Goodfellas (Movie)

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares129 Views

    These Oscar Snubs Still Rile Up Our Readers

    by

    You can’t forgive the Academy for passing up “Brokeback Mountain” or omitting Amy Adams in “Arrival,” among other oversights that still sting.Some things will always stick in your craw. When I asked readers, ahead of the Academy Awards on Sunday, if they were still mad about an Oscar snub, boy, did I get an earful.Technically a snub involves a film or an artist (or a song or any other possible contender) that was overlooked altogether at the awards. But a nominee losing to an unworthy rival was also fair game, and readers took both slights to heart.I received hundreds of responses. Readers felt strongly about the lack of nominations for “Paddington 2,” Danny Elfman’s score for the 1989 “Batman,” Will Ferrell in “Elf” and Abby Ryder Fortson in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” But these weren’t the most notable omissions and oversights. Here are the lightly edited responses:‘Saving Private Ryan’Steven Spielberg’s World War II drama lost best picture to the period romance “Shakespeare in Love” in 1999.“Saving Private Ryan” is unforgettable. The opening beach scene was jaw-dropping. “Shakespeare in Love” is entirely forgettable. Harvey Weinstein campaigned to get that Oscar. Shame on the academy. MATT DENTON, Old Bridge, N.J.Probably the best war movie of all time versus a lightweight rom-com about Shakespeare’s love life. Need I say more? SCOTT PARKIN, Reston, Va.Who has ever watched “Shakespeare in Love” more than once? BART DEWING, Mount Vernon, N.Y.Fernanda Montenegro in ‘Central Station’More “Shakespeare in Love” ire: Gwyneth Paltrow won for best actress in that film over the star of the Brazilian road trip tale.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Suzanne Shepherd, Actress Known for Playing Mothers, Dies at 89

      by

      After establishing herself as a teacher, she started a prolific screen acting career in her 50s that included roles in “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos.”Suzanne Shepherd, an influential New York acting teacher who found success in midlife as a character actress, including memorable turns as the mothers of Edie Falco’s character on “The Sopranos” and Lorraine Bracco’s character in “Goodfellas,” died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 89.Her daughter, Kate Shepherd, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and kidney failure.After establishing herself as a stage actress and director, Ms. Shepherd became well known as an acting instructor — her students included Gregory Hines, Bebe Neuwirth and Christopher Meloni — before she began acting in film and on television when she was in her mid-50s.She began her big-screen career with two 1988 romantic comedies: “Working Girl,” in which she secured a role from its director, her old friend Mike Nichols, appearing alongside Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford; and “Mystic Pizza,” playing an aunt of Julia Roberts’s character. She would accumulate about 40 film and television credits in the decades to come, with maternal roles a signature.In Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), Ms. Shepherd turned in a fiery performance as a protective suburban Jewish mother who is horrified when her daughter Karen (Ms. Bracco) starts dating Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), a charming young associate of Italian American mobsters from Brooklyn. “You’re here a month, and sometimes I know he doesn’t come home at all,” her character seethes to Karen in a memorable scene in the family’s living room. “What kind of people are these?”Her other films include the John Candy comedy “Uncle Buck” (1989), the Tim Robbins psychological thriller “Jacob’s Ladder” (1990) and the 1997 film version of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Leonardo DiCaprio Plays Dim in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

