Sopranos

Buscemi was good, maybe even great, in R dogs, but no way does he belong in this show

I did not like the Buscemi subplot. Generally felt like the "here come the guys who got out of jail" stuff was ill-conceived and underrealized.

Wow, I thought it was really good, Tony S having to break from his past all over again, digging into his insecurities, Tony B so out of sync with current reality, almost naively so. And the resolution genuinely shocked me. Really one of the great arcs of the show for my money.

And knowing Tony B couldn’t keep living a straight life, would have to break sometime, but was working so hard with his flash cards to get his massage license.

I don't think it's necessarily true that Tony is stupid- in some ways he's the sharpest character in the whole show. He's a good businessman (even those his business is rent-seeking and extortion backed up by violence), he's an effective politician, and to some extent he understands "how things work" and how he has come to be what he is- from one perspective the whole show is about him trying to better understand himself and break free from the life, though obviously he never fully achieves that. As for the other main characters, his crew are arguably dumb but know how to play the game even if some of them (all of them?) ultimately lose. And the women characters, including Livia, by and large have better self-knowledge than any of the men, even if they too make bad decisions and are both victims of circumstance and active participants in The Family.

but yeah I take the point that another theme is the general coarsening and degradation of American life under late capitalism, and that the characters are products of those processes

My favorite malapropism is when when of the old bosses finds out Tony is seeing a shrink and reassures him 'There's no stigmata about that type of thing these days.'

ooooohhh, I'm looking forward to that one.

Shit I forgot all about AJ’s transformation into shaved eyebrow gothy Robert smith jr

Stoned Chrissie is magical

Chrissie intahvention scene so good

I think my malaprop of choice in the “blink and you miss it” category is Toni informing Melfi she should get different waiting room art, maybe something by “Goyim”

did not like 'many saints', it skews like 80/20 too much fan service imo; hard to imagine chase is truly satisfied w this, my guess is he agreed to this cuz he couldn't otherwise get whatever other non-sopranos script he has made ? or hes just checked out & needed $ but that wasnt the sense i got from his interviews

I'd figure it is the same with any series you try to turn something episodic into a single feature, you lose something. I'd imagine a 8-10 hour show expanded out where you could explore the fictional world and characters a bit more beyond the main plot would perhaps worked better.

watched like 3 quarters of it, pretty bad, very stilted, some of the period stuff was cool

David Chase retire bitch

middle of the fifth season now and this feels like the weakest part of the series so far.

Many Saints of Newark: the fan service that the fans hate

Wanted to be positive going in, what a p.o.s.

Shit looked so weird, CG backgrounds and and shit like a Marvel mob movie

Ray Liotta got to turn in two shitty performances in one movie that's something

I saw the first 30-40 minutes and every line of dialogue from the black characters was some kind of signifier of being black in the late 60s, gave the actors almost nothing to work with.

David Chase retire bitch

Jeez, he wasn’t even in a healthy place to direct this. Shitty thing to say.

The recent article in Vulture is grebt.

About Gandolfini, except from an upcoming book about HBO called Tinderbox.

Many Saints of Newark: the fan service that the fans hate

Wanted to be positive going in, what a p.o.s.

Shit looked so weird, CG backgrounds and and shit like a Marvel mob movie

Ray Liotta got to turn in two shitty performances in one movie that's something

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, October 18, 2021 7:29 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTM

Liotta's boss in the first 15 minutes was embarrassing, especially when he started howling at his own joke. I thought his incarcerated, snobby-jazz-fan, quasi-twin brother was an okay performance; at least it was quiet.

I got strong Simpsons “white people drive like this” joke vibes from the scene at the body shop where everyone shooting dice and listening to James Brown and Dickie drives away listening to Tony Orlando and Dawn

Liotta as the dad was terrible but as his twin in jail I thought he wasnt bad.

What was the point of the black gang side plot apart from "there were race riots in Jersy in this year so lets put it there for some context"?

I mean don't get me wrong, I appreciate that stuff was given a voice when it wasnt in the Sopranos but it felt really shoehorned in.

