Posted on 09/23/2021 9:07:30 PM PDT by Albion Wilde
Daughter is wearing her Sopranos T shirt nnd has her Sopranos mug and can’t wait...and she’s only “half” Italian......
I took my recycling out a day early this evening, without realizing. Apparently I can't wait for Friday to get here, when the movie opens here. I'm not Italian, but I like poetry:
Open my heart, and you shall see
Engraved upon it: Italy.
—Robert Browning
At least Tony Soprano and his gang never tried to come off as upstanding, law-abiding people.
We loved the series, although we didn’t watch when it originally aired. Looking forward to the prequel!
The gangsters were better people than Democrats are, and more patriotic. I always have admired Americans with Italian heritage.
Excellent!.....
I'm pinging the thread again, but I suggest that if you haven't seen it yet, save the link so you can come back for discussion once you have seen it.
The Sopranos / Many Saints of Newark ping!
To be added or dropped from this pinglist, freepmail Albion Wilde.
Might not want to do that.
I’d start with season one and go from there.
Something important is revealed in the movie that is unknown in the series.
I watched it via HBO MAX it was released there at the same time as in the theaters...
I’ll not give out spoilers, but I was surprised at 1-2 of the main characters and how they were portrayed in the HBO Series...a couple were nasty in the movie which I never suspected in the Series..
Overall comments:
The movie was rather like the Downton Abbey movie: it tried to do too much in the time available. This could have been deliberate so that people will pay to watch it again, because it is hard to catch everything, now that we fans have pored over the television series at length. I would like to see it again, but don’t want to pay another $13 next time!
The story was compelling, but not as humorous as the longer timeframe of the TV series allowed. I was the only one laughing out loud at a few of the wisecracks, like what they said to explain to the priest about Pussy’s name when they introduced him— “It’s not what you’re thinkin’!” Like that’s what the priest was thinking! Also, Livia telling the school counselor to make the conference about Anthony’s misbehavior quick because “I’m parked at a hydrant.”
The sound quality was difficult — the background noise and music were louder than the dialogue, so it was hard to catch some of the critical moments between characters. Other patrons leaving the theater said the same. One of my friends has mulitiple auxiliary speakers on his TV, and he can adjust for that. Can’t say if the movie was at fault, or the theater.
Earlier comments on this thread wondered about the music, and I did give it a thumbs up for selections from the correct timeframe; but overall I have hoped for more, given the abundance of Italian-American pop groups of the era, like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Avalon, etc. They may have been in the background, but I didn’t catch them. The soul music of the era was also very upbeat and a few early Motown hits would have been welcome. Tthe mood of the picture could have been lifted with some upbeat tunes, or a little clip of Dick Clark on the TV, to contrast between the hopefulness of the 50s & early 60s reflected by the music, against the darkness of the life of crime and the ethnic and racial tensions permeating the characters’ worldviews.
Vera Farmiga was outstanding, as were most of the rest of the main players.
Did you have the sound problem on HBO that we had in the threater, of the background noise obscuring the dialogue?
I don’t recall anything like that, I wear ear plugs when I watch HBO MAX, because I watch it either on my Roku or Laptop...
Every time I was anything on HBO it seems I have to turn up the volume way up to make out what is being said....
I did have the sound turned up to nearly the max but it was fine and I heard everything
“..thumbs up for selections from the correct timeframe..
Robert Di Nero usually had good period piece RnB, Doo Wop in his flicks. Mean Streets, Raging Bull and especially Bronx Tale have exactly the music of it’s time. I know cause I was there during that time period. IMO
Maybe I'll complain to my local theater, then.
Just got back. I liked it. Sound was good. Nice story. Fun to revisit that world.
Agree about the music. It was okay, but it could have been better. Personally, I like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks but (1) It wasn’t a hit in its time; and (2) Do I think there’s any chance in hell that it was a cult favorite among Jersey mobsters? No.
I was a big fan of the TV show, but this movie was just okay. As you say, it tried to do too much. The acting was good, especially Nivola, Liotta, young Gandolfini, the Italian actress playing Dickie’s stepmother/mistress. But they were working on a rather ho-bum storyline that never really enthralled me. Also, the portrayals of Silvio and Junior seemed to drift into parody of the TV characters.
I agree -- the Silvio character particularly made it a caricature.
