Special Award: Best Film of the '90s

(Apologies - this was supposed to go up yesterday, but my home Internet connection was out all day.)

You know how we like our special categories - it's not Muriel season if there isn't at least one category that makes its voters flail in frustration. And yet, we always seem to come up with a pretty respectable winner.

But first, in third place - a tie!:



The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen) and The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick) [92/9]

Second place:



Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino) [148/14]

And your winner...





Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese) [224/19]

"I know for a fact there are people in the Muriel community much more qualified than I who could churn out an exemplary essay on Goodfellas. People who’ve probably seen the movie hundreds of times. People who most likely had a poster of the movie hanging in their dorm rooms. People who know the movie’s dialogue by heart and often rattle off lines in everyday conversation (like the bartender who just gave me a couple of lines from Joe Pesci’s “How am I funny?” rant when I told him what I was writing at his establishment).

Don’t get me wrong -- I like and admire the movie. And I can’t think of a better movie to anoint as the best film of the 1990s, especially since it practically cast a shadow over the entire cinematic decade, finding its way in many hotshot auteurs’ movies. Honestly, Quentin Tarantino’s black-comic crime yarns, P.T. Anderson’s sprawling ensemble epics, Steven Soderbergh’s cucumber-cool film noirs, the Hughes brothers’ bullet-riddled ‘hood flicks, even Wes Anderson’s visually kinetic quirkfests – they’ve all bitten from Scorsese’s violent, visceral, virtuoso display.

You can’t blame these filmmakers for cribbing from Goodfellas, since the movie, like nearly all of Scorsese’s films, is a film-studies lesson in itself. One Goodfellas diehard I know said he learned more about camera movement, lighting, editing and composition from that film than his entire time at NYU film school. Of course, when you’re dealing with a Scorsese film, you can certainly expect Marty to put his nuts (translation: give it his all) in every scene he shoots. And considering this was his first movie since Mean Streets to delve into both the Mafia and his own New York-bred, Italian-American culture, you knew damn well the man was going to come correct.

He came correct and then some, taking Nicholas Pileggi’s famed mob chronicle Wiseguy and successfully assembling a mob epic (written by both Scorsese and Pileggi) that was part period piece, part docudrama, part satire and part horror show. If the Godfather saga looked at the allure, power, danger and corruptibility of the gangster life from a classical, romantic point of view, Goodfellas did the same thing, but from a nervy, electrifying, damn-near-anarchic perspective. By laying out the story of dedicated wiseguy-turned-FBI informant Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta, using his bad-guy mug to turn in a matinee-idol performance), Scorsese blew holes in the sophisticated, honor-among-thieves mythos that’s been long associated with Mafia lore and mostly characterized mobsters as nothing more than extravagant, power-mad, swinging-dick alpha-males who’d sooner whack ya than share the wealth with ya.

Right from the now-notorious opening minutes, where Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci stop on the side of the road to savagely finish off Frank Vincent’s Billy Batts in the trunk and Liotta utters in voiceover how he’s always wanted to be a gangster (right after the camera conveniently freeze-frames on his concerned face, which suggests maybe he should’ve tried another line of work), Goodfellas immediately establishes how the world of organized crime can be both tempting and tempestuous. Once you’ve made it in good with a neighborhood mob crew, as Hill does in the movie, it’s like you become a rock star with a license to kill. But, as much as Scorsese glamorized the seductive, gangster lifestyle, he didn’t shy away from showing its brutal disadvantages. It’s a world where even the most made man can get beaten to a pulp for breaking somebody’s balls – and get later finished off by said pulp-beaters when they drive into the night to bury the body.

Diligently authentic yet playfully improvised, Goodfellas captured the New York mob stratosphere in all its bloody, beauteous glory, brought to life by a fearless, dedicated cast led by Liotta, De Niro (as Hill’s hijacking mentor, Jimmy “The Gent” Conway) and Pesci (in his immortal, Oscar-winning turn as Italian-American psycho Tommy DeVito) as the leads – practically playing the id (Pesci), ego (De Niro) and super-ego (Liotta) of the Mafia psyche.

When it comes down to it, Goodfellas is an audacious work of cinematic art. It was the first instance I saw of a movie being truly alive in each frame. There’s a reason why many of the movie’s momentous set pieces, from that glorious long, Steadicam shot of Hill escorting future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco, ballsy and beautiful) to the Copacabana and taking the mobster’s way in (a shot that was later revealed as Scorsese trying to one-up a long take De Palma did in The Untouchables), to the disturbing beatdown of Billy Batts set to Donovan’s “Atlantis,” to Henry’s cocaine-and-Harry Nilsson-fueled last day as a gangster (a sequence many has considered to be an accurate portrayal of being zonked out on coke) are still discussed, revered, ripped off and constantly YouTubed to this day.

So, even a mild fan like myself can acknowledge and appreciate Goodfellas for what it is: a dizzyingly spot-on account of living like a gangster, but also a dazzling feat of filmmaking. Besides, any movie that Steven Seagal famously disliked for being too violent is cool with me." – Craig D. Lindsey

See the full results.