening?
Sylvi: I can't do it. Keith does it better because Keith can make any sound.
Darcy: It's true.
Sylvi: Yeah, thank you.
Keith: Um, so it's so— I mean, can you believe how fucking acting they are?
Sylvi: Uh, hell yeah, man. I'm glad that's how I rate my acting.
Keith: I'm really into laughing face at my own joke.
Darcy: Wow, that's what I call acting.
Sylvi: Well, so like, listening to that, and like, to tie this back to our main season here, um, there's a lot of just like the DNA of the character that becomes Paulie, I think. And the— Mostly him telling the story like that, like it's not quite, uh, I was seeing your mother at the Eiffel Tower. She was giving out blowjobs at the bonbon stand or whatever. Um, but it definitely, like, you can— It's the— When he's doing his bing bang boom or whatever. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, this feels— This has the same energy of when, uh, Paulie's yapping at the guys. Uh, and like, I, I mean, we've talked about on the main show about how much— How influential this is. Um, but it is, it is definitely like a really fun time watching. Like, something I had fun with was watching this and being like, okay, who did this sort of inspire or like, uh, help shape in The Sopranos? And like, some of these I can't actually talk about yet.
Keith: Sure.
Sylvi: Uh, but there's like a few things where I'm like, oh yeah, okay, I can see like this is an— Not— It's not just the, the very direct, um, sort of, uh, narration in the first episode that feels basically just exactly like Goodfellas. But, uh, some like the characterization stuff that they're getting from here too. Um, like, there's, there's a lot of Tony in Jimmy Conway, I think.
Art: Hmm.
Sylvi: If that— Like, not necessarily, um, um, not like— It's not one-to-one, but the Spider scene is one that comes to mind. Or like how he's— He constantly will do the thing where he'll like egg on, uh, Tommy, and then when Tommy acts on it, he does the like, why the fuck you do that? I was just joking around. And Tony loves to do the like, I'm just breaking your balls.
Darcy: Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: There's the— they love this. Like, Tony's happiest when he is being violent. We saw it at the end of season 1. Uh, and then Jimmy's happiest when he's stealing stuff from people. Um, again, I don't think it's a one-to-one thing, but there's like a line you can draw between those two characters. And I think that there's like that— the sort of outsider-looking-in stuff that both Jimmy and, um, Henry deal with, uh, yeah, is really relatable to Chris, um, in a lot of ways. Chris obviously could be made because he's— He is, uh, racially pure enough.
Keith: Yeah, he's racially pure, yeah.
Sylvi: Again, race does have a pretty— Plays a pretty significant role in, in some, some things in this movie here. Um, but, uh, like, there's definitely that sort of feeling of like, yeah, I'm part of it, but I'm not like inner circle part of it.
Keith: Um, I had a really— Funny flash of a fake like Time magazine, uh, cover about, like, the first mixed-race made mafioso. Like, a progressive win. Woke mafia that made a half-Italian a made guy.
Sylvi: Oh my fucking God. Stupid.
[long suffering sigh from Darcy]
Sylvi: That rocks. That's so dumb.
Keith: Um, sorry. Uh, I also— Oh, the actual thing that I wanted to say with real content in it is, um, the other thing that I see in Tony is because like, okay, what is it about the violence that makes Tony happy? Is it when he's strangling the guy in College? Like, is he happy there? I think that the thing for Tony that makes him happy is the— Reckless abandon, the freedom of lack of consequence to his actions.
Sylvi: Sure. I think it's that. It's, it's, it's— That's part of it. I think, like, the power that comes with that lack of consequence is a big part of it. But, like, you know, there's a lot of— I, I think a lot about the happiest times we see him, and it's mostly when he's running a guy down with a car in the Pilot.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvi: Or having, having just escaped getting murdered and shit like that. It's— It— I guess it is the escaping of consequences. 
Keith: Yeah, totally. Well, this is just me trying to drive him— Or draw, draw a line between him and Henry, uh, someone who Tony Soprano actually hates in-universe. Um, because at the same time as Tony, uh, hates rats, um, and feels that the mafia is changing because of people like Henry Hill, the, the thing that him and Henry have in common is the idealization of the mafia lifestyle. And when he gets to drive his car into a guy in the middle of an insurance company campus, that's him reclaiming a bit of the past that he thinks is lost to the Henry Hills of the world. And I think that's something that those two have in common, which is like, they— What they actually want is to be back in the mid-'60s.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And driving your car and crashing into somebody and beating the shit out of them on a public campus is like, an expression of that.
Sylvi: It's the closest you can get to it.
Keith: Yeah. Tony's cool.
Sylvi: He's a good character.
Keith: Tony might be a good— No, I mean he's a good person. 
Sylvi: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, pure of heart. 
Keith: Yeah, and of blood, necessarily. 
Sylvi: Uh-huh. 
Keith: The mafia is fucking crazy. Hey, do you guys know this? The mafia is like, insane.
Darcy: Yeah, it's kind of weird.
Keith: It's kind of weird.
Sylvi: Anybody notice this? Anybody— you hear about this? You notice this?
Keith: It's just very weird to have racial purity be like one of the things that you need to join up any— With anything. You should— That's not— You shouldn't need to 23andMe to get to be a mafioso.
Sylvi: That's very brave of you.
Keith: I, you know, my whole family, we thought that we were all Irish until we were 23and— Until someone— I didn't, I don't, I would never do that. But someone in my family was like, we're half Italian. And the, you know, this is one generation above me that is saying—
Art: Whoa, you're like a real Goodfella.
Keith: I'm like a real— Yeah, I'm Henry Hill. I'm as Italian as Henry Hill is. Uh, by the way, if you had ever seen my paternal grandmother in your life, there's no way that you wouldn't have known that she was 3/4 Italian. [pause] Where the fuck are we?
Sylvi: We're all over the place.
Keith: Um, uh, he's, he's, uh, he's, he's courting Karen. Yeah.
Art: And then we get to, to the real, the real shot of the movie.
Darcy: Oh, which one?
Art: The walk of the, of the back of the Copa.
Keith: Oh, my god, that’s such a—
Sylvi: Oh, oh, that's so good.
Keith: Oh my God. And yeah, it's almost like a Through the Looking Glass thing. Like, yeah, he's literally shepherding her into the mafia lifestyle by, you know, they leave the car out on the street for a valet. She's like, what the fuck is a valet? He's like, it's fine, don't worry about it. And then they skip the line and they go down through the— He knows everybody, you know, everybody knows him. You walk through the kitchen, they bring out a table for him. It is like such a perfect kind of like, crossing a threshold moment. Unbelievable. Thank you, Art, for bringing that up.
Art: Have you heard the reason they did— they had— they did it like that?
Keith: Oh?
Art: The whole reason this shot exists?
Keith: Tell me about it.
Art: No, it's because the Copacabana wouldn't let them go in the front door.
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Art: That's funny.
Keith: Hey, necessity is the mother of invention.
Art: Yeah. Um, and then they had to shoot it, uh, eight times.
Keith: Worth it?
Art: Because the comedian at the end kept fucking up his lines.
Darcy: Wow.
Art: And those are like the worst jokes I've ever seen in my life. So the idea that like after two fuckups, I'm like, just get the next guy.
Sylvi: It was really funny watching this with my partner who had never seen this. When that guy comes out and says, please take my wife, and everybody laughs, and he was like, where's the fucking joke?
Keith: So, well, that's his— That was where we're talking about.
Sylvi: I know that was the catchphrase, but still.
Keith: It was a pre-established catchphrase. And, uh, you know, people wanted to hear— This is why Steve Martin quit comedy. People just wanted to hear the punchlines to things.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: And, uh, and you know, he was not— Henny Youngman was not as, uh, idealistic about his art as Steve Martin was. And so he would just come on stage and say, take my— It's very— I mean, it's funny because that was Henny Youngman, right? That was just the actual Henny Youngman.
Sylvi: I have no fucking idea, man.
Darcy: Yeah, it is. Yeah, I, I Wikied him because I was like, is this a— Is this the real guy?
Keith: That's the real guy.
Darcy: Is this the take my wife please guy?
Keith: It is for real the take my wife please guy.
Sylvi: I thought that was Rodney Dangerfield who did that.
Keith: No.
Art: I did too. That's why I had to look it up.
Keith: So, you know, it can— It can— There's some— That can cross-pollinate a little bit. You know, I think it's very easy to go, oh yeah, that was Rodney Dangerfield. But no. If anything, Rodney Dangerfield is like, simultaneously the last gasp of this kind of guy, but also the guy who reaches beyond it.
Darcy: Hmm.
Sylvi: Okay, sure.
Keith: I guess maybe Don Rickles is the last gasp of this kind of guy.
Art: I don't know how you would order those two.
Keith: Order?
Art: Like, I don't know which is—
Keith: Don Rickles is more past than Dangerfield.
Art: Is more past than Dangerfield?
Keith: I think so. It— Cer— I think both in age and in style. I think—
Art: Okay.
Keith: I think that that's true. I think that that's true.
Art: I have a real warmth in my heart for Don Rickles that he perhaps does not deserve.
Keith: Sure. Yeah, sure. I get that. I mean, these are guys— This is one of the things that I knew more about when I was 12 than I know now. So it's important when you like comedy when you're a little kid that you know about things like Don Rickles and Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield, but you can then sort of forget all about it if you need to. Um, which I— And then I did, which I did. Uh, it's funny to have Henny Youngman as himself, but clearly he's 35 years in the future from when the thing is actually happening.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: So he's way older. Um, which is, I, I assume, why he's forgetting all his lines. Um, even though he's been saying them for 50 years at that point.
Art: Yes, because he is, uh, let's see, 84 in this movie.
Sylvi: Sorry, that's the actual guy?
Keith: Yeah, that's the actual Henny Youngman.
Art: Yes, the actual guy.
Sylvi: Oh, sorry, I was— I didn't— I didn't catch that.
Keith: He was what? This movie's 1990. He was born in 1906.
Art: Also, his real name is Henry, which is so funny to meI did not know that.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: That Henny is a nickname.
Keith: Henny is a nickname. Yeah.
Art: But like, so, so he's messing up his lines and his one line is his—
Keith: His famous line.
Art: Entire— Yeah.
Keith: Yes. Yeah.
Art: Take my wife if you will. Fuck. Do it from the top, Marty.
Sylvi: Um, take my wife. Why don't you 
Darcy: Take my wife, you're welcome.
Keith: And the delivery on it isn't good, by the way.
Sylvi: You're welcome!
Keith: Like, he really doesn't land, take my wife, please. It just sounds— it sounds like, um, an out-of-context request that they take his wife, which the joke is that it doesn't sound like that. It sounds like your wife is an example of a thing. And then you say, please, to be like, oh, he just wants me to take his wife.
Art: This, this is like an example, I feel— Like there's like music you listen to from long ago that you're like, man, people just listened to some awful bullshit and thought it was the best back in the day. And the fact that this guy is like a killer stand-up comedian is, is kind of a similar thing.
Art: He's bringing the house down in this admittedly fake performance.
Keith: It is.
Darcy: His last joke was funny. I don't remember what he said, but his last joke made me laugh.
Art: Oh, do we, do we not have a button for the Henny Youngman?
Keith: I did not include Henny Youngman. Um, [reading] His inoffensive, friendly style of comedy kept his audiences laughing for decades.
Art: I once saw Don Rickles sharing a bill with Suzanne Somers in Boca Raton, Florida, and he sang a lot. He did a lot of songs.
Keith: Hmm. That's— You just had to do— You had to be a multi-hyphenate in comedy.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: This is why Steve Martin played the banjo and did magic.
