I'm bummed for a lot of reasons about the end of "The Sopranos." I'll miss Tony's invincible life force, and the shambling way he pulls late-night snacks out of the refrigerator. I'll miss Carm's shrewd emotional casuistry, and Meadow's fight to make a clean life, and Artie's weird unkillable marriage, and Paulie's utter lack of self-insight, and Dr. Melfi's half-sexy, half-unnerving voice. I'll miss the Bada Bing and Satriale's and that great opening sequence, the drive through stratified class layers until we arrive at Tony's vulgar McMansion. I'll even miss poor little lost A.J., who, God help him, not only tried to commit suicide, but discovered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But mostly, I'll miss the show's absolute and perverse amorality. In the age of Bush, how am I going to survive without my weekly double shot of ethical ambiguity?
The genius of "The Sopranos" has always been that it presents two apparently contradictory realities simultaneously, like one of those illustrations that looks alternatively like a vase or a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Its shtick is that it is a show about an American family just like ours -- who are also a bunch of coldblooded murderers whom according to even the laxest moral standards we should loathe. And the king of these monsters is, of course, our dear old Tony.
And he is our dear old Tony. We try to loathe him, but we can't make it stick. Not for very long, and not really at all. We identify with him too much. We feel for him. In a weird but undeniable way, we actually love him. Because even after he murders his relatives, or whacks some terrified kid who's pissing in his pants, a few minutes later he bobs back up, the original and literal whack-a-mole, the same old crinkly-eyed Tony. Tony is just Tony, as real as you or me -- and a hell of a lot more real than just about any other character on TV. We know him too well not to love him, this careworn family man damaged by his cruel mom, this dad trying to raise his kids and keep his marriage going, this hardworking guy who just happens to have this unusual job that involves killing people. He's our favorite murderer.
This puts us in a deliciously uncomfortable position. Loving Tony, like loving Hitler or Osama bin Laden, is not something we're supposed to do. In one episode, Tony callously murders his nephew Christopher -- then in the next reveals his most wounded, deeply sympathetic side, wrapping his arms around his suicidal son while groaning, "My baby, my baby." Neither of these is the "real" Tony, for there is no "real" Tony -- there are a multiplicity of Tonys, and at every moment he is free to choose. "The Sopranos" is existentialist TV: To paraphrase the legendary French capo Jean-Paul Sartre, Tony's existence precedes his essence.
"The Sopranos" is built not just on moral ambiguity, but moral obscenity. It achieves this by graphically depicting the most brutal events, while suspending all judgment about them. This holds true for the good guys and bad guys alike. Actually, there are no good guys. FBI agents are icy zombies. Priests are corrupt and confused. Psychiatrists are backstabbing pedants, trotting out neat phrases like "sociopath" that illuminate nothing. Married men are only as faithful as their options. Married women are manipulative and self-serving. Human behavior of any kind, from adultery to blackmail to murder, has no transcendental meaning. If Tony Soprano can strangle somebody and then return to checking out a college campus, it doesn't mean he's a madman. It's what he does.
"The Sopranos" wasn't the first mass entertainment to challenge the unwritten (and sometimes written) moral codes laid down by our national entertainment nannies. Film noir flirted with reversals of moral and narrative expectation. The '70s saw a wave of revisionist westerns and war movies. And many TV shows have pushed the envelope. But David Chase's creation represents the most decisive break ever with pop culture's punish-evil, reward-good rules.
Tony may die Sunday night, but if he does, his death will not represent "payment" for his sins. Whether he lived or died was just a matter of fate. Even Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," which brilliantly subverted traditional moral judgments -- and was attacked for glorifying criminal violence -- was not as nihilistic as "The Sopranos." The film's famous final shot, in which Michael Corleone, now completely and irrevocably alone, broods bitterly as his command to kill his older brother is carried out, implied some kind of cosmic justice: As ye sow, so shall we reap. In the universe of "The Sopranos," Michael would have brooded for a few minutes, then called up his goomah, done a few lines and partied. And then gotten depressed again a few weeks later. And then gone out to eat.
The sheer duration of "The Sopranos" helps to explain its oceanic approach to narrative and morality. Since the writers are not confined to a two-hour story, they aren't under pressure to make their stories mean anything. And the fact that most of the main characters have had a fictional life -- the entire show is 80 hours long! -- pushes the form toward the picaresque. There are dozens of little climaxes but no big plot hinge. This deepens the show's contingent, arbitrary, lost-at-sea feeling. Like the beautifully realized characters in John Dos Passos' great, insufficiently appreciated "USA" trilogy -- an achievement that led Sartre to call Dos Passos "the greatest writer of our time" -- the characters in "The Sopranos" wander aimlessly about, bump into obstacles, and eventually fall down.
For me, and obviously for many viewers, the amorality of "The Sopranos" is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. Growing up, I hated the bogus quasi-official morality promulgated by popular entertainment -- in movies, but especially in TV shows. I couldn't stand the fact that the Good Guys always won and the Bad Guys always lost. I groaned at the two-bit narrative semiotics employed by Hollywood hacks on shows like "Dragnet" -- the "maniacal" laughter of a villain, a hero's "noble" profile, all accompanied by message music piped in by some dreadful cosmic DJ.
In "The Story of the Bad Little Boy," Mark Twain viciously sends up the Sunday school tales he was forced to read as a child. "Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim -- though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books," Twain begins. "It was strange, but still it was true that this one was called Jim." Jim, Twain tells us, didn't have a sick mother, "who was pious and had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at rest but for the strong love she bore her boy." No, his mother was "rather stout than otherwise, and she was not pious; moreover, she was not anxious on Jim's account. She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss." Twain then goes on to relate how Jim did all kinds of horrible things, but instead of being caught and punished, he blamed them on other people and laughed coarsely. Finally, "he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature. "
Give or take a detail or two, this is the Tony Soprano story. But of course there's more going on with "The Sopranos" than just a satisfying reversal of bogus moral strictures. Its goal is not just to tear down pious, mom 'n' apple pie subjects like the family, but to use that destruction to wake us up to the quiet violence and repressed mayhem that haunt our own oh-so-respectable lives. The existence of Tony Soprano, whose combination of lovableness and explosive violence makes him an utterly familiar enigma, makes our own lives stranger and scarier and bigger.
And this is one reason why the corrosive moral ambiguity of "The Sopranos" speaks to us. Like Tony Soprano at the start of the series, America is a little stressed these days, a little anxious. On the surface, everything is fine. Under our devoutly Christian leader, we are all highly moral. We have right and God on our side as we fight the evildoers. Except that, well, we've been feeling kind of weird. And, to tell the truth, we have a few skeletons in our closet.
Somebody whacked some of our crew, and we were scared, so we whacked Iraq. Just like Tony ordered the hit on Adriana. Steps were taken, as Sil would say. Except it turned out there were some unexpected consequences. We basically killed an entire country, and a whole lot of Americans, and people are dying all the time. And what are we doing? Nothing. We're going to the Bada Bing. We're having dinner at Artie's. Same old same old. Everything's fine. It's just fine.
Except that it's wearing us down, having this strange war that no one thinks about, and this president who keeps preaching about good and evil and how we're the greatest country in the world and why we have to keep fighting this "war on terror" that no one understands. And it's hard to say anything back to him because he's really prickly and self-righteous. It's kind of like having a really mean, manipulative mom -- the kind who says, "Take the knife out of the ham and stab me here!"
