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FlamingLiberal posted:Do we know if the FBI stuff was supposed to have a bigger role in the series towards the end or not That was on purpose. As in real life, post 9/11 a lot of the FBI's focus shifted away from organized crime to terrorism, etc.
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Apr 26, 2023 18:01
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They had a lot of setbacks and bad luck on the way. Especially when Ray Curto died in the handler's car. Or when Meadow took the lamp to college.
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Apr 26, 2023 18:11
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Pope Corky the IX posted:That was on purpose. As in real life, post 9/11 a lot of the FBI's focus shifted away from organized crime to terrorism, etc. Season 2 of the wire is a fun companion piece to this
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Apr 26, 2023 18:14
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Brendan Rodgers posted:They had a lot of setbacks and bad luck on the way. Especially when Ray Curto died in the handler's car. Or when Meadow took the lamp to college. Jimmy, Pussy, Jack Massarone, and Adriana were killed. Eugene hanged himself.
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Apr 26, 2023 18:18
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Brendan Rodgers posted:They had a lot of setbacks and bad luck on the way. Especially when Ray Curto died in the handler's car. Or when Meadow took the lamp to college. That scene always makes me laugh cuz it just looks like his batteries ran out
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Apr 26, 2023 18:54
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Ainsley McTree posted:Season 2 of the wire is a fun companion piece to this Everyone seems to miss that they never stopped trying to bust up unions.
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Apr 26, 2023 19:13
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Kevyn posted:That scene always makes me laugh cuz it just looks like his batteries ran out Which is funny because an earlier scene had Curto complaining he needed batteries for his wire tap recorder.
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Apr 26, 2023 19:16
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Gaius Marius posted:It's a decent flick. Better send-off for Ray Liotta than Cocaïne Bear that's for sure. Probably would've worked better as a miniseries and with Sil fully recasted. It could have been such a good miniseries, ugh now I'm sad again
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Apr 26, 2023 19:33
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Pope Corky the IX posted:Yeah, the guy playing Sil is a loving cartoon. And I couldn't possibly care less about Hollywood Dick and they didn't give much time for that to happen anyway. The prison brother was much more interesting. Yeah, I liked Ray Liotta's performance(s) but I don't think the film has earned a spot alongside the series, because it's not nearly as good, is trying to do several muddled things in too little time, and it just doesn't fit. Junior on the show is fighting one long losing battle for dignity as an ageing, unmarried mafioso who never really came into his own, but that's a distinct thing from the film where he's spending every waking second of his life being insulted to his face and never confronting anyone or directly retaliating, which TV Junior does all the time. It feels like they started off from how pathetic he was at the very end of the series and worked backwards. I'm going to try and hold off trying to do actual fanfiction about it or anything, but to me if they were going to do the film it would have been better focused on Livia, Junior, Johnny Boy and Tony, or ideally Junior temporarily sort of standing in as the man of the house when Johnny Boy was in prison, given he seemed to have a closer emotional relationship with Tony and Livia than Johnny did. Also Tony's childhood isn't depicted to be as remotely as hosed up as all the flashbacks and anecdotes and psychological baggage in the series imply. His happiest memory was his mother laughing at his father falling down the loving stairs! As for Young Sil I don't remember totally hating the performance but it's just a lot to ask for anyone to recreate Sil and Paulie without it reading like a caricature, especially in a tiny amount of screentime. I think what really got my hackles up was, if I'm remembering this right, they faded in the show theme song over Tony at Dickie's funeral, which was moronic. UNRULY_HOUSEGUEST fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 19:34
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They also made Silvio a contemporary of Pussy and Paulie who barely knows Tony when in the show they were roughly the same age with daughters in the same grade and Ralphie mentions that the two of them plus Jackie Sr. made up the little crew that robbed Feech's card game. And they didn't just end it with the theme song. Teenage Tony does a pinky swear with Dickie's ghost coming out of the casket at the funeral. Compare that with literally anything in the series.
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Apr 26, 2023 19:38
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Jesus if that literally happened I must have shut my eyes. I do remember them making Christopher a baby when Tony's a teenager apparently just to set up that bit where he gets handed to him and starts crying, when in the show their age gap is what, a decade tops?
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Apr 26, 2023 19:47
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UNRULY_HOUSEGUEST posted:Jesus if that literally happened I must have shut my eyes. I do remember them making Christopher a baby when Tony's a teenager apparently just to set up that bit where he gets handed to him and starts crying, when in the show their age gap is what, a decade tops? Yeah, they mention it several times throughout the series and it's explicitly stated in Cold Cuts when Christopher tells Adriana about Tony and Tony B. tying him to a tree and leaving him there overnight. He says he was like eleven or twelve while they were nineteen.
