Sopranos

[DeAnna]

Also supports the "we the audience got whacked" concept. We saw black...their lives go on but we can't see it any longer. We got killed. The ultimate hit.

I dunno...that concept is going a little toooo far.

 

[D-Dogg]

I dunno...that concept is going a little toooo far.

:shakesfist:

 

[Chaplin]

Interesting blog post by a movie reviewer.

June 11, 2007 (Monday):

The Fat Lady Sings

SPOILERS for the final episode of The Sopranos...

So, for fans of the long-running HBO mob drama, the fat lady has sung, but did she hit a low note or a high one?

By now, the controversy has boiled over, being discussed in front of water coolers, on the Internet, and on TV and radio talk shows. Today, it was almost impossible to go anywhere and not hear someone venting or otherwise giving an opinion about the suddenly infamous fade to black. (I pity those who recorded the show last night but have not yet watched it.) If nothing else, David Chase's unorthodox conclusion to his series has done for The Sopranos what nothing else has accomplished in years: brought it to the forefront of pop culture (if only briefly) and gotten people talking about it. If that was his goal (and it certainly was at least part of it), then he had succeeded.

How did I react?

First of all, I wasn't impressed by the majority of the episode. I thought it was anticlimactic, poorly focused, and an unfit way to bring to an end one of the most celebrated TV shows of the decade. Then came the final five minutes... Brilliantly conceived and executed, they set up two possibilities: a simple night out for the Soprano family or a bloodbath. Chase, who wrote and directed the episode, ratched up the tension slowly but surely by cutting back and forth between Tony, Carmela, and A.J. at the table and Meadow ineptly parking her car. The camera caught nefarious looking men all around the restaurant. The Meadow entered, Tony looked up, and it all went black, with the strains of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" cutting off as suddenly as the final image vanished.

My initial reaction: WTF? A moment's stunned disbelief, then a chuckle. The more I thought about it, the more I loved what Chase did. The kind of cajones it requires to end something like that - forcing the audience down the "choose your own resolution" path and turning his back on closure. Surprising everyone. When you think about it, almost any ending would have been a letdown, so Chase elected an approach that no one could have predicted. Those who received an early publicity copy of the episode were convinced that the final minute had been excised from the DVD. But, no, that's how it ended.

I don't lean one way or another where Tony's future (or lack thereof) is concerned. Maybe he lives (un)happily ever after, paranoid but surrounded by his loved ones. Maybe he goes down in a hail of gunfire. The series is over. Many believe that Chase selected this ending to leave the door open for a movie. I don't accept that. I think this is as final as it gets. Even another future minute of The Sopranos would violate the ending and render it pointless and impotent. I'm willing to take Chase at his word when he says that Tony and his family will never again appear in any form, be it on the big or the small screen. (And, yes, Sean Connery did say "never again" before Never Say Never Again.)

Two titles came to mind in the near-term aftermath of Made in America (the episode's title): Blakes 7 and Limbo. The former, a British TV series that first aired in the late '70s and early '80s, came to a sudden and violent conclusion that left things shockingly unresolved. The latter, a John Sayles film from the '90s, cut off at a critical moment and left it to each viewer to decide how things would turn out. I loved the endings of both Blakes 7 and Limbo, but many did not. In fact, during the screening of Limbo, people in the audience threw things at the screen when the end credits began rolling. I have never seen such an explosive reaction before or since in that theater, regardless of the movie or the crowd.

We demand closure from our TV shows, books, and movies. We feel cheated without it. I can't say I don't understand the impulse (and I often agree with it), but there are instances when the decision to go another route feels right. It also takes courage. Had Chase elected to gun down Tony and his family at the restaurant, he would have taken a lot less heat today, but how would that have been interesting or different? We've seen it in The Godfather saga and countless other gangster films. That would have been the easy way out, the sell-out. Paradoxically, although it would have provided the greatly desired "closure," it would have made for a less memorable fade out.