      by

      Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest is unlike any Scorsese protagonist because, well, he’s dumb as rocks. And that changes the film in a fundamental way.The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.Henry Hill (Ray Liotta with Lorraine Bracco) serves as our guide to the Mafia in “Goodfellas.”Warner Bros.The quintessential Scorsese protagonist, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) also serves as the narrator of “Goodfellas.” It’s not just that he is a canny operator who helps plan a fictional version of the most lucrative heist in American history — his voice and his street smarts guide us through the Mafia’s underground society. It’s difficult to imagine Ernest having the know-how to pull off either task.DiCaprio in “Gangs of New York.” To survive, his character has to think fast.Ernest is not the first DiCaprio character to live a double life in Scorsese’s world. Amsterdam Vallon and Billy Costigan, his characters in “Gangs of New York” and “The Departed,” are undercover agents embedded in sophisticated crime organizations. They must think on their feet much faster than a man whose only task is to swindle a sick woman.DiCaprio in “The Aviator” as Howard Hughes, a leader more typical of a Scorsese protagonist.Miramax FilmsIn his more antiheroic roles for Scorsese, DiCaprio has played leaders like the tycoon Howard Hughes (“The Aviator”) and the stock scammer Jordan Belfort (“The Wolf of Wall Street”), rather than stooges like Ernest.“Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro with Sharon Stone) dealt with various risks in “Casino.”Universal PicturesSam Rothstein, a.k.a. Ace (Robert De Niro), the mob-associated gambling executive in “Casino,” and Jesus of Nazareth (Willem Dafoe) in “The Last Temptation of Christ” are also leaders, ones who operate under great personal physical risk at that. Their very different lives routinely present them with challenges the likes of Ernest could never surmount.Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple figuring out their position in a stratified society.Philip Caruso/Columbia PicturesThe same goes for Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer) from “The Age of Innocence.” Their doomed romance forces them to navigate the societal mores of wealth and status, with no all-powerful figure like King Hale (De Niro) to back them up.De Niro as Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.” He was expert with weapons, if not social cues.Sony PicturesNo one would mistake Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta, the iconic De Niro characters from “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” for geniuses, but each was brilliant in his own way at the application of violence.As a comedian, Rupert Pupkin (De Niro, with Jerry Lewis) isn’t too sharp but he has other skills.20th Century FoxUnlike Bickle or LaMotta, Rupert Pupkin, the painfully unfunny would-be comedian played by De Niro in “The King of Comedy,” is no good at all at his chosen field. However, he successfully carries out a plan to kidnap the talk-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) and ransom him for a turn in the spotlight.Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) has seen better days in “After Hours.”Warner BrosPerhaps the closest a Scorsese character gets to Ernest is Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) in the black comedy “After Hours.” Like Ernest, Paul is a man in over his head (Hackett can’t hack it). But he’s an otherwise normal and competent person having one crazy night in downtown Manhattan, not a murderer.Ernest is not an average Joe suffering a series of mishaps, like Hackett. Nor is he able to serve as a Henry Hill-esque narrator-navigator for the criminality of King Hale. He barely seems aware of what’s happening with his own small stake in the wider conspiracy, much less able to explain the entire thing to others. With even the mean success of a normal Scorsese criminal out of reach, Ernest is good for little more than relaying messages about murdering unarmed sick people — a task at which he fails as often as he succeeds — and occasionally chipping in by poisoning his own wife.Indeed, Ernest is too thick — intellectually, emotionally morally — to do much of anything but allow his hand to be forced, first by King, then by the federal agents tasked with taking him down. He never really learns, never really comes clean, never really grasps the monstrousness of what’s happening until it’s too late. He’s just not sharp enough to see it, or to allow himself to be shown. The man is a zero — the mental and moral void into which King Hale’s Osage targets and their allies disappear.The Scorsese movie we get out of him is very different as a result. A sharper character would have implied that it takes some canniness, cunning or charisma to plunder a land and its people. Instead, Ernest shows us that the bigotry and greed that fueled the genocidal campaign against the Osage are ultimately stupid, and the resulting tragedy all the sadder for it. More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      From ‘Goodfellas’ to ‘Flower Moon’: How Scorsese Has Rethought Violence

