Word: mobbed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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GoodFellas, the homicidally funny fresco of a Mafia family that Scorsese has made from the Nicholas Pileggi book Wiseguy, is the centerpiece in a new rogues' gallery. Mob movies are gathering, like capos at the Appalachia conference, from all over America. You want Italian-American hoods of the New York City stripe? We got 'em by the hundreds in GoodFellas. In My Blue Heaven, written by Pileggi's wife Nora Ephron as a kind of comic coda to the Scorsese picture, Steve Martin plays a Mafia rat in a Witness Protection Program out West. At Christmas, Paramount has The Godfather...
What's going on here? Why is Hollywood once again married to the Mob? It's not that the genre is especially popular these days. (The Untouchables was the only gangster blockbuster of the '80s.) Nor is it that the Italian underworld taps a nerve in today's body politic. Drug lords, often black or Hispanic, are the civic scourge of the moment, and they get their movie due only in Abel Ferrara's rancid, megaviolent King of New York, in which a white man (Christopher Walken) leads a rainbow coalition of pushers. Whatever charm the Mafia boss still possesses...
...real reason for the spate of Mob movies is that a few powerful artists want to make them. Directors love the form because its speed and anarchy spoke to them as young moviegoers. More important, it allows them to confront, in code, the awful ethnic schisms of American life; Italian vs. Wasp stands in for black vs. white. Actors love Mob movies because, now that the western is dead, the genre gives them one last chance to strut their maleness in a traditional setting. They can act like cowboys without having to ride a horse. And, as avatars...
...Italian-American brothers who move back to their mother's house in Brooklyn, is cleverly written and brightly acted. But that doesn't compensate for its rancid rehashing of every Italian stereotype known to Hollywood. (One brother is a playboy; another a wheeler- dealer with a hint of Mob connections; a third almost gives Mom a heart attack when he brings home a Jewish girl...
BEST SELLERS: Lady Boss by Jackie Collins -- The latest Hollywood antics of a daughter to the Mob. The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough -- 110 B.C. and all that. Four Past Midnight by Stephen King -- Novellas from the horror master. Memories of Midnight by Sidney Sheldon -- Another plot-till-you-plotz spy novel. Surrender the Pink by Carrie Fisher -- Star Wars, WordStar, it all comes easy to this actress-author. The Plains of Passage by Jean Auel -- Another big woolly mammoth from the queen of ice-age romance...