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Ton', you give this guy a golf club, he might try to gently caress it.
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Jul 2, 2014 19:15
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withak posted:It almost comes out in the one where he gets pissed about paying for dinner all of the time. Tony says something about it being tradition and how he had to do the same, but there is never any sign that anyone is coming up to be the new guy below Chris. The people who would be the new guys turn out to be bad at being a part of organized crime. There's definitely a motif in the show that the mob is falling apart due to a lack of leadership and organization, and that causes the youngest generation to suffer. I don't think they have the traditions that were in place even during Junior's heyday and nobody seems to know how to mentor them and teach them that the rules of the mob. They're forced to take their cues on what it means to be a gangster from the movies, from their own sense of frustration and entitlement, or from wild stories about a dramatic caper that Tony and his crew did. I'm generally thinking of Brendan, Sean/Matt, Jackie Jr, and to some extent AJ (in the episode where he tries to kill Junior). Chris suffers as a result of the disorganization and chaos, as well, but he believes that the traditions mean something and the group can still command loyalty. (I'm particularly thinking of his conversation with Brendan when Brendan wants to jack another one of Junior's trucks - "Why be in a crew? Why be a gangster?" and the fact that he sacrifices Adriana.)
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Jul 6, 2014 16:21
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KICK BAMA KICK posted:I totally forgot Richie was in Mean Streets. The only other thing I could remember him from was a weird run on Everybody Loves Raymond where he spent the whole time playing off his "Manson lamps". He plays Toby's rabbi in a couple episodes of The West Wing and he's in one of the vignettes in Four Rooms. I think I remember that David Chase said in an interview that he was considering that actor for Tony until he met James Gandolfini. I generally like the dream sequences in the show - they're more like "real" dreams in that they're meandering and ambiguous, as opposed to the more common direct/relevant dream sequences in fiction. (But Tony's dreams aren't so chaotic that you can't ask questions about them or find things that might be interesting, like how his dream-name sounds like "infinity" or whether or not the shadow in the "family reunion" doorway is supposed to be Livia.) Your Gay Uncle posted:I always thought the whole Vito/Jonny Cakes plot was a massive troll on the people who only watched the show for the whackings and because the mob is wicked cool. I was a bit like that when I first watched the show, as a much younger person. Now that I've rewatched the show and am a bit older, it strikes me how boring, even mundane, most of the mob stuff on the show comes across as. It's definitely a shift away from the presentation of mobsters as living kind of operatic lives, like you see in The Godfather. e: I mean, consider the various "Michael/Vito go back to Italy" storylines in Godfather 1 & 2 with the episode where Tony, Paulie, and Chris go to Italy. Chris spends all of his time doing heroin, Paulie doesn't like the food or the bathroom or the people by the end(and unlike Michael Corleone finding a beautiful Sicilian bride, he fucks an average-at-best prostitute) and is really happy to be back in New Jersey, and Tony has business on his mind and doesn't start seeing the romance of Naples until it looks like the deal is going to fall through. I think that episode is a pretty clever one. fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 01:55
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rejutka posted:Amofo It's like a hotel by Captain Teeb!
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Jul 11, 2014 02:04
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Pron on VHS posted:I feel like The Wire, Breaking Bad and other serious shows have bits of comedy in them, but The Sopranos has like 3-4 lol moments in every episode. Even Phil the final villain was mostly comedy, his Ellis Island speech is incredible. Part of what makes The Sopranos' comedy so great is that a lot of it is really understated. My favorite is in the episode where Tony meets his father's cumare and flips out when he sees the picture of her son with his childhood dog. It's absolutely hilarious to me that Tony, the hardcore cynical mobster, actually believed his dad had sent the dog to a farm upstate. e: It's also a good double-joke since that's usually a euphemism for killing the dog, but in this case Johnny Soprano actually did send it to a more loving environment -- somehow that makes Tony's outrage more hilarious to me. fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 01:57
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PantsBandit posted:So people were talking about this earlier but I'm trying to stop from looking at posts not directly related to mine since I'm still working through the show. I just made it to season 4 and it really is a shame how Furio has turned out. When they first made their journey to Italy and saw that man get brutalized in the street, it was an extremely memorable moment. It drew parallels between American organized crime and Italian, while simultaneously being alien and clearly making Tony and co pretty uncomfortable. When Furio first came over to America, I was thrilled, he was like a little souvenir of that brutality. This was especially emphasized by his first major scene where he shoots an unarmed man in the kneecap. And then after that he pretty much just disappeared off the map (well, other than beating up Jackie Jrs drug dealing buddy). And now he's a new romantic interest for Carmella? Such a waste of a potentially really cool character. You know who had an arc? Noah.