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Apr 26, 2023 20:02
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Pope Corky the IX posted:Jimmy, Pussy, Jack Massarone, and Adriana were killed. Eugene hanged himself. That's stuff the FBI hosed up themselves, I was mentioning the bad luck. They were terrible at handling their assets. We see them completely apathetic about losing Pussy, even though they wouldn't care about the person they would care about all the time and money put into cultivating him as an asset. But just as they were close to get a tape recording of Tony discussing conspiracy to murder, Ray just dropped dead. When they had a bug in the place Tony talks business in his house, the daughter takes the bug to college. Without those strokes of random luck, he probably gets convicted.
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Apr 26, 2023 20:46
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So I’m reading that in Many Saints of Newark we find out that Junior Soprano had Dickie Moltisanti killed. I felt like something was off in the episode where Tony gives Chris the identity of his father’s killer. Do we think he also knew Junior killed him?
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Apr 26, 2023 20:57
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FlamingLiberal posted:So I’m reading that in Many Saints of Newark we find out that Junior Soprano had Dickie Moltisanti killed. I felt like something was off in the episode where Tony gives Chris the identity of his father’s killer. Do we think he also knew Junior killed him? I’m pretty sure David Chase never dreamed that Junior had Dickie killed at any point during the writing of the series. The Junior connection in the film is a retcon, and it’s a pretty dumb one IMO.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:05
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I don't think they had that idea during the show but of course I don't know. It just seemed like a lovely retcon. Though because I'm insane years ago I went and watched that one bit of the Magnum PI episode that's playing during the scene in which Christopher kills Haydu and the "I'm sorry! I'm sorry" is from him and not dialogue from the television, so make of that what you will.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:06
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Yeah right, it was Junior. Mr. Magoo!
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Apr 26, 2023 21:09
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Pope Corky the IX posted:And they didn't just end it with the theme song. Teenage Tony does a pinky swear with Dickie's ghost coming out of the casket at the funeral. Compare that with literally anything in the series. I said it back when the movie came out, but the pinky-swear shot with the voiceover and the needledrop of the theme song is so astoundingly lovely that those last 10 seconds are singularly responsible for how negative the overall reaction was. It's a messy movie, but that ending...if you're like me and thought the movie was "fine," it leaves you second-guessing even giving it a charitable "I dunno, worth a watch" review. If you didn't like the movie already, that's the "Are you kidding me, can I get a refund on this" button to the whole thing. Between that and the clunky "Tony holds baby Christopher and Chistopher cries and some aunt says that's a bad omen; do you get it? Because of what happens at the end of the show? Do you get it." stuff, it's like Chase regressed to his writing/direction from the Pilot. Very broad and displaying none of the nuance that made the show so rich in later seasons. FlamingLiberal posted:So I’m reading that in Many Saints of Newark we find out that Junior Soprano had Dickie Moltisanti killed. I felt like something was off in the episode where Tony gives Chris the identity of his father’s killer. Do we think he also knew Junior killed him? Well, we find out that Junior ordered a hit. The identity of the gunman himself is left ambiguous, only seen in shadows. (I liked that development, it felt true to Junior's character.)
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Apr 26, 2023 21:13
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The movie really felt like something that would have been made after Chase was dead but nope.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:17
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I haven't seen it yet, and at this point, I don't think I'm going to, but from how you've all described it, it sounds like it was written by the winner of a fanfiction contest and David Chase was sick or something and didn't have time to edit the script e: i am not on a first name basis with david chase
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Apr 26, 2023 21:22
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There are definitely a lot of writers who lose their touch over time. He just may be one of them. Looking at his filmography, the only things he did post-Sopranos were one movie with James Gandolfini and the Many Saints of Newark. That's it.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:44
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It feels like a movie Christopher would make about the family after going into witness protection, like ghostbusters another fuckin money machine!
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Apr 26, 2023 21:56
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Brendan Rodgers posted:But just as they were close to get a tape recording of Tony discussing conspiracy to murder, Ray just dropped dead. When they had a bug in the place Tony talks business in his house, the daughter takes the bug to college. Without those strokes of random luck, he probably gets convicted. It seemed like with Carlo flipping he was running out of options anyway tbh
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Apr 26, 2023 22:01
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banned from Starbucks posted:It feels like a movie Christopher would make about the family after going into witness protection, like ghostbusters another fuckin money machine!