      by

      The director was long identified with ornately edited set pieces. In “The Irishman” and his latest film, the flourishes have given way to blunt truths.Of all the haunting images and disturbing sounds that permeate Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” none is more upsetting than the guttural cry from Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone), a tortured wail of rage and grief that escapes her reserved visage when tragedy strikes. And it often does: “Killers” tells the true story, adapted from the book by David Grann, of how Mollie’s Osage community was decimated by murderous white men, who killed dozens of her tribe members for rights to their oil-rich land.Mollie’s howl of pain is not quite like any sound heard before in a Scorsese film. But in many ways, Scorsese is emulating her jarring cry in the ominous aesthetics of “Killers of the Flower Moon” itself, and of his 2019 feature, “The Irishman.”The movies have much in common: their creative teams, expansive running times, period settings, narrative density and epic scope. But what most keenly sets them apart from the rest of Scorsese’s work is the element by which the filmmaker is arguably most easily identified: their violence. In these films, the deaths, which are frequent, are hard and fast and blunt, a marked departure from the intricately stylized and ornately edited set pieces of his earlier work.“The violence is different now, in these later movies,” Thelma Schoonmaker, his editor since 1980, noted recently. “And often it’s in a wide shot. It’s hardly ever a tight shot, which is very different from his earlier movies, right?”It certainly is. Wide shots, for those unfamiliar with the lingo of cinematography, are spacious, open compositions, often full-body views of characters and their surroundings (frequently used for broad-scale action or establishing shots). Medium-wides are slightly closer, but still allow us to observe multiple characters and their surroundings. The “tight shots” that Schoonmaker references as more typical of Scorsese’s earlier work are the medium shots, close-ups and extreme close-ups that place the camera (and thus the viewer) right in the middle of the melee.Take, as an example, one of Scorsese’s most effective sequences, the murder of Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) in his 1990 crime drama, “Goodfellas.” When Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) kill Batts, it’s dramatized in a flurry of setups and rapid-fire edits: from a three-shot of Tommy’s initial punch, to an overhead shot of Batts hitting the floor, a low-angle composition (from Batts’s point of view) of Tommy pummeling him with his fists, then an already-dollying camera that tracks Henry (Ray Liotta) as he goes to lock the bar’s front door. Scorsese cuts back to Tommy landing more punches, then cuts to Jimmy contributing a series of kicks, with a quick insert of a particularly nasty one landing on Batts’s brutalized face. We then see, briefly, Tommy holding a gun, Henry reacting to all of this in shock, more kicks from Jimmy and more punches from Tommy, as blood spurts from Batts’s face.It’s a signature Scorsese scene, combining unflinching brutality, dark humor and incongruent music (the jukebox is blasting Donovan’s midtempo ballad “Atlantis”). It’s a tough, ugly bit of business — and it’s also pleasurable. There is, in this sequence and much of Scorsese’s crime filmography, a thrill to his staging and cutting that is often infectious.He’s such an electrifying filmmaker that even when dramatizing upsetting and difficult events, we find ourselves swept into the visceral virtuosity of his mise-en-scène. It’s this duality, the discomfort of enjoying the actions of criminals or killers or vigilantes, that makes his pictures so potent: Jake LaMotta’s beatings in “Raging Bull,” the high-speed execution of Johnny Boy in “Mean Streets” and particularly the gun-toting rampage of Travis Bickle at the end of “Taxi Driver” are all the more disturbing because of the spell Scorsese casts.That’s not how the violence works in “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon.” When people die in these films, it’s grim, nasty, divergent in every way from the dirty kicks of “Goodfellas” or “Casino” (1995). In “The Irishman,” Sally Bugs (Louis Cancelmi) is dispatched in two setups, one wide and one medium, bang bang bang; the deaths of Whispers DiTullio (Paul Herman) and Crazy Joe Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco) are likewise framed wide, hard and fast — simple, bloody, done. One of the film’s most upsetting scenes, when Frank (De Niro) drags his young daughter to the corner grocery store so she can watch him beat up a shopkeeper, is staged with similar simplicity: Scorsese keeps the scene to a single wide shot as Frank goes in, drags the man over his counter, smashes him through the door, kicks him, beats him and stomps on his hand. Scorsese cuts away only once — to the little girl’s horrified reaction.Scorsese carries this sparseness into “Killers of the Flower Moon.” An early montage of Osage people on their deathbeds concludes with the murder of Charlie Whitehorn (Anthony J. Harvey), who is killed in two cold, complementary medium-wides. Another character is hooded on the street, dragged into an alley and stabbed to death, with all of the action in two wide shots; a third is knocked down in one wide shot, then thrashed to death in a low-angle medium. The mayhem is over before it even starts.“When I was growing up, I was in situations where everything was fine — and then, suddenly, violence broke out,” Scorsese told the film critic Richard Schickel in 2011. “You didn’t get a sense of where it was coming from, what was going to happen. You just knew that the atmosphere was charged, and, bang, it happened.”That feeling — that “bang, it happened” — is what makes the violence in “Killers” so upsetting. The most jarring and scary death comes early, with the murder of Sara Butler (Jennifer Rader) as she attends to her baby in a carriage; it’s all done in one medium wide shot, a pop and a burst of blood. A late-film courtroom flashback to an inciting murder is even more gutting, because we know it’s coming, so as the characters walk into the wide shot and arrange themselves, it’s more tense than any of Scorsese’s breathless montages could ever be.In contrast to the constant needle drops of “Goodfellas” or “Casino,” the murders in “Killers” and “The Irishman” often occur without musical accompaniment, nothing to soften or smother the cold crack of a single gunshot. This is most haunting in the closing stretch of “The Irishman,” as Frank makes the long, sad trip to kill his friend Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). It’s an order from on high, and Frank is merely a foot soldier, so he can’t do a thing about his pal’s fate but dwell. Scorsese makes us dwell with him, lingering on every detail, filling the soundtrack with the thick, heavy silence of surrender. And when the time comes, Scorsese stages one of the most famous unsolved murders of our time with a glum, doomed inevitability, as Frank stands behind Hoffa, puts two into him, drags him to the middle of the freshly laid carpet, and leaves.In these films, Scorsese has stripped his violence of its flourishes and curlicues, boiling it down to its essence. Of the comparatively restrained violence of his “Gangs of New York” (2002), Scorsese told Schickel, “I don’t really want to do it anymore — after doing the killing of Joe Pesci and his brother in ‘Casino,’ in the cornfield. If you look at it, it isn’t shot in any special way. It doesn’t have any choreography to it. It doesn’t have any style to it, it’s just flat. It’s not pretty. There was nothing more to do than to show what that way of life leads to.”Perhaps Scorsese was ready to dramatize violence as he remembered it, rather than how he’d seen it in the movies. Or perhaps, at age 80, he is acutely aware of his own mortality, and that awareness is affecting how he sees and presents death in his own work. Scorsese ends “The Irishman” with Frank literally picking out his own coffin and crypt; side characters are all introduced with onscreen text detailing their eventual deaths (“Frank Sindone — shot three times in an alley, 1980”). It’s coming for everyone, the director seems to insist, not in a razzle-dazzle set piece, but in a sudden moment of brutality, shrouded in a cold, endless silence. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Paul Sorvino, Master of the Mild-Mannered Mobster, Dies at 83