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Jul 18, 2014 04:15
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Jerusalem posted:Paulie listening to Sun Tzu on audio-book, then stopping to beat the poo poo out of two dudes over a lawncare territory dispute was hilarious. He's like the Chinese Prince Machiavelli. e: The way Paulie smiles and nods along with the audiobook in that scene is hilarious, too.
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Jul 19, 2014 17:45
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Don't tell me she was happier when she was goin' out with that uh... Jamaal Ginsburg, the hasidic homeboy.
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Jul 22, 2014 04:55
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It could be fun to have a rewatch thread for The Sopranos like there is for The Wire. There's certainly a lot to talk about with both series.
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Jul 26, 2014 04:11
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Pope Corky the IX posted:Toni Kalem, who played Angie Bonpensiero, was the story supervisor for season five and wrote the episode "All Happy Families" I wonder if Edie Falco stared uncomfortably at her while she was doing important Story Supervisor Things.
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Jul 27, 2014 22:34
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That's what the price of gas was in the 90s.
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Jul 31, 2014 02:05
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Selklubber posted:And then he disowns her when she discovered she wasn't his real mother. It was like watching someone shout at a kid, just that the kid was 80 years old. But then he got cancer (did he really, I cant remember) and he watched TV with her. He says he had chemotherapy and beat the cancer in the episode where Johnny Sack dies.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:49
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EvanSchenck posted:I'm pretty sure Carmine Jr. was based on John Gotti's eponymous son John "Junior" Gotti, who didn't immediately succeed his more famous father but did become acting boss of the Gambino Family for a brief period a few years after his father went to prison. He was widely regarded as an idiot and got little respect from his subordinates or people from other families. I think his worst fuckup was from 1997, when the FBI searched his home and found a bunch of typed documents that had stuff like lists of made members of the Gambino crew, lists of guys inducted into other mafia families over the past several years, a list of people who attended his wedding and how much cash they gave him in gifts, etc. You can guess how useful that kind of information would be to the FBI and how stupid he had to be to keep copies around. I guess that explains why John wanted that ice cream truck.
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Aug 3, 2014 02:55
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Supreme Allah posted:a) destroy Janice when she was trying to be better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmb7TU0OrOI c) put his mother in a nursing home
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Aug 3, 2014 06:01
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Cervixalot posted:ITS A RETIREMENT COMMUNITY! 
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Aug 3, 2014 06:16
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pentyne posted:Is there anyone here who was watching the show when it debut and followed it? I was trying to figure out when the show became the cultural juggernaut it is. I know even as a young kid without HBO I still heard about it during season 1 from media entertainment news programs and Entertainment Weekly. My only solid recollection was that the end of season 2 and Pussy death was talked up like crazy in entertainment magazines. When Nancy Marchand died and they were going to digitally recreate her I saw it talked about everywhere because of the cost of doing it and the digital effects required. I watched the show when it originally aired but I didn't pay attention to entertainment magazines or shows. It was talked about and stood out as a Thing You Should Watch even during the first season. Critiquing the "romantic" view of the mob/mobsters has always been part of The Sopranos. In seasons 1 and 2 it was done in a more playful and less obvious way, but definitely in Season 3 with episodes like University the message became more overt. It's interesting that Employee of the Month is commonly described as (in various words) "a middle finger to the audience" for the reasons you describe, but the episode where Tony doesn't kill Meadow's soccer coach after he's revealed to be sleeping with one of the other underage girls isn't usually described like that. Obviously the crime in Employee of the Month is more horrific and happens to a character who we care about, but there's the same "you should feel bad about yourself if you're cheering for Tony to gently caress this guy up" message in both.
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Aug 8, 2014 04:47
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pentyne posted:Except the soccer coach was arrested and probably faced justice for what he did. Tony even felt proud of the fact that he didn't kill the coach and let the cops arrest him, but the only reason was because Artie stood up and told him not to knowing that backlash he'd get. Tony didn't seem "proud" of staying his hand - at the end of the episode he comes home drunk out of his mind on cheap whiskey. The coach being arrested is a more satisfying outcome than the rapist getting off on a technicality, certainly, but I don't think that's supposed to satisfy us (or satisfy the various mob dads) compared to what Tony wanted to do. Just like it's hard to watch Employee of the Month and not want Melfi to have Tony kill the rapist, I think it's hard to watch Boca and not, on some level, want Tony to kill the coach. Maybe the difference in why one is more resonant than the other in making the viewer feel uncomfortable with the result is that the ethical argument is made explicitly by Artie in Boca but not in EotM? (I'd hate to think it's only the savagery of the crime and familiarity of the victim that makes EotM more resonant.) Justice in the powerlessness/corruption of proper authorities is certainly the line that people use to justify criminal syndicates, but Chase is subverting that theme from the very first non-pilot episode of the show. We'd like to romanticize those kinds of situations as operatic -- "Help me, Don Corleone, this corrupt official murdered my son and I can't do anything to get him back, so I come to you to ask a favor..." -- but the first instance of the Mafia doing that on the show, it's two guys trying to find a stolen car on the whim of their boss and causing more criminal mayhem as a result. Not exactly noble but misguided black knights, you know? (By the later seasons the message has gone from play and satire to just straight-up anger, like Finn saying "Don't give me that 'poverty of the Mezzogiorno' bullshit" in response to Meadow's attempts to rationalize things.)