We're trying to act like nothing's wrong but all this stuff is working on our minds. Nothing they tell us about right and wrong seems to make sense anymore. It's all self-contradictory. They told us all terrorism is evil, but it seems like some terrorist acts are more evil than others. Like this Turkey deal. Some Kurdish separatists just set off a bomb outside a shopping center in Turkey's capitol, Ankara, killing six innocent people. The Turks want to cross the border into Iraq and wipe out the terrorists. But we don't want them to, even though we cited a terror attack against us as justification for invading a country that didn't even have anything to do with the attack. What's up with that? They tell us lying is wrong. But after Lewis Libby was convicted of lying to federal investigators, the same people who were screaming the loudest about America's moral decline and the need to embrace transcendent values are now raging that it didn't matter because no crime was ever discovered. What's that about? It's all confusing, and the pressure is building up, and we're starting to get these anxiety attacks. And there's no Dr. Melfi in sight.
Art serves a cathartic function by exposing the unspoken, the repressed, the taboo. In this case, the taboo is our moral code -- a rigid, black-and-white, self-righteous insistence that what we are doing must be right and no one must question it. In Bush's America, this code has become singularly oppressive. But it predates Bush. It's the way we simplify the world, the story we tell ourselves to make sense out of life's senselessness.
Among its many other achievements, "The Sopranos" has allowed us to mock that frozen certainty. For seven years, it has been a saturnalia of ethical meaninglessness. It has given us a precious breather from sanctimony, a holiday from the tyranny of right and wrong. It has thrown us into the big, blue, endless sea and let us swim. It's scary being out in the middle of the ocean, no horizon in sight. But it's liberating.
And now that "The Sopranos" is over, we'll have to find other seas to swim in, other stories to reflect our lives. Stories that are bigger and darker and truer than the ones they've been telling us, and the ones that we tell ourselves.
Thanks to Gary Kamiya
Showing posts with label Sopranos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sopranos. Show all posts
Monday, June 11, 2007
Pizza Man Soprano Mystery Man
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
After eight years and 86 episodes, the ultimate fate of fictional New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano might be determined by a pizza shop owner from Penndel.
Paolo Colandrea, owner of Paul's Penndel Pizza, last month filmed a potentially pivotal scene for the final episode of “The Sopranos,” the groundbreaking HBO mob drama that says goodbye at 9 Sunday night.
Colandrea, 47, describes his role as simply “mystery man,” a guy who walks into a diner and locks eyes ominously with Tony, who's sitting at a table with wife, Carmela, and son, A.J. Colandrea sits down at the counter, stares at Tony again, gets up to go the bathroom, and ...
He can't say what happens next. But even if he could, it might not mean a thing.
“Sopranos” creator David Chase reportedly filmed three different endings to ensure secrecy. Colandrea, who spent 18 hours on the set one day and 10 hours two weeks later, doesn't even know if his scene will appear.
“I don't know. Nobody knows,” the charming Italian said while sitting in the restaurant he's owned since emigrating from Naples in 1978. “They keep it so closed, not even the cast knows all that's going to happen. I can assume, but I don't know.”
Colandrea, who doesn't have any lines, filmed his scene at Holsten's Diner in Bloomfield, N.J. Off camera, he said he mingled with series stars James Gandolfini (Tony) and Edie Falco (Carmela) and met Robert Iler (A.J.) and Chase. During his first day of filming, he shared a sushi dinner with Gandolfini, Falco and the crew.
“He's such a nice guy, just an unbelievable person,” Colandrea says of Gandolfini. “And Edie Falco, she's the sweetest woman you ever want to meet.”
Colandrea, who earned more than $3,000 (before taxes) for his role, also saw Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Meadow) on the set but didn't talk to her. “She's so gorgeous,” he said. “She has bodyguards with her, but I don't blame her.”
So how does a pizza shop owner with no previous acting experience land a role on the final episode of the most acclaimed program in cable television history? Right place, right face, really.
Earlier this spring, Eileen DeNobile, owner of the Lawrenceville, N.J.-based Noble Talent Management, was looking for an Italian man, about 6 feet tall, between the ages of 30 and 50, for a part on “The Sopranos.” She stopped into Penndel Pizza for dinner one evening, saw the framed photo of Colandrea pouring a glass of wine and thought she might have found her man.
“That's authentic Italian all the way,” said DeNobile, who already knew Colandrea casually. “He certainly looks the part. Plus, we were looking for a person easy to work with, and he's got a great personality, very bubbly.”
DeNobile sent the photo and a recommendation to HBO, and Colandrea was invited to audition in New York City, along with 29 others. The audition consisted of performing the actual role as it appeared in the script. A few days later, Chase called Colandrea and asked him to come to North Jersey for a costume fitting. The part was his.
“It's unbelievable,” said Colandrea, a fan of the show since its debut in 1999. “For an Italian, it's the experience of a lifetime to be on "The Sopranos.' ”
Colandrea, a single father of two daughters, said he plans to watch Sunday's episode with about 100 friends and family members at a cousin's house in Ewing. (“I have to cook for all of them,” he said, smiling.)
Meanwhile, he said, “half of Italy” is waiting to hear what happens Sunday night. And if his scene ends up on the cutting-room floor?
“Everyone knows there's nothing I can do, that it's out of my power,” Colandrea said. “But I'm thinking, "Why make me go up again after two weeks if they're not going to use me?' I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Thanks to Andy Vineberg
After eight years and 86 episodes, the ultimate fate of fictional New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano might be determined by a pizza shop owner from Penndel.
Paolo Colandrea, owner of Paul's Penndel Pizza, last month filmed a potentially pivotal scene for the final episode of “The Sopranos,” the groundbreaking HBO mob drama that says goodbye at 9 Sunday night.
Colandrea, 47, describes his role as simply “mystery man,” a guy who walks into a diner and locks eyes ominously with Tony, who's sitting at a table with wife, Carmela, and son, A.J. Colandrea sits down at the counter, stares at Tony again, gets up to go the bathroom, and ...
He can't say what happens next. But even if he could, it might not mean a thing.
“Sopranos” creator David Chase reportedly filmed three different endings to ensure secrecy. Colandrea, who spent 18 hours on the set one day and 10 hours two weeks later, doesn't even know if his scene will appear.
“I don't know. Nobody knows,” the charming Italian said while sitting in the restaurant he's owned since emigrating from Naples in 1978. “They keep it so closed, not even the cast knows all that's going to happen. I can assume, but I don't know.”
Colandrea, who doesn't have any lines, filmed his scene at Holsten's Diner in Bloomfield, N.J. Off camera, he said he mingled with series stars James Gandolfini (Tony) and Edie Falco (Carmela) and met Robert Iler (A.J.) and Chase. During his first day of filming, he shared a sushi dinner with Gandolfini, Falco and the crew.
“He's such a nice guy, just an unbelievable person,” Colandrea says of Gandolfini. “And Edie Falco, she's the sweetest woman you ever want to meet.”
Colandrea, who earned more than $3,000 (before taxes) for his role, also saw Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Meadow) on the set but didn't talk to her. “She's so gorgeous,” he said. “She has bodyguards with her, but I don't blame her.”
So how does a pizza shop owner with no previous acting experience land a role on the final episode of the most acclaimed program in cable television history? Right place, right face, really.
Earlier this spring, Eileen DeNobile, owner of the Lawrenceville, N.J.-based Noble Talent Management, was looking for an Italian man, about 6 feet tall, between the ages of 30 and 50, for a part on “The Sopranos.” She stopped into Penndel Pizza for dinner one evening, saw the framed photo of Colandrea pouring a glass of wine and thought she might have found her man.
“That's authentic Italian all the way,” said DeNobile, who already knew Colandrea casually. “He certainly looks the part. Plus, we were looking for a person easy to work with, and he's got a great personality, very bubbly.”