      by

      A would-be singing star, he found success in Hollywood playing a variety of roles, but they were often quiet, dangerous men, like Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas.”Paul Sorvino, the tough-guy actor — and operatic tenor and figurative sculptor — known for his roles as calm and often courteously quiet but dangerous men in films like “Goodfellas” and television shows like “Law & Order,” died on Monday. He was 83. His publicist, Roger Neal, confirmed the death, at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. No specific cause was given, but Mr. Neal said that Mr. Sorvino “had dealt with health issues over the past few years.”Mr. Sorvino was the father of Mira Sorvino, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995). In her acceptance speech, she said her father had “taught me everything I know about acting.”“Goodfellas” (1990), Martin Scorsese’s acclaimed Mafia epic, came along when Mr. Sorvino was 50 and decades into his film career. His character, Paulie Cicero, was a local mob boss — lumbering, soft-spoken and ice-cold.“Paulie might have moved slow,” says Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta, his neighborhood protégé in the film, “but it was only because he didn’t have to move for nobody.” (Mr. Liotta died in May at 67.)Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role because he couldn’t fully connect emotionally, he told the comedian Jon Stewart, who interviewed a panel of “Goodfellas” alumni at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. When you “find the spine” of a character, Mr. Sorvino said, “it makes all the decisions for you.”Mr. Sorvino with Ray Liotta in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s mob epic “Goodfellas” in 1990. Mr. Sorvino almost abandoned the role.That didn’t happen, he recalled, until one day when he was adjusting his necktie, looked in the mirror and saw something in his own eyes. When he saw what he called “that lethal Paulie look,” Mr. Sorvino told The Lowcountry Weekly, a South Carolina publication, in 2019, “I knew at that moment I had embraced my inner mob boss.”He had made his mark onstage as a very different but perhaps equally soulless character in “That Championship Season” (1972), Jason Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tragicomedy about the sad reunion of high school basketball players whose glory days are decades past. In the original Broadway production, Mr. Sorvino played Phil Romano, a small-town strip-mining millionaire arrogantly having an affair with the mayor’s wife.Mr. Sorvino received a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a play and reprised the role in a 1982 film adaptation.Paul Sorvino (1939-2022)The tough-guy actor, who was best known for his role as the mobster Paulie Cicero in “Goodfellas,” died at 83.Obituary: A would-be opera singer, Paul Sorvino found success in Hollywood playing quiet but dangerous men.Remembering ‘Goodfellas’: In 2015, we asked the cast to reflect on the film’s production 25 years later. Here’s what Mr. Sorvino recalled.An Operatic Soul: “Singing allows me to be me,” Mr. Sorvino told The Times ahead of his New York City Opera debut in 2006.Paul Anthony Sorvino was born on April 13, 1939, in Brooklyn, the youngest of three sons of Fortunato Sorvino, known as Ford, and Marietta (Renzi) Sorvino, a homemaker and piano teacher. The elder Mr. Sorvino, a robe-factory foreman, was born in Naples, Italy, and emigrated to New York with his parents in 1907.Paul grew up in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and attended Lafayette High School. His original career dream was to sing — he idolized the Italian American tenor and actor Mario Lanza — and he began taking voice lessons when he was 8 years old or so.In the late 1950s, he began performing at Catskills resorts and charity events. In 1963, he received his Actors Equity card as a chorus member in “South Pacific” and “The Student Prince” at the Theater at Westbury on Long Island. That same year, he began studying drama at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York.Acting jobs were elusive. Mr. Sorvino’s Broadway debut, in the chorus of the musical “Bajour” (1964), lasted almost seven months, but his next show, the comedy “Mating Dance” (1965), starring Van Johnson, closed on opening night.Mr. Sorvino worked as a waiter and a bartender, sold cars, taught acting to children and appeared in commercials for deodorant and tomato sauce. After his first child, Mira, was born, he wrote advertising copy for nine months, but the office job gave him an ulcer.