The Last Decade of Cinema 25 films from the nineties

By Scott Ryan

“ I feel like Scott Ryan could have written this directly to me and others in our generation who have basically given up' on movies. It is at once tribute and eulogy, so bittersweet.” Screenwriter Helen Childress (Reality Bites)“ The nineties are lucky to have Scott Ryan.” Actress Natasha Gregson Wagner (Two Girls and a Guy, Lost Highway)Ah, the nineties. Movies were something in those days. We' re talking about a decade that began with GoodFellas and ended with Magnolia, with such films as Malcolm X, Before Sunrise, and Clueless arriving somewhere in between. Stories, characters, and writing were king; IP, franchise movies, and supersaturated superhero flicks were still years away. Or so says Scott Ryan, the iconoclastic author of The Last Days of Letterman and Moonlighting: An Oral History, who here turns his attention to The Last Decade of Cinema— the prolific 1990s. Ryan, who watched just about every film released during the decade when he was a video store clerk in a small town in Ohio, identifies twenty-five unique and varied films from the decade, including Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society, and The Shawshank Redemption, focusing with his trademark humor and insight on what made them classics and why they could never be produced in today' s film culture. The book also includes interviews with writers, directors, and actors from the era. Go back to the time of VCR' s, DVD rentals, and movies that mattered. Turn off your streaming services, put down your phones, delete your Twitter account, and take a look back at the nineties with your Eyes Wide Shut, a White Russian in your hand, and yell “ Hasta la vista, baby” to today' s meaningless entertainment. Revel in the risk-taking brilliance of Quentin Tarantino, Amy Heckerling, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others in Scott Ryan' s magnum opus, The Last Decade of Cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fayetteville Mafia Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781949024715

Scott Ryan

SCOTT RYAN has been teaching Earth Science at Ardsley Middle School in Ardsley, New York, for almost 20 years. His teaching career spans almost 30 years and includes teaching Earth Science, Science 8, Biology, and Physics. He resides in Ossining, New York.

Book preview

Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over.

If you are ever in a position where you have to defend a ridiculous claim about an entire industry, such as something as highfalutin as the nineties were the end of complex movies, I sure hope you get to start off with a mic drop example like Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. Not only do I believe this is the best movie of 1990, it really should be in any argument for one of the best movies ever made. I love that this is where I get to start my argument. It feels more like where it should end.

The film was released eighteen years after The Godfather and three months before The Godfather, Part III. I often wonder if Francis Ford Coppola’s stomach ached when he saw what his friend had accomplished with Goodfellas. There was nothing Coppola could change about Part III. It was filmed. It was done. The third Godfather picture is much maligned and rightfully so. It is clunky, sluggish, and is a great example of a movie that just feels old. That is from rewatching it today, but I wonder how the film would have been received in December 1990 if it didn’t have to be compared with the superior Goodfellas, which blew open the genre of Mafia movies with its plot and pacing. Based on the book Wiseguys by Nicholas Pileggi, the script, written by Scorsese and Pileggi, took the real-life story of Henry Hill and melted it down into a rocket ship of a movie—destroying everything, including its characters’ lives, in its path. But that comes later; at first it is all fun in the sun.

Rags to Riches

Goodfellas begins in New York 1970 where we are introduced to Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). They have a dead body in the trunk that isn’t as dead as they thought. As they finish the job with knives and guns, the camera zooms in on Liotta’s face. We hear the voice-over As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster, the title card of Goodfellas appears on-screen, and the music soundtrack kicks in with Tony Bennett’s version of Rags to Riches. Pop songs from the fifties will play for the next fourteen straight minutes of the film, one after another; they play quietly, and most times in their entirety. This is only layer number one of the soundscape for this film. One can imagine these songs playing as 45s on a jukebox or coming out of a transistor radio in any of the establishments the young Henry Hill runs between doing odd jobs for the mob. Pop music was the language everyone spoke in the fifties and for the next few decades. Everyone wasn’t blocking out the world with their own music on their own headphones.