S2 opening montage to It Was a Very Good Year is pretty incredible if a little on the nose.

s5 extended dream sequence is a real highlight of the series

The one where Tony is a regular business guy? I thought Gandolfini was great in that episode--totally and convincingly transformed his character.

the coach dream

Many Saints of Newark: the fan service that the fans hate

Wanted to be positive going in, what a p.o.s.

Shit looked so weird, CG backgrounds and and shit like a Marvel mob movie

Ray Liotta got to turn in two shitty performances in one movie that's something

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, October 18, 2021 7:29 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

OTM

― 《Myst1kOblivi0n》 (jim in vancouver), Tuesday, 19 October 2021 16:56 (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

OTM

A special word for the fool playing syl who seemed to think he was in an SNL sketch, an actual embarrassment that a director considered calling him back for day 2

Haha yes, Syl's character was corny enough when Van Zant was playing him, with that exaggerated swagger, but it was like a cartoon of a cartoon.

Just got to S2 when Christopher gets shot and tells Paulie and Tony about his vision of hell. I'm trying to remember if there are any other moments like Paulie and the psychic where the supernatural is presented as real?

Also, did not remember how much redemption was an early theme of the show early on. So many characters are given a chance to renounce the life and get out (Tony, Carmella, Pussy, Chris, Adriana) and none of them take the opportunity and all of them move forward with (at least on some level) eyes open that they've chosen this life. It's pretty fucking rough and existential when you know how this shit goes for everyone.

that episode with Carmela and the Jewish psychiatrist a pretty good example of that, when she intentionally mishears what the shrink says.

with (at least on some level) eyes open that they've chosen this life

Hyman Roth, GFII: "So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, 'This is the business we've chosen.'"

ID EAT HUH SHIT

Haven't seen the movie, but lots of great comments here on the Series---the women, yes, how they, maybe even more, in their own ways. struggle with adaptation, not choosing is a choice etc, meanwhile ooooh shiiit ladies,
as in Get Carter, which seems like it might have been an inspiration for Chase, although he'd never admit it if so, like with some fairly obvious plot lifts from true crime books, also documents (was sued by one former prosecutor, who may have had his own book to do, or already done) Anyway, Get Carter!

NYTimes editor, Sopranos junkie and I think podcaster, was telling NPR recently about wire transcript of two bosses talking hopes and fears for kids, seeming Sopranos as hell thematically, but Chase was nah, never hoid of it, natch.

I'm halfway thru s3 now and finding it funny for all of Meadow's scenes at Columbia they really turned the traffic outside up so loud in the mix in this 'oh the chaotic squalor of Manhattan' way.

I was talking to this ex armed forces headcase earlier about Sopranos. He's one of them that came back a bit broken from Afghanistan and always has a big bag of cans when he's taking his dog for a walk and is possibly mentally unstable and possibly quite dangerous. He told me he was so disgusted with the final scene of episode 21 of Season 6 that he put his balls on the DVD when it ejected it from the player. I just felt like a record needed to be made of this incident.

That's such a Ralphie move

finished the whole thing and it was tremendously stressful throughout, not the show you want to watch before surgery
i made it about thirty minutes into saints of newark and gave up. pure hot garbage.

nb i logged almost 80 hours of viewing time to watch saints of newark! no regrets but wow

Just finished S2 on the rewatch and not stressful so far:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNXW3OrPoDE

My recollection was that the Meadow-Jackie Jr. storyline was a big deal and played as tragedy, but upon rewatch Jackie Jr. is another Matthew Bevilacqua and can't die soon enough.

jack jr was a true dummy, thought his dead dad would protect him, unclear on the concept of death

Jackie Junior is a fucking moron but he engenders one of my fave scenes from the series
"I don't think they like you"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FdjOga6bqQ

I take it back, this storyline has all been worth it for this:

World Champion Scrabble player Jackie Aprile, Jr. pic.twitter.com/0Xt1uVWIYx

— Funhouse (@BackAftaThis) April 23, 2020

Scrabble - Classic or Dud?