Art: This has been the comedy minute.
Keith: The comedy minute. Yeah, we had to stretch to get to a whole minute. 
Art: Good, because this episode is coming in dangerously short. 
[Sylvi laughter]
Keith: Yeah, yeah, good one. Yeah, it's not like I have a lot to say about any other thing that happens in this movie.
Sylvi: Who would?
Art: But like, to link these to The Sopranos, the shot going through the Copa is what Tony means when he talks about coming in at the end. Tony wants his life to be the tracking shot through the Copacabana, and it isn't.
Keith: Sorry, did Art cut out for anybody else or just me?
Sylvi: No, a little bit.
Keith: Art, I heard you say that Tony wants his life to be blank.
Art: The tracking shot through the Copacabana, and it isn't.
Keith: Right. Yes.
Art: He wants that to be what he does, and it isn't.
Keith: And he wants wives' night and girlfriends' night, and he wants to hand bills to everybody that he meets, and he wants free cars.
Art: And you know, who doesn't?
Sylvi: I mean, who doesn't?
Keith: Who doesn't, right?
Darcy: Yeah, I would like a free car.
Keith: Like, that is the thing. There's a sort of unambiguousness to why Henry's life is appealing. But then there's the sort of sane, uh, view of like, how it's not worth it and how you'd have to have some sort of a severe lack of, uh, uh, impulse control or moral reasoning to do the things that he does to get these things. Um, you know, maybe you can, like Tony does, hand wave some of it as like, look, it's all just fucking insurance money and giant corporations are turning the frogs gay. But you do have to come up against the fact that these guys are killing each other for nothing, for no reason. Like I said in the intro, the attitude that puts someone like Paulie at the top, the secrets and the closed doors and the one-on-one and the scheming and the crime. That's how he keeps his spot. But then when you bring— You know when a TV show lasts long enough that fans of the TV show are in the writers' room?
Sylvi: Yeah, sure.
Keith: And it's wrong. It becomes wrong. Something bad happens when you get that like— The transference of ideas is imperfect. And so you get people who have imperfectly received the original intention and then are writing— I think The Simpsons is a great example of this. Looking at 10, 11, 12 season Simpsons— I haven't seen beyond that because it wasn't worth it to.
Art: It actually doesn't become a problem that quickly, but it's definitely the entire problem from season like, 20 and on.
Keith: Really? You don't think that there's fans of The Simpsons ruining— Not every episode, but—
Art: I don't think that's the problem then. And then I think it does become the problem.
Keith: Okay. Well, as long as we both agree that it eventually becomes the problem and that The Simpsons remains a good example of this, like I think that happens everywhere. That happens all over the place. And it's a really pernicious way to have an institution implode because you have this improper transference. In the third episode of season 1 of Media Club Plus, I did a bit where I talked about, from this movie, I talked about the Hunters as the mafia in this movie. And that sort of same thing happens where people get into it for the wrong reasons or imperfect transference from generation to another generation, and they kind of can't do it. And so it changes and warps and then collapses. And so it's not like Henry Hill was the wrong guy to be in the mafia and that him being there was like, a poison pill, but more like the pill is there from the beginning, but it takes a generation or two generations in order to germinate and then kill everyone or kill the organization. And that's, I think, the thing that happens in— The thing that happens to Tony's version of the mafia. It's already happened. Like, it's the withered husk of a thing that used to look like the— What, Act 2 of Goodfellas?
Art: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Which is why this was a great choice to watch for— There's another moment, another phenomenal moment that actually happens before this Copa scene, which is, uh, Karen comes in as a second narrator.
Sylvi: Yeah, I love when Karen starts narrating.
Keith: Huge, huge, huge moment.
Darcy: So good.
Sylvi: It's such a smart decision.
Keith: It's so— It kind of blows open what the movie is by giving you—
Art: It's also a book jump scare.
Keith: Really?
Art: Yeah, 'cause she also starts getting interviewed in the book, like, eight chapters in or something.
Keith: Oh, very— That's very cool. I like that they've, they've like, brought that from the book to the movie. I did not expect that to be the case. Here, we can hear a little bit of that.
[1:45:00]
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Karen: [voiceover] Of course, when Friday night came around, Henry stood me up.
Tommy: I feel terrible. I don't know where he is. You know, he really liked you too. I mean, it's really All we do is talk about her, you know. 
Karen: [voiceover] We were a trio instead of a double date that night.
Tommy: I hope it's nothing serious. That's what I'm worried about. 
Karen: [voiceover] But I made Tommy take me looking for him.
Henry: Tommy, what the fuck?
Karen: You got some nerve standing me up. Nobody does that to me. Who the hell do you think you are, Frankie Valli or some kind of big shot?
Henry: Slow down, all right? I forgot. I thought it was next week.
Karen: It was Friday. It was this Friday, and you agreed, so you're a liar.
Henry: Come on, we can talk about this, all right? Take it easy.
Karen: Talk about it? Talk to you after what you just did to me? Forget it. I'm not talking to you about anything. 
Henry: Wait a second, I thought you were gonna stand me up. You looked bored.
Keith: Contradictory lie.
Henry: Let me make it up to you, Karen.
Karen: I'll think about it.
Henry: [voiceover] I remember she stood screaming on the street, and I mean loud, but she looked good.
Karen: I'll think about it. It's gonna cost you, Hill.
Henry: I'm gonna make it up to you.
Karen: It's gonna cost you a lot.
Henry: [voiceover] She had these great eyes, just like Liz Taylor's. At least that's what I thought.
[audio ends]
Keith: Um, I love that they've built the start of their relationship on— He tells two separate lies in a way that makes you know that they're both lies. Because it can't be true that he thought the date was on a different day and also that he thought she was gonna stand him up.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: So he's like played his hand that like, actually, I just didn't give a fuck and I didn't want to show up, is basically what he told her by— And he— The way he told her was by telling two lies that couldn't both possibly be true. And it's at that exact moment that she's suddenly attracted to him.
Sylvi: You know…
Darcy: He talks pretty.
Sylvi: These things happen.
Keith: Um, she gets sexually assaulted by her neighbor Bruce, who shows up. Um, he hears about this when they're first dealing with Maury's ball busting. Uh, we haven't talked about Maury. He's a wig salesman. He's a local shitty business owner.
Sylvi: Did you guys recognize Maury?
Darcy: No. Who is he?
Sylvi: He's in an episode of The Sopranos.
Keith: Um, no.
Sylvi: He is, uh, Shlomo Teitelman.
Keith: He's Shlomo Teitelman! Oh my God. Yeah.
Sylvi: He's the Jewish man. Yeah.
Keith: Um, crazy. I did not, I did not pull that. Um.
Sylvi: Very different styling in this movie. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, so just quickly, he's a great arc in this. I want to make sure that I say this out loud because it's really fun. He initially doesn't want to pay Jimmy his loan shark money, um, because he thinks that the percentage interest is unfair.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: The entire rest of the movie, it's actually Jimmy that owes Maury money and won't pay it back, and Maury has no recourse. There's nothing he can do. He owes him, at various points, between $20,000 and $500,000.
Art: It turns out that Paulie does not want to be partners in a wig business.
[Keith and Darcy laughter]
Keith: Yeah, hilarious local commercial.
Sylvi: Really good.
Keith: It's really good. So I just wanted to say, that's the arc of Maury. I think it's this really— It's this understated thing that runs through it, but there's one scene where Maury owes money and doesn't want to pay it and is like, choked out in order to pay it, and then every other time he shows up, he's actually owed a huge amount of money by Jimmy. Um, uh, Jimmy hates to pay his debts, apparently. That's a big part of Jimmy's character. Um, so Henry hears that she's been assaulted by her neighbor. He races to her house, gets a gun, and beats the absolute fuck out of his skull with the butt of the pistol.
Sylvi: It does rock, to be honest.
Keith: It is—
Darcy: Yeah, it's really good.
Sylvi: I'm very here for it.
Keith: It's such an intense scene. It's really well done. It's really well acted. Fuck this Bruce motherfucker. Uh, and, uh, then he gives the gun, uh, to, um, Karen and tells her to hide it. She says, I know there are women like my best friends who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide, but I didn't. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.
Sylvi: My note for that scene is, you're so real for that one, Karen.
Keith: Oh, immediate cut to their wedding.They are— They— It cuts from the gun and her hiding the gun and that little monologue, cut to the minute that their vows are sealed. The second their vow— Like, that is— And it's so good. The end. There's a reason—
Sylvi: Again, really good at making you get caught up in the whirlwind of it too.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvi: Right? Like, as a viewer. Sorry, finish your thought, just before we got off of that.
Keith: There's a reason why Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker work so well together. Hmm. Because his kind of flexible and dynamic filming and his willingness to have the editing be part of the story fits perfectly with her willingness or her ability to make editing part of the story by being a fucking phenomenal editor. It is one of the best constructed movies that you will ever see.
Art: Is it appropriate now to talk about what happened to this movie at the Academy Awards?
Keith: I don't know. So yeah, tell me about it. Oh boy.
Art: Okay, this movie was nominated for 6 Oscars.
Keith: Wow.
Art: It won one.
Keith: Editing?
Art: Uh, no, Best Supporting Actor, Joe Pesci.
Keith: Okay, fine, fair.
Art: Uh, losing in an acting category, Lorraine Bracco for Best Supporting Actress. She lost to Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, which I think is fair.
Keith: Haven't seen it.
Sylvi: I haven't seen Ghost.
Keith: I'm gonna, I'm gonna say based on nothing, not fair, because this is the one that I've seen and liked.
Darcy: Mm-hmm.
Art: Well, I have seen Ghost, and it's, it's a very good movie. That's a very good performance. The other four categories it was nominated—
Sylvi: Holy shit.
Keith: Love her in Sister Act, by the way.
Sylvi: Sorry, I looked ahead, Art. Please, please tell them.
Art: It was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing, and lost in all of those categories to Dances with Wolves.
Darcy: Ohhhhh.
Sylvi: Fucking insane.
Keith: Oh no, no. A movie which, if I remember high school correctly, has particularly not good editing.
Sylvi: I mean, that's one of the issues with it.
Darcy: Yeah, that's, that's the Kevin Costner white savior movie.
Keith: Yes, it sure is. Yeah.
Art: Um, directed by Kevin Costner. That's right, Kevin Costner had a Best Director Academy Award 14 years or whatever before Martin Scorsese.
Sylvi: Oh my God, why did you say that?
Keith: Outrageous. You know, we talk— Well, when I made my comment at the beginning that Martin Scorsese is, if you can believe it, underrated, and that Goodfellas is, if you can believe it, underrated, I was actually talking about a more recent past than now where he has kind of, you know, I think that he suffered some unfair criticism for people not understanding his movies. I think it's been a really long time since his prime, his quote-unquote prime anyway. Killers of the Flower Moon is his second best movie, so he's not past his filmmaking prime, certainly. But I'm thinking of like, 2010. If, if, if people's understanding of him in 2010 was frozen, I still think that he's underrated. And I'm like, he was underrated in the year this movie came out! 
Sylvi: Oh yeah.
Keith: Because they gave Best Director to Kevin Costner over this?
Sylvi: It was like a famous thing, right?
Art: The Academy was pissed at him for a very long time for staying in New York.
Keith: Wait, say again?
Art: What'd you say?
Art: The Academy was pissed at him for a very long time for staying in New York.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's what I was gonna bring up, is that the Academy just kind of had a grudge against him for a while.
Keith: Yeah, no, listen, dude.
Darcy: That he wouldn't just film in California, that he only wanted to film in New York?
Art: Yeah, that he lived and worked on the East Coast.
