'Goodfellas'

GoodFellas was the first film I'd seen that really opened my eyes to the artistry of filmmaking. To put it another way, it was the first film I saw that I realized that films could be really good.

I had to be 11 or 12. A couple of years after it was released and then aired on HBO or Cinemax. Back then, I didn't know Martin Scorsese from Martin Short or Robert DeNiro from a hole in the wall. A film either kept my interest or it didn't.

The characters and performances in GoodFellas captivated my little brain. The images were forever etched on my frontal lobe. When Karen is dumping all the cocaine when the FBI busts in the door and she goes to her dresser and pulls out the gun and stuffs it in her panties. The look on Ray Liotta's face when he laughs super hard at Joe Pesci's Tommy. When Spider tells Tommy to "fuck off" and you sit there waiting for the volcano to erupt.

Over time (I probably haven't seen GoodFellas in 10 or so years) my perspective of the film's changed quite a bit. As a youngster, I enjoyed the early, good years of Henry Hill and, later, Karen Hill. I loved the 1950s and 1960s when Hill was dapper, Jimmy Conway still looked young and vibrant and Karen had a bit of chic to her.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Henry got strung out on drugs, the house got tacky, Karen looked stressed and ragged and Jimmy looked too old. In that scene when Henry is busted by the feds and he's rushing around with the guns, the drugs and cooking dinner for his brother, it turned me off. Now it's my favorite part. Liotta looks like he'd been on a 15-day coke bender. Karen's had better days. The editing and narration give it a different feel. As if a cokehead was telling us about his day.

What I don't get nowadays is that Henry Hill went into witness protection, and, yet, he's out and about. You can find this guy. Why aren't gangsters trying to kill him? Is it because the interested parties are all dead? Do they no longer care? Is the mob so gutted over time and atrophy that it doesn't matter? If you wanted to kill Henry Hill, there's plenty of opportunities to do it.