There are many reading this who disagree with me. Violently. They feel betrayed by Chase and are angry at him and HBO. In a way, I am also irritated, but not by the ending. The Sopranos has been treading water for a while now, meandering pointlessly here and there. It has come back into its own during the last few weeks but can three or four solid episodes dispel the sense of staleness that has grown over the past three years? Chase's mistake was in taking HBO's money and keeping the show running past its expiration date. Made in America should have aired in 2004, not 2007. Thank god Battlestar Galactica is going off after one more season. It will be spared a similar fate.

I'm not going to defend my opinion of the show. People will like it or hate it, with few falling in between. I can understand both sides. Above all, however, I'm pleased that there's finally something to talk about with this program, and that it didn't slip away quietly. Rage, rage against the dying of the light... Watching 24 this year was akin to viewing the slow, inexorable deterioration of a good friend. That show's final episode only underlined the decay. The Sopranos chose another way out. Like it or hate it, you will not forget it.

The fat lady has sung. Can she get off the stage without being lynched?

 

[D-Dogg]

http://blog.silive.com/advanceupdate/2007/06/exclusive_an_interview_with_so.html

Interview with Chase in the Newark Ledger.

Some interesting stuff in there...and the reporter debunks the rumor of the three guys in the diner mentioned above.

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

:shakesfist:

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

I was entertained. Thanks, David.

Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."

He doesn't seem like a movie is on his agenda.

Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," Chase says. "To me, that's Tony."

Thought I'd quote that, since we've been discussing it in this thread a bit.

-- After all the speculation Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.

"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," Chase says of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.

That was one of my favorite parts of the episode. He was all excited...

-- Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show, Tony killed at least one, if not both, of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.

 

[Southpaw]

Hmmmm.

Tony Soprano's Final Ride Down the New Jersey Turnpike

By Max Fraser, The Nation. Posted June 11, 2007.



After the 86th and final episode, The Sopranos has come a long way since it burst into our collective consciousness in 1999 -- and along with it the iconic role the mob has in the American imagination. Tools
Editor's note: HBO broadcast on Sunday night the final episode of The Sopranos, of which Associated Press TV reviewer Frazier Moore writes, "In the end, the only ending that mattered was the one masterminded by Sopranos creator David Chase. And playing against viewer expectations, as always, Chase refused to stage a mass extermination, put the characters through any changes, or provide his viewers with comfortable closure. Or catharsis. After all, he declined to pass moral judgment on Tony -- he reminded viewers all season what a thug Tony is, then gave him a pass." Read the full review of the last episode here.

Two doors shut on Tony Soprano during the second-to-last episode of the iconic HBO creation that bears his name, the series that David Remnick eulogized in The New Yorker as "the greatest achievement in the history of television." The first is slammed closed by his psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, ending what seems to be their final session. It comes as a symbolic rupture in the show's original comic conceit, which set the panicked paterfamilias in the therapist's plush armchair, seeking relief from the twin stresses of organized crime and suburban domesticity. The second door Tony shuts behind himself, a final barricade against a hostile world fast closing in on him. We watch the door through his eyes with an ominous sense of foreboding; the nearness of an end -- the end -- is palpable. Instead of the man whose sins the late Ellen Willis, in her essay "Our Mobsters, Ourselves," found "in all of us," we are now inside of him, taking one final look back over the last eight years. What do we see?

No television show in recent memory has earned the critical accolades heaped on The Sopranos since its premiere in 1999. A cable sensation of unprecedented proportions, it swept up Emmys, cultural cachet and middling acting careers (most notably those of James Gandolfini and Edie Falco) during seven at times painfully drawn-out seasons.

From its earliest episodes, The Sopranos was compared with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy and Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas and eventually joined them in a holy trinity of American Mafia fiction. Like its predecessors, the show has been a rich send-up of the old Horatio Alger rags-to-riches narrative so closely associated with our collective national identity. But instead of the traditional portrayal of the Mafia -- bound by its code of omertà and a glorification of violence -- The Sopranos often gave us a brutal and diminished anachronism. "The show took the concept of il declino del padrino -- the decline of the godfather -- and made it very central to the series," says George De Stefano, author of An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America. Or as Regina Barreca, who has written about the show and teaches English literature at the University of Connecticut, puts it, "These guys are trying to be larger than life figures, but it's not possible. They're in New Jersey -- it's not even the Brooklyn mob. They're always one step removed from greatness."