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Aug 8, 2014 16:55
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Solice Kirsk posted:One lovely cut is ok for a 6 season show. I like to think an editor let his son do it for a 10th birthday present. I vaguely remember David Chase or someone in an interview saying it was just an editor screwing up. When I looked to try to find the source of my vague recollection, I came across a thread on a fan forum from when the episodes were first running, and fans were speculating in general about the episode. Someone thought Adriana was going to get jealous of Tony B's success at running the casino and get him sent back to prison by telling the FBI, which is a pretty charming and innocent theory compared to what actually happens.
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Aug 9, 2014 05:01
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Perdido posted:It's pretty interesting looking at the parallels between the Shah of Iran and Tony. It's also pretty interesting looking at the parallels between the Shah of Iran and Phil.  
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Aug 15, 2014 05:19
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kippa posted:You ever think what a coincidence it is that Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease? You're gonna make that same stupid joke every time that comes up?
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Aug 17, 2014 20:09
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Ishamael posted:One of the things I love about this show (especially compared to other shows) is that people are almost never saying what they really think. They are constantly lying to themselves, to other people and to the world. In most TV shows, dialogue is expository and is meant to help you understand the characters by telling you what they are thinking. What makes this show so great is that, like real people, their actual thoughts and intentions are buried in there somewhere among their bullshit. It says, "Hey, rear end in a top hat, we're from Harvard. What do you think about this spooky, depressing barn and this rotted-out tree?"
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Aug 21, 2014 17:43
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Basebf555 posted:This is kind of embarrassing to admit but when I first went back and watched the show years ago I fast forwarded through the majority of the therapy scenes. I was more interested in the mob characters and putting together all the connections between them and all that. But now I see why the Melfi scenes are so great and so integral to what the show is about. I find a lot of Soprano family life scenes incredibly uncomfortable to watch. When I first saw the show, I was a teenager and thought those family scenes were dull and I wanted them to get back to the cool mob stuff. When I've rewatched the show as an adult, I've realized that my own family life was pretty dysfunctional growing up, and Tony's family is a window into some of that. (To my knowledge I'm not related to any criminals, but a lot of aspects of Tony and Carmela and Janice are really familiar and horrifying to me now.)
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Aug 21, 2014 19:27
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He often has difficulty waiting his turn, is often quote unquote, "on the go" or acts if driven by a motor. Often interrupts or intrudes on others. And often fidgets with hands or feet.
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Aug 27, 2014 02:31
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There was an interview with David Chase where he said his original idea was to have the fade to black run all the way through the credits, up until the HBO woosh sound. The Screen Actors' Guild (which has power over who has to be credited, in what order, and so on) wouldn't sign off on the idea of a creditless episode.
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Aug 30, 2014 21:08
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It's not wrapped up in a pretty little bow, but I think Tony's more or less in hell; all of his friends except Paulie are dead, his generation of the mob is reduced to basically nothing, and he's seen firsthand things are going to end up like Jackie Aprile in the cancer ward or like Junior in the mental hospital. His children are almost certainly disappointments: for all of her promise, Meadow's going to marry a connected guy's son and AJ's going to gently caress around making movies with Little Carmine. I don't think Tony really needs to be murdered for us to get some kind of moral closure about him. (Another type of possible dramatic resolution here would be for him to have some moment like King Oedipus where he realizes the sheer horror of his crimes and attempts to atone, but that's not the kind of guy that Tony is.)