“Most of the time I was just another out-of-work actor who couldn’t get arrested,” he told The New York Times in 1972. “I had confidence in my ability, and I was angry as hell when other people didn’t recognize it.”Mr. Sorvino, second from left, with other cast members of “That Championship Season,” which started Off Broadway before moving to Broadway. With him, from left, were Walter McGinn, Richard Dysart, Michael McGuire and Charles Durning.Leo FriedmanThen his luck changed. He made his film debut in “Where’s Poppa?” (1970), a dark comedy directed by Carl Reiner, in a small role as a retirement-home owner. Then “That Championship Season” came along, starting with the Off Broadway production at the Public Theater.The film role that first won him major attention was as Joseph Bologna’s grouchy Italian American father in “Made for Each Other” (1971). Mr. Sorvino, almost five years younger than Mr. Bologna, wore old-age makeup for the role.He appeared next as a New Yorker robbed by a prostitute in “The Panic in Needle Park” (1972) but did not fall victim to the cops-and-gangsters stereotype right away. In 1973. he was George Segal’s movie-producer friend in “A Touch of Class” and a mysterious government agent in “The Day of the Dolphin.”Mr. Sorvino later played an egotistic, money-hungry evangelist with a Southern accent in the comedy “Oh, God!” (1977) and God Himself in “The Devil’s Carnival” (2012) and its 2015 sequel. He was a down-to-earth newspaper reporter in love with a ballerina in “Slow Dancing in the Big City” (1978). In “Reds” (1981), he was a passionate Russian American Communist leader just before the Bolshevik Revolution.Mr. Sorvino in 2000 with castmates in “Law and Order.” With him, from left, were Chris Noth, Michael Moriarty and Richard Brooks.NBCHe was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, complete with German accent, in Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” (1995). And he played Fulgencio Capulet, Juliet’s intense father with an ancient grudge, in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996).But in a half-century screen career, Mr. Sovino’s characters were often on the wrong side of the law. He played, among others, Chubby de Coco (“Bloodbrothers,” 1978), Lips Manlis (“Dick Tracy,” 1980), Big Mike Cicero (“How Sweet It Is,” 2013), Jimmy Scambino (“Sicilian Vampire,” 2015) and Fat Tony Salerno (“Kill the Irishman,” 2011).And in at least 20 roles, he played law officers with titles like detective, captain or chief. For one season (1991-92), he was Sgt. Phil Cerreta on NBC’s “Law & Order,” but he found the shooting schedule too demanding — and difficult on his voice.Mr. Sorvino continued to sing professionally, making his City Opera debut in Frank Loesser’s “The Most Happy Fella” in 2006.His personal life sometimes reinforced his tough-guy image. Most recently, in 2018, when the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was on trial for criminal sexual acts — and Mira Sorvino had accused him of harassment — Mr. Sorvino predicted that Mr. Weinstein would die in jail. “Because if not, he has to meet me, and I will kill the [expletive deleted] — real simple,” Mr. Sorvino said in a widely aired video interview. Four months later, Mr. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison.Mr. Sorvino’s final screen roles were in 2019. He played a corrupt senator in “Welcome to Acapulco,” a spy-comedy film, and the crime boss Frank Costello in the Epix series “Godfather of Harlem.” Mr. Sorvino with his daughter Mira Sorvino in 2007. Kathleen Voege/Associated PressHe married Lorraine Davis, an actress, in 1966, and they had three children before divorcing in 1988. Mr. Sorvino’s second wife, from 1991 until their 1996 divorce, was Vanessa Arico, a real estate agent. He married Dee Dee Benkie, a Republican political strategist, in 2014.Mr. Sorvino began making bronze sculpture in the 1970s and considered his nonperforming arts work particularly satisfying. “That’s why I prefer it,” he told The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, in 2005. “No one really tells you how to finish something.”“Acting onstage is like doing sculpture,” he said. “Acting in movies is like being an assistant to the sculptor.”Mr. Sorvino is survived by his wife, Dee Dee Sorvino; three children, Mira, Amanda, and Michael; and five grandchildren.Johnny Diaz More

