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Just finished watching this a few days ago after starting in January. What an amazing show. I kept myself away from the thread since I didn't know if there would be spoilers (and I was very paranoid about having it ruined for me) and I'm glad that I kept my guard up so high. One or two spoiler-free posts I saw online claimed something like: "Don't worry about running out of Sopranos, the best part is getting to re-watch it." Even already, re-visiting scenes, you realize how fathoms-deep with richness and texture every single character and interaction is. What a remarkable show! I kind of can't believe that the show works so well both as on the first-pass through and on the N-th pass basis; that simultaneously it's super detailed, but not so hard to follow that you can't enjoy it taking each turn as you go, and that there are always new details to catch and observations to treasure upon revisit. Even just watching supercuts, compilations, and scenes on youtube over the last few days has been mindblowing. So much to think about! And of course, Jerusalem's write-ups are first rate, and are helping to cast light on some of that depth. I love how there is so much about the show that there are no straightforward answers about so many of the characters. Even after seeing them from so many angles, there is still so much that is murky and mysterious about them. Two scattered observations, I'll share more later. I found the scene with Paulie in Miami laughing alone in his hotel room incredibly depressing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLS5bqRusKs; just knowing what a rough season Paulie had up until that point with the revelation about his mom/aunt, his cancer scare, etc. and the fact that he lives a fairly lonely existence, getting a snatch of him so delighted by the TV alone in his room-- Sitting upright in rapt attention, not even lying down!-- having the time of his life just broke my heart. (It even mirrors the scene from late S6 part 1 where Tony sees AJ becoming a goon loving around on his computer in his underwear, laughing to himself while instant messaging someone, and scowling a look of pure disgust) And sure enough, I was surprised to learn that some people in the comments thought this scene was totally charming and heartwarming, and I get why they see it that way too! Another thought. I like how Tony never stops trying to wear down Melfi with gifts and favors throughout the series: like giving her the Cleaver DVD, though that nominally had a therapeutic purpose for letting her see the scene he was upset about, or at one point in a late season he offers to give her meat on the house from Satriale's (and the dialogue suggests it isn't the first time he's offered), or the part I think in season 5 where he tries to give her a tip and she counts it as overpaying. Even though he must understand on some level that Melfi will never compromise and take the bait. Naively, on my first pass, I figured it was a charm offensive that he refused to turn off, partially because he never really stops being attracted to Melfi, or that perhaps he just enjoyed using his power to offer gifts / favors to people who he likes based on a transactional framing of his therapy sessions. You know he does respect her wisdom and intelligence, because even as far back as season 1 (when he isn't on board with the therapy thing), he parrots things that she says all the time. But when you stop, and think, and see Tony as a calculating sociopath, an absolute animal who is patient and persistent about working the angles on everyone around him 24/7, it really casts his repeated efforts to ingratiate himself with Melfi into a different light. Mushroom Zingdom fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 00:12
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:49 |
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I also love how AJ becomes a proto-goon and extremely online in a Bush-era way, and during the finale offers a passionate but scattered and incoherent critique of American culture and nobody at the table knows what the gently caress he's talking about. One of my favorite moments near the end of Season 6a, when Tony is talking to him in the parking lot after his aborted attempt to kill Junior... Gandalfini's amazingly well-sold mixture of anger and desperate relief from bailing AJ out of serious trouble, and then when AJ explains that he was trying to follow in the footsteps of The Godfather, Tony's tone softens as he realizes that he isn't reasoning with an adult but in fact trying to reach a child. "It's a movie... AJ, you gotta grow up. You're not a kid anymore. You hear me? You gotta grow up." and this causes AJ to immediately dry-heave. Their exchange is kind of similar to the emotional arc of the scene when he rescues him from the pool. I forget if someone posted this earlier in the thread but I'll put it here again: https://twitter.com/nickusen/status/1195761127160000512?s=20 Mushroom Zingdom fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Apr 11, 2021 |
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Apr 11, 2021 04:03
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Dawgstar posted:I love Tony doesn't even say anything. He doesn't even look particularly more disgusted, just a mixture of confusion/annoyance. A particularly observant YouTube comment also pointed out that this is even funnier when you realize that the mobsters mostly spend all day just sitting around shooting the poo poo in Satriale's / The Bing.
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Apr 12, 2021 00:47
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Chris also parroting AA and NA literature non-stop while going about the tasks of being a mobster, shaking down his sponsor, and even relapsing is so twisted, in-character, and hilarious.