Keith: Good for you, Marty.
Art: And he, he lost— He definitely lost awards because of that.
Sylvi: Yeah, absolutely.
Keith: That is— I mean, I've never, I've never liked the Academy Awards, and I've never felt that they represented the movies that I would have been giving awards to. Um, and, uh, that is even an understatement. Um, but I thought that's just beyond the pale. I mean, not giving Martin Scorsese an award, giving Dances with Wolves any award over Goodfellas because he wished that Martin Scorsese would move to Los Angeles? Go fuck— That's crazy. Who cares?
Sylvi: Well, apparently quite a few. 
Keith: Apparently! I can't— I cannot think of a smaller issue with when judging a film, what state the director lives in.
Art: Yeah, I think LA might be a fucked up town in a lot of ways. I'm sorry you had to find out like this.
Keith: They've got this really cool religion going on that I'm interested in checking out, after I get some money together. 
Art: Yeah, bring money. 
[Keith laughter]
Keith: Um, like, oh, like the people in this movie, I'm looking to get away with some crimes.
Art: Hey, we're back.
Keith: Yeah. Um, uh, there's a lot of great, uh, Lorraine Bracco— Lorraine?
Sylvi: Lorraine Bracco, yeah.
Keith: I second-guessed myself. Uh, there's a lot of great, great Lorraine Bracco, uh, monologues and dialogue in this movie. I love when she's talking about being sort of fully inundated in the crime wife life. You know, for a while she didn't know. She asked him like, what he does, and he says like, construction.
Sylvi: Construction.
Keith: And she's like, you don't seem like you work in construction. And then he's like, I'm a union delegate. And this does not— She both does not care and also does not believe him. But by the time that they're married, she sort of fully understands what's going on. Detectives are coming to the house looking for him, harassing them. She's talking about she always offers them coffee. Some of the other wives yell and scream at them. Jimmy Connolly's wife— Wait, Jimmy Conway. Jimmy Conway's wife spits on the floor and she says, she used to spit on her own floor. That never made any sense to me.
Sylvi: That's so real as well.
Keith: Yeah, it's really— She's like, I just offer them coffee and then call my lawyer. And it's like—
Art: Yeah, they're not gonna be bothered by you spitting on your floor.
Keith: Right. Yeah. And there's like— There is this sort of sense of that despite both of them in the film having kind of good head on their shoulders, not being able to stop, what's happening to them in their lives because it's fundamentally their problems do not stem from not being smart enough to solve their problems. It stems from them having reasons why they're always doing the wrong things. And I just think that's great. I just think, she can't solve her problems by being nice to the police officers. And she can't solve her problems by being smart enough to know that spitting on her own floor wouldn't make any difference. She's great in this, by the way.
Sylvi: She's amazing in this. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Um, truly unbelievable in this movie.
Keith: The—
Sylvi: You make me— I'm getting angry about the Oscars again.
Art: I mean, go watch Ghost. It's, it's a, it's a defendable—
Sylvi: No. Yeah, this is the thing. It's the— I'm— Ghost is probably fine. It's the other stuff that I'm mad about, and I need to remind myself Whoopi had nothing to do with that.
Keith: By the way, if you want to watch a not white savior movie, go watch Killers of the Flower Moon. Oh my God, that— Cannot believe how good that was. Unbelievable. I wish it was 40 minutes longer.
Art: Yeah, at no point are you gonna think, I bet a white person's gonna save someone here.
Keith: Or if they do, it's gonna be in exchange for some jewels. Hey, I know I just saved you. Do you happen to have any jewels or land that I can have? Well, yes, I do. I happen to have lots of jewels and land.
Sylvi: Wow.
Darcy: Are we talking about Martin Scorsese or are we talking about Skyrim? What's happening here?
Keith: Uh, we're talking about, yeah, we're talking about Martin Scorsese.
Sylvi: Jarl Scorsese. Um, what— Where— What do you— I— This has been very fun, but a little all over the place. So I'm kind of like trying to figure out—
Keith: Honestly, I think that the last, the last hour has been fairly on target.
Sylvi: It's been on target. No, I mean, like, um, I'm having trouble just figuring out where we are in the linear film, uh, like, summary stuff more than anything. So I figured I was gonna— I was gonna ask if you had a button.
Keith: I do actually have a perfectly timed button, so thank you for asking. This is more of, uh, Karen Hill talking about how easy it is to slide into a life of crime.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Karen: [voiceover] After a while, it got to be all normal. None of it seemed like crimes. It was more like Henry was enterprising, and that he and the guys were making a few bucks hustling, while the other guys were sitting on their asses waiting for handouts. Our husbands weren't brain surgeons. They were blue-collar guys. The only way they could make extra money, real extra money, was to go out and cut a few corners. 
Tommy: Where's the strongbox, you fucking bum?
[audio ends]
Keith: Another great jump cut from her making excuses for her husband's life of crime to them sticking up a truck driver, calling him a varmint, and stealing all of his money.
Sylvi: But they're just— They're just the— They're just some blue-collar guys.
Keith: Yeah. More, I think, like really one-to-one, like critique of, you know, financialized capitalism going on. Like the, the way that the movie sort of— The— I mean, people working their stupid jobs like, waiting for handouts. Like, this is such a familiar way to frame regular people living regular lives as like, lazy and incompetent and mooching off of the enterprising work of the people who are actually bilking them for their dollars. Uh, um, the— Oh, I had another thing to say about the guy, the guy who's in Sopranos who's also the restaurant owner. He plays the—
Sylvi: Artie Bucco.
Keith: Artie— no, not Artie Bucco.
Sylvi: Um, oh, oh, oh, the guy who plays the restaurant owner in this.
Keith: Who plays Larry Boy.
Sylvi: Larry Boy. Yeah, I couldn't remember.
Keith: Yeah. I kept thinking Johnny Boy because of Johnny Boy.
Sylvi: Johnny Boy is Tony's dad.
Keith: But yeah, Larry Boy. Uh, uh, yeah, Larry Boy in The Sopranos plays the, uh, restaurant owner who has to get in bed with the mafia in order to stop Tommy from putting thousands of dollars on their tab. Um, and the thing I think subtextually that's pretty clear about that scene is that Henry presents it as like, look, you and me talked about this. Why don't you take it to Paulie, ask Paulie to come in on the business? And Paulie is like, what do I know about restaurants? I don't know anything about restaurants. What am I gonna do? You want me to be your partner? I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You know, Tommy's crazy. What do you want me to do? I can't do anything. And he makes this whole big deal, like, I'm doing you the favor of being your partner. I think subtextually, there's no fucking way that this wasn't planned out ahead of time, that he didn't go like, hey, Paulie, I've got this restaurant thing. I think I can get this guy to fucking let you bilk his whole restaurant and then blow it up.
Art: Yes, it's 100% the play in the hallway. It's something that's very clear in the book.
Keith: Yeah, it's very clear.
Art: They do this all the time.
Keith: Yeah. And so— And so it's like— They're parasites. They're literal parasites. It's one thing to call them police for people who can't go to the police. It's another thing to call them criminals. What they actually are is like, landlords. They're [Sylvi: Very much so.] They have a sort of criminal landlordization network. Where they bill you for anything that they could possibly think of under penalty of criminal violence, any violence, and then construct this narrative where, one, that's just how things are. Two, I'm enterprising and you're lazy. And it is— It couldn't be— I mean, we talked about at the very beginning, it couldn't be more Wall Street if it tried. And it still wasn't enough to get people to understand it and also give it the Oscar over Dances with Wolves.
Sylvi: Dances with Wolves!
Keith: Oh, that's—
Sylvi: You're gonna be thinking about that all day, aren't you?
Keith: All day? I'll be thinking about that forever.
Sylvi: Until— On your deathbed.
Keith: Yeah. You know, way too long of a movie, by the way. That's why I said that the editing was particularly bad. It's because it felt like it wasn't edited.
Sylvi: Dances with Wolves?
Keith: Dances with Wolves.
Sylvi: Okay, I was really confused.
Keith: Dance of the Wolves was really, really fucking long because I watched it in school. I think it took 4 days.
Sylvi: Jesus Christ.
Darcy: It's like, what, 2 and a half hours?
Keith: It can't— it has to be longer than that. Uh, okay, it's— yeah, it's 3 hours. It's 181 minutes.
Darcy: Jesus Christ.
Keith: Meanwhile, Killers of the Flower Moon is like 200 minutes, and it could have been 40 minutes longer, and I think it would have been a better movie for it.
Art: Well, let's all— Let's all save our, our big judgments on this until we get to the end of our second season bonus episode.
Keith: Oh, so anyway, that was just to sort of connect what she was saying about them being industrious entrepreneurs who are out taking things for themselves, and that that makes them good, and it makes people who don't do that bad, to this other current that they have of this rentierism that they inflict on their neighborhood. You know, as if they're doing everyone a favor. It's really fun. It's so crazy. Like, it is just— There's like— It is such a good kind of like, clockwork mechanism of personal interest that kind of all of it— Because there are— I'm sure there are ways that people in the neighborhood are happy to have the mafia there. Like when you're getting a big payout because you've got the truck that's got the shrimp and the lobsters, I'm sure you're happy they're in town.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: But eventually, yeah, the, the, the risk is high. The risk is high, and you might end up being the one on the receiving end of like, they had to fucking kill a guy today. Something went wrong and they killed someone, and it could be you. And maybe they had to burn down your restaurant. You thought that you were inviting your friend in that you've known your whole life to be a partner in your business, but actually he just wanted to turn it into a debt dump and then force you to burn it down so that you can pay him the debts that you incurred to him by partnering with him with the insurance money. Crazy. I mean, it's great. Good stuff.
Sylvi: Uh, well done, everybody.
Keith: Well done. Um, I, I love the introduction of, um, girlfriend night at the Copa as—
Sylvi: When they're, they're with their girlfriends? Like, uh—
Keith: Yes. I think they said, was it Friday is for the wives but Saturday is for the girlfriends?
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Yeah. Um, or is it the other way around? The other way around.
Keith: It could have been the other way around. Whichever way it is, there's one night that's for the wives and one night that's for the girlfriends. And I think that this is sort of the canary in the coal mine for the structural issues within the mafia's internal logic. That they can have anything they want and do anything they want as long as they back each other up and stay family, starts to run into problems when you can't even stay family with your family.
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah! That's a good way to put that. I really liked how you worded that. That took me a second, but I was like, yeah!
Keith: Thank you, thank you. And it honestly immediately precedes brick by brick everything kind of coming down. The fact that you have this whole culture of infidelity, which, it's the '60s, but still, this is a community that is perpetuating this. It's not just one person cheating on his wife. This is like— Everybody gets it. This is the night that the mobsters bring in their girlfriends to cheat on their wives, which is like a whole layer of unnecessary risk. It's a whole— It is also— It's exposing the, like, the seams of how far you can push this thing of community and sticking up for each other. And yeah, I just like the way that it plays into— And then the girlfriends end up like, really, really playing into things going bad all the way through. Like, they are always a cog in things getting worse for Henry, and for the mafia in general.
Sylvi: Yeah, I agree.
Art: Yeah, very true.
Sylvi: Sorry, I was waiting for somebody else to jump in.
Keith: That's okay. That's okay. Um, do you want to hear a little bit of that breaking down?
Sylvi: Sure.
Keith: And Darcy, you know, resident sort of mental health professional, if this has any red flags for you, if— You know, I don't know either way. I don't know either way! But this might sort of bring something up that sounds a little suspect. So you could let us know.
Art: Sure, sure.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Karen: You haven't been home in 2 weeks. You're not going out tonight. 