The distinction is significant, and not only because of the stench emanating from the Jersey Turnpike. "In The Godfather: Part II," De Stefano points out, "Hyman Roth says to Michael Corleone, 'We're bigger than US Steel.' On The Sopranos, we have gangsters fighting over stolen power tools and provolone. It shatters any of the mythology and romanticism of the Mafia image."

And so our identification with Tony has always been perverse but logical. Battling over a shrinking pot of power tools and garbage collection routes, juggling college tuition, a prodigal son, a troubled marriage and the costs of maintaining a sufficiently bourgeois lifestyle, Tony shares the insecurities of class and status that are so deeply ingrained in the American experience of the last forty years. "In the very first episode," De Stefano recalls, "Tony tells Dr. Melfi 'things are trending downward,' and it's clear even then that he's not just talking about the Mafia." If the Corleones were once bigger than the giant of American industry, then the Sopranos are a perfect fit for our deindustrialized present. If The Godfather: Part II offers a revisionist take on the 1950s American Dream, then The Sopranos is our elegy to that long-gone era of postwar affluence.

Which is not to say we have forgiven Tony all his many trespasses. Killer, bigot, egoist, misogynist, crook -- he has been all of these things at one point or another. And caricature? For some, that has been the most unforgivable part of The Sopranos. It's what compelled Camille Paglia to denounce the "libelous images of Italian-Americans" served up for elitist New York critics "full of designer Marxism" in a 2001 lecture cosponsored by the National Italian American Foundation. It might also be why Nation film critic Stuart Klawans bemoans the show's decline from a singularly exceptional first season into a more prosaic TV soap in later years, overly dependent on "silicone boobs, sickening violence and enough cursing for a convention of Tourette's syndrome patients."

So in some way it is fitting that, despite our fondness for Tony, disaster looms as we head into the final hour. Dr. Melfi's slammed door speaks for all of us. "Even under the very best of conditions, psychotherapy for an anti-social personality disorder is unlikely to succeed in real life," according to Dr. Glen Gabbard, psychiatrist and author of The Psychology of "The Sopranos". "The show began with an upbeat attitude about psychotherapy," Gabbard notes. But as time wore on, "Tony's psychopathy and his inaccessibility to therapeutic change became intractable." By the final season, "Tony has shown himself to be irredeemable. And that was always the hope of the audience -- maybe a bad man can become a good man, and be redeemed."

When we next see Tony, he'll be pulling out of the Lincoln Tunnel, beginning the last of his weekly rides out to the deceptive creature comforts of his suburban home. Over eight years, this opening montage embodied the conflict at the root of the show, the progression of images outside the car window -- from industrial grunge to urban clutter, small family homes and, finally, the surreal palaces of North Caldwell -- the willful inversion of Tony's downward-trending reality.

The road he travels on is at once the open one of the American imagination, that interminable icon of opportunity, self-made men and -- yes -- redemption; but it is also the doomed path leading inexorably to where we last saw him, alone in the dark, stripped of family and possessions, his hour of judgment at hand. This Sunday, those two roads converged in the 86th and last chapter of The Sopranos saga, an episode called, appropriately enough, "Made in America."

 

[phillycard]

Spoiler

That was very good and well done. Especially with the song chosen playing and the way it ended.

Don't stop believing....



But I didn't like the non-ending ending...it was a cop out. It's nice to see an artistic ending, but the fans of Sopranos aren't the David Lynch crowd. This ending will get blasted, likely.

Anything resembling an actual ending would have been fine, no matter how it turned out, but to do the whole "create your own ending" was totally uncalled for.

