Word: ratting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then there was the dirt. In the late 19th century, when curators were presumably less anal than they are today, dirt was considered a positive adjunct of museum art; it lent mellowness and venerability. Ryder's studio was filthy, a pack rat's cave. "It is appalling, this craze for clean-looking pictures," he once complained. "Nature isn't clean." To distinguish between the dirt, the dust, the brown varnish, the pigmented glazes and the goo underneath and then to stabilize the surface to preserve some notion of Ryder's intentions have always been a conservator's nightmare...
GOODFELLAS. The fellas -- Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci -- are anything but good in Martin Scorsese's homicidally funny portrait of a Mafia family. They kill, maim and rob; they rat on their friends or slit their throats. This vast fresco of criminal amorality is also a how-to book for making it big and gaudy in New York City...
WHAT HAPPENED WAS THIS by Josh Greenfeld (Carroll & Graf; $18.95). This zesty comic novel about a young man's climb from Catskills waiter to Hollywood film director who testifies against his left-wing friends during the McCarthy era could have been called What Makes Sammy Rat...
...discipline or distemper. At their best they have a sense of honor and a fear of their bosses that would do credit to the medieval church. At their worst they play their sick whims on the weak, and when the sport grows tiresome, they rat on their friends or slit a few throats. They are gangsters, hit men, wise guys -- good fellas, in the parlance of dapper don John Gotti and wizard filmmaker Martin Scorsese...
...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 Part III, a climax to the gangland Nibelungen Ring, starring Al Pacino, Diane Keaton and a cast of many Coppolas...