Arrggh - Sopranos

[jomar]

Final episode. Not satisfying!

 

[bluebell]

Final episode. Not satisfying!

Are they ever, though?

Now all the men in my office will have to give big boo-hoos into pillows that it's over. That's what they talk about at the copy machine...

 

[Belegon]

Please! No spoilers...

West Coast. Three hour time difference. Understand?

*cracks knuckles and nods at muscle watching the BadaBing girls behind him.*

 

[TheeGoatPig]

Final episode. Not satisfying!

Hahahaha! My sister and mother are saying the same thing! (and my mother doesn't even like the show)

I loved it. That was one of the best deaths ever. Suspenseful last scene too. I just wish that AJ had died. I hated that kid.

 

[jomar]

Please! No spoilers...

West Coast. Three hour time difference. Understand?

*cracks knuckles and nods at muscle watching the BadaBing girls behind him.*

No. No spoilers. FuhgetaboutitQ

Are they ever, though?

Now all the men in my office will have to give big boo-hoos into pillows that it's over. That's what they talk about at the copy machine...

A lot are disappointments. Seinfeld was. Seems like the MASH finale wasn't.

 

[jomar]

Hahahaha! My sister and mother are saying the same thing! (and my mother doesn't even like the show)

I loved it. That was one of the best deaths ever. Suspenseful last scene too. I just wish that AJ had died. I hated that kid.

Which one? (close your eyes Belegon).

 

[TheeGoatPig]

Which one? (close your eyes Belegon).

Don't worry Belegon, I'll white it out

There was only one death. Phil. His head was run over by his own truck as his wife watched witht he kids in the back. That was just great

 

[Edward Teach]

Please! No spoilers...

West Coast. Three hour time difference. Understand?

*cracks knuckles and nods at muscle watching the BadaBing girls behind him.*

Well, everyone gets killed and there is nothing left but this long black rectangular obelisk floating out through space

 

[drksideofthemoon]

Final episode. Not satisfying!

I've never seen a single episode of it...

For the longest time I thought the Sopranos was a musical thing, something like the Four Tenors....

 

[bluebell]

Tony the Soprano

I've never seen a single episode of it...

For the longest time I thought the Sopranos was a musical thing, something like the Four Tenors....

Now that would add a whole new dimension.
I wonder if James Gandolfini can sing?

 

[Boota]

Not satisfying? I think "sucked" is more to the point. It's like the audience is just being fucked with and made fun of for watching for six seasons.

 

[flavortang]

That's one of those shows that everyone's supposedly watching that I've never seen. I'm sure the entire cast is swimming in pools of cash, though. It seemed to be pretty damned popular.

 

[3113]

I loved it. That was one of the best deaths ever. Suspenseful last scene too. I just wish that AJ had died. I hated that kid.

Not a death at all...or was it? Ambiguity (and there's at least 3 possiblities to the end) doesn't fly well with most audiences. Which is why so many folk are finding it unsatisfying. 9 out of 10 messages I read said they thought their cable had gone out

 

[Seattle Zack]

"Woke up this morning, got myself a gun ..."

I loved the final episode, and the way it ended. The screen went black and I waited ... and waited ... wtf? ... then those familiar credits. I laughed out loud, how absolutely perfect, and so in line with the character of the show.

Americans love their TV shows and movies and books to wrap up into a tidy ending, even the slightest bit of ambiguity is something that makes them extremely uncomfortable. I'm sure there are many shrill comments and squeals of protest out there, and I bet David Chase is chuckling at every one of them.

(Belegon--You don't have the east coast HBO feed? What's up with your shitty cable company?)

At least Phil got whacked. Chase wrote and directed the final episode, and it seemed to me the story arc of this entire series was the glimpse into Tony's life that we got over the last ten years, courtesy of Dr. Melfi. She was, in essence, the audience. It started with Tony entering therapy, and ended with her kicking him out of it.

I like the idea that the Sopranos' life will go on, imperfect and unresolved (just like real life), we just don't get a window to it anymore.

I will admit, the final sequence seemed a little gimmicky, with all the quick takes, the impending sense of dread with every passing minute ("Don't Stop Believing" seemed particularly ironic), as he focused in on the most mundane details (Meadow parking her goddamn car was especially nerve-wracking).

Then again, like one of my friends suggested, maybe Tony did get whacked. In the first episode, if you remember (also penned by Chase), Tony was out on a boat with Bobby discussing what it's like when you're killed. I don't recall the exact line, but Bobby said something like "It probably don't feel like nothing. You probably don't even know what happened." Tony responds, "Yeah, you're probably right."

My fantasy baseball team started a pool on who would whack Tony, for five bucks you could pick any character, even enter multiple times. We had like 240 bucks in the final pot, with people picking everyone from the Russian to Adrianna. I tossed in ten bucks myself, took AJ and Paulie Walnuts.