 

[phillycard]

I sometimes think I've missed out on American culture because I've watched every episode of the Soprano's with an instinctive resistance to root for Tony. It was often difficult to watch without an identifiable hero, and I'm sorry, but I already feel we herald anti-heroes far too much in our culture.

What I enjoyed about the show is the same thing I guarded against. When I first started watching I was certain the writers were going to attempt to redeem TS, which is an American fantasy: Take all the interesting quirks to a dark character but turn him into the ultimate unwilling hero. A mobster as the lobsided grinning pirate/scruffy nerf herder. I've always been more of Luke Skywalker-type than a Han Solo-type, but we seem very rare these days. TS wasn't redeemed because he couldn't be, which was the escape hatch so many viewers were looking for to justify their own fascination with the show. I admire the writers for taking that bold step. If they had delivered true justice, practically everyone on that show would've died a miserable death, but it wouldn't satisfy the neo-reality they had created. Instead, justice was delivered to the audience by relaying the kind of anxiety every mobster must live with. In some ways I think the writers were attempting to redeem themselves.

The ending sort of parallels the sympatico I think I've shared with the writers. On one hand there is something fascinating about a life that seems without remorse, willingly above the law and even social mores. I suppose to white guys from the suburbs, it's the ultimate voyeur experience to witness that kind of personal freedom. On the other hand we see the toll it takes, the constant denial of shame and guilt, the finality of denying the totality of the human experience. Upon closer inspection, it's more appalling to think someone would aspire to foist this lifestyle on themselves, where once it was just appalling to think to someone could consciously commit such evil on others. The writers failed to apologize -- rightfully -- for these characters because as badly as we feel for them, there is no justifiable empathy.

Movie or not, the ending was the correct one, IMO. There is no relief, there is no closure, there is no peace in this world. Prosperity is an illusion. Eat, drink and be merry, or at least pretend to as a show of strength and power, for tomorrow you are likely to be whacked on the toilet by your best friend. At least you should anticipate it to happen -- half out of mercy, half out of envy, entirely out of justice. In quiet there is the ambiguity of relationship that so many of us living lesser lives of power take for granted, and the sum total is wasted life rolled up in a ball of conflict and confusion.

Okay G, where did you plagarize this from??!!

 

[Gaddabout]

Okay G, where did you plagarize this from??!!

I'm the only one dumb enough to claim my own tripe. Used to get paid well for my stuff, but now I live with the occasional $50 from whatever magazine I can dupe into thinking I've got some mojo.

 

[D-Dogg]

I'm the only one dumb enough to claim my own tripe. Used to get paid well for my stuff, but now I live with the occasional $50 from whatever magazine I can dupe into thinking I've got some mojo.

Gad, do you know how to golf? Or write about it?

 

[Gaddabout]

Gad, do you know how to golf? Or write about it?

There's actually a very funny response to that. At least it's funny to me. Not so much ironic, though the average person tends to confuse irony with coincidence all the time.

My former editor at azcentral.com would not let me write a column about golf until I spent a day at the Phoenix Open. That's exactly what I did. It produced one of the most inflammatory FanBoy columns ever, entitled: Why I Hate Golf.

So, yes on both accounts, but I'm not accounting for credibility.

 

[D-Dogg]

There's actually a very funny response to that. At least it's funny to me. Not so much ironic, though the average person tends to confuse irony with coincidence all the time.

My former editor at azcentral.com would not let me write a column about golf until I spent a day at the Phoenix Open. That's exactly what I did. It produced one of the most inflammatory FanBoy columns ever, entitled: Why I Hate Golf.

So, yes on both accounts, but I'm not accounting for credibility.

But do you really hate golf? (BTW, do you have that article 'cause I'd love to read it.)

Check your PM.

 

[DeAnna]

So...was the cat supposed to be Adriana's reincarnation?

 

[Skratchy_Seal]

So...was the cat supposed to be Adriana's reincarnation?

There must've been some kind of theme with the cat and 'rats'...kind of like The Departed.