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Apr 12, 2021 14:40
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And the above-throwaway line status Donald Trump enjoys in the series finale.
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May 2, 2021 04:20
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Check out this beautiful, haunting impressionistic montage from Season 6 set to the music from the outtro of "Blue Comet": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogeq4h_Yjho
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May 25, 2021 19:34
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Two of Christopher's lines have been kind of disturbing me recently. When he's talking to Adriana -- who he's about to sell out to Tony -- and says "I gave that gently caress [Tony] pieces of my soul", and when he says "That's the man I'm going to hell for". It's so upsetting on rewatch just how horrifying the way Tony chews up and then spits out Chris is over the course of the series. It was such a bad idea in the first place to fast-track him through the ranks (which was the source of insecurity on Chris' part, friction with Paulie, bad strategic decisions Chris made, etc) to assuage Tony's *own* insecurity about not having a confidante or someone he knew he could count on unconditionally, primarily when he screws up so badly it absolutely could not get out to the others or he'd be toast (like when Tony kills Ralphie). I'm glad that we got the Melfi-Tony dream sequence in Kennedy & Heidi to get a shot of Gandalfini selling us, the audience, with full unambiguous glee how happy Tony he was to get rid of him.
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Jun 20, 2021 21:40
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Vasukhani posted:you know, as strange as it sounds, I thought it worked well. People just randomly die sometimes in real life. It's unfortunate that we never saw that arch finish, and ofc that the actor die, but having a character just drop dead when the plot was clearly leading to a cruscendo added some strange realism. I second this. I also like how the show has a bunch of open threads and red herrings that never go anywhere, like cousin Brian getting nice suits from Tony and it becoming (IIRC) known to the FBI, but then nothing comes of it. EDIT: The scene where Tony finds out after just coming inside from doing something in the yard also struck me as very true-to-life.
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Jul 6, 2021 18:30
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I was thinking about this microscene the other day from The Fleshy Part of the Thigh (Long post incoming). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvznay6ZFjg Tony: "Get this - says here that 'If the history of the planet were represented by the Empire State Building, the time that human beings have been on earth would only be a postage stamp at the very top. Do you realize how insignificant that makes us?' Chris: "I don't feel that way." Tony enjoying the dinosaur book charming in a childlike way and simultaneously in-line with his characterization throughout the series, in that he does have an intrinsic curiosity about him that he does like to indulge, as long as something has caught his interest. For example, him reading the book on ducks -- which still has the sticker on it, implying it was recently bought and not just sitting around the house-- in the pilot, or that he enjoys World War 2 documentaries in a way that is archetypically boomer. Not only does he enjoy facts (Paulie does too- "I watch TV to understand the world around me") he also likes to take the things he learns and integrate them into his life, such as when he identifies with the generals in the end of season 5 after Paulie makes the comparison of him to one. This factoid Tony is seized by also is one of many seeds planted in his brain throughout season 6 that point toward Tony's growing awareness of his place within the broader circle of life, his appreciation of his own mortality, and a more existential flair to his tendency towards a 'bleak' outlook on things. For instance, his explanation to Melfi of his highdea he had at the end of Kennedy & Heidi about mothers as busses. And, in keeping with the outrageous genius of this show basically being the Great American Novel but set in New Jersey of all places, it's a comparison to a familiar local landmark -- the Empire State Building -- that helps to literally bring this fact home to Tony. And, of course, Tony spends most of the show playing a tense and highly dangerous game of brinksmanship around the sleeping giant that is the Lupertazzi family- much like how the hypercompetence of Brother Mouzone in the Wire represents the power and reach of the great city-state of New York relative to Baltimore, so too does Tony work in the shadow of the 5 families of New York City throughout the entire run of the show, with many of his problems circling back to being helplessly dwarfed by New York's resources and scale. (Edit: Has this pygmy poo poo always been a postage stamp on top of the empire state building? Top dog, but in a provincially limited, contingent, and vulnerable way? The toughest guys in Essex County, who used to run North Jersey,? Their only legacy left in this world are just a jacket and a demented, nasty old man in a wheelchair. Does Tony realize that is he is, and always has been, 'Reigning in Hell' versus serving in Heaven? Is this what the Kevin Finnerty episodes show us what serving in heaven may have looked like?) But, that he shares this line in particular with Christopher helps to illustrate even more of the grim contrast between the two characters and their relationship. Note that Christopher explicitly disagrees with Tony instead of playing it off with a throwaway comment like 'that's nice' or 'how cool' or 'huh', as would have been