DeNobile sent the photo and a recommendation to HBO, and Colandrea was invited to audition in New York City, along with 29 others. The audition consisted of performing the actual role as it appeared in the script. A few days later, Chase called Colandrea and asked him to come to North Jersey for a costume fitting. The part was his.
“It's unbelievable,” said Colandrea, a fan of the show since its debut in 1999. “For an Italian, it's the experience of a lifetime to be on "The Sopranos.' ”
Colandrea, a single father of two daughters, said he plans to watch Sunday's episode with about 100 friends and family members at a cousin's house in Ewing. (“I have to cook for all of them,” he said, smiling.)
Meanwhile, he said, “half of Italy” is waiting to hear what happens Sunday night. And if his scene ends up on the cutting-room floor?
“Everyone knows there's nothing I can do, that it's out of my power,” Colandrea said. “But I'm thinking, "Why make me go up again after two weeks if they're not going to use me?' I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
Thanks to Andy Vineberg
Warming Up for The Sopranos' Swan Song
With the end coming for Tony Soprano, wanna bet on his last words? I figure one word will do:
Mama.
If he says "Mama," the Oedipal gangster is ending where he began, though I'm not wagering money. Placing bets about the end of "The Sopranos" with offshore Internet gaming companies would be too ironic, even for me.
Or, Tony might offer up a pathetic "I'm sorry," after he's been betrayed by a friend, the universe contracting in that last moment of excruciating clarity, when there's so much to say but no time left to say it. But the only one he could tell is Paulie Walnuts, so why bother?
Then again, Tony might live. And his last words could be, "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," as he sits in the witness stand, ballooning out of his suit, staring glumly at old colleagues at the defense table.
He'd have something in common with real-life Chicago mobster Nick Calabrese and his old pals, who will show up soon in the federal building in Chicago for the upcoming and historic Outfit trial, to the dismay of those who simpered that the Outfit was dead and that Chinatown tough guys are the stuff of fiction.
Either way, it's been a fine ride, and I've loved it and laughed along with it, and tonight it's over, with "The Sopranos" final episode on HBO after an eight-year run.
I'm old enough to have witnessed other pop-culture spasms of ritual mourning for television shows, and loathed them all, cringing at words like "iconic" and "touchstone" being applied to what escapes the idiot box. I've been nauseated by eulogies of comedy/dramas about sex-crazed Army doctors in Korea or sex-crazed alcoholics in Boston sports bars where everybody knows your name, even the drunken mailman. But here I am, in ritual, reeking of incense, and I can't help it, because "The Sopranos" was great drama and great TV.
What a premise: the dysfunctional suburban gangster family and the boss undergoing therapy, appraising the legs of his psychiatrist week after week, and the whiny children and the wife who made her bargain with blood money and decided to keep it. And the guys, Paulie and Big Pussy and Bacala, and Christopher seduced by Hollywood like others before him, and Silvio, who ran the strip club, yet was appalled that his teen-age daughter could be seen as a sexual object by a soccer coach.
The hook was a natural, and for years we sat safely in our living rooms, enjoying characters offered up as the last unrepentant white males, saying what they wanted, grabbing what they wanted, smoking, drinking. And we remain locked on the other side of the screen, in an increasingly bureaucratic, timid and politically correct modern American landscape.
No wonder Tony Soprano's crew stood out like broken thumbs on the hands of a mannequin in a window.
Corruption was the constant theme, not only the pimping and the muscle stuff and the gambling, but corruption with the stain of legitimate business upon it. It was realistic, too, in its analysis of politics. Organized crime can't survive without the support of politicians and judges and police officials, in those towns where billions of dollars in public works and development deals are skimmed. We viewers understood all this, if not in our bones, then somewhere in the inarticulate ligaments of our wrists, as we signed our names on tax forms. But millions were also turned off by the show when one of the gangsters had his questionable sexuality challenged by a dimwitted stripper, and he beat her to death in the parking lot of the Bada Bing. A woman at work was visibly shaken by the scene of the stripper's murder and could not believe they could be so cruel. But that's what they are, I told her. That's who they are. They're criminals.
They run suburban abortion clinics and rely on our respect for privacy to shield them. They're shot down in the vestibules of fried chicken restaurants at morning meetings, pawing the glass doors as they fall. And if they're lucky enough to die shriveled with age, as did the ruthless Chicago Outfit hit man Marshall Caifano, then their children fill their coffins with crucifixes asking Jesus to save them.
"The Sopranos" creator David Chase told the truth and created characters that are aped by the wise guys
, and the guys who ape wise guys on Rush Street, much as their grandfathers aped the fictional persona of Edward G. Robinson's "Little Caesar," a case of life imitating art.
It was art, as Chase allowed his characters to reveal themselves. "The Godfather" films glamorized the wise guys, and though many Italians know the lines from those films, many -- including my wife who is now hooked on the show -- felt insulted by Tony Soprano, and argued that he glorified crime. But in the end, is Tony glorious? In the episode preceding the finale, he was hiding out in a dump, on a bed without sheets, in his clothes, staring at the ceiling in the dark, cradling a gun, waiting to be betrayed.
I expect he calls on his mother when, and if, he goes. But don't bet on it. Gambling's illegal -- unless it's government-approved.
Thanks to John Kass
Mama.
If he says "Mama," the Oedipal gangster is ending where he began, though I'm not wagering money. Placing bets about the end of "The Sopranos" with offshore Internet gaming companies would be too ironic, even for me.
Or, Tony might offer up a pathetic "I'm sorry," after he's been betrayed by a friend, the universe contracting in that last moment of excruciating clarity, when there's so much to say but no time left to say it. But the only one he could tell is Paulie Walnuts, so why bother?
Then again, Tony might live. And his last words could be, "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," as he sits in the witness stand, ballooning out of his suit, staring glumly at old colleagues at the defense table.
He'd have something in common with real-life Chicago mobster Nick Calabrese and his old pals, who will show up soon in the federal building in Chicago for the upcoming and historic Outfit trial, to the dismay of those who simpered that the Outfit was dead and that Chinatown tough guys are the stuff of fiction.
Either way, it's been a fine ride, and I've loved it and laughed along with it, and tonight it's over, with "The Sopranos" final episode on HBO after an eight-year run.
I'm old enough to have witnessed other pop-culture spasms of ritual mourning for television shows, and loathed them all, cringing at words like "iconic" and "touchstone" being applied to what escapes the idiot box. I've been nauseated by eulogies of comedy/dramas about sex-crazed Army doctors in Korea or sex-crazed alcoholics in Boston sports bars where everybody knows your name, even the drunken mailman. But here I am, in ritual, reeking of incense, and I can't help it, because "The Sopranos" was great drama and great TV.
What a premise: the dysfunctional suburban gangster family and the boss undergoing therapy, appraising the legs of his psychiatrist week after week, and the whiny children and the wife who made her bargain with blood money and decided to keep it. And the guys, Paulie and Big Pussy and Bacala, and Christopher seduced by Hollywood like others before him, and Silvio, who ran the strip club, yet was appalled that his teen-age daughter could be seen as a sexual object by a soccer coach.
The hook was a natural, and for years we sat safely in our living rooms, enjoying characters offered up as the last unrepentant white males, saying what they wanted, grabbing what they wanted, smoking, drinking. And we remain locked on the other side of the screen, in an increasingly bureaucratic, timid and politically correct modern American landscape.
No wonder Tony Soprano's crew stood out like broken thumbs on the hands of a mannequin in a window.
