Was Scorsese Messing with Us?

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I've never watched the entire movie Goodfellas, but a caught a bit of it flipping through the channels tonight, and was shocked by one of the scenes I saw.

Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta, and Robert De Niro are sitting around the table of someone's mother, and Robert De Niro begins shaking ketchup onto his pasta! Look, as an Irish-Catholic growing up with lots of Italians, my family had only second-hand knowledge of "proper" Italian eating, but in my entire childhood I do not ever recall anyone doing something as nasty as substituting ketchup for pasta sauce.

Was this supposed to be a joke of some sort?

Comments

  1. Anonymous12:15 AM

    that scene was ad-libbed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah7:49 AM

    Does that mean De Niro was messing with us instead?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thomas L. Knapp9:09 AM

    Never noticed that before, but at the end of the movie Ray Liotta's character (I won't give full context as it would be a spoiler) complains that the delivery "Italian" he ordered has ketchup on it. So maybe there's some thematic import to the whole thing.

    ReplyDelete

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