Henry: Hey, hey, Karen, will you grow up? Stop! I'm still going to go out.
Karen: Not without your car keys, you're not. 
Henry: Are you nuts? Are you fucking nuts? What's your problem? 
Karen: Yes, I'm nuts. Something's going on.
Henry: Stop with that already. Enough. Stop with that. 
Karen: No, I'm telling you, I look in your face and I know that you're lying! Get out!
Henry: Shut up!
Karen: Get out! Get out of my life!
Henry: You're fucked up in the head, Karen. This is all in your mind.
Karen: You're a lousy bastard. You got a problem? Go ahead, go to your ready-made whores. That's all you're good for! Get out of my life! I can't stand you! 
[audio ends]
Keith: Any issues there, maybe?
[Keith laughter]
Darcy: Yeah, just a handful. There's some— We could make some changes to their communication patterns, I think.
Keith: Interesting. What changes would you make?
Darcy: You know, there's not a lot of I statements there. I really think we need to start with owning our part in the conflict before we start identifying the other person's issues.
Keith: So if he had said like, I feel like you're fucked in the head, 
Darcy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's— As long as you say, I feel like, it's not gaslighting anymore. That's how it works. You can go ask Seth Rogen all about that.
Keith: They do such a good job in these scenes where they're screaming at each other. He's throwing things, he's hitting her, you know, he's scaring her in different ways. She's scaring him sometimes. Um, where they always, like— Couple things. Cut to the little baby children listening in on it. Like, there's a six-second-long shot of, like, their four-year-old girl, like, standing right outside the room listening to this.
Darcy: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Um, and, and I'm sure that has nothing— 
Darcy: No…Hey, are you familiar with the Adverse Childhood Experiences scale and the study that's been done?
Keith: No, I have— No, I’m not.
Darcy: It is a survey that asks, I think, I can't remember if it's 8 to 10 questions about what they have identified as adverse childhood experiences. Things in there include not just being abused, but being in the presence of abuse, specifically spousal abuse. Um, and the more of these you have, the more likely you are to have all sorts of horrible, like, increased health risk and increased, like, negative outcomes for everything from mental health, physical health, uh, alcoholism, how much money you're gonna make. Like, it's, it's not good. I’ll tell you that.
Keith: Do me a favor, nobody make me take that test, please.
Sylvi: Yeah, I was about to say the same thing.
[Keith and Sylvi laughter]
Darcy: It's the first thing I give every client I see for those reasons. And because childhood in America is so fucked up that we don't really talk about or acknowledge how fucking bad and abnormal so much of it is.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, they cut to the dog, they cut to the kid. Sometimes you hear the fighting and that you just like in the background can hear a baby crying. You know, for— I think that this movie does a really good job of both showing Karen Hill as a victim of Henry Hill's abuse, but also as a participant in the abusive household.
Darcy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Art: The visiting in prison scene is like—
Sylvi: Oh, yeah.
Keith: Oh, my God. Yeah. Uh, there's— So, Art, do you want to set that scene up?
Art: Uh, sure. Eventually, Henry does go to prison because they like, go to— They go to Florida to like, rough up a guy at his sister's—
Keith: She's a typist for the FBI.
Art: Yeah, a typer for the FBI. So Henry and Jimmy both go to jail for, like, a while. And you get this like, things are so great for gangsters in prison. And also, lots of things are just awful. Including this like, they visit and she sees the mistress on the call sheets. They're arguing about that. But also, like, she's passing him drugs and food products and—
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Um, someone's like changing a diaper on the next table. It's, it's just dreadful.
Keith: Yeah, it's really bad. Yeah, she, she has like a 2.5-foot-long salami that she's got hidden in her coat and she throws it at him and he's like— Throws his hands up like, ah, fuck it. Like, what am I— I'm in prison. I can't control who comes to visit me. And then she pulls out the drugs, and then he's like, will you fucking put my drugs away so that I can handle this? And then he's able to talk her into continuing to participate. And sadly, that's a pattern that continues. I believe the story is long after the events of the book take place. One of the final shots of the movie is, um, uh, a sort of Animal House-style, where are they now? Um, and, um—
Sylvi: Really funny way to put that. You're not like, wrong, but really funny way to put that.
Keith: They didn't do the freeze frame on people's face, but they could have, and it would've been really funny.
Art: They are playing Louie Louie for some reason.
Keith: Um, no, they're playing, um, uh, they're playing My Way. It's like a cover of My Way. 
Sylvi: It’s— Yeah, it's a pop punk My Way cover.
Art: Oh, I must have gotten a weird copy of the movie playing Louie Louie.
Keith: Yeah, the— My credits are all being—
Art: iIt's— You don't have it where it's, um, John Belushi dressed up as all these people?
Keith: Oh, I did have that. That was— Yeah, that actually happened. That preceded this, so I did have that.
Art: Okay.
Keith: Um, good. I'm glad we all watched the same copy.
Sylvi: Uh, yeah, we all watched it together on the couch. We shared popcorn.
Keith: It says, um— Yeah, that's how we do all these, by the way, in person. Um, we, we find the middle location, uh, between all of us and go and fly there, even if we're close.
Sylvi: Well, the flight is part of the experience.
Keith: The flight is part of the experience. I love flying. Uh, but there, there's a part where it says that like they, three years later, they separated after 25 years of marriage in, I think it was like '88 or something. Um, but I believe that Henry Hill's story in real life contains a lot more Karen Hill, to the point where the adult children have to like, disown their parents together and leave.
Sylvi: Damn.
Keith: 'Cause they— I guess they get back together, and they're both constantly, you know, in the '90s and early 2000s, running different criminal enterprises and scams and cons and doing drugs. And she is in that household until those kids are adults, as far as I remember from having read about this a couple years ago. So the, the Henry Hill story and the Karen Hill story actually end up even worse than it appears.
Art: One thing I learned bopping around on the internet before this one is that the two kids wrote a book in 2004.
Keith: Interesting.
Art: About their lives, and I would be interested in reading that. And also, I bet it's a stone-cold bummer.
Keith: I bet it is a stone-cold bummer to have been these kids.
Art: Um, that book is called— Where did I see that? Um, On the Run: A Mafia Childhood.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, they— So Henry Hill keeps getting kicked out of witness protection. Well, he has to keep— First, what happens is he has to get new identities multiple times because he keeps blowing his cover. And—-
Sylvi: God.
Keith: And because he can't stop doing crime, and he can't stop bragging about being a criminal. And eventually, uh, he has like, this massive drug operation that he's running, and the government is like, we can't be paying a guy money to be in witness protection that is using that money to do a big drug thing. And so he gets kicked out. And I can't remember if Karen Hill follows him out of witness protection at that point, but I do remember being like, one or multiple of these kids having to emancipate themselves, essentially. Because she's so involved in the crime and drugs. Bad situation.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: If you can believe it.
Art: Yeah, I'm against it.
Keith: I'm against it. Yeah, it's not a great scene. Hey, the guy from Philly that they meet, the guy who, uh, uh, they're picking up the cocaine from, who is that? That guy is very familiar to me.
Sylvi: Oh, I, I knew— Know who you mean, but I don't know who the actor is. He is very familiar.
Keith: I don't know his character’s name, so I can’t—
Sylvi: I think he’s just called— Is he just Dealer? Is that the guy?
Darcy: Do you mean Pittsburgh?
Sylvi: It is Pittsburgh. Yeah.
Darcy: Okay.
Keith: What did I say? Did I say Philly?
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Oh, yeah. Sorry. Um, Paul Herman, potentially?
Sylvi: Yeah, that's who I think it might be.
Keith: He's in Heat.
Sylvi: Oh.
Keith: He's in The Irishman. Uh, he's in 6 episodes of The Entourage. He's in The Sopranos. [Sylvi: He's in The Sopranos.] He plays a guy named Beansie Gaeta, who I don't know if I know yet. Hmm, 
Art: You don't.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvi: Close the— Close the fucking— Close the page.
Keith: Yeah, I'm not— I've already scrolled past. I didn't click. I didn't even click. I'll— I'm already forgetting it. Oh, he's in Casino. Um, yeah, I don't know if I know this guy from something, but— Oh, he's in Big. He plays Schizo in Big.
Sylvi: Sure.
Keith: He's in a lot of— He's in Last Temptation of Christ. He's in several Scorsese things. So there you go. Okay, that's it. That's it.
Sylvi: Okay, cool.
Keith: I definitely don't know this guy. I mean, he's in a lot of stuff. I'm just like, this is what I recognize from his, um, yeah, filmography. Uh, oh, of course he's in Little Fockers, which is my favorite movie.
Sylvi: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't stop talking about that one.
Darcy: Yeah.
Keith: Let's, let's bring us back into the movie. He's going to jail based off this Florida thing. This is the ambiguous thing that I never fully understood. And I think probably it's actually clear and I'm overthinking it. Earlier in the movie, uh, he's cheating on his wife. His wife is figuring out who it is. She's going to harass— With the kids. She brings the kids. to the mistress's apartment to scream at her through the intercom. By the way, the mistress has a way, way nicer apartment than she has a house.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Just so that everybody knows, that is an insanely nice apartment and full of expensive shit, just gaudy, expensive nonsense. So she's getting worried about getting arrested and he's like, don't worry about it. I'm not going to be arrested. Nobody gets arrested unless they want to get arrested. The reason the guy you're talking about got arrested is to get away from his bitch wife that he hates. I would never do that to you. So don't worry. I'm careful. I'm smart. I won't get arrested. And then later on in the movie, he gets arrested. And the part that was always ambiguous to me is they spin it like a, yeah, who'd have thunk we accidentally ended up in jail because we fucked with the wrong guy whose sister was an FBI typist. Now, he goes to jail, he gets 10 years. He does not spend 10 years in jail. He spends maybe two years in jail? He does not get out long after Paulie, and Paulie got like— I think he got out a little less than a year in.
Art: He was in for four years.
Keith: He was in for four years? Okay. So he was in for a while. Was he in there on purpose? He's unreliable. He's not— He’s telling his wife what she wants to hear. But also, he did get arrested at the exact perfect time to not have to deal with his wife. And Paulie got arrested for contempt, and he got a year, and he probably served less than a year. And so I'm thinking, is Paulie in there to make— To smooth all of this over because he got arrested on purpose so that he didn't have to deal with his wife?
Sylvi: I mean, I can't disprove it.
Keith: I can't disprove it. That's all I'm saying.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: The book suggests no.
Keith: Okay, that's good.
Art: But where, you know, the text of the movie again does not—
Keith: It does not equal the book?
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Um, yeah, I think that there's—
Darcy: He does strike me as a guy who would explicitly say, God, I just went to jail to get away from my bitch wife, if that's what he thought.
Keith: Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I, I think that it— I think that probably he goes to jail just to show that he doesn't have everything figured out, that he can't control for uncontrollable elements. I bet that he probably would have just gone to Florida and come back and apologized to his wife and then also kept on carrying on as usual. But that thought was always there of like, well, he said he would only get arrested on purpose. Maybe he got arrested on purpose. Anyway, he goes to jail. Unbelievable scene. Oh, and also the way he pops a pill and then says, take me to jail, as if who gives a fuck, you know, as if it's vacation. So we're gonna hear that, and then we're gonna hear about how fucking sick jail is.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: Now take me to jail. [voiceover] In prison, dinner was always a big thing. We had a pasta course, and then we had a meat or a fish. Paulie did the prep work. He was doing a year for contempt, and he had this wonderful system for doing the garlic. He used a razor, and he used to slice it so thin that it used to liquefy in the pan with just a little oil. It was a very good system.