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      Remembering Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’

      by

      His performance as Henry Hill includes many touches that weren’t in the script. But the producer didn’t want to cast him originally.There’s a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic “Goodfellas” that always tugs at my heartstrings. Scorsese’s movie is brutal and cleareyed and unsentimental, yes. But Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the viewer’s docent into the criminal world, injects a note of tenderness that’s all the more effective for coming out of the mouth of a slick sociopath. (The movie is based on the true-crime book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi; the real Hill attained some celebrity in the wake of the picture’s release.)It’s during the voice-over when Henry recalls as a boy envying the wiseguys who hung out at the pizza parlor and taxi stand across the street from his home. The guy who runs the pizza joint is Tuddy Cicero, brother of the mob underboss Paulie Cicero, for whom Henry will be working soon. Narrator Henry says the gangster’s full name and pauses. Then, in an exhalation that has low but strong notes of love and nostalgia, he adds, “Tuddy.”Now mind you, Tuddy is eventually revealed to be as ruthless and coldblooded a gangster as they come. It is he who puts the bullet in the back of the head of Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) at the fraudulent ceremony at which Tommy is to become a “made man.” But here is Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, clearly still besotted with a childhood idol and the life he shared with the man. Liotta, who died this week at 67, fills Scorsese’s movie with dozens of equally revelatory touches.When I was researching “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas,’” my 2020 book about the film, I asked about that moment in the movie several times. The pause and the repetition of Tuddy’s name was not in the script drafts I saw. It was Liotta’s own touch. No one I spoke with remembered whether Liotta suggested it during the voice-over recordings or just added it himself. In any event, it works. Maybe too well, for people who believe that depiction is endorsement. In a movie that relentlessly examines the lure and transgressive thrill of amorality, Liotta’s depiction of Hill is the hook that draws the viewer in.If you saw Hill on television or listened to any of his appearances on Howard Stern, you were likely to get the impression that Henry Hill was what your grandmother might call a schnook. While he did commit acts of violence both gang-related and domestic, he wasn’t intimidating. Edward McDonald, the prosecutor who got Hill and family into the witness protection program, and who plays himself in “Goodfellas,” told me that Hill was more a mob court jester than any kind of master criminal.But Scorsese’s movie isn’t just about real-life gangsters — it’s also about how we mythologize them. “Movie stars with muscle” is how Hill characterizes his crew. And Liotta was a perfect Henry, able to turn on a dime from dry charm to deadly rage. In one of the movie’s famed tracking shots, when Henry escorts his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), into New York’s Copacabana nightclub by way of a side entrance, Liotta concocted all the bits of charming business a guy like Henry would use: tip a doorman here, shout out to a cook there, steer your date by the elbow lightly, act like it’s just what you’re due when the waiter flies out from the wings and sets a personal table at the side of the stage. Liotta got suggestions from Hill himself — and more from audiotapes of Hill speaking with Pileggi. But the research Liotta did into Hill’s world, and the inner work he did, was crucial.The part came at a point when he might have been headed for a career as a character actor. He was unforgettable in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” as an ex-boyfriend of Melanie Griffith’s whose possessiveness explodes in still-shocking violence. And in “Field of Dreams” he played a reincarnation of the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson. Sometimes the crinkle in his eye reminded the viewer of the man’s corruption, but his portrayal was mostly of an awe-struck love of the game he could now play forever in a Midwestern cornfield turned ballpark.When “Goodfellas” was announced, more than one of its eventual cast members told me that it was the movie every New York and Los Angeles actor wanted in on. And Liotta was no exception. Everyone liked him for the part save the producer Irwin Winkler. He did not see the actor’s charm. In his book “A Life in Movies,” Winkler recalls Liotta coming to his table at a Santa Monica restaurant and asking for a word. “In a 10-minute conversation he (with charm and confidence) sold me on why he should play Henry Hill,” the producer wrote. When I interviewed Winkler, he said, rather sheepishly, “You heard the story of me not wanting Ray?” I told Winkler I had and said, “I can’t see anyone else doing it.” Winkler responded “Nor can I.”As it happened, I was not able to interview Liotta himself for my book. Early talks with his publicist were promising. It was possible that I could get some time with him when he was in New York promoting “Marriage Story” at the New York Film Festival; then it wasn’t. We were both represented by the same agency; no dice. He was in a film on which a few close friends of mine were crew members. Can’t go there. And as I worked on the book, I heard several accounts of an intense, serious actor who, upon deciding he wasn’t going to do something, kept to that.He had spoken about “Goodfellas” in other interviews, including an oral history that ran in GQ in 2010. The shoot had its challenges: He suffered the death of his mother halfway through and felt at least slightly shut out by male castmates like Robert De Niro and Pesci. Going through De Niro’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across a thank-you card from Liotta, and inside was a handwritten note: “Bob, Now I can tell you how much of a trip it was to work with you. You’re the best. Hope we can do it again. But I really mean Do it!” Liotta’s eagerness is palpable. The two did work together again, in “Copland.”But “Goodfellas” was irreproducible. Because it did show off his range, and it is a landmark film. Liotta’s signature role is one any actor would hope to be remembered by.Glenn Kenny is a critic and the author of “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas.’” More

    • 125 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      Paul Herman, Mainstay of Gangster Movies, Is Dead at 76

