Why did you do that, Ray?

Ray Liotta was the rare actor who peaked early and also peaked late.

The Goodfellas era Liotta was of course a treasure for people in my age bracket, who were just barely old enough to watch a movie like Goodfellas in 1990. That's the first time I was aware of him, though it was his fifth film and he'd had a television career dating back ten years before that. (If we're going for maximum accuracy here, I would have seen him the year before that in Field of Dreams, but since that was a small role that only came in at the end of the movie, it wouldn't have yet been enough to register him in my consciousness as a name I should know.)

Liotta worked steadily after that, making about one film a year, but Goodfellas is a hard place to start out if you are trying to top yourself, as every actor should. But Liotta wasn't really a leading man, even though he is certainly the lead in Goodfellas. He was a character actor sought out largely for sinister roles, even though he is arguably the least sinister character in Goodfellas. His role in Something Wild -- which preceded Goodfellas by four years but which I didn't see until about ten years ago -- is a better measure of how he was seen by casting directors.

But just when Liotta had entered "Remember Ray Liotta?" territory, he started doing some of the best work of his career. The last ten years featured memorable performances like Killing Them Softly, The Place Beyond the Pines, Marriage Story and The Many Saints of Newark. Granted, those films were still playing on the Liotta persona we knew, but they had a lot more depth and nuance than some of the roles he was saddled with right after he became famous. In fact, this post is not the first time I'm tagging Ray Liotta on my blog. I was inspired by his performance in Marriage Story to write this post, which says a lot of things about Liotta that I would want to say today -- so maybe I will let it do some of the work I would otherwise do here. And that performance was not like the typical Liotta performance, as he played a divorce lawyer rather than a mobster.

Liotta died in his sleep while filming a movie in the Dominican Republic. He was 67. He had a lot more to give, seeing as how he had three movies filming and two in post-production. One of those last two was Elizabeth Banks' Cocaine Bear, which is about how it sounds -- it's based on that story of the bear who ate the cocaine. That also gives you an idea how Liotta liked to play off of that persona for comedic purposes, as he did in films like Muppets Most Wanted, Wanderlust, Date Night and a film I probably shouldn't like but do: Wild Hogs. (And I also wrote about him in relation to Wild Hogs, making this actually the third time I've tagged him on my blog.)

He will certainly live on in our minds and in our memes. "Why did you do that, Karen?" is a line I still say quite a bit, alluding to that moment in Goodfellas after his wife, played by Lorraine Bracco, hastily dumps all their cocaine (speaking of cocaine) down the toilet upon baseless fears of discovery. "They would have never found it!"

Why did you do that, Ray? Why did you go and die on us when you still had more peaks yet to come?

Rest in peace. 

What the other goodfella has been up to

Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci have been earning a lot of praise this fall leading into winter (leading into summer in Australia), but there’s one goodfella who has been flying a bit under the radar.

Ray Liotta does not appear in The Irishman, but he does appear in Netflix’s other big awards contender released within the past month, Marriage Story. And I’d argue that what he’s doing here may be more interesting than what they’re doing there.

I’m sure if Martin Scorsese had written a part in The Irishman for Liotta (Harvey Keitel’s?), he would have gladly accepted it. A commitment to Marriage Story would not have prevented him. But if not being in The Irishman did, in some way, allow him to be in Noah Baumbach’s film, I’m grateful for it.

See, De Niro and Pesci are doing things they’ve done before. Many times before. That’s kind of the point. And to their credit, they are both playing significantly less hot-headed versions of their prior incarnations of these characters, in a way that particularly surprised me in Pesci's case.

Ray Liotta? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him be a lawyer before.

There are a lot of credits on Liotta’s IMDB page – 116, to be exact – and I can’t possibly know what all those roles were, especially as some of them were in movies that no one saw. But a cursory scan of the titles, coupled with the ones I’ve already seen, tells me it’s very unlikely that he’s ever played an attorney.

And even if he has, it has probably been a shady attorney, one indistinguishable from the mobster rolls that have been his bread and butter ever since Goodfellas made him famous. If not actual mobsters, then criminals, lowlifes and other rapscallions.