I'm guessing that since a 'rat' is an enemy of the mob, then the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

There must be some meaning to the cat catching a rat at the safe house. Carlo was there too, and it turned out he flipped.

What about the cat purring at the picture of Christopher? With all the problems he had, he was still loyal to TS, and even managed to take care of the problem after he caught himself running his mouth a bit too much.

I don't know...I'm still thinking this through.

 

[Rivercard]

I'm guessing the cat was only a form of comic relief.

 

[Skratchy_Seal]

I'm guessing the cat was only a form of comic relief.

That's a lot more logical than what I came up with.

I swear...after following this series, I get paranoid and think everything has a hidden meaning. It kills me.

 

[phillycard]

What's this now about Journey not wanting their song to be affiliated with Tony's death, thus the early cutoff? Makes some sense, but because I've drawn my own conclusion, I still can't hear that song and not think about it.

 

[Gaddabout]

The production of this episode has more mythology than an Ohio Players album cover.

 

[Southpaw]

Another take or maybe more of the same.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8052

Sopranos Explained! David Chase Whacked "You" in Democrat-Ordered Hitby RJ Eskow | Jun 11 2007 - 9:50pm

Stop all this endless speculation about last night's Sopranos! Here's what really happened: The screen went black at the end because "You" - the audience, the American public - got whacked. Yes, I mean the very same "You" that was TIME's Person of the Year a few months ago. Why? Because "You" were getting in the way of the Democratic Party and its plans. So they hired David Chase as a hit man, and he lured "You" to your TV with promises of more satisfying resolutions that can be found in real life. Then he took "You" out in cold blood.

Don't believe me? Look at the evidence: As many bloggers have pointed out, the season's opener included dialog about what happens when you get shot. "I'll bet you don't even hear it coming," says Tony's brother-in-law. Then, just as You were watching the climactic restaurant scene - nothing. Silence, darkness. That sudden blackness was You, experiencing total loss of sensory functions as the bullet struck and Your brainstem shut down.

Were there any clues that a Democratic-funded hit was coming? Well, there's the fact that Chase - a meticulous man with an encyclopedic knowledge of music - chose "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey as background music for Your demise. The choice is eerily reminiscent of the Democrats' 90's-era theme song, Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow."

It's not personal, it's business. After all, You voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party in 2006, and You said clearly in exit polls that you did so mainly to end the war in Iraq. Now that they've failed to show the courage needed to do that, You've begun turning on them. And while all that blogging and You-tubing and whatnot got You the "Person of the Year" nod, frankly You were becoming a pain in the ass.

Still, as I said, it wasn't personal. Except maybe with Chase. He was sick and tired of the way You keep blabbering on about The Sopranos when he wanted to move on to something else. You kept him imprisoned with contracts and golden handcuffs and God know what else. He made his feelings clear with the song he used to awaken Tony at the start of last night's episode and then used as a recurrent theme: "You Keep Me Hangin' On." (That's "You keep me ...") Some bloggers have said the tune was a clue that Chase wasn't going to serve up a satisfying resolution, but I think he was really telling everybody what he thinks of You. "Set me free, why doncha? You don't really love me, you just keep me hangin' on ..."

You! You were a problem. You voted to start withdrawing troops. You are getting unhappy with the status quo in Washington and Iraq. You are starting to suspect that maybe Frank Zappa was right when he said that "government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." You want real change. So what's an oligarchy to do but croon You a lullaby that says "don't stop believing" - right up until the moment the fatal bullet strikes?

Like the song says, the movie never ends.

 

[jenna2891]

i thought the episode was absolutely brilliant, start to finish. aside from the fact that it was gorgeous to watch (how amazing was that sit down scene in the tractor warehouse?), the ending left any viewer's preconceived ending still within the realm of possibility.

music has always been a huge part of this show. the songs were always really well placed and perfectly chosen for their moments in the show (john cooper clarke's "evidently chickentown" during the baptism of christopher's kid was the perfect example of this). this episode was no different in that respect, although (and i'm going on memory here, so correct me if i'm wrong) in this episode every song was played by a character in some way (example: the opening song sounded like background music, but it turns out it was tony's clock radio). how fitting that, in the end, we are left with quiet credits.

