Sopranos
- Thread starter loudog
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- Mar 13, 2002
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And, if I remember correctly, when tony had just left the hospital and was wating for janice to bring the car around, I believe the bell in the clock tower rang three times, meaning it was 3:00....and vito called silvio at 3:00 am to find out if the guys told him anything.
- Mar 13, 2002
- 399
- 1
- 0
Entertainment Weekly
5/15/06
Is anyone really surprised that Vito ? er, Vincent ? literally crashed back into the reality of his old life, wreaking emotional as well as bullet-induced damage as The Sopranos proceeds with crazy sorrow toward its season finale? By now it is a truth universally acknowledged in the David Chase cosmos that a man who makes a point of listening to Frank Sinatra sing ''My Way'' is a man who can't do it his way. And even dem guys who persevere without benefit of a soundtrack ? soft toughie Johnny Sack in his desolate prison twilight, broken and taking a guilty plea (along with 15 years and the forfeit of almost all riches except some ''scraps'' for his beloved behemoth wife, Ginny), dangerously foolish Paulie with the prostate that betrays him, ox-ish Bobby Bacala with his limited brain power and limitlessly unhappy second spouse ? well, dese guys, too, can't do things any way except the dinosaur way.
And Tony least of all. Not to get all New Yorker-y on a show so New Jersey-ish, but as the shrink-savvy writer Janet Malcolm once observed, ''the crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights.'' And Lord (or Freud) knows there's only so much Dr. Melfi can do for ''Patient Soprano,'' except cross her svelte lady legs and gently steer him toward making connections he doesn't want to make between his mother, his older sister, and the effect both women had on the son who ''got the scars.''
But there's something even bigger being communicated, I think, through Tony's boredom (not even his ''recreational life outside of the home'' fills the gaps), Carmela's increasing avarice (at this point, she gazes at Angie the businesswoman with envy bordering on crazy eyes), and gaunt Meadow's insecurity about her skittish fianc?, Finn. Indeed, every non-follow-through of a story line we've seen this season has its reasons: There is no satisfaction to be had for all the waste-management contracts in North Caldwell, N.J. There's just a toy choo-choo train that goes round and round the tracks. And men who transact their brutal business deals, the puniness of which was giggled at, in Matthew Weiner's sly script, when Ginny Sack's brother, playing jailhouse courier, can't even get the secret lingo right: ''coffee with the chicory,'' ''the stuff behind the pool'' ? hah! The ladies meet to share birthday cakes and display weekly hairstyle changes, speaking their own wifely code of collusion. Now there's snow on the ground.
Why would Vito want to return to such a life, especially when, in the fulfillment of a fairy-tale dream, he has the love of a good man who desires every round pound of him? Because ? thinking back to the spurious Bible lesson taught by the skeevy pastor at Tony's hospital bed ? there is no evolution. Let us pause, then, to marvel that the tenderest integration of love and sex between two characters in the history of the series took place between a mobster on the lam and his Johnnycakes. Pretty amazing, no?
And let us acknowledge that of course it couldn't last. So while Vito leaks tears and pulls on a bottle during his drive back to unspecified doom (with echoes of the famous ''Pine Barrens'' episode in the landscape), Janice sobs from a different sort of pain. The woman who knows she ''annoys people,'' the mother who, in Tony's words, has given birth to a ''little twin'' (and is becoming more and more Livia-like every day), is the same woman who blubbers, ''No one's ever done something so...so...,'' unable to finish a sentence involving gratitude when her brother yanks away Johnny Sack's house so his sister can get a deal. Earlier Janice told Tony, ''There's nothing holding us together but DNA.''
You said it, sister.
PS: There are two episodes left this season. And Sopranos tradition suggests that the next-to-last might contain a plot doozy, along the lines of Janice plugging Richie. So here's your cue: What's gotta give?