Corruption was the constant theme, not only the pimping and the muscle stuff and the gambling, but corruption with the stain of legitimate business upon it. It was realistic, too, in its analysis of politics. Organized crime can't survive without the support of politicians and judges and police officials, in those towns where billions of dollars in public works and development deals are skimmed. We viewers understood all this, if not in our bones, then somewhere in the inarticulate ligaments of our wrists, as we signed our names on tax forms. But millions were also turned off by the show when one of the gangsters had his questionable sexuality challenged by a dimwitted stripper, and he beat her to death in the parking lot of the Bada Bing. A woman at work was visibly shaken by the scene of the stripper's murder and could not believe they could be so cruel. But that's what they are, I told her. That's who they are. They're criminals.
They run suburban abortion clinics and rely on our respect for privacy to shield them. They're shot down in the vestibules of fried chicken restaurants at morning meetings, pawing the glass doors as they fall. And if they're lucky enough to die shriveled with age, as did the ruthless Chicago Outfit hit man Marshall Caifano, then their children fill their coffins with crucifixes asking Jesus to save them.
"The Sopranos" creator David Chase told the truth and created characters that are aped by the wise guys
, and the guys who ape wise guys on Rush Street, much as their grandfathers aped the fictional persona of Edward G. Robinson's "Little Caesar," a case of life imitating art.It was art, as Chase allowed his characters to reveal themselves. "The Godfather" films glamorized the wise guys, and though many Italians know the lines from those films, many -- including my wife who is now hooked on the show -- felt insulted by Tony Soprano, and argued that he glorified crime. But in the end, is Tony glorious? In the episode preceding the finale, he was hiding out in a dump, on a bed without sheets, in his clothes, staring at the ceiling in the dark, cradling a gun, waiting to be betrayed.
I expect he calls on his mother when, and if, he goes. But don't bet on it. Gambling's illegal -- unless it's government-approved.
Thanks to John Kass
Sopranos Fall Short of Organized Crime's Impact on Cyber Crime
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
The world of Tony Soprano ended Sunday night with the final episode of "The Sopranos." Over seven years, the award-winning HBO TV series offered insight into the business of the modern Mafia, albeit based on a fictional crime family in New Jersey.
We got glimpses of garbage contracts, construction scams, protection rackets, illegal gambling, truck hijacking and credit card fraud. But missing from the list of criminal enterprises was cybercrime. Tony Soprano was a face-to-face communicator, someone who is wary of wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. He wasn't a laptop user, and he didn't appear to cash in on the myriad ways to get rich from Internet-related scams.
Richard Stiennon, chief marketing officer at security firm Fortinet Inc., says this is where "The Sopranos" fell short in its depiction of modern organized crime.
"Here they are beating people up with baseball bats, and a lot of the criminals have moved online," Stiennon said. "The opportunity has been growing with the growth of the Internet. Cybercriminals are looking to expand. They need an organization to exploit those opportunities. It's like organized crime 2.0."
Stiennon has been an expert on security for a while. For work, at PricewaterhouseCoopers, he was a "white hat" hacker. He would break into corporate networks to tell companies where their vulnerabilities were. He succeeded every time, he said.
Now at Fortinet, which supplies security appliances that protect networks, Stiennon has been going around giving talks on how we have to worry about how much money is flowing through the illegal crime networks online.
Of course, a lot of security tech vendors want us to be scared. They'll make more money if we buy enough armor to protect ourselves. "Some like to take the attitude that this is all vendor hype," Stiennon said. "The problem is, there is so little revelation of actual attacks. Companies like to stay out of the news, even when they're attacked."
But others are raising the same alarms about organized crime. Like the Mafia depicted on the show, the nature of cybercrime has evolved over the past seven years from "script kiddies," or young kids who used automated programs to create "cybergraffiti," to organized efforts aimed at stealing a lot of money.
Michelle Dennedy, chief privacy officer at Sun Microsystems Inc., said that in the past couple of years, the FBI and Secret Service have been warning that they're encountering much more organized crime activity in cyberspace. "Stealing identities is the new bank job," Dennedy said. "They go to chat rooms where they trade credit cards, using code words. I don't know if you need to have mob bosses behind it. But it is organized crime."
Christian Desilets, research attorney for the National White Collar Crime Center, said the "Tony Soprano types" may indeed be missing out on electronic crime. But Desilets added, "We do see them in offshore betting, but not as much in electronic crimes. But the electronic criminals are organized. There are very sophisticated operations linked to the Russian Mafia."
In its annual report on organized crime and the Internet last week, McAfee Inc. said that new criminal organizations are emerging to prey on Internet users and that they're becoming more sophisticated and scoring bigger paydays.
One study that McAfee cited said banks lost $2 billion through illegal access to online bank accounts last year. In 2005, the FBI estimated computer crimes cost U.S. corporations $67 billion.
With such stakes, you can bet most organized criminals are involved. The FBI notes that a number of crime syndicates are based in Russia but that many cross borders.
Stiennon contends that organized criminals online now are split up, like vendors in a flea market. Some sell hacking tools for spying on people or stealing identities. Others use those tools to steal credit cards and data, including programs that harvest identities from unsuspecting Internet users.
The FBI periodically shuts down these sites. The criminals put credit cards up for sale. Still others will buy the cards and use them to buy merchandise in electronics stores.
Since organized criminals have traditionally been linked to credit card fraud, expanding into online credit card theft is an easy expansion. Here and there, evidence of organized criminals using technology is emerging.
In 2005, thieves stole $423 million from the London branch of the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank. They did so by posing as janitors, putting "keystroke loggers" that captured keystrokes on computers, thereby stealing passwords from clerks who handled wire transfers.
Authorities traced the crime to a gang in Israel, and Stiennon noted that one person held for the crime was later killed.
In a series of incidents ranging from mid-2005 through January 2007, more than 45 million credit card numbers were stolen from TJX Cos., the owner of the TJ Maxx, Marshalls and other retail chains. Stiennon said many of those card numbers have been used around the world in various kinds of fraud. One ring of criminals used the card numbers to buy more than $8 million in merchandise in Florida.
Other big cases have involved the purchase and sale of controlled drugs via Internet pharmacies or credit card theft.
Extortion, one of the oldest traditional mafia tactics, has moved online as hackers threaten to shut down Web sites unless they're paid off.
Meanwhile, the federal budget aimed at stopping cybercrime doesn't add up to much, Stiennon said. "The sequel to the Sopranos will be cybercrime, with a lot of young kids using computers," Stiennon said. "Tony, assuming he's still alive, will be typing LOL (laugh out loud)."
The cost of cybercrime
Thanks to Dean Takahashi
The world of Tony Soprano ended Sunday night with the final episode of "The Sopranos." Over seven years, the award-winning HBO TV series offered insight into the business of the modern Mafia, albeit based on a fictional crime family in New Jersey.
We got glimpses of garbage contracts, construction scams, protection rackets, illegal gambling, truck hijacking and credit card fraud. But missing from the list of criminal enterprises was cybercrime. Tony Soprano was a face-to-face communicator, someone who is wary of wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. He wasn't a laptop user, and he didn't appear to cash in on the myriad ways to get rich from Internet-related scams.
Richard Stiennon, chief marketing officer at security firm Fortinet Inc., says this is where "The Sopranos" fell short in its depiction of modern organized crime.
"Here they are beating people up with baseball bats, and a lot of the criminals have moved online," Stiennon said. "The opportunity has been growing with the growth of the Internet. Cybercriminals are looking to expand. They need an organization to exploit those opportunities. It's like organized crime 2.0."
Stiennon has been an expert on security for a while. For work, at PricewaterhouseCoopers, he was a "white hat" hacker. He would break into corporate networks to tell companies where their vulnerabilities were. He succeeded every time, he said.