Keith: I love the shot of him cutting the tomato with the razor blade, the garlic.
Vinnie: Veal, beef, and pork.
Paulie: Ah, good, but you gotta have the pork.
Vinnie: That's the flavor.
Henry: [voiceover] I felt he used too many onions, but it was still a very good sauce.
Paulie: Don't put too many onions in the sauce.
Vinnie: I didn't put too much onions at all. 3 small onions, that's all I did.
Paulie: 3 onions? How many cans of tomatoes? 
Vinnie: I put 2 cans, 2 big cans. 
Keith: I'm in favor of doing this.
Henry: [voiceover] Johnny Dio did the meat. We didn't have a broiler, so Johnny did everything in pans. It used to smell up the joint something awful, and the hacks used to die, but he still cooked a great steak. 
Johnny: How do you like yours?
Vinnie: Rare. Medium rare.
Johnny: Medium rare. Hmm, an aristocrat.
Henry: [voiceover] See, you know, when you think of prison, you get pictures in your mind of all those old movies with rows and rows of guys behind bars, but it wasn't like that for wise guys. It really wasn't that bad, excepting that I missed Jimmy. He was doing his time in Atlanta.
Johnny: Give me two steaks while you're in there, all right, John?
Vinnie: Sure enough, she goes in.
Henry: [voiceover] I mean, everybody else in the joint was doing real time, all mixed together, living like pigs, but we lived alone. I mean, we owned the joint.
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, that's such a great scene, watching them in prison cooking like, a beautiful dinner. It's so good. slicing the garlic thin with the razor blade. You know, they could have got a knife if they wanted. No, this is how Paulie wants to do the garlic.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, later on, he, he comes in with a bag of goodies, including his secret drugs that he's doing, uh, behind everyone's back— Doing and selling behind everyone's back. Uh, but the bag has, you know, prosciutto and scotch, uh, and red and white wine. And like when the wine comes out, Paulie's like, oh, now we can eat. We've got the fucking wine. Okay, great. Like it's a, it's a, it's a better dinner than I'm having most nights. I mean, almost every night. It's a better dinner than I'm having almost every night. Mm-hmm.
Sylvi: It looks great. Iwould—
Art: They got nothing to do in prison except make— They got all the time to cook.
Keith: Oh, Art, we're losing you a little bit.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Art: Uh-oh. [pause] They got all that time to cook.
Keith: Yeah, they got all the time to cook. Yeah, for sure. But they're also— They look comfortable. They're all in whatever clothes, you know. One of them's in a silk bathrobe, one of them's in like, a terry cloth bathrobe, uh, one of them is in, you know, uh, tank top and shorts, and then one— And, uh, Henry's in a tracksuit, uh, which is, you know, foreshadowing.
Sylvi: Oh, huh.
Keith: Because you, you do— You— When you wear a tracksuit, you do cocaine.
Sylvi: I thought you meant about his civilian life, but yeah, sure.
Keith: No, people in tracksuits are buying and selling drugs. It's not the dignified clothes of a mafioso.
Sylvi: Uh, well, I don't know.
Keith: That's what I believe.
Sylvi: I would refer back to the season of television we just watched where they're always wearing tracksuits, but—
Keith: Well, they're in a post-Henry Hill world.
Sylvi: Oh, so he did this.
Keith: Right. So, well, it's sort of the, the, uh, the seedier element of crime is, is tracksuit. Tracksuits are seedier crime coded. Uh, and so, he broke the barrier on mafiosos doing drug stuff. This is what I think.
Sylvi: I like— You've had some good theories.
Keith: Thank you.
Sylvi: This episode, man.
Keith: Thank you. Uh, all right, what, what else do I got here? Um, uh, we didn't talk— We talked a lot— We talked about it sort of out of order. Uh, they've obviously killed and then hidden and then re-hidden Billy Batts at this point. But Billy Batts' involvement in the story is not over. How do we get from here to Paulie being made? It's through—
Art: Tommy being made.
Keith: Tommy. How do we get from here to Tommy being made? It's through Jimmy's big heist, right?
Darcy: Yeah, it's after the little Fonza heist.
Keith: Yeah, the little Fonza heist.
Art: Uh, we might want to cover Michael Imperioli first.
Keith: Yes. So we already know Tommy's a wild card, to say the least.
Sylvi: He's got cowboyitis.
Keith: He's got cowboyitis. Do you think that he transferred his cowboyitis to Michael Imperioli via the murder?
Sylvi: Via murder?
Keith: Yeah. And so he has to take his cowboyitis with him into The Sopranos. They had no choice. 
Sylvi: You can’t prove it. 
Keith: Um, and this is why they did a whole— I didn't get it. I didn't get why. I didn't get why in The Sopranos they do a little fucking Spider bit with him in the bakery store.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: I just thought— I just thought it was a good— I just thought it's because they like Goodfellas in the writers' room. But it's because he's the guy that that happens to.
Sylvi: He is the guy that that happens to, yeah.
Keith: It's just— It's— He was— It was psychic transference from one property to the other.
Darcy: Hmm.
Keith: He was— He went from Spider to Spidey, and then the— Well, he's the— He's the spider.
Darcy: Tom Holland?
Keith: No, he's the spider. In the situation, if he's the spider, then Joe Pesci's the spidey. And then in Sopranos, he becomes the spidey and the teller becomes the spider.
[long pause]
Sylvi: Sure.
Art: Sure, yeah.
Keith: Hundreds of thousands of people are following that.
Sylvi: I'm sure there are. Our millions of listeners.
Keith: Yeah, well, of our millions of listeners, hundreds of thousands are following it. Um, uh, which then makes it actually a bad percentage. [Art: Yeah.] Well, who wants to talk about Spider, please?
Sylvi: Uh, yes, go, go. Oh, Art, please go ahead.
Art: I think we touched on this very— Spider's like, the, the guy who tends the bar at the card game, but like, bartender is too much respect.
Keith: He's the new— He's sort of a new generation henchman.
Art: Yeah, kind of. He's getting drinks, he's bringing drinks, and he doesn't hear or doesn't fully understand Tommy asking for a drink.
Keith: Or Tommy didn't fucking ask for a drink is also possible.
Sylvi: He asked for water. You can like— He does get talked over in it, but he does ask for water at the beginning of the scene. 
Art:I thought it was Cutty and water. I thought he was offering— He was out of scotch. Also, Cutty Sark is everywhere in this fucking movie. I don't know if that was product placement or what, but every scene feels like it has a bottle of Cutty Sark in it.
Keith: I did not notice the Cutty Sark.
Art: Oh, it's— Go back and next time you watch it, look out for the Cutty Sark.
Keith: I only noticed the bottle of Bacardi at the, uh, at the prison table.
Art: Um, and yeah, and, and Tommy is, you know, really mad that he didn't get a drink. And they go back and forth and he's stuttering a little bit. And he's like, well, go get me a drink. He goes to get him a drink. He's complaining about not being fast enough. And he shoots him in the foot.
Keith: Yeah, he does like an Old West dance thing where he's supposed to dance around the bullets like a cartoon.
Art: Yeah. But it doesn’t work.
Keith: But he doesn't because he's not in a cartoon. Only Joe Pesci is in a cartoon in this movie.
Art: Yes, I mean, that's very true. Joe Pesci is a cartoon character in this, weirdly.
Keith: A really scary cartoon character.
Art: And I think, like, pretty immediately we come back to this.
Keith: Yeah, it's like one scene in between. He shoots him in the foot, and everybody's like, like, sort of half like, you ruined the card game, but also half like, we're gonna still do the card game.
Art: Yeah, definitely. And they come back again and Spider's got a big bandage on his foot and Tommy's still, you know, now he's like, making fun of the fucking bandage and stuff.
Keith: Yeah, how big it is.
Art: Yeah. And Spider tells him to go fuck himself. And uh—
Keith: Everybody likes that.
Sylvi: Yeah. Everybody's like, oh, whoa, Spider stood up for himself. Jimmy in particular is really into it. 
Keith: Gives him a lot of hundreds. 
Sylvi: But then also is immediately going to Tommy being like, you're going to take that? You're going to let him talk to you like that?
Keith: And yeah, there's only one way. There's like, as you know, in my mind, Jimmy's the kind of guy who roots for the bad guy in movies. There's kind of no way that I believe that Jimmy saw another way out of this.
Art: Right? Yeah.
Keith: He knows— He acts like, what the fuck? What are you doing?
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Why would you do that? Come on, I was just fucking with you. And it's like, you can't just fuck with Tommy. You've known him for 20 years. You know that you can't just fuck with Tommy.
Sylvi: Nobody just fucks with Tommy.
Keith: Nobody just fucks with Tommy. Last time someone halfway fucked with Tommy, he killed him.
Art: Yeah. Um, and there's a— There's a— Did I already tell this story about that shooting?
Keith: No.
Art: Um, so, uh, Michael Imperioli is doing this, and, uh, uh, uh, in case you don't know the way this works in a movie is they put squibs on you.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: Which are little explosives. And they, they have blood packs on them.
Keith: It's like a firecracker filled with blood.
Art: Yeah, that's how getting shot in a movie works. And he was holding a— He's holding a glass when he gets shot. And for the take that they use in the movie, he's holding a real glass instead of a fake glass. And he gets shot and he crushes the glass and he is bleeding really badly. He's cut his hand very badly. And they take him to the hospital and the hospital— He's like, I cut my hand. They're like, oh my God, you were shot and you're in shock. And they get him pretty far in the ICU like, process of, um, like, treating him for gunshot wounds before they realized that, no, he's telling the truth. He— this was a movie and he's— He just cut his hand.
Keith: Was there not someone else there to be like, I'm vouching for the movie?
Darcy: Right. Yeah. 
Art: I think in like, an emergency room setting, it might be hard to convince people that you haven't been shot if you walk in looking like you've been shot 4 times in the chest or whatever it is.
Keith: Maybe true, maybe true. Oh, this was that one, not the one with the foot.
Art: No, no, this is the second one.
Keith: Second one, got it. Okay, that makes— It makes a little more sense. That's so funny. That's a great— That's a great behind-the-scenes tidbit, Art.
Art: Yeah, thanks.
Keith: You're welcome. Um, great scene. Tommy's crazy. Great character. Joe Pesci killing it. Love to see it. Wet Bandit. The Wet Bandit himself.
Art: The Wet Bandit.
Keith: I can't believe they got the Wet Bandit for this. Um, predates, right? By a couple years.
Art: Yeah, by a couple years.
Keith: Yeah, he was already the Wet Bandit.
Art: They, they saw that. The, the Home Alone people saw that, were like, that's our guy who's gonna menace a child.
Keith: Yeah. I mean, we needed a cartoon character for this. Perfect. Um, does he, does he go way back with, uh, with Scorsese or am I misremembering or, uh, an interview that I saw years ago?
Art: Joe Pesci or Macaulay Culkin?
Keith: Joe Pesci.
Art: Uh, I think they go forward from here.
Keith: They go forward from here. Okay. I'm remembering interviews of like, Joe Pesci being cagey, if not outright kind of shitty about talking about his past, potentially having grown up around Goodfellas types.
Art: Mm-hmm.
Keith: And I remember either Martin Scorsese or people who just know them both being like, the reason he's like that is because Martin Scorsese was never really around it. He was around guys who were around it. You know, if he was more around it, he might not want to talk about it so much. So I was like, oh, maybe they know each other from like back— From like, longer back.
Art: I do see now that of course Joe Pesci was in Raging Bull, which is 10 years before, right?
Keith: Right. Right. Uh, all right. Um, let's see.
Art: Although, uh, that was 12 years after his debut album, Little Joe Sure Can Sing.