But in Marriage Story, he’s the best divorce lawyer money can buy – which I don’t suppose rules out the concept of him being shady. In fact, at $850/hour, maybe he’s even more shady. But he’s clearly respectable, as only people who can afford it pay for him.

And he’s really good in the role. It may have less than ten minutes of screen time in total over only two or possibly three scenes, but Liotta makes that character truly believable, an able sparring partner for superlative Laura Dern on the other side of the aisle. I believe that Liotta could argue for his client like a shark going after chum, and not just because he’s a sleazebag familiar with all the tricks. It’s because he’s an actually competent lawyer playing a kill-or-be-killed game.

Seeing Ray Liotta as a respectable lawyer tells me Liotta is not done reinventing himself as an actor. As for Pesci and De Niro, they are both paying homage to, and possibly suggesting they have nowhere still to go from, the roles that made them famous. Pesci had to come out of actual retirement to play the role, as a matter of fact. 

Now granted, there’s a bit of an age gap here. Liotta is “only” 65, while the other two both turn 77 in 2020. That’s enough of a gap, at that age, that it means the difference between still going strong and starting to wind down.

But when I saw that Scorsese had “rejected” having Liotta in his movie – not that his calculation was probably anything like that – it kind of made me wonder why Liotta didn’t get to take part in the fun.

And I’m happy with the answer “He’s still got too many new surprises left in him.”

Escorted out by Ray Liotta

The timing of our move was pretty perfect as far as the TV season goes.

Since all the network shows stopped airing within the past couple weeks, our DVR was pristine by the time this past weekend rolled around. I managed to finish the season finale of Fringe on Friday night, and that was our last obstacle to a clean DVR. Something you never otherwise see in our house.

And so there would also be no obstacle to saying goodbye to the old house with a couple movies, one on Friday night and one on Saturday night, before we tore the equipment out of the wall on Sunday.

Ah, but what movies? What movies would best encapsulate the three years and three months we lived in this place? What best to encapsulate the house where we lived when our son was born? The house where we lived when, uh, we bought our first house?

How about Date Night and Wild Hogs?

You laugh, but I'm serious.

Our Netflix instant queue is chock full of movies we never want to watch right now. They all feel like homework of some kind. And we wanted to watch something light, but also something that had the possibility of being really good. Since we were pretty good with catching up on our 2011 comedies, that left the new releases in the Redbox machine largely lacking in palatable options.

So I swung by the library on Friday and selected a couple contenders. I started with a classic I knew my wife loved: Big. But then when it came to the other two, I developed sort of a theme: underappreciated comedies that we discovered while living in this house.

That's where Date Night and Wild Hogs come in.

Speaking of the birth of our son, we watched Date Night the day after we got home from the hospital. You'd think the sheer panic of parenting on our own for the first time would have sapped our senses of humor, but we just laughed and laughed at it. About a year before that we watched Wild Hogs on a random night in September. My wife was researching road trip movies for a script she was writing, so I brought it home from the library on a lark. We ended up really enjoying it.

What surprised me is that my wife opted for both choices over Big. It's not that she likes them better than Big, just that they ... felt right for the occasion.

We got a late start on Friday night, so we went with the shorter one, which was Date Night. So the cinematic classic Wild Hogs was left for the grand finale on Saturday night.

And sometime in the middle, I realized that these two movies both feature Ray Liotta.

It was certainly a coincidence. He has a sizable role as the primary antagonist in Wild Hogs, the menacing leader of a biker gang called the Del Fuegos. I definitely remembered that he was in it. But in Date Night he has about five minutes of screen time, playing a mob boss. 

Still, I thought it was funny that the comedies of Ray Liotta would be the way we would say farewell to our old house, cinematically speaking.

But kind of appropriate, right? I mean, Ray Liotta is consummately that guy who would show you the door. Or else he'd get one of his lackeys to do it. Either way, Ray Liotta wants you to get the fuck out of here.

Which we did yesterday. Last night, we slept in our new home for the first time.

For those of you seriously doubting our taste in comedies right about now, I should tell you that neither film tickled us the way it had the first time. But both did serve to remind us of some of the unexpected movie-watching joy we attained in the last place we lived before we owned a home.

Now, our first movie in the new place should definitely be ... The Money Pit.