Now at Fortinet, which supplies security appliances that protect networks, Stiennon has been going around giving talks on how we have to worry about how much money is flowing through the illegal crime networks online.
Of course, a lot of security tech vendors want us to be scared. They'll make more money if we buy enough armor to protect ourselves. "Some like to take the attitude that this is all vendor hype," Stiennon said. "The problem is, there is so little revelation of actual attacks. Companies like to stay out of the news, even when they're attacked."
But others are raising the same alarms about organized crime. Like the Mafia depicted on the show, the nature of cybercrime has evolved over the past seven years from "script kiddies," or young kids who used automated programs to create "cybergraffiti," to organized efforts aimed at stealing a lot of money.
Michelle Dennedy, chief privacy officer at Sun Microsystems Inc., said that in the past couple of years, the FBI and Secret Service have been warning that they're encountering much more organized crime activity in cyberspace. "Stealing identities is the new bank job," Dennedy said. "They go to chat rooms where they trade credit cards, using code words. I don't know if you need to have mob bosses behind it. But it is organized crime."
Christian Desilets, research attorney for the National White Collar Crime Center, said the "Tony Soprano types" may indeed be missing out on electronic crime. But Desilets added, "We do see them in offshore betting, but not as much in electronic crimes. But the electronic criminals are organized. There are very sophisticated operations linked to the Russian Mafia."
In its annual report on organized crime and the Internet last week, McAfee Inc. said that new criminal organizations are emerging to prey on Internet users and that they're becoming more sophisticated and scoring bigger paydays.
One study that McAfee cited said banks lost $2 billion through illegal access to online bank accounts last year. In 2005, the FBI estimated computer crimes cost U.S. corporations $67 billion.
With such stakes, you can bet most organized criminals are involved. The FBI notes that a number of crime syndicates are based in Russia but that many cross borders.
Stiennon contends that organized criminals online now are split up, like vendors in a flea market. Some sell hacking tools for spying on people or stealing identities. Others use those tools to steal credit cards and data, including programs that harvest identities from unsuspecting Internet users.
The FBI periodically shuts down these sites. The criminals put credit cards up for sale. Still others will buy the cards and use them to buy merchandise in electronics stores.
Since organized criminals have traditionally been linked to credit card fraud, expanding into online credit card theft is an easy expansion. Here and there, evidence of organized criminals using technology is emerging.
In 2005, thieves stole $423 million from the London branch of the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank. They did so by posing as janitors, putting "keystroke loggers" that captured keystrokes on computers, thereby stealing passwords from clerks who handled wire transfers.
Authorities traced the crime to a gang in Israel, and Stiennon noted that one person held for the crime was later killed.
In a series of incidents ranging from mid-2005 through January 2007, more than 45 million credit card numbers were stolen from TJX Cos., the owner of the TJ Maxx, Marshalls and other retail chains. Stiennon said many of those card numbers have been used around the world in various kinds of fraud. One ring of criminals used the card numbers to buy more than $8 million in merchandise in Florida.
Other big cases have involved the purchase and sale of controlled drugs via Internet pharmacies or credit card theft.
Extortion, one of the oldest traditional mafia tactics, has moved online as hackers threaten to shut down Web sites unless they're paid off.
Meanwhile, the federal budget aimed at stopping cybercrime doesn't add up to much, Stiennon said. "The sequel to the Sopranos will be cybercrime, with a lot of young kids using computers," Stiennon said. "Tony, assuming he's still alive, will be typing LOL (laugh out loud)."
The cost of cybercrime
2 million: Number of Americans whose online bank accounts were robbed
$2 billion: Total losses for the banking industry from such thefts
$30 million: Credit card company fraud losses from online crime, 30 percent of total fraud losses
15 million: Number of Americans who reported being victims of identity theft in the 12 months ending mid-2006, up 50 percent from 2003
$3,257: Average loss from identity theft in 2006, up 131 percent from 2005
Source: McAfee North American Criminology Report: Organized Crime and the Internet, 2007
Thanks to Dean Takahashi
Fans Bid Farewell to The Sopranos
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
MILLIONS of fans of the mafia series The Sopranos anxiously awaited the hit drama's final episode on Sunday amid a flurry of speculation over the fate of its top mobster, Tony Soprano.
Viewers were left last week with a final scene of Tony climbing into bed at a hiding house, clinging to a massive assault weapon after his New York rivals gunned down his top captain and sent his consiglieri into a bullet-ridden coma.
With the last of 86 episodes of the award-winning series set to air at 9pm (local time), the media was abuzz with predictions about how the psychotherapy-seeking New Jersey mob boss and his dysfunctional family's saga would end.
"I think he lives," former FBI special agent Joe Pistone, whose life as an undercover infiltrator of the mob was chronicled in the hit movie Donny Brasco, told Fox News television.
Another mob expert, Bill Bonanno, son of the notorious real-life New York mafia kingpin Joseph Bonanno, concurred. "I think he lives because (show creator) David Chase would like to bring him back some time," he said.
Chase reportedly filmed three different endings in order to keep secret the finale of the series which began in 1999 and has aired on the cable channel Home Box Office, or HBO.
Chase said he knew "about three years ago" how the story would end, and that "from the beginning, my goal was always to do a little movie every week," according to the Washington Post. "It has all been planned out, we always knew exactly where it was going, but within that framework, we left a lot of room for each episode to have its own character and to invent stories that would fit in with the continuing story," he said.
However, Chase has ruthlessly upset expectations throughout the long-running mafia yarn, killing off popular characters like mob girlfriend Adriana LaCerva (Drea de Matteo) and letting a Russian foe escape a gunbattle in the snowy woods, never to resurface.
Over the last eight years, mob watchers have come to adore quirky characters like Tony's right-hand man Silvio Dante, played by Steven Van Zandt who in real life strummed guitar alongside rock legend Bruce Springsteen.
Tony's therapist Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco who starred as mobster-turned-rat Henry Hill's wife Karen in the movie Goodfellas, and Tony's blond money-grubbing wife Carmela, portrayed by Edie Falco, are also fan favorites.
Tony is played by James Gandolfini, who has admitted that he is ready to let the character go after years of whacking enemies and friends, having sex with mistresses, lounging in his Bada Bing strip club and trudging down his driveway to fetch his newspaper in his open bathrobe. But however bloody, cruel or treacherous Tony has been over the years, his character is cherished by fans and the twists and turns of his storyline have largely won over the American public.
"I think America has witnessed an erosion in kinship with each other and an erosion of honor," said Bonanno. Regardless of what happens with the characters, "people still see a sense of morality there."
The New York Times described the series, which has won 18 Emmy awards, as "widely proclaimed as the greatest drama ever created for television."
For Pistone, the public just adores the mafia lifestyle, and its sheen will never wear off. "I think people really go for the mob and the movies and the Sopranos show, because the average guy is a working stiff. He comes home he has the same hours every day. He sees the Sopranos, he sees guys that don't go to a 9-5 job."
MILLIONS of fans of the mafia series The Sopranos anxiously awaited the hit drama's final episode on Sunday amid a flurry of speculation over the fate of its top mobster, Tony Soprano.
Viewers were left last week with a final scene of Tony climbing into bed at a hiding house, clinging to a massive assault weapon after his New York rivals gunned down his top captain and sent his consiglieri into a bullet-ridden coma.
With the last of 86 episodes of the award-winning series set to air at 9pm (local time), the media was abuzz with predictions about how the psychotherapy-seeking New Jersey mob boss and his dysfunctional family's saga would end.
"I think he lives," former FBI special agent Joe Pistone, whose life as an undercover infiltrator of the mob was chronicled in the hit movie Donny Brasco, told Fox News television.