5/15/06
Is anyone really surprised that Vito ? er, Vincent ? literally crashed back into the reality of his old life, wreaking emotional as well as bullet-induced damage as The Sopranos proceeds with crazy sorrow toward its season finale? By now it is a truth universally acknowledged in the David Chase cosmos that a man who makes a point of listening to Frank Sinatra sing ''My Way'' is a man who can't do it his way. And even dem guys who persevere without benefit of a soundtrack ? soft toughie Johnny Sack in his desolate prison twilight, broken and taking a guilty plea (along with 15 years and the forfeit of almost all riches except some ''scraps'' for his beloved behemoth wife, Ginny), dangerously foolish Paulie with the prostate that betrays him, ox-ish Bobby Bacala with his limited brain power and limitlessly unhappy second spouse ? well, dese guys, too, can't do things any way except the dinosaur way.
And Tony least of all. Not to get all New Yorker-y on a show so New Jersey-ish, but as the shrink-savvy writer Janet Malcolm once observed, ''the crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights.'' And Lord (or Freud) knows there's only so much Dr. Melfi can do for ''Patient Soprano,'' except cross her svelte lady legs and gently steer him toward making connections he doesn't want to make between his mother, his older sister, and the effect both women had on the son who ''got the scars.''
But there's something even bigger being communicated, I think, through Tony's boredom (not even his ''recreational life outside of the home'' fills the gaps), Carmela's increasing avarice (at this point, she gazes at Angie the businesswoman with envy bordering on crazy eyes), and gaunt Meadow's insecurity about her skittish fianc?, Finn. Indeed, every non-follow-through of a story line we've seen this season has its reasons: There is no satisfaction to be had for all the waste-management contracts in North Caldwell, N.J. There's just a toy choo-choo train that goes round and round the tracks. And men who transact their brutal business deals, the puniness of which was giggled at, in Matthew Weiner's sly script, when Ginny Sack's brother, playing jailhouse courier, can't even get the secret lingo right: ''coffee with the chicory,'' ''the stuff behind the pool'' ? hah! The ladies meet to share birthday cakes and display weekly hairstyle changes, speaking their own wifely code of collusion. Now there's snow on the ground.
Why would Vito want to return to such a life, especially when, in the fulfillment of a fairy-tale dream, he has the love of a good man who desires every round pound of him? Because ? thinking back to the spurious Bible lesson taught by the skeevy pastor at Tony's hospital bed ? there is no evolution. Let us pause, then, to marvel that the tenderest integration of love and sex between two characters in the history of the series took place between a mobster on the lam and his Johnnycakes. Pretty amazing, no?
And let us acknowledge that of course it couldn't last. So while Vito leaks tears and pulls on a bottle during his drive back to unspecified doom (with echoes of the famous ''Pine Barrens'' episode in the landscape), Janice sobs from a different sort of pain. The woman who knows she ''annoys people,'' the mother who, in Tony's words, has given birth to a ''little twin'' (and is becoming more and more Livia-like every day), is the same woman who blubbers, ''No one's ever done something so...so...,'' unable to finish a sentence involving gratitude when her brother yanks away Johnny Sack's house so his sister can get a deal. Earlier Janice told Tony, ''There's nothing holding us together but DNA.''
You said it, sister.
PS: There are two episodes left this season. And Sopranos tradition suggests that the next-to-last might contain a plot doozy, along the lines of Janice plugging Richie. So here's your cue: What's gotta give?
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Is phil also Gay???? Why was he in the closet? It seems like there telling us he came out of the closet??
- Mar 13, 2002
- 399
- 1
- 0
Entertainment Weekly
5/22/2006
Ah, Paris ? don't you wish you were there right now? Especially given the way this bountiful and satisfying episode kept cross-cutting between the romance and beauty of the City of Lights (where Carm, who had won the trip in a church raffle, took a well-deserved vacation with pal Ro) and the sordidness of Tony's world back in Jersey, with its strippers, vermin, and murders.