What an awesome show. Outstanding writing, great acting, superb music, and some of the most outlandish (yet completely believable) characters ever created. I'll certainly miss it. This is what TV should be like, yet most Americans would rather watch moronic shit like American Idol and Friends.

 

[john-the-author]

Not a death at all...or was it? Ambiguity (and there's at least 3 possiblities to the end) doesn't fly well with most audiences. Which is why so many folk are finding it unsatisfying. 9 out of 10 messages I read said they thought their cable had gone out

I sure did. And it wasn't until the later evening broadcast that I realized that it hadn't.

It seemed slightly less cheap than killing Tony/everyone in his family, but there wasn't a resolution. It just ended. Yes, life is like that all the time, but we tend to expect a little more of fiction than that.

 

[Belegon]

I was a little pissed...then I loved it.

 

[Grushenka]

(Meadow parking her goddamn car was especially nerve-wracking).

Really! It was a tense episode-- the restaurant setting, the door opening and closing, the guy staring, going to the toilet (grand shades of Godfather I). Then WHAM! Black-out. Silence. Perfect.

Made up for lots of crappy episodes (the Vito story) in the past couple years.

 

[jomar]

Not satisfying? I think "sucked" is more to the point. It's like the audience is just being fucked with and made fun of for watching for six seasons.

Sucked works.

Not a death at all...or was it? Ambiguity (and there's at least 3 possiblities to the end) doesn't fly well with most audiences. Which is why so many folk are finding it unsatisfying. 9 out of 10 messages I read said they thought their cable had gone out

Ha! I had the same thought for a second.

I loved the final episode, and the way it ended. The screen went black and I waited ... and waited ... wtf? ... then those familiar credits. I laughed out loud, how absolutely perfect, and so in line with the character of the show.

Americans love their TV shows and movies and books to wrap up into a tidy ending, even the slightest bit of ambiguity is something that makes them extremely uncomfortable.

Ambiguity is okay, I just wanted action - maybe even the start of a gunfight would have been okay. I thought that when Phil got killed the Soprano's would be be fine - there was nobody else gunning for Tony so the last scene was BS.

 

[Chantilyvamp]

do you know they sale a sopranos signed photo (and not a large one) in a magazine for nearly £2000. For that amount of money their DNA had better be laced all over that photo

 

[BlackShanglan]

Thoroughly juvenile. I'd just heard Chase on NPR a few days before blathering about how "profound and seemingly endless" the possible interpretations of the show were, and that had already confirmed for me the diagnosis that I'd previously made from the later seasons of the show - very bad, potentially terminal case of "Serious Artist Syndrome."

What other diagnosis is there for someone who so self-adoringly crows about his ham-fisted symbolic gestures (honestly, Tony's "near death" sequence was just embarassing) while basing his series-wide plot arc, so far as anyone could guess from the results, on a water-cooler discussion about people's Christmas breaks? ("Hey, the wife and I drove up to New Hampshire and we had these great things called Johnny cakes ..." "I just read this wild article about how sociopaths respond to the talking cure ..." "Man, did you see this news story on how some SUV's can catch on fire if their catalytic converters touch a pile of leaves?") He can write action, but the man is positively agonizing to watch when he thinks he's being profound, and Lord knows you can't miss those moments because he hires an industrial-rated piledriver to pound them home.

And that, of course, is the worst of it. I'm sure that Mr. Chase is indeed crowing and patting himself on the back, because for Serious Artists well-advanced in the disease, everything is a sign of success. No doubt at this moment he's smugly congratulating himself on refusing to offer audiences the "neat, tidy little ending" he imagines they were looking for. One can indeed avoid the "neat, tidy little ending" by not writing one, but not writing an ending at all - and he didn't - is either incapacity or the special brand of adolescent "cleverness" normally reserved for third-year film students.

Ambiguity can be a delight, and I'm certainly not an enemy of an ending that leaves some questions unanswered. Indeed, I have ended a story with my protagnonists in mid-air over a hundred-foot drop. But a good ending does achieve important goals, and to decline to achieve them at all is simply to demonstrate that one cannot write well. A strong ending with power and effect to it is one that culminates the themes and actions and drives home the weight of the work as a whole - a task that would admittedly have been made easier on Mr. Chase had he had the slightest inkling of what the work as a whole was doing. Alas, the later seasons made it clear that he didn't, and undoubtedly that was a considerable inducement to opt for the film equivalent of the ever-popular (in ninth grade) story ending of " ... THE END ???"

Shanglan

 

[jomar]

Thoroughly juvenile. I'd just heard Chase on NPR a few days before blathering about how "profound and seemingly endless" the possible interpretations of the show were, and that had already confirmed for me the diagnosis that I'd previously made from the later seasons of the show - very bad, potentially terminal case of "Serious Artist Syndrome."