Keith: That's true. It was. And he sure can. As in, you know, no one's stopping him or no one was stopping him yet.
Art: And then him and the guy who played Billy Betts were a comedy duo.
Keith: That's so funny.
Sylvi: Sure.
Art: They went around doing Abbott and Costello-inspired double-act antics.
Sylvi: Oh my God.
Keith: Unbelievable. I mean, he's so funny.
Art: I would love— Is this on TV? Can I watch this?
Keith: Is this on TV is maybe the oldest thing you've ever said, Art.
Art: Is this on the YouTube? They performed as Vincent and Pesci.
Keith: Vincent and Pesci. Oh, I think I know about this. Yeah, I now remember. I didn't realize that it was that guy. That's great. It's funny that he's the guy that they get to do that.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: He gets his comedy friend a gig so that then he can kill him for their comedy. And they do basically a comedy bit, but like a high-stakes, kind of threatening, scary one.
Art: Yeah, I could see Abbott and Costello doing that.
Keith: Yeah. Um, let's talk about the Lufthansa heist. Lufthansa?
Art: Lufthansa.
Keith: Lufthansa. The Lufthansa heist.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Uh, Maury has the tip. Now, the reason Maury is excited about this is because Jimmy already owes and is not paying him $20,000 worth of, I assume, gambling winnings, uh, because Maury's addicted to gambling. Maury's a degenerate gambler. And so he's like, I've got this tip. I don't even know what they— I've seen this movie six, seven times. I have no idea what they stole. Is it just more bags of money? Where was the money? It was just in a plane? It was in a German plane?
Art: Oh, they go into this a lot in the book and I forget the exact thing, but it's like at the time you were required— It was like shipping money.
Keith: Right.
Art: Because it was like a German airline, they had to move cash.
Keith: Yeah, it's the exact thing that the Air France thing was, but German.
Art: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. But it was $7 million or something instead of half a million.
Art: Yeah, there was some confluence of events that made it so they had a particularly high amount of money.
Keith: Yeah. And so, Maury gives this tip about the airport to Jimmy, being like, this is how I'll get my money back and then some, because he will owe me for the tip. And then Henry's sort of just a go-between between Maury and Jimmy, so he's not exactly involved in this in the same way. Uh, Art, was there— Did you have a correction?
Art: No, I think that's, that's about right.
Keith: Okay, so Jimmy gets a whole crew together. The guy who can't stop talking Italian, the guy who works security at the airport, um, you know, we're talking about the perm guy, the Italian perm guy, um, and, uh, the guy who ends up in the meat locker. 
Sylvi: Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Carbone. Yeah, Jimmy Carbone.
Keith: Yeah, Carbone. Yeah, there's a lot of— To me, they're comedy bits of like, they just go through, they point the camera at an Italian guy and they say his mafia nickname. There's two scenes where that happens where there's like, they give you like, seven different guys each time and they're fucking hilarious each time.
Darcy: Hey, it's Freddie Two Times because he says everything two times.
Sylvi: Yeah, that's a very famous one.
Keith: Uh, yeah, and there's like, like, you know, Jimmy the Eyes, and it's just a guy with glasses. And it's like Timmy No Nose, the guy with the nose. I don't know why he's called No Nose if he's got a nose. Um, uh, but he gets all these guys together. He gets Samuel L. Jackson, AKA Stacks Edwards.
Sylvi: Yep.
Keith: Um, uh, who's maybe the biggest surprise name in this movie. He just shows up as a random guy. Um, and, uh, they do this Jimmy or Henry finds out about it on the news. They're like, it's the— They're on the news.
Sylvi: He's listening to the radio in the shower.
Keith: It's the biggest heist in history, where $7 million— That's how they— And he's in the shower. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's screaming and dancing in the shower. And something I love— Everybody knows show, don't tell.
Sylvi: Mm-hmm. I've heard of it.
Keith: Sometimes you get a lot of mileage out of tell, though. And something I love about this movie— and, you know, maybe someone could make an argument that they are showing, and that's fine. But it's— Henry knows Jimmy really well. And Jimmy, to the viewer, is acting fairly normally, I think. And then Henry is going in monologue, this is how I knew that Jimmy was fucking falling apart and was freaking the fuck out. And I'm like, this is how you knew? This is not— I didn't—
Sylvi: You mean the line where he's asking, like, does Maury talk to you?
Keith: No, no, no, an earlier one, an earlier one.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Uh, that's the one where he was like, that's how fast it happens, you know? One minute you're fine, the next minute you're dead. Uh, but there's an earlier one where— It's right after— So the part where they really tip you off is, he's yelling at everybody about their extravagant purchases. He's told everyone, don't spend your money yet. They're watching us. If you buy a $20,000 Cadillac— No, a $20,000 mink and a new Cadillac— They're going to notice that. And investigate us for having robbed $7 million. And everybody's sad and sorry, and they're like, but it's under my mom's name, or whatever. Another really funny bit, actually. Um, but then they like have like kind of a normal rest of the day, and then Henry chimes in being like, this is how I knew that Jimmy was fucking freaking the fuck out about this shit. Uh, and I thought that was really great, like, because I was like, he was mostly acting normally— Uh, to me, to me he was acting normally, but to Henry he was freaking out. And I thought that was nice and a good touch. Um, De Niro is really good in this, by the way, if we didn't say.
Sylvi: Uh, it's crazy, Robert De Niro putting in a good performance.
Keith: Can you believe it?
Sylvi: Um, that guy never does that.
Keith: He should be famous for doing that, actually.
Sylvi: Yeah. Uh, somebody should give him like, some sort of an award from an academy.
Keith: Jimmy Conway's solution to this, to being upset about the heist and his stupid colleagues, is to start slaughtering them one by one.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Starting with Stacks for making an error in judgment that led to him not getting rid of his getaway vehicle. They come in and they shoot him in the head.
Sylvi: Um, yeah, it's, uh, Tommy takes care of that one. Yeah, there's a good gag where the guy— He's like, yeah, the coffee to go. And then the guy's trying to bring the coffee maker thing out with them, and he's like, I was joking.
Keith: Um, weird. Where— One of the weird cuts in the movie there, where they cut after that scene ends, it like, cuts back to like, a slow motion of Tommy shooting that guy. 6 times. I didn't quite understand that. Whatever. But then, yeah, the, the Carbone ends up dead, you know, Roast Beef ends up dead. They— Oh, and—
Sylvi: Maury ends up dead.
Keith: Maury ends up dead. Great. They set this to the slow part of Layla by Derek and the Dominos, which is a great song. They used it again for the end credits, 'cause if you're gonna pay for it, you might as well use it. I do have a button for it. Here we go. It's like all of the different mobsters killed in different ways, in the Cadillac that they loved, stuck in a meat freezer, et cetera.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: [voiceover] Jimmy was cutting every link between himself and the robbery, but it had nothing to do with me. I gave Jimmy the tip, and he gave me some Christmas money. From then on, I kept my mouth shut. I knew Jimmy. He had the cash. It was his. I know he kicked some money upstairs to Paulie, but that was it. Made him sick to have to turn money over to the guys who stole it. He'd rather whack 'em. Anyway, what did I care? I wasn't asking for anything, and besides, Jimmy was making nice money with me through my Pittsburgh connections. Still, months after the robbery, they were finding bodies all over. When they found Carbone in the meat truck, he was frozen so stiff it took them two days to thaw him out for the autopsy. Still, I never saw Jimmy so happy. He was like a kid. We had money coming in through my Pittsburgh people, and even after a while, the Lufthansa thing began to calm down. But the thing that made Jimmy so happy that morning was that this was the day that Tommy was being made. Jimmy was so excited, you'd think he was being made. He must have made four calls to Tommy's house. They had a signal all set up so he'd know the minute that the ceremony was over.
[audio ends]
Keith: God, I just love that scene. I love, like, what does this say about Henry? You know, the family, the life, the community. You know, he's like, what did I fucking care Jimmy wanted to kill them all one by one so he didn't have to pay them for the deal that they made? For the robbery that they all did? 
Sylvi: He seemed happy.
Keith: He seemed happy, you know? And he's Jimmy. That's my dad. That's my dad.
Art: Yes. Um, the book is like, a little more about how this is—  It's mostly that he doesn't want to give anyone any money, but it was some fear of getting caught. And they have an interview with the federal prosecutor that ends up prosecuting this case, who's like, we knew pretty immediately everyone who was involved. They were not actually successful in diverting attention from themselves in this. The big thing is that the guy, the inside guy at the airline told the armored truck that they weren't going to give him any money on Friday for the pickup. And there was no reason for that. And so they were like, well, that's who did it, that guy. And we figured out who he knows.
Keith: Yeah. Well, but that's different than proving it in a court of law.
Art: It is very— Then they were not particularly close to proving it in a court of law until, um, until Henry Hill flipped.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, which is, I assume, why they wanted Henry Hill to flip, so that they can— Johnny Roast Beef. That's— I knew there was a Roast Beef. I couldn't remember his actual name. Johnny Roast Beef. Because I see here that Fran McGee plays, quote, Johnny Roast Beef's wife.
Sylvi: Wow. Role of a lifetime.
Art: Oh, for real. 
Keith: So, uh, yeah, I, I, I, I, I have a lot of feelings about, like, what leads bright-eyed, community-focused young Henry Hill to the point where he doesn't care about this. Uh, because you'd think on paper Henry Hill would go, hey man, don't kill all of our family.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Uh, but also I guess, but the, but the, the, the mindset of like, fuck everybody and get your money, it leads you to eventually you make a smaller and smaller circle of who counts as everybody. Or sorry, a bigger circle of who— A smaller circle of who counts as somebody. And the circle of who is everybody else gets bigger and bigger and bigger in kind of a fascistic way. The list of enemies grows bigger as the pressure and stress and the breakdown of interior logic, as all of these things create more and more contradictions to the lifestyle that you say that you want, and then your solutions are crime and violence. It's pretty obvious how you get here, but it is still, like— It's very fast. It happens very fast, you know, that Henry goes from doing crimes with these people to sort of hand-waving away their almost pointless murder. Like, that Jimmy should get to keep—
Darcy: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Six of the $7 million instead of merely one. By the way, old Jimmy looking good with his little glasses.
Art: They introduced Jimmy as a generous guy.
Keith: Yes, yes, they introduced him as a generous guy, which is why I added my little triangle. You know, he's in it, he's a psycho in it for the love of the game, and that he sort of manufactures this appearance to just facilitate his true love, which is violence.
Art: Well, but I think it's two things, right? It's like he walks in the door and gives $20 to the doorman. He gives the bartender $50 for keeping the ice col— Ice cold, and on and on and on. And it's like, yes, it is very easy to— I mean, it's much easier to be generous with $50 than it is to be generous with $5 million.
Keith: Right. Yeah. Yeah. But no one—
Art: And it shouldn't be like that, but it do be like that.
Keith: Uh, but it's also a way to disguise yourself as part of the team. You know, does Jimmy ever really feel like part of the team? Or does he, throughout the movie, transparently have his own team of him, Tommy, and Henry? 
Darcy: Sure. And then he is also willing to forego Tommy after he dies to, you know, to stay on his own team. 
Keith: Yes. Yeah. Um, speaking of Tommy dying.
Sylvi: Yeah, the, the scene of the movie. Not really, but like, it's one of them.
Keith: It's real. I mean, it's visually striking.
Darcy: It’s one of them.
Sylvi: It's incredible.