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Sep 1, 2014 00:09
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Chumpion posted:I recall Chase saying something to this effect but I'm not very good at googling stuff. But it raises an interesting point that David asked because how is the outcome of Tonys kids a disappointment, and to whom? Meadow hasn't become a pediatrician or independent lawyer, but she probably will still exist outside of a housewife dynamic or stuck like her mother or mothers friends in a Madonna/whore complex ignoring each day a dozen comares (goomah?). Aj is a fuckup who can't even drown properly but at least he's not a Jackie Junior scale fuckup caught in the lifestyle and murdered before his 20th birthday. As so often with this show, I don't have any particular smoking gun to point at to support my claim. But it's a question whether Meadow will exist outside of the universe of her upbringing. She's engaged to be married to Patrick Parisi, who we never really meet but who Tony and Carmela tacitly disapprove of. (Given that Patrick is Patsy's kid and is at least Italian, it seems likely that disapproval comes from some kind of earlier criminal or pathological behavior on Patrick's part.) For all of her intelligence, Meadow's often a poor judge of character, as with But -- there's a theme in the show about Tony's mistresses being shades of his mother. Melfi remarks on it a few times and Tony shrugs it off. So there's a precedent to at least suggest that Meadow might be attracted to Patrick because he's an insider who is a shade of Tony. We don't get to see the details, of course, but it's not outlandish to draw that connection as a possibility. With AJ, there's less to go on, but he's going into a business run by a mobster. He's not Jackie Jr. just yet, but while he's in that environment, he's only ever going to be a few bad decisions away from ending up in a similar position as Jackie Jr. I suppose it comes down to how optimistic one is about whether they'd be able to escape the cycle. I agree with you that there was hope for them variously throughout the show, but in the end, it's questionable as to whether or not they do. fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Sep 4, 2014 |
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Sep 4, 2014 03:08
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It's interesting though they'd be so similar, isn't it? And I always thought, "OK, Hunchback of Notre Dame. You also got your quarterback and your halfback of Notre Dame".
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Oct 22, 2014 05:58
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I thought Boardwalk Empire had good visuals and acting but was always held back by its sense of pacing -- I tend to marathon shows and for the first three/four episodes of every season I found myself thinking 'gently caress, why am I watching this?' but then the season's plot starts to get interesting. After season 1 the central character of the show becomes the least interesting part of it, too. It would be like The Sopranos if instead of Tony the show was focused on Silvio or Johnny Sack.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:53
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Bonzo posted:While not funny, this scene is really one of the most powerful to me. It perfectly sums up Soprano family dynamic and sets the tone for the show. I know seniors who are inspired! e: I think that scene really shows James Gandolfini's talent as an actor -- the way he goes from reasonable to hostile to completely frustrated while trying to use arguments he clearly doesn't understand, like saying Cap d'Antibes as Captain Teeb, is just wonderful. fantastic in plastic fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Oct 31, 2014 |
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Oct 31, 2014 01:57
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That's all anybody ever talks about is proscuitto, cheese, and fuckin' fava beans.
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Nov 9, 2014 00:32
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Well, all I know is, daughters are better at taking care of their mothers than sons.
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Nov 13, 2014 06:31
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"Swingers"? He can suck my dick. It swings, too!
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Nov 17, 2014 08:32
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This show's writing can be insidious. I described myself as "sitting here like fuckin' Patience on a monument" when I was angry with someone the other day, and I didn't even mean to reference Junior Soprano. It took me a few minutes to realize what I'd said.
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Nov 19, 2014 17:08
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All happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. I was an only child so I don't know what it's like to have an irresponsible con artist for a sister, but a lot of the Tony and Carmela as parents scenes hit really close to home for me.
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Nov 24, 2014 01:12
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Oh, look at that wrist action! All those years yankin' it are finally startin' to pay off.
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Dec 4, 2014 03:07
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Bown posted:How is Lilyhammer, anyways, people who've seen it? Obviously I'm not expecting Sopranos-good but I'd definitely give it a watch if I felt like I'd like it. Would've tried already but too few hours in the day and all. I watched the first season. I could understand that things were supposed to be funny and I'm sure someone from Norway would be laughing, but a lot of it fell flat for me. Sad Elvis-impersonator local Norway cop who looks kind of like Steve Buscemi was the best part.
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Dec 7, 2014 07:17
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pentyne posted:Given how the Sopranos continues to be so popular, does anyone else show an interest in a Let's Watch of the first season? I've seen similar things in the past in TVIV for some shows, and ADTRW has done quite a few threads where they schedule and watch a notable anime series from a few years back and discuss it. Personally for me, following a thread where people watch 2-3 Sopranos episodes a week (with no spoilers) and hopefully drawing into new viewers would be really engaging. I'd probably participate in a thread like that. Sopranos is one of my favorite shows everywhere and I think it lends itself to discussion from all kinds of perspectives. The holiday season might not be the best time for starting it, though, because everyone's schedules get hosed sideways and it takes some time to watch an episode, process what you've seen, and write commentary.
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Dec 8, 2014 18:30
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Swimmin'! The best exercise. Works every muscle group.
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Dec 11, 2014 18:59
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I took a swing at a possible OP for a rewatch thread.quote:In this thread we'll be re-watching the entire series of The Sopranos, on a loose schedule of 2 episodes per week.
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Dec 12, 2014 09:51
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That mortadell's number three? He used to be Junior Soprano's driver.
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Dec 27, 2014 03:40
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