What other diagnosis is there for someone who so self-adoringly crows about his ham-fisted symbolic gestures (honestly, Tony's "near death" sequence was just embarassing) while basing his series-wide plot arc, so far as anyone could guess from the results, on a water-cooler discussion about people's Christmas breaks? ("Hey, the wife and I drove up to New Hampshire and we had these great things called Johnny cakes ..." "I just read this wild article about how sociopaths respond to the talking cure ..." "Man, did you see this news story on how some SUV's can catch on fire if their catalytic converters touch a pile of leaves?") He can write action, but the man is positively agonizing to watch when he thinks he's being profound, and Lord knows you can't miss those moments because he hires an industrial-rated piledriver to pound them home.

And that, of course, is the worst of it. I'm sure that Mr. Chase is indeed crowing and patting himself on the back, because for Serious Artists well-advanced in the disease, everything is a sign of success. No doubt at this moment he's smugly congratulating himself on refusing to offer audiences the "neat, tidy little ending" he imagines they were looking for. One can indeed avoid the "neat, tidy little ending" by not writing one, but not writing an ending at all - and he didn't - is either incapacity or the special brand of adolescent "cleverness" normally reserved for third-year film students.

Ambiguity can be a delight, and I'm certainly not an enemy of an ending that leaves some questions unanswered. Indeed, I have ended a story with my protagnonists in mid-air over a hundred-foot drop. But a good ending does achieve important goals, and to decline to achieve them at all is simply to demonstrate that one cannot write well. A strong ending with power and effect to it is one that culminates the themes and actions and drives home the weight of the work as a whole - a task that would admittedly have been made easier on Mr. Chase had he had the slightest inkling of what the work as a whole was doing. Alas, the later seasons made it clear that he didn't, and undoubtedly that was a considerable inducement to opt for the film equivalent of the ever-popular (in ninth grade) story ending of " ... THE END ???"

Shanglan

Ha! Too bad Mr. Chase doesn't qualify to be on The Actor's Studio with James Lipton. The Soprano's did meander. I recall the producers/writers (?) of 24 saying they had to seriously regroup - they realized they were getting ready to jump the shark when they had the daughter in the mountains fighting off a bear or bobcat or something.

 

[shereads]

I don't have HBO, but recently found old episodes of "The Sopranos" on A&E Network. Loved it. Then I realized I was becoming addicted to the show at precisely the wrong time - near the end of its run - just as I did for "Twin Peaks." Dammit.

So in a way, I'm glad I missed the last episode. If I can break my addiction to the reruns, I won't miss the first-run episodes; won't regret the degradation of quality toward the end; and will have one less potential disappointment ahead.



Questions: Are there any dancing dwarf dream sequences in The Sopranos? What kind of pie do they have? Did Tony Soprano have anything to do with the death of Laura Palmer?

 

[BlackShanglan]

I don't have HBO, but recently found "The Sopranos" on A&E Network. Loved it. Then I realized I was becoming addicted to the show at precisely the wrong time - near the end of its run - just as I did for "Twin Peaks." Dammit.

So in a way, I'm glad I missed the last episode. If I can break my addiction to the reruns, I won't miss the first-run episodes.

I'd say stick with the re-runs. The first few seasons were really quite good. The SO and I developed a major habit.

But that's the great tragedy of Serious Artist Syndrome - it nearly always strikes those who have actually done some notable work. It's a chronic inflamation of the ego caused by infectious toadies and yes-men coming into contact with a success-elation-compromised artistic immune system. The infection ravages the critical-awareness and self-examination centers and leaves the artist in a state of euphoric numbness through which the sensation of even his most agonizing blunders cannot penetrate. It's a mercy, I suppose, that they do not themselves suffer, but their work exhibits the most grotesque convulsions.

Shanglan

 

[shereads]

I'd say stick with the re-runs. The first few seasons were really quite good. The SO and I developed a major habit.

But that's the great tragedy of Serious Artist Syndrome - it nearly always strikes those who have actually done some notable work. It's a chronic inflamation of the ego caused by infectious toadies and yes-men coming into contact with a success-elation-compromised artistic immune system. The infection ravages the critical-awareness and self-examination centers and leaves the artist in a state of euphoric numbness through which the sensation of even his most agonizing blunders cannot penetrate. It's a mercy, I suppose, that they do not themselves suffer, but their work exhibits the most grotesque convulsions.

Shanglan

When "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin was disappeared, the network suits said the writing would be essentially the same, but "without all the banter." Banter was replaced with a kidnapping storyline and multiple terrorist plots. I was relieved when they pulled the plug, even though I had stopped watching. I hadn't liked knowing the body was being kept alive without its brain.

But the question remains: what about Laura Palmer?

 

[BlackShanglan]

But the question remains: what about Laura Palmer?

I suppose I shall be forced to ask, then. Who is Laura Palmer?