Posted on 01/09/2019 4:58:33 AM PST by simpson96
For the longest time, I’ve considered myself a Sopranos superfan. Perhaps THE Sopranos superfan.
As a teenager, I followed the New Jersey mafia drama since its debut 20 years ago this week – Jan. 10, 1999 – often employing illegal online file-sharing services to download the episodes, as my parents wouldn’t fork over the money to subscribe to the Movie Network (Canada’s HBO equivalent) so a 16-year-old could learn about the subtle art of “waste management.” In the years since creator David Chase inflamed America with his infamous cut-to-black series finale, I’ve rewatched my precious Sopranos DVD box-sets over and over (last count: nine full-series revisits … maybe 10). And in 2013, a month after the death of star James Gandolfini, I organized what I thought was a supercool Sopranos trivia night at a downtown Toronto bar. Nine rounds of questions, worth 100 points, including a section on the show’s gangster-spouted malapropisms (Sample: Which character says, “Create a little dysentery among the ranks”?). I think four people attended.
But my fandom pales in comparison to the veritable Rhodes Scholars of Sopranos Studies, television critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz.
(snip...) the pair have reunited to write The Sopranos Sessions, a 20th-anniversary analysis of what they rightly call the greatest and most influential series in television history.
The massive book, which arrives this week, not only offers deep-dive essays on every single one of the series' 86 episodes (including copious David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes), but also includes an intense, insightful multichapter interview with the usually press-shy Chase. What’s more: Chase finally clarifies the ending. Sort of.(snip)
“It was because of The Sopranos that you got The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones and on and on and on,” says Zoller Seitz.
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
I agree with Big Red Badger.
Your take roughly mirrors my own.
I would say that “The Godfather” glamorized the mob, but movies like “Goodfellas” and this series removed that glamour by exposing them to the light of day.
funny!
“In art and the media, we have elevated criminals to status of hero to be envied and worshiped.”
Robin Hood.
The Wire is great. Maybe it’s good because it was created by a former Baltimore police detective, and a reporter for the Baltimore Sun who covered the police beat.
David Simon-——all he produces is great.
.
I am fairly omnivorous about teevee and moovee fare, but I have always boycotted The Godfather films and The Sopranos series.
I want to see gangsters disgraced, imprisoned, and/or eliminated - not glorified. I want heroes, not villains.
It is a morally and spiritually unhealthy sign that Americans - including ostensible conservatives - prefer this to anything - anything! - wholesome and edifying.
(When I say, always, I mean always. I heard plenty about the movies at a “Christian” prep school; I have never watched them.)
When the entire focus is on glorifying evil, no, it is not.
What if the Bible solely focused on the evil works of Satan, the Father of Lies, indulging in exhaustively orgiastic, at times virtually orgasmic, delineation of them, but ended by showing him getting what was coming to him?
Would that be good enough to show us what goodness, mercy and grace is?
I repeat: No, it is not clear enough.
I cannot see any TV series that glorifies evil, crime and violence as being “great”
I respectfully, and strongly, disagree.
Hearing people, including talk-show hosts, discuss the series makes it clear it glamourizes organized crime.
See my previous post.
Good for them!
The first seasons of the Sopranos were great but then it became “Who gets whacked?”.
Hollywood is filled with nihilists, relativists, and hedonists.
They literally - like George R. R. Martin, the author of A Song of Ice and Fire [A Game of Thrones], a former teevee script writer, do not believe in objective moral good. They are cynical about human nature being capable of good, while at the same time incessantly reveling in its debauchery. Martin is not the American Tolkien (as the media has sold him); he is the American anti-Tolkien.
They are truly anti-Christian, and therefore actively anti-morality.
Humanity is fallen, and in need of grace, but good is real, and to be pursued.
John Wayne’s characters were flawed humans - and sometimes even anti-heroes [Red River] - but they acknowledged an objective moral standard.
I respect your opinion, but I think you have misjudged the depiction of evil as being equivalent to glorifying evil; when in fact The Sopranos exposed and ridiculed the evil and stupidity of a criminal underworld that had previously enjoyed the very glorification you condemn. The Sopranos was a much-needed corrective to the romantic myths surrounding the Italian-American Mob.
If that's the way you see it, fine. I'm sure your opinion is grounded in a firm moral base and I consider it valid and intellectually honest.
Personally I found The Sopranos to be effective FICTIONAL literature about good or evil, life or death and the consequences of making the wrong choices - throughout the whole thing. I only watched it once, but... Richie Aprile, Ralphie, Uncle Junior, Johnny Sacks(?)... Tony's mom, too, all came to grief at various points along the way, while Christopher, Paulie Walnuts, and Silvio, (whom I rather admired for being a somewhat dapper guy, in his own style, until his true nature as a killer was revealed when he obediently murdered, what was her name, Christopher's young wife...) all met their demise within about, what a couple of days of the moment when Tony and his family [CUT TO BLACK]
SPOILER ALERT: For those who didn't figure it out, when Tony, Carmella, and A.J. took their seats in the big booth in the diner and as Meadow was having a hard time parking her car, remember all those unaccompanied middle-aged men who entered the diner and casually took seats at tactically located spots all around them? One particularly recalls that one of them was wearing a Carhartt work vest and a baseball hat that said "USA", with an American flag on it? Those guys were all hit guys, sent to exterminate what was left of the Soprano crime family.
Tony had it coming for obvious reasons. Carmella had been enabling Tony for at least 20 years. Meadow (she's late but on her way in from the parking lot now, she doesn't know it but her life is about to end) has ultimately used all that smartness she was blessed with to rationalize her dad's pathological life, rather than excel at law school and make the right choices. Young A.J. is not as smart as Meadow but he's smart enough at 18 to actually manipulate his parents out of a new BMW and some other bling, as he courts a high school girl... who BTW elicits the information from him, A.J, about where the whole family can be found, in public, this very evening... so they've all made their choices to follow Tony as the head of the "family"... oh, you still don't know it's all over yet?
Yes, that "Cut to black" was the end of the show and the end of the Sopranos. They don't exist any longer, not in this world. No spinoffs, no epilog, no requiem except maybe by Carmella's priest. They all died in a crossfire, let's say within about one second of one another.
Glorifying evil? To the contrary, IMO it was all about the consequences of evil, in Tony's case, and also of tolerating it, etc, in the case of his "family family".
So sad for them. I'm glad Dr. Melfi had some friends helping her out. She had a close call herself.
Mrs. Sooner tells me I need to learn to economize my words...
No; I thought your words clearly expressed the drama of the last moments. I watched every single episode but the last one. I appreciate your view of it, since so many reviewers waffled and thought it was “inconclusive.” But like the fate of Michael in Godfather III, which many viewers shied away from but I loved, it was an inexorable end, either on this side or the next, since repentance was highly unlikely. Thanks!
Well, thank you for your kind words.
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