      by

      Over a four-decade career, he was perhaps best known for his role on “The Sopranos.” But he also had dozens of film credits, including “Goodfellas” and “The Irishman.”Paul Herman, who put in appearances as wiseguys and schlemiels in movies like Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” and “Casino” and three seasons of “The Sopranos,” died on Tuesday, his 76th birthday.His manager, T Keaton-Woods, confirmed the death in a statement but did not specify the cause or say where Mr. Herman died.Over a four-decade career, Mr. Herman was perhaps best known for his role on “The Sopranos” as Peter Gaeta, known as Beansie, the owner of pizza parlors who gets in trouble with a mobster — his travails include being hit on the head with a pot of hot coffee — but who manages to re-establish himself.Mr. Herman also appeared for five seasons on another beloved HBO series, “Entourage,” as an accountant who pleads unsuccessfully with his celebrity client to be less of a wastrel.He frequently played unnamed characters in the roughly half-dozen films by Mr. Scorsese in which he appeared, but in the director’s most recent feature, “The Irishman,” he had a more notable part: Whispers DiTullio, who, like Beansie, is a businessman involved with the Mafia who angers the wrong people and comes to grief.Mr. Herman at an awards show in Santa Monica, Calif., in 2014.John Shearer/Invision, via Associated PressMr. Herman’s dozens of other film credits include such crime-themed movies as “The Cotton Club” (1984), “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), “Heat” (1995) and “American Hustle” (2013), a screwball comedy about political corruption for which he and other members of the cast shared a Screen Actors Guild Award.“The only one who ever gave me the chance to play a saint is Marty,” Mr. Herman told The New York Times in 1989, referring to his role as Philip the Apostle in Mr. Scorsese’s 1988 film, “The Last Temptation of Christ.”Paul Herman was born on March 29, 1946, in Brooklyn. His movie career got going with “Dear Mr. Wonderful,” a 1982 West German film about working-class life in Newark and New York City that featured Joe Pesci in his first starring role.From there, Mr. Herman made a specialty of using his haggard but trusting mug to play bit characters like a burglar (in Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”), a headwaiter (in another Allen film, “Bullets Over Broadway”) and a bartender (in Sondra Locke’s “Trading Favors”), along with a motley assortment of gangsters.Information on survivors was not immediately available. Mr. Herman had homes in New York and Santa Monica, Calif.Offscreen, he was known for being friendly and well connected. “If you visited NYC from LA, he was the entertainment director,” the actor Tony Danza said on Twitter after his death.The music executive Tommy Mottola posted an undated black-and-white photo on Instagram of Mr. Herman sitting at a restaurant between young versions of Robert De Niro and the actress and the director Penny Marshall, who died in 2018. Mr. Mottola said Mr. Herman had been on a “first name basis with every superstar actor and musician in the world.”Mr. Herman was a part owner of the now closed but once buzzy Upper West Side restaurant Columbus, where one evening in 1989, sitting beside Al Pacino, he told The Times that he served as the nightly “social director.” The restaurant’s patrons included Mr. Scorsese, Mr. Allen and Francis Ford Coppola — all friends who had cast him in their movies over the years.Those three men had very different directing styles, Mr. Herman told The Times in 1989.With Mr. Scorsese and Mr. Coppola, “you can give them your ideas on a scene,” he said. “But with Woody, well, you just don’t do that with him because he has ideas he’s working out. You really can’t say one style is better than another, though.” More

    • 100 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      The 10 Best Titles Leaving Netflix This Month