Still, Carm couldn't keep the two worlds from meshing in her mind: dreaming of the ill-fated Adriana, seeing a beacon on the Eiffel Tower that looked like the one in Tony's comatose dream, and being so overwhelmed by the generations of history in Paris that she recalled Tony's existential question in the hospital, ''Who am I? Where am I going?'' Thinking about Ro's dead husband and son, she asked Ro why she never talked about them. ''Why would you bring Jersey here?'' snapped Ro.
It's probably sacrilegious for me to wonder if Carm's lingering look at a statue of Jesus, bearing the legend ''Ecce Homo'' (''Behold the Man''), wasn't also a punning reference to Vito ? may he rest in peace. Vito's death wasn't as great a shock as it might have been; we'd been expecting it all season, and his return to Jersey made it all but inevitable. (Plus, doomed major characters, like Richie Aprile and Adriana, often get whacked during the penultimate episode of a Sopranos season.) At least he got to have one nice outing with his wife and kids before he met his fate, at the hands of two of Phil Leotardo's soldiers, who beat him to death in a motel room and staged the incident to look like a gay pickup gone bad.
I'm one of those who think Vito's story line this season was essential to the thematic concerns of the show and not a side trip or distraction. Vito's plight raised fundamental questions about what it means, in Tony's world, to be a man, questions that resonated richly throughout this episode. There's Phil, literally coming out of the closet as he presides over Vito's final moments. There's A.J.'s friends, making casual homophobic jokes. There's Tony, telling Dr. Melfi about his rage toward his giggling, shiftless son ? and turning away from her insight that the kind of shelter from Tony that Carm had always given A.J. was just the kind of protection Tony had longed for in vain from his own mother. There's Carm, practically giving Tony permission to do ''whatever it is that boys do when they're on their own'' while she's gone, and Tony taking advantage of Carm's absence to get serviced by a stripper while he's driving. (Am I the only one who thought at first that his heavy breathing was the sign of another panic attack?) And there's Fat Dom, one of Vito's killers, gloating about Vito's demise and gay-baiting the apron-clad Carlo until Carlo (like Phil, defending the manly honor of his family and himself) and Silvio kill him in a fit of rage. Behold the men.
On a practical level, of course, Vito's murder was about more than just Phil's shame over the scandal that had befallen his cousin, Vito's wife. As Tony and Sil recognized, it was also a power play. Tony had been seriously considering Vito's offer to return to work in a low-profile way, far away in Atlantic City, and even though he'd been on the verge of having Vito whacked anyway to mollify Phil, Phil's taking matters into his own hands and killing a captain in another Mob family was a brazen move that suggested Phil believed he was untouchable. Tony didn't want to respond violently. ''When guys are on the mattresses, they're not out earning,'' he told Sil. (Has someone compiled a book of the management maxims of Tony Soprano? Loved the well-chosen Godfather reference, by the way.) Tony planned to hurt Phil where it counts ? in the wallet ? but the impulsive slaying of Fat Dom probably means a real Mob war is inevitable.
One of the brilliant and diabolical aspects of The Sopranos is the way it toys with your sympathies. It's easy to feel sorry for Vito this week while forgetting that last week he killed an innocent bystander in cold blood. Or to feel disgust at Tony's casual infidelity but appreciate the warm, fatherly, firm way he finally laid down the law to A.J. Or to note that Carmela feels haunted by the deaths of Adriana and Jackie Aprile Jr. but doesn't grasp her husband's responsibility for those deaths. Or to marvel at the moral calculus that finds homosexuality a damnable sin but not beating an unarmed man to death.
So, Sopranos watchers, how do you think the season will wrap in two weeks? Will open warfare break out between Tony and Phil? Will Meadow's journey to California to be with Finn effectively end her involvement in the series? Will A.J. finally show some responsibility in his new job and earn his father's respect? And will Carmela make a moral leap and recognize the connection between her luxurious vie en rose and the grimy goings-on that make it possible?
5/22/2006
Ah, Paris ? don't you wish you were there right now? Especially given the way this bountiful and satisfying episode kept cross-cutting between the romance and beauty of the City of Lights (where Carm, who had won the trip in a church raffle, took a well-deserved vacation with pal Ro) and the sordidness of Tony's world back in Jersey, with its strippers, vermin, and murders.