Keith: It's really good. And the— It happens so fast. There's like 3 or 4 super quick cuts and it's over. It's really great. I really love it. And him on the tiled floor sort of slowly bleeding out, and the way that they call— Or they get a call from Jimmy, and Jimmy's like, excited about it, and they're like— Ah, sorry. Something happened. The euphemism, the way that they're so euphemistic about it is chilling because of how sensitive they are about this to Jimmy. When one, they killed him. They did it. They're the ones that did it. And then also, they've done so many other horrible things that they can't be open about this is like, you know, it's just interesting where their lines are, um, you know, emotionally. Uh, but yeah, they're like, we, we lost him. Uh, you know, something happened there. We— There's nothing we could do about it.
Sylvi: Yeah, I love the way they word it. It's like, it's just really good that it's so clinical.
Keith: Yeah. And vague.
Sylvi: Oh, absolutely.
Keith: Um, let me see, where's the— It reminds me of the later line when, uh, Henry is trying not to be murdered by Jimmy for potentially turning. Which was not really on the table until he starts getting the vibe that Jimmy is trying to kill him and his wife. But he says, your murderers come with smiles. They come as your friends. And then he says, and they always seem to come at the moment when you're at your weakest. Something like, you know, when you need their help the most. And Tommy wasn't really at his lowest here, but his murders absolutely did come with a smile and as your friends. This is a line about when you're part of a crew and your crew wants to kill you. They don't tell you that they're going to kill you. They just do it, acting like they're helping you out. And that is what happened with Tommy. Frankly, he deserved it. He's a liability. I mean, they probably should have killed him a long time ago, frankly.
Sylvi: You're taking the side of the restaurant guy early on.
Keith: Yes. The restaurant guy early on is like, yeah, Paulie's like, whoa, shut up. You want me to, you know, put a bullet in him? And he's like, it might not be a bad idea. And then he immediately is like, um, I didn't mean that. I didn't mean that. I'm just scared. He's scaring me.
Sylvi: It's a joke, bro. It's a joke. It was a prank.
Art: But he hasn't— He of course doesn't get killed for any of the things that he should be 
Darcy: What do they say is like—Is it just— 
Keith: It's 'cause of Batts. It was Batts.
Art: It was 'cause of Billy Batts.
Keith: It was Batts and— They say Batts and other stuff, is basically what they say.
Art: But like, there's another thing. In the book, it's a little more clear. It's that like, the Gambino guys finally like, had enough proof in their minds that it was him.
Keith: Yeah.
Darcy: Okay, gotcha.
Keith: I mean, could you believe how bad of a fucking made guy he would have been.
Darcy: Oh, he'd be horrific.
Keith: He would have been terrible. I mean, just the worst guy. Uh, it would have been like in a movie when— And this was sort of like a movie, uh, it would have been like—
Sylvi: Shut the fuck up.
Keith: It would have been like in a different movie when you've got like, a wasteland despot who like, kills you for no reason. Like, you're in his crew and he brings you the wrong thing and then you're like, you kill him and then you just get another guy out from there. That's what he would have been like as boss. Uh, not a good guy to have as a boss. Um, Jimmy was, I think, naive to have wanted Tommy in their corner because that would have flipped their dynamic. You know, Jimmy could control Tommy as his— As a father figure, same as Henry.
Darcy: Yeah.
Keith: But once he's a made guy, Jimmy's now working for Tommy, it would have not— It wouldn't have worked out well.
Sylvi: And he's in the position that Billy Batts is in, right?
Art: The transition from Jimmy's crew to Tommy's crew would have been a rough one.
Sylvi: Yeah. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Uh, and I think Tommy would have very quickly found a reason to kill Jimmy.
Sylvi: Yeah, I'd believe that.
Keith: Yeah.
Darcy: Yeah, probably.
Keith: Just, you know, just, just speculation.
Darcy: Um, and he'd probably go about it the right way, at least. Quote unquote, the right way.
Keith: Henry is being followed by helicopters. He's on tons of drugs.
Sylvi: Yeah, he's coked out of his mind.
Keith: I really love— Actually, one of my favorite things in the movie is Ray Liotta like, rapid-fire going through all the shit he has to do in one day. It was the moment that it became so clear to me how he ends up nothing like Paulie in the end, how he doesn't get any of the space to move slowly like Paulie has. And he's like, I gotta cook this dinner. I gotta get my brother from the doctor. I gotta do that. I gotta make— I gotta do the cutlets. I gotta get the girl who— Uh, try to fix my drugs. I gotta sell these guns. I gotta— And he's like got like, 20 fucking things. He has a super tight schedule, and also he's on drugs, and also he's being followed by helicopters. He's trying to figure all that out. Everybody's telling him that he's paranoid. He's not being— Well, he is being paranoid, but he is right, uh, that he's being followed. Um, and the movie's position seems to be like he was gonna get caught for something eventually, and the thing he gets caught for is that despite repeatedly saying, make the call about the drugs from an outside line, his stupid ex-babysitter goes, I'll actually just make the call from right here. And so they know—
Sylvi: It's so funny.
Keith: They know exactly when he's leaving and with what, and he leaves and they get him. Uh, and it's bad. It's bad right away. He thinks he's gonna get killed the whole time. Um, this is like— The camera is crazy in this. It's super— It's like, shaky handheld camera following him around, you know. There is this energy that is as frantic as he is. Uh, he's roping Karen into this. Um, you know, there's— It's just really good. He gets out of jail and needs to figure out— Really make bail. He gets Karen's mother to put up her house as collateral for the bail, which is bad because he's actively planning to skip town, which would forfeit the bond.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: That's a really dick move, honestly. And Karen has, I think, in a smart move, she has dumped a ton of drugs that was in the house, $60,000 worth of cocaine. He was counting on this cocaine and didn't— So they could sell for money. And he didn't know that she had done that. And so he's flipping out, even though I think she made absolutely objectively the right move to like not have that.
Art: Yeah, his assertion that they were not going to find it and, and it was just like tucked behind the TV. Basically just like in the front of a kitchen cabinet.
 
Keith: Totally baseless. But if you want, if you want one scene that encapsulates the marriage of Henry and Karen Hill, it is this scene of him in the striped shirt in this like, disorientingly checkered room, him screaming about the drugs, her screaming her excuses and apologies. He's throwing things, she's screeching, and then they end up sort of like, wrapped up in each other's arms as they kind of cry and scream and yell and panic. That is their marriage.
Art: Well, there's the inexplicably skipped scene of her pulling the gun on him.
Keith: Oh, I did skip that scene. That was a while—
Art: We're all over the place.
Keith: That was a while back. That was a long time ago. We, uh, we talked around that scene, but we didn't— I didn't say it. Yeah, explicitly when she— It's when she— it's— I mean, it's like an hour ago in terms of movie runtime, uh, when she knows for sure about, uh, Lauren Rossi is her name?
Sylvi: Yes.
Darcy: Janet?
Keith: Janet Rossi.
Sylvi: Janice Rossi.
Keith: Janet Rossi.
Sylvi: Janice Rossi.
Darcy: Janet. Janice. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, Janice Rossi. And she's got a gun on him, and then he has to talk her down. And then she's like, I even wanted to fuck him while I was holding the gun against his head. Uh, and so she's like, I wasn't— I was never gonna kill him.
Darcy: Yeah, who among us?
Keith: Yeah, he like, tackles her and hits her and takes the gun and then threatens to kill her and then asks, how do you like it? Uh, and she doesn't. Um, but she does also, kinda.
Darcy: Yeah.
Keith: Um, which is part of her whole deal.
Darcy: I mean, you know, should be said, it is extremely difficult to leave abusive relationships for a variety of reasons.
Keith: Yeah, totally, for sure. Yeah.
Darcy: Um, but yeah, Karen Hill doesn't necessarily acquit herself.
Keith: No, no, she's a— She's, you know, like I was talking about earlier, like, she's like a victim of his abuse, but she's also like, a participant in the abusive household that they have built together on crime. Because, you know, she's a criminal before he's doing so much of the worst of his behavior towards her.
Art: They get married very young.
Keith: Yeah. Like, 22?
Sylvi: They're like 21, 22. Yeah.
Art: They're— And like have no— And neither of them, you know, she lived with her parents until like— I'm not excusing anyone's behavior, but they, they were not set up for success here.
Sylvi: No, no, no, no, I agree with that.
Darcy: It does not seem like either one had a strong marital blueprint.
Keith: You— Oh, that's for sure. Yeah, you, you see flashes of the future though in that first scene right after their marriage where he doesn't come home for the night and the mother is like egging Karen on to like, chew him out. And she's like, no, you don't know. You know, she's like, you know, husbands don't do this. And she's like, you don't know how I feel. And he comes home and like, she's screaming at him, uh, the mother. And Karen is like, Mom, stop, cut it out. And he just kind of like, walks away cackling and goes back out.
Sylvi: And it's the— Sorry, finish up.
Keith: Oh, just that like, this is kind of a— It's two things. It's a reflection of what was already in the mix of like, he will not be told what to do. He has built his life around creating an ability to defy any order given to him, besides— With the exception of, like, Paulie. And even Paulie knows—
Darcy: Even then.
Keith: Yeah. Even Paulie knows you don't just tell him what to do. You tell him what has to happen, and then say, I know you're gonna do what you want to do, but this is what we think, and you gotta do what's right. And, you know, that's how Paulie— he either controls you with like, a bad look, or he controls you with like, a little baby, you gotta be— Everybody gotta take care of the baby. So it's a reflection of that, but then it's also a flash forward into the future of like, like he is not— He's not seeing himself as an equal partner in a marriage. He's seeing a wife as something he has.
Darcy: Yeah. Yeah.
Sylvi: Oh, 100%.
Keith: Right.
Darcy: Yeah.
Keith: And that is like the day after their wedding. It's not something that gets built to, even though the behavior spirals out of control. His attitude about it was always there. Sorry, someone else had something to say about this.
Sylvi: I wanted to mention that, that scene where he, uh, Karen's mother is like, yelling at him for staying out all night and the way Karen reacts, they both react like teenagers, basically.
Keith: Right.
Sylvi: Like, and I think that just goes to the point of how young they got married.
Keith: They almost were teenagers.
Sylvi: They basically were, yeah. But like, you can feel it in the performance, is, is my point more than anything.
Keith: Mm-hmm. Uh, Joe Pesci in the car mimicking the mother is really funny.
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, okay, jump back forward. They fall asleep. He's, he's— He thinks that at any point, he could be shot in the head. That's a stressful situation to be in. I believe.
Sylvi: Yeah, no, I wouldn't do great under that.
Keith: She thinks that he's being kind of paranoid because the person that he thinks is going to kill him is Jimmy. And she's like, we vacation with Jimmy. Our kids play together. Jimmy's not going to kill you. She goes to see Jimmy. He hands her a few thousand dollars. And it becomes very clear that Jimmy was about to kill her. And she, she definitely is like, I think he's gonna kill me. At the same time, he goes to Paulie to beg for forgiveness, and Paulie is like, I can give you a little bit of money, but then I have to turn my back on you. Those are his words. I actually have a clip of that.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: [voiceover] $3,200. That's what he gave me. $3,200 for a lifetime. Wasn't even enough to pay for the coffin.
[audio ends]
Keith: Disagree. That is enough to pay for the coffin, actually. 
Art: Especially in the '90s. 
Keith: Yeah. Maybe now, not.
Art: Um, I think you could, I think you could put someone in the ground for $3,200.
Keith: I think so. It wouldn't be, it maybe wouldn't be nice. I've been to the coffin store. It's probably not as nice as it would have been in 1980. I've been to the coffin store. It's really expensive there. Uh, it's one of the most expensive. It's like, maybe coffin store, and then one step up from that is car store. I don't know if there's something that's like in between coffins and cars price-wise. I don't think so.
