Movies in a Minute: Goodfellas

Henry Hill: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to narrate my life, first person style. None of that third person omniscient narrator bullshit for me.

"When I was a kid, all the coolest people were gangsters. They had card games late into the night, protected their own from the police, and stole cigarettes from the rich to provide for their nicotine starved family. Tommy DeVito and I were friends from the beginning, and Jimmy Conway was our mentor in all things crime."



Jimmy Conway: "Henry, today you learned the greatest things in life. Never rat on your friends, keep your mouth shut, don't cooperate with the police, and that nothing is more satisfying to the audience like the irony of a well established fact being overturned in a movie's third act."

Henry Hill: "Whatever we wanted, we took. And if anyone complained they got hit so hard they never complained again. If we wanted a girl group song in the background setting the tone without paying off the half mad, half insane producer responsible for it, it happened. It was so easy."

Tommy: "Anyone want to hear another droll anecdote about police brutality and its effect on Italian minorities in today's society?"

Henry: "Tommy, you're really funny."



Tommy: "You think I'm funny? How am I funny? Am I like a clown? Do I amuse you? How am I funny?"

Chris Columbus: "You'd be wasted in stand-up, but you'd make a hilariously threatening but still PG-13 appropriate nemesis to a homicidal ten year old. Wanna sign on for my picture?"

Tommy: "Thanks, I've been trying to classify my humor style for years, but this guy won't do shit about it."



Henry: "Then I met Karen. Karen was great. She had these eyes like Liz Taylor's and hair that could be piled higher than Priscilla Presley's."

Sadako: "And this was in the days before bumpits were patented."

Jimmy: "Henry, we were about to send out invitations to the next box social--can you swing by the wharf and pick up a few dead fish?"

Henry: "Shit, it's Karen. I gotta go thwart an attempted rapist."



Henry: "I swear to god, if you touch Karen again, you're dead! Here, hon, hide this."



Karen: "I know there are women who would have gotten out the minute their boyfriends gave them a gun to hide after he pistol whipped a guy who tried to grope them. But I was turned on. And it was more convenient than carrying around a rape whistle."

Henry: "Welcome back from prison, Billy!"



Billy Batts: "Now go home and get your shine kit, Tommy."

Tommy: "MOTHERFUCKER!"

Sadako: "For those of you new to mafia flicks, wondering why Billy is going the way of LiLo's career, that's the Real Housewives equivalent of flipping a table, yanking out a weave, or not inviting your friend to a Labor Day party."

Henry: "We had a real problem with Billy Batts. This was a touchy thing. Before you killed a made guy, you had to have an okay, you hadda have a good reason, like he gave you a nickname that someone else already had, or he made a joke about your wife having a ninety pound mole removed from her ass."

Jimmy: "Henry, you know that thing? With the stuff? From the before time?"

Henry: "Um."



Jimmy: "The thing we bonded over by beating and then stabbed? They're putting up a new development, and we gotta dig it up and rebury it. Get your car, a shovel, and the best of the Shangri-Las."



Winston the Wolf: "I'm sensing an untapped business market."



Henry: "Saturday night was for the wives, but Friday at the Copa was for the girlfriends. Sunday was for lobbying that gender relations be set back even further than they already were."

Karen: "Henry? Henry, wake up. I know about that whore you're sleeping with."



Henry: "What are you, nuts?! I got enough to worry about, wondering whether to file Frankie the Wop under F or W in my Rolodex, I gotta come home to this?"

Karen: "The truth was I couldn't kill him. No matter how bad I felt, going down on him for cash withdrawals was better than going down on Johnny Two Times or Paulie Walnuts any day."



Jimmy: "You gotta go back to Karen, Henry. You take a break and then go back to her and things'll be great. But no divorce. We're not animali."



Martin Scorcese: "Get it? Because they kill people for tiny things but think divorce is a great evil. Get it?"

Sadako: "Yup, Marty, I'm wearing the same oh, the quaint customs of the natives face I wore when I saw The Gods Must Be Crazy."

Henry: "Then it was time for a transitional scene, so it was off to jail. When you think of prison you get pictures in your mind. All these rows and rows of guys with bars. For wiseguys, it wasn't like that. We ruled the joint."

Phil Leotardo: "Are you fucking kidding me? Thin sliced garlic and fresh sauce when I was eating grilled cheese off the radiator?"

Sadako: "Stay in school, kids."

Jimmy: "Tommy's getting made!"

Henry: "We've finally got one of ours in?"

Jimmy: "Yup. On an entirely unrelated note, we really got away with that that Billy Batts shit, huh?"

Henry: "Tommy was gonna be a made guy. It was a license to do whatever you wanted, and no one would fuck with you. Jimmy and I could never be made because of our Irish blood. But Tommy's sociopathic tendencies and his last name that ended in a vowel were finally getting the respect they deserved."



Jimmy: "I can't believe it. It was set up. They fucking whacked him."

Henry: "Batts was a made man. Tommy wasn't. It was payback for killing Billy Batts and a lot of other things. We had to sit still and take it. They even had the nerve to shoot Tommy in the face so his mother couldn't have an open casket funeral."

Sadako: "Now if she wants to draw a portrait of his likeness with two dogs, she'll have to either do it from memory or rent one of the Home Alone movies."

Henry: "Then it was the seventies, and wiseguys turned to cocaine, porn, and paranoia. We even enlisted our old babysitter to help smuggle coke in baby diapers."

Sadako: "But at least you didn't do anything really bad like listen to ABBA instead of the Stones on your drug runs."

Police: "Police!"

Henry: "Karen? What'd you do with the drugs?"

Karen: "I flushed them! The cops were gonna find them."

Henry: "WHAT?! Coke's the gangster 401K! I was depending on that."



Karen: "They had a search warrant!"

Henry: "Time to pull a Sammy the Bull."

Sadako: "Squealing to the police: the gangster's Medicaid?"

Henry Hill: "And now it's all over. I testified for the prosecution, and now I'm in the witness protection program. Waiting around like a regular guy. The soundtrack to my life going from the Crystals to Muzak. Goomars without Aquanet. I ordered spaghetti with marinara sauce the other day and got egg noodles with ketchup. I get to live my life like a regular schnook."

Sadako: "Is the constant threat of violence by an angry associate considered worse or better than the marinara sauce incident?"