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe 10 Best Titles Leaving Netflix This MonthAn array of great movies and TV shows are leaving for U.S. subscribers by February’s end. It’s a short month; stream these while you can.From left, Will Ferrell, Steve Coogan and Mark Wahlberg in “The Other Guys,” from 2010, a kind of bridge for the director Adam McKay between films like “Talladega Nights” and “The Big Short.”Credit…Macall Polay/ColumbiaPicturesFeb. 1, 2021, 4:52 p.m. ETThis month’s batch of Netflix exoduses feature some big names — Eastwood, Scorsese, Soderbergh, Verhoeven — and a variety of pleasures, from cop comedy to gangster sprawl to historical documentary, as well as the erotic thriller that launched a thousand imitators (and parodies).Catch these 10 titles before they leave Netflix in the United States by the end of February. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘The Other Guys’ (Feb. 11)Adam McKay began his film career making broadly funny, crowd-pleasing Will Ferrell comedies like “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights”; these days, he is known as the Oscar-winning writer and director of the sharp-edged sociopolitical studies “The Big Short” and “Vice.” This 2010 comedy was the unlikely hinge between those worlds. On its surface, “The Other Guys” is a sendup of buddy cop movies, with Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg as second-string New York police detectives. But McKay uses those spoof elements as cover, smuggling in a pointed indictment of the shenanigans that led to financial meltdown, culminating in an informative end credit sequence that now plays like a prologue to “The Big Short.”Stream it here‘Hostiles’ (Feb. 14)Making a Western in the 21st century is a tricky bit of business: It’s a genre knotted up with leftover stereotypes and assumptions, and reckoning with the true legacy of that era, particularly with regard to the genocide of Native Americans, is a bigger job than most filmmakers are willing to accept. This 2017 effort from the writer and director Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”), on the other hand, deals with those issues head on, focusing on a cavalry officer (Christian Bale) who must put aside his bigotry when he’s forced to escort a dying Cheyenne chief (Wes Studi) back to his Montana home. Cooper refuses to romanticize the era or soft-pedal its brutality. It’s a blunt, difficult movie, but a rewarding one.Stream it hereFreddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga as Norman and Norma Bates in a scene from “Bates Motel.”Credit…Joe Lederer/A&E‘Bates Motel’: Seasons 1-5 (Feb. 19)When A&E debuted this “Psycho” prequel series back in 2013, it sounded like a beating-a-dead-horse situation (especially since the franchise had already yielded three sequels, a TV movie and a remake). But the series quickly came into its own, supplementing its original exploration of the rich psychological dynamic between a young Norman Bates (Freddie Highmore) and his mother, Norma (Vera Farmiga), with expansive story lines about their family history and the town around them. Ultimately, however, the show works thanks to Highmore and Farmiga, who flesh out two of cinema’s most iconic characters into living, breathing, complicated people.Stream it here‘Basic Instinct’ (Feb. 28)The runaway commercial success of this 1992 mystery would kick-start a yearslong cycle of erotic thrillers — steamy, provocative portraits of murderously attractive women and the reckless men who must have them. But few were put together with the kind of sleek style and sweaty sleaze created by the combustible combination of the director Paul Verhoeven and the writer Joe Eszterhas. Its most controversial elements haven’t aged well, yet it remains a case study in the specific skills required to make truly great trash. It also made Sharon Stone a star, and it’s not hard to see why; her work here is a pulse-quickening combination of noir femme fatale, icy Hitchcock blonde and unapologetic MTV-era sexuality.Stream it here‘Easy A’ (Feb. 28)Another Stone — Emma — also became a star, 18 years later, thanks to her work as a big-screen “bad girl,” although in this case, it’s all an act. The director Will Gluck’s clever riff on “The Scarlet Letter” features Stone as the splendidly named Olive Penderghast, whose entirely fictitious promiscuity turns her into a high school cause célèbre. Bert V. Royal’s screenplay asks properly pointed questions about gender roles and identity while providing juicy roles for a stellar supporting cast (including Lisa Kudrow, Thomas Haden Church, Malcolm McDowell and best of all, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci as Olive’s parents). But the main attraction remains Stone, who puts across the character’s intelligence, wit, self-awareness and self-doubt with charm and poignancy.Stream it here‘The Gift’ (Feb. 28)The actor Joel Edgerton (“Loving”) made his feature debut as a writer and director with this moody, unnerving 2015 psychological thriller. He also co-stars as Gordo Moseley, who tries a bit too hard to ingratiate himself into the life of a former high school classmate (Jason Bateman) and his wife (Rebecca Hall). Edgerton’s crisp screenplay deftly dramatizes the delicacy with which social norms and “good manners” can hide our deepest secrets, and he coaxes a disturbing turn out of Bateman, giving a pre-“Ozark” hint of the darkness lurking beneath his established persona of cheerful ironic detachment.Stream it hereFrom left, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro in “Goodfellas.”Credit…Warner Bros.‘GoodFellas’ (Feb. 28)This 1990 gangster epic from Martin Scorsese seems to come and go from Netflix every couple of months, but it’s going again, so catch it while you can. Ray Liotta stars as the real-life wiseguy Henry Hill, a low-level grinder for a New York crime family whose high-spirited, backslapping life of crime descends into a paranoid nightmare of drugs and death. Robert De Niro is both affable and terrifying as Hill’s mentor, while Joe Pesci won an Oscar for his unforgettable role as a hot-tempered gunman with an itchy trigger finger. (He’s very funny, but don’t tell him that.)Stream it here‘Gran Torino’ (Feb. 28)Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this 2008 drama about a bitter and bigoted Korean War veteran who spends most of his days sitting on the porch of his Detroit home and growling at his Hmong neighbors — until he strikes up an unlikely friendship with young Thao (Bee Vang), and begins to understand the difficulties of Thao’s life. Much as his 1992 masterpiece “Unforgiven” complicated and re-contextualized Eastwood’s many Western films, “Gran Torino” subtly examines the casual racism of the actor’s police dramas, suggesting one of the most quietly daring ideas of his late filmography: that it’s never too late to change the limited ways we see the world.Stream it here‘Haywire’ (Feb. 28)Steven Soderbergh is known for many types of movies — indie character studies, Oscar-winning dramas, crowd-pleasing heist movies — but few thought of him as an action director until he built this vehicle for the mixed martial artist Gina Carano in 2012. Eschewing many of the more irritating techniques of contemporary action cinema (like cut-to-ribbons editing and overpowering music), “Haywire” is essentially a gender-flipped James Bond adventure, with Carano as a for-hire operative who gets burned by her employer (Ewan McGregor) and has to save her own skin. The results are sleek and action-packed, offering the distinct pleasure of watching Carano pick off an all-star cast (including Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Channing Tatum and Michael Fassbender) one by one.Stream it hereDan Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s documentary “LA 92” looks at the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.Credit…Nick Ut/Associated Press‘LA 92’ (Feb. 28)On the 25th anniversary of the 1992 Los Angeles uprising (following the acquittal of four white police officers who were caught on tape beating a Black motorist, Rodney King), the Oscar-winning documentarians Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin (“Undefeated”) assembled this harrowing ticktock of the protests, rioting and unrest of those days. Jettisoning such documentary standbys as contemporary retrospective interviews and “voice of God” narration, the filmmakers instead rely solely on archival footage from the time. The effect is shattering, creating a visceral immediacy that parachutes the viewer into that earthshaking moment, with no clear resolution in sight.Stream it hereAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More