Still, Carm couldn't keep the two worlds from meshing in her mind: dreaming of the ill-fated Adriana, seeing a beacon on the Eiffel Tower that looked like the one in Tony's comatose dream, and being so overwhelmed by the generations of history in Paris that she recalled Tony's existential question in the hospital, ''Who am I? Where am I going?'' Thinking about Ro's dead husband and son, she asked Ro why she never talked about them. ''Why would you bring Jersey here?'' snapped Ro.
It's probably sacrilegious for me to wonder if Carm's lingering look at a statue of Jesus, bearing the legend ''Ecce Homo'' (''Behold the Man''), wasn't also a punning reference to Vito ? may he rest in peace. Vito's death wasn't as great a shock as it might have been; we'd been expecting it all season, and his return to Jersey made it all but inevitable. (Plus, doomed major characters, like Richie Aprile and Adriana, often get whacked during the penultimate episode of a Sopranos season.) At least he got to have one nice outing with his wife and kids before he met his fate, at the hands of two of Phil Leotardo's soldiers, who beat him to death in a motel room and staged the incident to look like a gay pickup gone bad.
I'm one of those who think Vito's story line this season was essential to the thematic concerns of the show and not a side trip or distraction. Vito's plight raised fundamental questions about what it means, in Tony's world, to be a man, questions that resonated richly throughout this episode. There's Phil, literally coming out of the closet as he presides over Vito's final moments. There's A.J.'s friends, making casual homophobic jokes. There's Tony, telling Dr. Melfi about his rage toward his giggling, shiftless son ? and turning away from her insight that the kind of shelter from Tony that Carm had always given A.J. was just the kind of protection Tony had longed for in vain from his own mother. There's Carm, practically giving Tony permission to do ''whatever it is that boys do when they're on their own'' while she's gone, and Tony taking advantage of Carm's absence to get serviced by a stripper while he's driving. (Am I the only one who thought at first that his heavy breathing was the sign of another panic attack?) And there's Fat Dom, one of Vito's killers, gloating about Vito's demise and gay-baiting the apron-clad Carlo until Carlo (like Phil, defending the manly honor of his family and himself) and Silvio kill him in a fit of rage. Behold the men.
On a practical level, of course, Vito's murder was about more than just Phil's shame over the scandal that had befallen his cousin, Vito's wife. As Tony and Sil recognized, it was also a power play. Tony had been seriously considering Vito's offer to return to work in a low-profile way, far away in Atlantic City, and even though he'd been on the verge of having Vito whacked anyway to mollify Phil, Phil's taking matters into his own hands and killing a captain in another Mob family was a brazen move that suggested Phil believed he was untouchable. Tony didn't want to respond violently. ''When guys are on the mattresses, they're not out earning,'' he told Sil. (Has someone compiled a book of the management maxims of Tony Soprano? Loved the well-chosen Godfather reference, by the way.) Tony planned to hurt Phil where it counts ? in the wallet ? but the impulsive slaying of Fat Dom probably means a real Mob war is inevitable.
One of the brilliant and diabolical aspects of The Sopranos is the way it toys with your sympathies. It's easy to feel sorry for Vito this week while forgetting that last week he killed an innocent bystander in cold blood. Or to feel disgust at Tony's casual infidelity but appreciate the warm, fatherly, firm way he finally laid down the law to A.J. Or to note that Carmela feels haunted by the deaths of Adriana and Jackie Aprile Jr. but doesn't grasp her husband's responsibility for those deaths. Or to marvel at the moral calculus that finds homosexuality a damnable sin but not beating an unarmed man to death.
So, Sopranos watchers, how do you think the season will wrap in two weeks? Will open warfare break out between Tony and Phil? Will Meadow's journey to California to be with Finn effectively end her involvement in the series? Will A.J. finally show some responsibility in his new job and earn his father's respect? And will Carmela make a moral leap and recognize the connection between her luxurious vie en rose and the grimy goings-on that make it possible?