 

[jenna2891]

today's woot description was an homage to the ending:

Printed In America

Tommy Baritoni watched the photo print roll out of the HP Photosmart 3210 All in One Printer. Ah, that’s the stuff, he thought, admiring the full-color portrait of his favorite band in all their early-’80s glory, headbands, keytars, and all. They stopped making bands like Journey anymore, but I still believe. Tommy checked his watch and wondered where Marcela, Summer, and T.J. were. They were supposed to meet him here fifteen minutes ago.

Around him, the other customers of the Bloomfield Copy & Print Shop went about their business. They paid only casual attention to Tommy, unaware that here was the man who ran the largest hubcap-fencing ring in East Jersey. Nice little all-in-one printer, scanner, and copier they got here, Tommy mused. Prints without a PC thanks to the memory card reader and PictBridge USB port. Fast, too – 32 ppm black and 31 ppm color. I oughtta get one for Club Fuggetaboutit, have the girls put ‘em on the glass and sell the printouts. He filed the enterprising idea away until next week.

Just then, a guy in a suit stepped through the copy shop door and seemed to look right at Tommy – or did he? For a terrifying second, Tommy wondered if the guy was with the Dotatello family, or maybe was working for those Syrians that Tommy had ratted out to the FBI. As the suit moved up to the counter to pick up a printing order, Tommy tried to shrug off the anxiety that haunted him. No matter how forcefully he commanded his mind to think pleasurably about the HP Photosmart 3210 All in One Printer, he couldn’t shake this cloud of impending doom. He found no comfort in its built-in slide/negative adapter, dust and scratch removal, and advanced copying features. For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, it felt like everything was about to come to a sudden, inexplicable, unsatisfying end.

Tommy eased a bit as Marcela and T.J. came through the door, the electronic sensor in the door bleeping as they did. Through the plate glass window, he saw Summer by the bicycle rack outside, struggling with the padlock on her bike. “Hey, Dad, want some Funyons?,” T.J. asked, extending the yellow cellophane bag. Tommy plucked out a Funyon, watching Summer finally clasp the padlock shut and walk toward the copy shop door. He pecked Marcela on the cheek and wiped away the stray Funyon crumbs his lips left there. The electronic door sensor bleeped again. Tommy looked up and

 

[jenna2891]

It's actually one of the funnier episodes in a while. The cat scenes where hilarious and Paulie was absolutely classic. Pretending to sweep the floor when he sees Tony coming, sitting out there holding that ridiculous reflector thing, etc.

in the end when meadow was trying to park, she was driving a nice, new lexus. it would be hilarious if that were one of the lexus' that can parallel park itself. typical meadow would refuse to use that feature, seeing it as another way that "the man" widens the gap between the rich and the poor. she would never get the irony of the legal aid lawyer who lets daddy buy her a new lexus.

 

[Southpaw]

Meadow came from the ob/gyn office. She was too nervous to park , cause she was pregnant and was going to break the news. Life goes on.

 

[Rivercard]

i thought the episode was absolutely brilliant, start to finish.

I agree Jenna.

I heard some gambling businesses were taking bets about whether Tony would be whacked. Wonder what happened with those. You could make a case that it was implied he was whacked, though they obviously didn't show it.

 

[D-Dogg]

Meadow came from the ob/gyn office. She was too nervous to park , cause she was pregnant and was going to break the news. Life goes on.

Yep yep. I've heard this before and I think it actually is an interesting idea. She was at the doctor to "switch birth control?" I don't think so.

 

[Southpaw]

Yep yep. I've heard this before and I think it actually is an interesting idea. She was at the doctor to "switch birth control?" I don't think so.

Like, oh by the way, you won't need to switch this week. You have one in the oven.