Sylvi: Coffins and cars.
Keith: That's my—
Sylvi: Comedians in cars getting coffins. That's— There's the joke I was looking for.
Keith: Give it a few more years and that will be what Seinfeld needs. 
Sylvi: Yeah.
Keith: Um, uh, the, uh— He's getting old.
Sylvi: Good.
Keith: Uh, the—
Sylvi: Fuck that guy. What?
Darcy: Yeah, no, fuck that guy for real. That's what I'm laughing at.
Keith: And then they meet, Henry and Jimmy meet, and he's like, hey, why don't you go to Florida with my buddy Anthony and kill the guy who is testifying against you? And he's like, that's when I knew if I went to Florida, I wasn't coming back.
Sylvi: Yep.
Keith: Basically cut to Witness Protection Office. 
Art: Yeah, I think it is literally.
Keith: Literally cut to. Yeah. Um, look, if he's legitimately bronchial, we'll take that into consideration. One of the line— One of the best lines.
Sylvi: Really good line. Before we get to this, I need to mention something that I fully forgot that I did put a screenshot of in the chat. Jigsaw's in this movie. That was—
Keith: Oh yeah!
Sylvi: That was my final pointing at the screen. He plays Tobin Bell, who plays John Kramer in the, uh, Saw franchise of films, is the parole officer, which is a job that I think Jigsaw would take because he loves torturing people.
Darcy: Okay, I have an important question. It was my understanding that Jigsaw is specifically the little clown doll.
Sylvi: No, you're thinking of Billy the Puppet, right? You got it backwards.
Darcy: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: You'd think it was the opposite way of what people think, but then you forgot what people think.
Art: All Billys are Jigsaw, but not all Jigsaws are Billy.
Darcy: Ohhhhh.
Keith: Is that true?
Sylvi: I can't get it. We can't do this. We keep— No, we can't do this.
Darcy: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Sylvi: I know too much about Saw lore. We can't do this.
Darcy: Anyway, so the cop, Billy Jigsaw.
Keith: Mr. Billy Jigsaw to you.
Sylvi: Mr. Billy Jigsaw, yeah. 
Keith: Yeah, they like, just casually negotiating. Like, do we go? Do we not go? Uh, they go.
Sylvi: They do go.
Keith: They sure do. Uh, he just doesn't want to go somewhere cold because he's bronchial. I believe, this is my belief, he's not legitimately bronchial.
Darcy: He's been smoking a long time, man. He might be legitimately bronchial.
Keith: He might be legitimately bronchial. Yeah. I guess we don't know for sure. But I would agree with you. Cold people—
Darcy: My assumption would be that he's lying.
Keith: Smokers live where cold people go. Sorry, smokers live—
Art: Cold people?
Keith: “Smokles” live where it's cold. You know what I mean? 
Sylvi: “Smokles” live where it's cold.
Darcy: Smokles…
Keith: Do you want to hear about schnooks?
Sylvi: Are you writing that down?
Art: We've just— we've really gotten to a weird place, you know?
Keith: Well, I have one more button. We're at the very end of the movie. Let's hear about schnooks.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: [voiceover] See, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the life.
[audio ends]
Keith: Okay, I have to pause so that I can explain something.
[laughter]
Sylvi: Let's fucking go.
Keith: It's important. Everyone— Everyone will agree that it's important. This is the breakout monologue, literally, of the movie, because he's monologuing over the film, and then he, like, steps into the monologue role in the present time of the film, sort of addressing the camera directly. Which is, like, a crazy thing to do 2 hours and 20 minutes into a 2-hour and 25-minute movie, like, suddenly breaking the fourth wall.
Art: This is how you know it's a real— This is— This— That's cinema. That's cinema.
Sylvi: It fucking rocks.
Keith: Yeah. And then—
Sylvi: That's the movies, baby.
Keith: And then we then cast the monologue forward into the future where he's already in witness protection. So we get like, this like, triple-layered monologue of him like in the future, in the present, and then back at the future. [Art: Yeah, it fucking rules.] So you're gonna hear the microphone change in the monologue, which is why I paused to tell you the microphone’s gonna change.
[audio from Goodfellas starts playing]
Henry: [voiceover] See, the hardest thing for me was leaving the life. I still love the life. And we were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all just for the asking. Our wives, mothers, kids, everybody rode along. I had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen. I had a sugar bowl full of coke next to the bed.
Lawyer 1: People call them rats because a rat will do anything to survive. Isn't that true? 
Lawyer 2: Objection!
Judge: Objection sustained.
Henry: Uh, look, I don't know nothing about being a rat.
Lawyer 1: Mr. Hill, you know everything about being a rat.
Lawyer 2: Objection, Your Honor, in view of the violence.
Henry: [voiceover] Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars, the keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I'd bet 20, 30 grand over a weekend, and then I'd either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. [voiceover ends] Didn't matter. Didn't mean anything when I was broke. I would go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops, we paid off lawyers, we paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it's all over. [voiceover] And that's the hardest part. Today everything is different. There's no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. Can't even get decent food. Right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I'm an average nobody.
Keith: Lie.
Henry: [voiceover] Get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.
                [gunshot sounds]
[audio ends]
Keith: Uh, [reading] Henry Hill is still in witness protection program. In 1987, he was arrested in Seattle, Washington for narcotics conspiracy and received five years probation. Since '87, he has been clean. [stops reading] A lot of that is not true after this movie comes out. [reading] In 1989, Henry and Karen Hill separated after 25 years of marriage. [stops reading] I think that also is— was not true for a long time. And then Paul Cicero died. His name actually— his name's like, what, Paul Viero in real life? Um, [reading] Paul Cicero died in 1988, uh, in Fort Worth Federal Prison of respiratory illness. He was 73. Jimmy Conway is currently serving 20 years to life sentence for murder in a New York State prison. He will not be eligible for parole until 2004, when he will be 78 years old.
Art: And Jimmy Burke died in 1996.
Keith: Okay. Uh, well, I mean, just what a movie. And I love— Here's what I love. Tony Soprano picks up this monologue in the very first episode of The Sopranos.
Sylvi: Yes.
Keith: That is like—
Sylvi: I was gonna say, it leads in— One leads into the other.
Keith: Yes. You know, Henry talking about how he's gotta live, you know, a regular fucking life, and how the thing that he loved is dying, picks up with Tony, you know, almost a decade later being like, everything's still fucking dying.
Sylvi: Uh, yeah, he came in at the end of it.
Keith: He came in at the end of it. He came in after—
Sylvi: And it's like the shadow of Henry Hill is on that episode too, because he comes up in the conversation between, uh, Chris and Tony later.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a phenomenal movie, you guys. I mean, I mean, there's so many fucking movies, and I think that this is really one of the best of them.
Sylvi: It's one of your top— What number did you give?
Keith: It's definitely top 10. It's definitely top 10. I don't think it cracks five. I think it might be like seven or eight or something like that.
Art: There are so many movies.
Darcy: There’s a lot of movies.
Keith: There's so many movies. Jesus, this is a good one though.
Sylvi: If we weren't going long, I'd ask what the top five were, but we're going long. That can be for another day.
Keith: Yeah, but it's always in flux.
Art: Again, if you've gotten to this point and you haven't watched this movie, go watch this movie.
Sylvi: Go watch this movie.
Darcy: You should go watch this movie.
Art: This movie whips.
Keith: Yeah, it's so good.
Darcy: As, as the person on this show who has never watched any of the fucking movies, I really enjoyed watching this movie, and I think you should watch this movie.
Keith: Yeah. Is this the best movie you've had to watch for Media Club Plus, Darcy?
Darcy: Oh, okay. First of all, let's not say have to. It's, you know, 
Keith: Well, even if you want to, you still have to. You know, that's true. That's true.
Darcy: It's true.
Keith: Uh, it's only got one. There's only one movie that's even in the running.
Darcy: I would say, yeah, I've watched Old. I think that's—
Keith: Like Sixth Sense is the only other movie that could be in the running.
Sylvi: You're not, you're not rocking with Phantom Rouge?
Art: Oh, I don't— Did we watch— I don't remember if we watched that or not.
Sylvi: Didn't we?
Keith: Yeah, we did in November of last year.
Sylvi: Yeah, I swear we did. Yeah, man, it's been a while.
Darcy: Man, I don't know.
Keith: It was in November. That's coming out this year.
Sylvi: I'm fucking with you.
Keith: It's coming out the week that we're talking, not the week it's coming out. 
Darcy:You know what I'll say? Goodfellas, best movie I've watched from Media Club Plus.
Sylvi: Yeah, for sure.
Keith: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure.
Darcy: Uh, Old's a close second.
Keith: There's a couple movies that are always in my top five, even though it's changing. I'll tell you that it's, uh, Blade Runner is always in there. Blade Runner is always one of the top.
Darcy: It’s a good one.
Keith: Yeah. Wet Hot American Summer, also always in the top five. The Jerk, also always in the top five.
Sylvi: Okay, so we've got three of the top five.
Keith: Three of my top five. The other two move around sometimes.
Sylvi: Um, interesting.
Keith: You know, I don't think that your top five needs to be the highest art you've ever enjoyed. Those are my— Those are three of my five favorite movies to watch.
Sylvi: Hell yeah, man.
Keith: I truly believe that if you watch The Jerk with French New Wave cinema in mind, it will blow your mind. I believe The Jerk is the most French New Wave—
Sylvi: I still gotta watch The Jerk.
Keith: It's the most French New Wave American movie ever made, I think. And also it's one of the funniest movies ever made.
Sylvi: Yeah, yeah, sure. Okay, I'll take your word for it. I need to see it.
Keith: What is this? What is this from, Art? What is this? Okay, what is this? Half, half disbelieving okay.
Art: No, no, I'm not— I love The Jerk as much as anyone who grew up in our general age cohort and loves comedy.
Darcy: This is the Steve Martin movie, right?
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Darcy: What is the movie? I'm mixing that up with a movie.
Sylvi: Are you thinking of The Pest?
Darcy: Yes, I am. Holy shit, Sylvi.
Sylvi: This is a much different movie. Hey, Darcy, you know how I knew that? First time Keith brought up The Jerk to me, I did the same thing.
Keith: Um, now I know that when they were making The Jerk, they had in mind, you know, Russian realism in the way of The Idiot. But I think that when you combine the sensibility of someone who wants to make a movie like The Idiot but an American comedy, what accidentally you also do is make French New Wave. 
Sylvi: Hmm.
Art: I think we literally can't do this right now.
Sylvi: Yes, fair.
Art: And if you want to talk about The Jerk, we— I, I would do— Oh, that's an '80s movie, right?
Keith: '70s. 
Art: Really? I would do— but like, I would find a way to do like The Jerk and maybe even like Caddyshack as some sort of like, Bronze Age comedy, important movies. Like, we could seriously do that.
Keith: Yeah.
Art: But we can't do it at the end of 3 and a half hours of talking about Goodfellas. We simply have to—
Sylvi: We have to end the podcast. We have to get off the boat. Okay.
Keith: Okay. Okay. Go— I mean, go watch The Jerk. Bye.
[“Shame About It (Vocals)” by Jack de Quidt starts playing]
Sylvi: Thanks for listening. Bye.
Darcy: Bye. Listen to More Media Club Plus before you listen to The Jerk. Bye.
Sylvi: Leave us a 5-star review on Podchaser, on iTunes. Thank you, bye! 
[“Shame About It (Vocals)” by Jack de Quidt plays in its entirety]


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[1] The name in the audio recording is no longer in use, hence the audio/transcript discrepancies.