The second layer of sound, also quieted, is the dialogue spoken between the characters we watch on-screen—Paulie (Paul Sorvino) giving orders to the mobsters busting each other’s balls as they hang out on the street. Characters are talking to each other nonstop as a young Henry performs mundane tasks for all of them. These pointless conversations happen while the music plays, but neither track is turned up to a normal volume. The third and main sound is adult Henry’s voice-over. Liotta is explaining to us what is going on. All three of these soundscapes are coming at us while the pictures are moving fast. These opening fourteen minutes takes us through Henry’s teenage years, and it is virtually impossible not to long to be him. We can totally see why being a part of this world is enviable.

Scorsese says in the DVD commentary that the film’s concept is nostalgia of a world filled with gods. This is a perfect description of what the opening sets up. Paulie runs the neighborhood with his eyes. A look from him can make the baddest bad buy quiver. Even the middle- to lower-level men in the organization are seen as gods through young Henry’s eyes. The entire film revolves around the idea of a world filled with gods, but I would add one change to Scorsese’s description, and say Goodfellas is a film filled with nostalgia for a time when this country was competent. There is no doubt all of these men are evil. They commit heinous crimes—they murder, steal, and terrorize—but they also provide a service for the neighborhoods. The reason the Mafia existed in the first place is because the country banned alcohol, and the Mafia just supplied citizens with that service. It was a group of people who got things done. In a time when we have to wait twenty minutes in a Starbucks drive-through for a cup of coffee, it is a joyous experience to watch an organization that is competent. But there is a price to be paid for this service, but we don’t have to pay it for the first fifty-two minutes of the film.

Music plays for so much of the front part of the film. There are only a few scenes that play without a song scoring the film. Each of those scenes is key to the story. The first time the music stops is when Jimmy comes to bail out Henry, who is arrested as a teenager for the first time. There is nothing to distract us when De Niro tells the teenager the most important thing is to never rat on his friends and to always keep his mouth shut. These are the two rules Henry will eventually break. Scorsese wants us to pay attention, but only for a moment; the music kicks back in as they walk out of the courtroom and everyone, including Paulie, is there to congratulate Henry on getting his cherry popped. Billy Ward and His Dominoes start singing their up-tempo version of Stardust, and we are back on the good-times train.

Be My Baby

Consequences are not a part of this story at this point. The concept that sets this film apart from other movies is that it isn’t told like a movie, it is told like a story. Henry Hill and, later on, Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) are sitting down to tell you the story of their life. Many films use voice-over to help the audience keep up with the plot, but this is the opposite; the voice-over is the plot, and what we witness on the screen is the backstory. It’s all just a goodfella spinning a yarn for the ages. One of the first scenes to prove this point is the first of three oners I want to cover. A oner, for those of you who weren’t film nerds in the nineties and didn’t discuss these kinds of things over and over at Video Time, is a sequence in a film that has no edits. The actors complete all the action in one take. There is no coverage or second chances. The DP (director of photography) for the TV show thirtysomething Ken Zunder explained a oner to me as, A oner doesn’t mean the camera just sits there in a wide shot. It moves in and moves out. The camera moves with, around, through, and behind the actors. The more complex the shot, the better for film geeks like myself. But Scorsese wouldn’t just do a oner without a reason. From 16:45 to 17:51, we are introduced to all the gangsters in Henry Hill’s world as he enters a bar. This is not the famous oner with Lorraine Bracco and Ray Liotta, which we will get to in a moment. This is a shorter one, but it has a ton of actors saying hello to Liotta while he voices over their names. Scorsese explained why he had them talk directly to the camera: Introducing a character was not as important to do it conventionally. It would take up too much time conventionally. We had other things to talk about. The film is an exercise in storytelling, not moviemaking. So to follow moviemaking rules would be pointless. Therefore, it isn’t really breaking the fourth wall by having these characters introduce themselves to the audience any more than it is when Liotta, at the end of the film in court, jumps off the witness stand and delivers his voice-over directly to the audience as he walks out of the courtroom. Scorsese is moving the story along. The story, not the plot. The actions of every character comes from the idea that someone is telling you a