polite to keep the peace with the Boss, or even with a friend. He delivers the line with stonefaced, unsmiling, unqualified conviction. Even polite indifference might have been better, like the chilly reception Tony gets later on in his recovery while holding court at Satriale's and nobody listens to him talking through the minutae and bodily details of his treatment and recovery (note that Tony rattles off a few drug names too in that scene when - again, that conditional but functional curiosity). Christopher doesn't "feel that way". He doesn't feel insignificant at all. And that's just the problem for him. Part of the fundamental insecurity that drive's Christopher's life and his decisions is his need for his life to have lasting meaning and significance, and problems arise when he tries to take shortcuts to that route starting all the way back in the pilot with him wanting to cash out on the mob life to become famous. He talks about "writing his memoirs" and his desire to be somebody, anybody in Hollywood, but we can also look back to one of the keystone scenes of his entire arc: when he talks to Paulie in season 1 about how he can't handle the fact that he "has no arc" and "no identity". Christopher makes it clear that Paulie's contentedness with "I'm alive, I'm surviving," is not good enough- "That's it", Christopher says, "I don't just wanna survive." I think Jerusalem or some Youtube comment pointed out, that it's disturbing how defeated and dark Christopher's mood is in that scene all the way back in Season 1, a much simpler and innocent time for Chris- before his inability to cope with "the loving regularness of life" being "too loving hard" for him lead him down the pitch-black road of heroin addiction and consigning his fiance to death to maintain his station in his world, only to be sidelined, humiliated, and ultimately murdered by the man he "gave pieces of his soul to". It's unclear what exactly Tony loves about that fact about the Empire State Building and our place in the planet's history; fascination, comfort, the opportunity to share something for a little attention and social capital ("Get this!"), even bemusement at the New York-flavored framing of the cold fact that we're all dust in the wind. Easy enough for this to be a soothing thought for Tony, helping him deal with how "every decision [he] make[s] affects every facet of every other thing", to put in perspective how he goes about in pity for himself, as well as to make sense with his own mortality and his life decisions. In short: easy enough for him to say. But for Chris? How could he look back on the suffering he's been through at that point and find comfort in the fact that it all was "a big nothing"? It's impossible for him to accept that the totality of his experiences could only amount to a sliver of silver of a sliver in the grand scheme of the universe. He doesn't feel that way. Edit 2: Is this the long shadow of Olivia Soprano, with her black-hole nihilism poisoning not just Tony Soprano and AJ's soul, but indirectly, Christopher's? Christopher cannot handle that it might be "a big nothing", which is the kind of crack-ping Olivia Soprano tries to inspire in everybody she meets. Does Oliva know that she claims Christopher as one of her victims? Is that why she wants to keep him in her orbit, to gaze upon her handiwork (her only real source of joy and pleasure in life)? After all, in a rare moment of mercy or even sentimentality, Olivia tells Junior to spare Christopher's life: "Tony loves him like a son. And so do I, Junior. He put up my storm windows one time." I don't know if Olivia ever expresses an opinion after that (alright, members of the audience who are on rewatches, help me find other examples of Olivia <-> Chris' relationship), but that's a pretty ringing endorsement- she didn't need to be that obvious to give the direction to Junior not to kill him. Is it some alarming kind of genuine fondness? God, the richness this show squeezes into the smallest moments. Mushroom Zingdom fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jul 9, 2021 |
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Jul 8, 2021 21:07
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TheKingslayer posted:Christopher's intervention might be some of the finest television ever created. It truly is. It's a scene I just keep coming back to, I've watched it at least a dozen times on Youtube and I have only seen the show once through from January-April. I appreciated the positive reception from posters here about the analysis I wrote about the micro-scene between Chris and Tony in the hospital a few pages back, I'll write and post a close reading of the intervention scene sometime soon. It's a laugh-out-loud hilarious scene but on recent re-watches I've come to realize what a tragic missed opportunity the scene represents for the characters. There is a lot of richness between Chris' interactions with Paulie and Tony in particular. disgusting
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Jul 21, 2021 06:29
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 05:49 |
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What episode of the series do you think could be best extended into a play? (Assuming that more dialogue was added to pad out background details, if you snipped out the details that relate to longer-term plotlines, but kept the relationships between characters intact?) I would nominate Proshkai, Livushka; a version which centered around the action of Olivia's death and the immediate fallout for act 1, and the wake at Tony's house for act 2, would be pretty baller and could tell an interesting story about who Olivia was just from the way people talk about her, and talk to *Tony* about her for the rest of the episode.
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Jul 29, 2021 20:18
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