Sopranos

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?

https://frinkiac.com/video/S11E06/_K0h1QBcdHscPaKJkh4cmh_YN6Q=.gif

Hit the 'When they say Jon Gotti, YOU tell them Rudolph Giuliani!' line in s4 earlier XD

The least realistic part of the entire show is the music playing for the strippers at the Bing. 90s Stones, 80s, Kinks? Sure, Chase.

Love is strong
Bite this thong

Not sure if this has ever been posted--I'd never seen it till now. Not all the jokes are great, and I'm guessing they'd like to have one of them back, but it's just funny seeing all of them out of character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6MFJwuTZII

Still hard to believe Gandolfini has been gone for so long

those blocked music queues are really annoying

agreed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srZdMGmMuck

that drove me nuts too

when the artifacts are louder than the audio? It's the internet, baby

On S3 of another rewatch. I posted on FB last year how stunned I was--stunned that I missed it--when I discovered Uncle Junior was Johnny Ola in The Godfather II. A couple of lesser connections this time: Chuck Low (Morrie in Goodfellas) in S1 as the Hasidic Rabbi with the son-in-law problem, and, across different seasons, Richard Romanus (Michael in Mean Streets, Johnny Boy's nemesis) as Dr. Melfi's husband. When I saw "Richard Romanus" in the credits, I suddenly thought "Fast Times!"--Damon, the ticket-scalper--and I could see the resemblance, even if the age didn't quite make sense, but that's Robert Romanus. Who is, as I never knew till today, Richard's younger brother.

Tony Jr. giving Carm The Matrix on her birthday a touching stand-in for every bad gift you ever gave your own parents, or that you received as a parent (or, in my case, as a teacher).

James Gandolfini gets it. pic.twitter.com/YDkW0SrOQc

— Mariah Carey's secret alt rock album (@noyrabot) July 4, 2022

Sorry, that Tweet has been deleted.

"If they say 'spaghetti and meatballs,' you tell them 'orecchiette with broccoli rabe.' If they say 'John Gotti,' you tell them 'Rudolph Giuliani.'"

Amazing!

finally watched it all this spring, back on a second rewatch, taking my time as i don't think bingeing suits the show. i wasn't expecting to love it so much. it really does live up to the hype, doesn't it? anyway, it's been making a lot of other filmed media leave me wanting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc1JP6OaeE8

i'll avoid posting clip after clip of the priceless work Sirico did for the series. Gandolfini's Pippen. RIP.

RIP ;_;

Holy cow, the timing...just started S5 in this current rewatch, and also, about six hours ago, when it arrived in the mail--before learning of this--The Sopranos Sessions.

https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/the-sopranos-sessions/9781419734946-item.html

(I loved Seitz's Mad Men book.)

In the first few pages, there's a footnote on Sirico's real-life criminal background. Still my favourite Paulie line (to Furio): "Hey, chef of the future."

RIP Paulie

A few days ago, during the Feech/lawn-care subplot, I was thinking about who I'd consider the scariest and most vicious character. Narrowed down to five, I'd go with Tony, Richie Aprile, Feech, Phil Leotardo, and Paulie.

it's livia

Actually, yes--fixated on physically scary, forgot all about her. Psychologically vicious, she's without competition. (Junior might be next on that list.)

I’ve always wanted a GIF of Paulie driving back to the tree trimmer.

🤘

Not that the Christopher Columbus episode isn't so-so, but I think "The Test Dream" from S5--the Annette Bening episode, if you will--is worse. Scripting a weird dream is fish-in-a-barrel, and this one throws in anything and everything. Short dream sequences in earlier episodes were fine, and I like the upcoming dream episode when Tony's on his deathbed, but "The Test Dream" feels like a generic Lynch imitation. I do like the non-dream conversation with Carmela that ends the episode.

i feel like this show fails most when it tries to overexplicate subconscious motivations for everything in a kind of pedantic way. some of the therapy scenes suffer with this too esp in earlier seasons