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Apr 26, 2023 22:15
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Yeah but Baldwin took Kingsley to loving acting school!
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Apr 26, 2023 23:27
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The movie feels like fan fiction in the worst ways. There are things that are really good (aforementioned Gandolfini and Bernthal performances) but there are things that are REALLY bad, like Silvio and Uncle June, and the whole thing feels like its on fast forward. You start feeling like the film is gathering some momentum and then it immediately ends. Somehow it all feels like less than the sum of its parts. Oh well, it doesn't do anything to really hurt the enjoyment of the series and somewhat supplements it in a way by showing how Tony's memories of his family is WAY out of sync with what it was really like. But yeah, its a real missed opportunity.
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Apr 26, 2023 23:50
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Huge Sopranos fan here weighing in that I gave TMSoN two chances and still never finished it. It was loving terrible.
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Apr 26, 2023 23:55
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FlamingLiberal posted:The best thing about the fake movie Cleaver is that they had aspirations to get Sir Ben Kingsley (who has been in all sorts of trash movies) but had to settle for a lesser Baldwin brother. "We appreciate your time is less than limited."
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Apr 27, 2023 00:56
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It was a bad omen as soon as it was revealed that Tony is somehow a teenager in this time period, it doesn't add up. Everything loving added up in the show.
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Apr 27, 2023 01:29
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HNO7ATCKP8 10/10 scene, no notes
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Apr 27, 2023 01:30
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Mike N Eich posted:You start feeling like the film is gathering some momentum and then it immediately ends. Somehow it all feels like less than the sum of its parts.
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Apr 27, 2023 02:50
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Im not gonna defend the movie but Syl IS a cartoon and I thought the performance was fine.
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Apr 27, 2023 03:00
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Yeah but kid sil being just as much of a cartoon is a little too twee, like the fuckin prequel shorts for The Wire
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Apr 27, 2023 04:17
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It's such a shame because there are a couple of key moments in Many Saints that REALLY work well, like the reveal about Livia's vulnerability after Johnny Boy went to prison and how it lead to one of the few tender and cherished memories Tony has of her. Or the fact that we learn right near the end of the movie that Dickie's memory was poisoned by Livia's misunderstanding of why he had pills in his pocket, leading to a game of telephone to the point he became a degenerate junkie shooting up heroin in the minds of most, including a son who would go on to become that very thing. But the rest of it is just kind of okay at best and actively awful at worst. Sil and Junior are basically caricatures, with Sil in particular cartoonishly bad.
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Apr 27, 2023 05:09
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Jerusalem posted:It's such a shame because there are a couple of key moments in Many Saints that REALLY work well, like the reveal about Livia's vulnerability after Johnny Boy went to prison and how it lead to one of the few tender and cherished memories Tony has of her. Or the fact that we learn right near the end of the movie that Dickie's memory was poisoned by Livia's misunderstanding of why he had pills in his pocket, leading to a game of telephone to the point he became a degenerate junkie shooting up heroin in the minds of most, including a son who would go on to become that very thing. Just my opinion, but I don't think that stuff really worked at all. Especially the "Dickie was a junkie but oh no it was all a misunderstanding" thing.
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Apr 27, 2023 05:31
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To me it doesn’t feel earned or like something that was conceived within the world of the show during its run. Too clever by half to try and create some kind of payoff for the movie at the expense of an extremely dumb retcon within the context of the series.
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Apr 27, 2023 07:20
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MrMojok posted:Just my opinion, but I don't think that stuff really worked at all. Especially the "Dickie was a junkie but oh no it was all a misunderstanding" thing. Yeah, this doesn’t make sense at all when Christopher’s mother also referred to him as a junkie.
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Apr 27, 2023 10:10
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I couldn't remember if Joanne made any statement expressly acknowledging it, but it seemed like she would be privy to whatever the truth was regardless of the "family" narrative. So if it was just a rumor she would have heard it, and disavowed it before it was able to cement itself as the truth. And Christopher certainly wouldn't be repeating it if it were untrue, in that circumstance.
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Apr 27, 2023 14:33
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I appreciate whoever gave the general review that they were shocked how bad it was proportional to the number of people who were involved in the production of both it and the original series
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Apr 27, 2023 14:36
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By the way, notice how nobody has mentioned Leslie Odom Jr.'s character or any of their story showing what a waste it was to even try something like that if they were going to go all fanfiction.
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Apr 27, 2023 14:44
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