Word: mafia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mafia runs a lot of the trafficking circles and they have ways of getting around the law," said Heather L. Feldman, a Brandeis graduate student and coordinator of the Lubin Symposium, which will address trafficking this year...
Until a few days ago, Ben Sobol (Billy Crystal) was just an ordinary, humdrum, neurotic psychiatrist whose lot it was to aid those more neurotic than he. But he had the misfortune to rear-end a Mafia vehicle and to view the contents of its trunk. The driver of the car, a clay-faced hood known only as "Jelly" (Joe Viterelli), told Ben to forget the insurance. Forget any of it ever happened. Forget there was a man laying bound and gagged in the trunk...
...practically has an anxiety attack of his own when Paul interrupts a therapy session to say that he needs counseling. "What is my goal here?" Ben asks. "To make you a happy, well-adjusted gangster?" No, Paul says; there's a big meeting of the country's major Mafia families in two weeks, and he can't afford to appear weak. He needs a quick cure. Ben takes the case-how can he say no to the man with the hired guns? and thus begins a wild romp that shifts rapidly between the genres of "parodistic mobster movie" and "canned...
Given the premise of Analyze This, we have certain expectations. We know that there must be a) a scene in which Robert De Niro embarrasses himself by spouting touchy-feely psychobabble to his Mafia rivals and b) a scene in which Billy Crystal is called upon to impersonate a gangster. I will spare you the suspense; both of these scenes are indeed in the film, one of them more than once. But the film has surprises, even within the more predictable scenes. Primo Sindone (Chazz Palminteri)'s reaction to Paul's expressed desire for "closure" is priceless...
There are several factors in Elvis' "inexorable decline," none of which, as Guralnick emphasizes in his introduction, provides a "simple or monolithic" explanation but which make his death seem all but inevitable. His life is presented as a round of silly escapades with his seemingly ever-present "Memphis Mafia," a group of employees/syncophants/friends whose main purpose was to indulge Elvis' whims, trysts with multiple girlfriends and performances in movies and concerts of varying quality. This was all fueled by a constant stream of drugs, mainly amphetamines, to which he became addicted in Germany while serving in the Army and which...