(there's a way to read this show in which it's deconstructing its own conventions and provisional narratives as it winds down although a lot of that might just be chase being a contrarian dick about fan expectations)

idk if this is a hot take but AJ is the funniest fucking character in the whole thing. such a specific type of millennial shithead and they realised him so well that everyone hates him more than the actual murderers in the show but almost everything he does or says is gold. i don't think he even registered as comedy to me before bc i was his age watching it but he rules and his all over the place politics in the last episode is so real and perfect and 2007

Yeah, it refreshes the show when Tony dumps his therapy sessions with Malfi. The concept was exhausted. But they bring it back iirc? Love the early seasons but not the last one really.

great call re AJ - his and Meadow's arcs in the last season feel like the writers getting a few things off their chests.

Would have been kind of brilliant to end S5 five minutes earlier than they did, with Tony and Carmela lying in bed trying to get their heads around what an "event planner" does.

idk if this is a hot take but AJ is the funniest fucking character in the whole thing. such a specific type of millennial shithead and they realised him so well that everyone hates him more than the actual murderers in the show but almost everything he does or says is gold. i don't think he even registered as comedy to me before bc i was his age watching it but he rules and his all over the place politics in the last episode is so real and perfect and 2007

Yes!

"I agree with that Senator Sanitorium, who says if we let this stuff go too far, pretty soon we'll be fսck¡ng dogs."

Nice reminder that Senator Sanitorium, 15 years later, was brought onto CNN as basically the moderate face of the Republican party...

Vito's subplot in S6 was such a great idea. He reminds me, in a way, of Doug Stamper in House of Cards (his obsession with Rachel), or more than one of the supporting Russian agents in The Americans, especially Dylan Baker--these characters who are out there at the edge of the main story, haunted and on the run. The shot of him walking down the road at night after his car breaks down is beautiful. (Something about the way he walks is especially sad.) I've still got most of S6 to go--I forgot the specifics of what happens to him in the end, but I know it's not good.

it's fascinating how the homophobia manifests differently among the characters as they're trying to figure out what the correct line is. despite all their posturing they still want maintain these exceptions- it's not necessarily gay to fuck a guy in prison, and penetrating is almost nbd compared to being penetrated - penetration as projection of hetero male power (including between men) is basically how the whole thing is wrapped up. and to give head to anyone is to be penetrated- it's almsot like an imperial roman or fascist sexual politics they have (of course none of them really follow it and paulie might well have fucked some guys in prison)

they all know that being gay is incompatible with being a mafioso even as they're also forced to acknowledge that gay mobsters exist and always have done (a lot of the fan reaction of the time was not dissimilar- just the idea of this fat gay mobster finding love for a while, something that actually happens irl- was derided as totally unrealistic (the actual supernatural shit in a few episodes never inspired the same incredulity)

still not sure how i feel about the storyline as a whole - i'm glad they did it and it does have a strangely different tone to it which sets it apart from pretty much the entire series in a cool way. the leather daddy thing- i'm kind of glad it's there since the gay respectability politics of the time was so opposed to representation of kinky or overly "stereotypical" gay culture, which made for some boring gay representation for a while. otoh it totally feels like something a bunch of straight boomers pitching gay things for vito to do would come up with because they think the village people are hilarious

The scene inside the gay club was pretty corny shock-value; what I really liked were the shots of Vito walking around this small New Hampshire town, popping into the antique shop, watching the firemen at work (which obviously had a secondary purpose), trying to imagine a new way of life.

Not sure how credible it is that Meadow and Finn--who are supposed to be conscientious, and left-leaning, albeit in a 2006 context--sell Vito out so readily. Surely they realize what will happen to him. (And Finn had remained silent thus far.)

tony sirico was one of the most naturally funny people ever

supposedly he did his own hair and wouldn't let the professional hair people on the show touch it

The moment when Finn first saw Vito in the truck was such a shock when the episode first aired.

Having just watched these episodes, I'm pretty sure there were a couple of very brief intimations before that concerning Vito's sexuality--shots that were almost subliminal.