Another mob expert, Bill Bonanno, son of the notorious real-life New York mafia kingpin Joseph Bonanno, concurred. "I think he lives because (show creator) David Chase would like to bring him back some time," he said.
Chase reportedly filmed three different endings in order to keep secret the finale of the series which began in 1999 and has aired on the cable channel Home Box Office, or HBO.
Chase said he knew "about three years ago" how the story would end, and that "from the beginning, my goal was always to do a little movie every week," according to the Washington Post. "It has all been planned out, we always knew exactly where it was going, but within that framework, we left a lot of room for each episode to have its own character and to invent stories that would fit in with the continuing story," he said.
However, Chase has ruthlessly upset expectations throughout the long-running mafia yarn, killing off popular characters like mob girlfriend Adriana LaCerva (Drea de Matteo) and letting a Russian foe escape a gunbattle in the snowy woods, never to resurface.
Over the last eight years, mob watchers have come to adore quirky characters like Tony's right-hand man Silvio Dante, played by Steven Van Zandt who in real life strummed guitar alongside rock legend Bruce Springsteen.
Tony's therapist Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco who starred as mobster-turned-rat Henry Hill's wife Karen in the movie Goodfellas, and Tony's blond money-grubbing wife Carmela, portrayed by Edie Falco, are also fan favorites.
Tony is played by James Gandolfini, who has admitted that he is ready to let the character go after years of whacking enemies and friends, having sex with mistresses, lounging in his Bada Bing strip club and trudging down his driveway to fetch his newspaper in his open bathrobe. But however bloody, cruel or treacherous Tony has been over the years, his character is cherished by fans and the twists and turns of his storyline have largely won over the American public.
"I think America has witnessed an erosion in kinship with each other and an erosion of honor," said Bonanno. Regardless of what happens with the characters, "people still see a sense of morality there."
The New York Times described the series, which has won 18 Emmy awards, as "widely proclaimed as the greatest drama ever created for television."
For Pistone, the public just adores the mafia lifestyle, and its sheen will never wear off. "I think people really go for the mob and the movies and the Sopranos show, because the average guy is a working stiff. He comes home he has the same hours every day. He sees the Sopranos, he sees guys that don't go to a 9-5 job."
Tony Soprano: Leadership Consultant
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
If you're in the waste management/strip joint/butcher racket, look to Anthony John Soprano as your guiding cannoli ... er ... light.
His story--a blueprint for how to run a crime family like a well-oiled business machine--has been airing Sundays on HBO for the past seven years and has now come down to this weekend's series finale. Fans are heading into the closer blind, with previews revealing no more than a few quick cuts of the main characters set to a resonating drum beat.
Whether Tony lives or dies, he'll be missed like no other capo.
Since The Sopranos, which Vanity Fair called ''the greatest show in television history,'' debuted in 1999, Tony Soprano--reputed mob boss of northern New Jersey, loving father, modern-day American icon and born leader--has proved that ruling with an iron fist can be quite efficient.
Nancy Davis, associate professor at the Chicago School of Business Psychology (and a Sopranos fan), says Tony's approach, while effective, leads to a power struggle within the core group and spurs an utter state of panic, or "learned helplessness," among followers.
As a result, "they can't function without the support of the boss," Davis says. ''They need to be led. They need to be puppeteered." But the minute a gunshot wound to Tony's gut forced him into a coma in Part 1 of Season 6, his underlings were more concerned with who would be a fitting successor rather than with their boss's health; hence the power struggle. Silvio--Tony's loyal but limited henchman--ultimately takes the reins as acting boss. Davis predicts Tony will fall.
Jennifer Thompson, an assistant professor and Davis' colleague at the Chicago School of Business Psychology, says Tony's method of leadership has much to do with class distinction. Thompson says the closest comparison to this type of leadership is in a blue-collar work environment where brute force can win the boss's respect.
"It's not appropriate, but it's understandable [in Tony's case] and effective," Thompson says.
She cites an episode in Part 1 of Season 6, when Tony, post-coma, bludgeoned his massive bodyguard though he was unprovoked, emphasizing he was still the alpha in the room and proving he was still capable of dominance, despite recent proof that he is, in fact, fallible.
Wharton School professor Michael Useem says Tony's authoritative style works because lives are at stake. He made the comparison to a Marine commander, who gets his soldiers to comply by the judicious use of force because any procedural snafu could prove more costly than cash-filled envelopes.
"Tony Soprano has it half-right in business," Useem says. "When you get away from those circumstances, then autocratic control tends to be a non-starter. As a decision-maker, you do want people working for you who don't see it your way because they may see an opportunity you're not looking at."
It's hardly in Tony's nature to be that democratic, but everything is behind him now as his men stand firm in his corner at the crucial 11th hour.
How many CEOs wish they could say the same?
Thanks to Matthew Kirdahy
If you're in the waste management/strip joint/butcher racket, look to Anthony John Soprano as your guiding cannoli ... er ... light.
His story--a blueprint for how to run a crime family like a well-oiled business machine--has been airing Sundays on HBO for the past seven years and has now come down to this weekend's series finale. Fans are heading into the closer blind, with previews revealing no more than a few quick cuts of the main characters set to a resonating drum beat.
Whether Tony lives or dies, he'll be missed like no other capo.
Since The Sopranos, which Vanity Fair called ''the greatest show in television history,'' debuted in 1999, Tony Soprano--reputed mob boss of northern New Jersey, loving father, modern-day American icon and born leader--has proved that ruling with an iron fist can be quite efficient.
Nancy Davis, associate professor at the Chicago School of Business Psychology (and a Sopranos fan), says Tony's approach, while effective, leads to a power struggle within the core group and spurs an utter state of panic, or "learned helplessness," among followers.
As a result, "they can't function without the support of the boss," Davis says. ''They need to be led. They need to be puppeteered." But the minute a gunshot wound to Tony's gut forced him into a coma in Part 1 of Season 6, his underlings were more concerned with who would be a fitting successor rather than with their boss's health; hence the power struggle. Silvio--Tony's loyal but limited henchman--ultimately takes the reins as acting boss. Davis predicts Tony will fall.
Jennifer Thompson, an assistant professor and Davis' colleague at the Chicago School of Business Psychology, says Tony's method of leadership has much to do with class distinction. Thompson says the closest comparison to this type of leadership is in a blue-collar work environment where brute force can win the boss's respect.
"It's not appropriate, but it's understandable [in Tony's case] and effective," Thompson says.
She cites an episode in Part 1 of Season 6, when Tony, post-coma, bludgeoned his massive bodyguard though he was unprovoked, emphasizing he was still the alpha in the room and proving he was still capable of dominance, despite recent proof that he is, in fact, fallible.
Wharton School professor Michael Useem says Tony's authoritative style works because lives are at stake. He made the comparison to a Marine commander, who gets his soldiers to comply by the judicious use of force because any procedural snafu could prove more costly than cash-filled envelopes.
"Tony Soprano has it half-right in business," Useem says. "When you get away from those circumstances, then autocratic control tends to be a non-starter. As a decision-maker, you do want people working for you who don't see it your way because they may see an opportunity you're not looking at."
It's hardly in Tony's nature to be that democratic, but everything is behind him now as his men stand firm in his corner at the crucial 11th hour.
How many CEOs wish they could say the same?
Thanks to Matthew Kirdahy
Sunday, June 10, 2007
The Sopranos Transformed the Gangster Movie Genre
And so it ends.
No more weekly ride with Tony Soprano from the Lincoln Tunnel past smoke-belching factories to his McMansion in suburban New Jersey.