What I really missed was the humor, dark though it was in the TV show. The original premise was absurd--that a mob boss would have panic attacks and go to a therapist. There were frequent surreal episodes like the talking fish on ice in a fish market mocking Tony after Pussy's murder, and then his daughter giving him a battery-powered talking fish novelty placque for Christmas. It was Fellini-esque.
This movie could have used some of that surreal "shorthand" symbolism, since it was supposedly the clairvoyant knowledge of the narrator, Christopher, who was already dead. Instead was very grim and humorless. It cried out for quick, clearly narrated explanations, like a "wham!" camera noise and a still snapshot of young Tony with his pals Artie, Pussy and Silvio as children in their confirmation class, as the voice tells you who they are—then on to the next scene. As it was, you had to try to glean who was who from which boys were using the f-bomb every other word as they walked along the street in profile.
I thought the use of Ray Liotta as a sort of morality guru was interesting. He suspected more than he was saying about Dickie's version of events that killed his father and his goomar.
Great point about the lack of humor. I didn’t laugh at anything in the movie. I get that there were multiple wink-and-nod allusions to events of the TV show that were intended to be funny and/or ironic, but I wasn’t laughing.
You’re absolutely right about the total absence of absurdist humor. I think about an episode that I recently rewatched... the one in which Adriana wants to get into the music industry. Christopher’s behavior at the studio, i.e., beating the musicians to motivate them to cut an album is darkly but absurdly funny. There’s none of that in this movie.
Ultimately, it really does come down to tone. This is the Sopranos’ universe, sure, but it’s that universe as seen in a Scorsese pastiche. It’s like, after 14 years or whatever, they forget their brand. I guess I could forgive that if it really worked... just as different iterations of the Batman franchise have wildly different tones, e.g., ranging from campy and tongue-in-cheek to darkly violent and unapologetically serious. But as a straight-ahead period mob flick à la Goodfellas, it just doesn’t succeed.
Couldn't agree more. Beating up the ice cream man, joyriding his truck and stealing his merchandise just didn't come off as ludicrous, because it was a promising young man (whose character development fans came there to see) going down the wrong path; yet the film's only comment was when some of the adults called it a prank. Sad.
You would wish that with such a key incident, that there be some expansion on how his mother, father or Uncle Dickie handled it. Was Tony punished? Beaten? Encouraged and enabled? You want to see played out the type of influences that directly corrupted this smart, smiling and morally neglected boy who became a murderous mob boss. The young Tony in Many Saints wasn't even there to witness Uncle Dickie committing his two major atrocities, or know that Dickie was cuckolded by someone Dickie felt superior to. Tony being rejected by Dickie on Christmas and looking at the corpse was not enough.
Speaking for myself as a fan, I was less interested in Dickie's love life than in wanting an examination of what laid waste to Tony's soul. The school counselor scene was excellent. There should also have been a clear bridge between the indifferent mothering of Livia in the movie and her conspiracy with Uncle Junior in the TV series to have her own son whacked.
The casting: Johnny Boy Soprano and Corrado (Uncle Junior) did not look enough alike to have been brothers. The arrestingly handsome Billy Mangussen as Paulie Walnuts? Should have given him a prosthetic nose, or used a more grizzled character actor. And in an unfortunate miscasting that many films make, Dickie's wife and his goomar looked too much alike at a glance. The Italian beauty was suitably exotic up close; and while many guys do have a "type", the two women's similar manes of black hair was hard to keep distinct at the rapid pace of the scenes.
The cinematography: We saw 90% the same two camera angles of every conversation between Dickie and his imprisoned uncle. Throughout, there was little dynamic zooming, panning or overheads. Even the looting scenes—I may be wrong, but my main impression was two camera angles: shoulder height from the street to the storefronts, and up on a crane to depict the destroyed shopping street. It's so easy today with drones to hover and move over a street scene. There was cinematic gold left in the mine there. I'm thinking of the gritty 2015 film Spotlight, which also had very few locations, yet utilitzed outstanding film editing and camerawork, garnering multiple nominations and awards.
Lawrence Konner, the only Many Saints writer credited alongside the creator David Chase, was with the original Sopranos series, but wrote only three Sopranos episodes and three script adaptations—out of approximately 120 episodes—and he wasn't one of the main writers. Many Saints' director, Alan Taylor, had only directed 9 of the TV episodes.
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