No more Bada Bing Club. No more sit-downs. No more visits from the feds. No more revelations in Dr. Melfi’s office. No more fights with Carmela or worries about AJ and Meadow.
No more heartache, no more guilt.
No more beatings. No more shootings. No more dismemberments.
No more struggle for Tony, a crime boss trapped in an old-school gang, to find a place in the 21st century.
The HBO broadcast of the final episode of “The Sopranos” will mark the end of an era. The weekly Mafia soap opera with R-rated sex, grotesque violence and an indie-film sensibility became a true showbiz phenomenon after its premiere in 1999.
The reason seems clear enough now: Nobody had ever seen gangsters depicted this way — as complicated people with quirky (if monstrous) personalities who found modern life as baffling as the rest of us.
“The Sopranos” occupies a unique place in gangster cinema. Just as specific eras were dominated by individual stars and directors, the gold standard today is James Gandolfini, his co-stars and writer-director-creator David Chase. Gandolfini’s complex performance as a mobster who sees a shrink has defined the Italian-American mobster in popular imagination for the foreseeable future. But the history of gangster movies shows us another reason for the popularity of “The Sopranos”: an unabated public fascination with the underworld.
Specific films in the 1930s stunned audiences with their cruelty and characters who were as charismatic as they were horrifying — James Cagney in “The Public Enemy,” Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesa
,” Paul Muni in “Scarface (Universal Cinema Classics).”
Those films set the tone for more than three decades. As late as the mid-’60s the majority of gangster movies were shot in black-and-white.
Robinson would age well, demonstrating a skill for playing sociopaths well into middle age. So would his contemporary Humphrey Bogart. These films, shot at traditional studios, placed the audience at a comfortable distance from the blood-curdling events on screen with their carefully crafted artificiality.
City streets clearly were on back lots or soundstages. Gangsters talked tough but kept it clean for the censors. There was plenty of shooting but hardly a trace of blood.
These same values fueled “The Untouchables,” a 1959-63 TV series set in Chicago in the ’20s. The success of “The Untouchables,” in turn, inspired Roger Corman’s “The St. Valentine's Day Massacre,” a floodlit, back-lot feature memorable for its good cast, lurid violence and color photography.
Corman didn’t know it, but his film, released in the summer of 1967, would be the last of its kind.
Barely six weeks later a very different kind of crime movie, “Bonnie and Clyde,” hit American screens.
“Bonnie and Clyde” set a new standard for realism. Director Arthur Penn shot on Texas locations. Only a handful of shots used soundstages. The dialogue had an improvised feel. He used non-actors in small roles.
He shot through filters that gave the movie a vivid, dust-blown quality, as if we were peering through a window into the past. And the sickening violence culminated with the famous slow-motion ballet of death as Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed by a posse on a dusty back road.
There was no going back.
Five years later came the “Gone With the Wind” of gangster films — “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece that attracted a mass audience like no gangster movie ever had.
Committing to the new realism, Coppola employed an almost sociological approach to Italian-American rituals. The festivals, weddings, family dinners and crowded streets had a lived-in feel. The violence seemed spontaneous and un-choreographed.
He got a defining performance from Marlon Brando, who was willing to transform himself utterly to play Don Corleone. Brando became the gangster of the ’70s.
More than that, “The Godfather” gave us an epic, multigenerational view of the Mafia. It was a grand family saga that allowed us to sympathize with people willing to use violence to accrue power. Michael Corleone’s dilemma, one we see echoed in “The Sopranos,” was whether to resist joining the “family business” and become a respectable member of the upper middle class or to surrender to family ties too strong to break.
“The Sopranos” shows the influence of Martin Scorsese’s gangster films — “Mean Streets,” “GoodFellas,” “Casino” — but we can trace its lineage directly to “The Godfather.” Just as the first and second “Godfather” films created a collective tragedy — Michael Corleone, the initially reluctant don, becomes so dehumanized that he ultimately orders the murder of his own brother — Tony Soprano is a man who cannot afford to acknowledge his sins.
Indeed, much of the show’s tension and humor stem from its depiction of mobsters trying to emulate middle-class normalcy. They shop at Home Depot. They see therapists. They cruise eBay. They watch cable television. They have traditional Sunday family dinners and try to get their kids into good schools. But no matter how hard they try, they can’t make the clothes fit.
In one episode this season, Tony tells Dr. Melfi that he sees himself as a “good guy,” but by any objective standard he’s really a thug who can knock your teeth out on impulse.
And we should recognize the show’s dramatic roots. It juxtaposes comedy and horror. It gives us a central character struggling with his conscience and haunted by unsettling dreams. It shows us people unable to escape their fate. And it specializes in irony-drenched plotting. All of that adds up to one word: Shakespearean.
But ultimately, what sustains our eagerness for “The Sopranos” is Tony. It’s his unique combination of neuroses, denial and capacity for violence that keeps us glued. James Gandolfini has given us a performance for the ages.
And in Tony we find a cautionary tale. A compartmentalized life can take you only so far. Create a web of secrets so intricate that nobody — your wife, your kids, your friends, your shrink — knows who you really are, and you’re unlikely to meet a tidy end.
Thanks to Robert Trussell
No more weekly ride with Tony Soprano from the Lincoln Tunnel past smoke-belching factories to his McMansion in suburban New Jersey.
No more Bada Bing Club. No more sit-downs. No more visits from the feds. No more revelations in Dr. Melfi’s office. No more fights with Carmela or worries about AJ and Meadow.
No more heartache, no more guilt.
No more beatings. No more shootings. No more dismemberments.
No more struggle for Tony, a crime boss trapped in an old-school gang, to find a place in the 21st century.
The HBO broadcast of the final episode of “The Sopranos” will mark the end of an era. The weekly Mafia soap opera with R-rated sex, grotesque violence and an indie-film sensibility became a true showbiz phenomenon after its premiere in 1999.
The reason seems clear enough now: Nobody had ever seen gangsters depicted this way — as complicated people with quirky (if monstrous) personalities who found modern life as baffling as the rest of us.
“The Sopranos” occupies a unique place in gangster cinema. Just as specific eras were dominated by individual stars and directors, the gold standard today is James Gandolfini, his co-stars and writer-director-creator David Chase. Gandolfini’s complex performance as a mobster who sees a shrink has defined the Italian-American mobster in popular imagination for the foreseeable future. But the history of gangster movies shows us another reason for the popularity of “The Sopranos”: an unabated public fascination with the underworld.
Specific films in the 1930s stunned audiences with their cruelty and characters who were as charismatic as they were horrifying — James Cagney in “The Public Enemy,” Edward G. Robinson in “Little Caesa
,” Paul Muni in “Scarface (Universal Cinema Classics).”Those films set the tone for more than three decades. As late as the mid-’60s the majority of gangster movies were shot in black-and-white.
Robinson would age well, demonstrating a skill for playing sociopaths well into middle age. So would his contemporary Humphrey Bogart. These films, shot at traditional studios, placed the audience at a comfortable distance from the blood-curdling events on screen with their carefully crafted artificiality.
City streets clearly were on back lots or soundstages. Gangsters talked tough but kept it clean for the censors. There was plenty of shooting but hardly a trace of blood.
These same values fueled “The Untouchables,” a 1959-63 TV series set in Chicago in the ’20s. The success of “The Untouchables,” in turn, inspired Roger Corman’s “The St. Valentine's Day Massacre,” a floodlit, back-lot feature memorable for its good cast, lurid violence and color photography.
Corman didn’t know it, but his film, released in the summer of 1967, would be the last of its kind.
Barely six weeks later a very different kind of crime movie, “Bonnie and Clyde,” hit American screens.
“Bonnie and Clyde” set a new standard for realism. Director Arthur Penn shot on Texas locations. Only a handful of shots used soundstages. The dialogue had an improvised feel. He used non-actors in small roles.
He shot through filters that gave the movie a vivid, dust-blown quality, as if we were peering through a window into the past. And the sickening violence culminated with the famous slow-motion ballet of death as Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed by a posse on a dusty back road.
There was no going back.
Five years later came the “Gone With the Wind” of gangster films — “The Godfather,” Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 masterpiece that attracted a mass audience like no gangster movie ever had.
Committing to the new realism, Coppola employed an almost sociological approach to Italian-American rituals. The festivals, weddings, family dinners and crowded streets had a lived-in feel. The violence seemed spontaneous and un-choreographed.
He got a defining performance from Marlon Brando, who was willing to transform himself utterly to play Don Corleone. Brando became the gangster of the ’70s.
More than that, “The Godfather” gave us an epic, multigenerational view of the Mafia. It was a grand family saga that allowed us to sympathize with people willing to use violence to accrue power. Michael Corleone’s dilemma, one we see echoed in “The Sopranos,” was whether to resist joining the “family business” and become a respectable member of the upper middle class or to surrender to family ties too strong to break.
“The Sopranos” shows the influence of Martin Scorsese’s gangster films — “Mean Streets,” “GoodFellas,” “Casino” — but we can trace its lineage directly to “The Godfather.” Just as the first and second “Godfather” films created a collective tragedy — Michael Corleone, the initially reluctant don, becomes so dehumanized that he ultimately orders the murder of his own brother — Tony Soprano is a man who cannot afford to acknowledge his sins.
Indeed, much of the show’s tension and humor stem from its depiction of mobsters trying to emulate middle-class normalcy. They shop at Home Depot. They see therapists. They cruise eBay. They watch cable television. They have traditional Sunday family dinners and try to get their kids into good schools. But no matter how hard they try, they can’t make the clothes fit.
In one episode this season, Tony tells Dr. Melfi that he sees himself as a “good guy,” but by any objective standard he’s really a thug who can knock your teeth out on impulse.
And we should recognize the show’s dramatic roots. It juxtaposes comedy and horror. It gives us a central character struggling with his conscience and haunted by unsettling dreams. It shows us people unable to escape their fate. And it specializes in irony-drenched plotting. All of that adds up to one word: Shakespearean.
But ultimately, what sustains our eagerness for “The Sopranos” is Tony. It’s his unique combination of neuroses, denial and capacity for violence that keeps us glued. James Gandolfini has given us a performance for the ages.
And in Tony we find a cautionary tale. A compartmentalized life can take you only so far. Create a web of secrets so intricate that nobody — your wife, your kids, your friends, your shrink — knows who you really are, and you’re unlikely to meet a tidy end.
Thanks to Robert Trussell
The Final Sopranos Episode Ever
This week, Dr. Melfi has cut her ties, Silvio's in a coma, and Bobby has been derailed - now, there is no more hiding. Don't miss The Final Episode of the groundbreaking series The Sopranos, Sunday at 8pm, Central Time.
Mob War Breaking Out in New York?
Friends of ours: Colombo Crime Family, Gambino Crime Family, Genovese Crime Family, Paul Castellano, John Gotti, Rudolph "Cueball" Izzi, Robert DeCicco, Frank DeCicco, George DeCicco
Friends of mine: Sopranos Crime Family
A pair of mob shootings in three days, one of them reminiscent of a hit on last week's episode of "The Sopranos," prompted speculation of a nascent Mafia war in New York City.
Not likely, according to mob experts who say "The Life" - as mobsters refer to their criminal pursuits - rarely imitates art these days. In an era of dwindling Mafia initiates and multiplying federal informants, gangsters are more dangerous to each other by sitting on the witness stand than by "going to the mattresses" as in "The Godfather."
"Years ago, there were things worth killing for," said Howard Abadinsky, a St. John's University professor and author of several books on organized crime. "It wasn't like today. It sounds funny, but murder is a serious thing to get involved in these days from a wiseguy's point of view."
Recent history bears him out. The last real New York mob war, involving the Colombos, began in 1991 and claimed 13 victims, including a teen bagel shop worker killed in a case of mistaken identity.
The last hit on a mob boss occurred six years earlier, when "Big Paul" Castellano was murdered by John Gotti and a cadre of Gambino family underlings.
The Mafia's ruling Commission has been widely reported as having imposed a moratorium on murder within the ranks, with the heads of New York's five families acknowledging that internecine killings are bad for business.
"Murders were ruled off limits in the '90s, after the Colombo war," said veteran mob chronicler Jerry Capeci, author of "The Complete Idiots' Guide to the Mafia." "Murders were out to keep the heat off."
That wasn't enough to save Rudolph "Cueball" Izzi, a 74-year-old reputed Genovese family bookmaker and loan shark. Izzi was found dead Thursday on a bed in his Brooklyn apartment, a single gunshot wound in his head.
Two days earlier, a Gambino family associate with a lengthy mob lineage was wounded in a drive-by shooting just 1 1/2 miles from Izzi's home. Robert DeCicco, 56, was winged while sitting in his car outside a Brooklyn pharmacy in a neighborhood that serves as the mob's heartland.
That shooting echoed the penultimate episode of "The Sopranos," where killers blasted at consigliere Silvio Dante in a car outside the New Jersey strip club that fictional Tony Soprano's gang uses as a headquarters.
There was one major difference: the television shooters were more accurate. Silvio ended up in a coma; DeCicco walked out of a police station hours after the attempt on his life. "I'm all right," he said while walking down the precinct steps. "I feel very good."
FBI spokesman Jim Margolin acknowledged the twin shootings raised the question of whether a mob war was possible. "I'm not aware that it's one we've answered," he said.
Several theories were broached: Gambling debts were involved. Revenge was a motive. The killings were linked. Or perhaps someone with a grudge against Izzi used the DeCicco shooting as a smoke screen to take him out.
No arrests were made in either case.
The murder try on Robert DeCicco was familiar, if unfortunate, terrain for his family. His uncle, Frank DeCicco, had lured Castellano to his death outside Sparks Steak House in December 1985. Frank, who became the Gambino family underboss, was killed four months later by a retaliatory car bomb.
Robert's father, George, continued in the family business after Frank's death, becoming a constant presence on the Mafia scene.
Hours after his son was shot, George DeCicco told reporters outside his home that an explanation was beyond him.
"You got all these crazy people, these terrorists doing crazy things," he said. "I'm shocked just like anybody else."
Thanks to Larry McShane
Friends of mine: Sopranos Crime Family
A pair of mob shootings in three days, one of them reminiscent of a hit on last week's episode of "The Sopranos," prompted speculation of a nascent Mafia war in New York City.
Not likely, according to mob experts who say "The Life" - as mobsters refer to their criminal pursuits - rarely imitates art these days. In an era of dwindling Mafia initiates and multiplying federal informants, gangsters are more dangerous to each other by sitting on the witness stand than by "going to the mattresses" as in "The Godfather."
"Years ago, there were things worth killing for," said Howard Abadinsky, a St. John's University professor and author of several books on organized crime. "It wasn't like today. It sounds funny, but murder is a serious thing to get involved in these days from a wiseguy's point of view."
Recent history bears him out. The last real New York mob war, involving the Colombos, began in 1991 and claimed 13 victims, including a teen bagel shop worker killed in a case of mistaken identity.
The last hit on a mob boss occurred six years earlier, when "Big Paul" Castellano was murdered by John Gotti and a cadre of Gambino family underlings.
The Mafia's ruling Commission has been widely reported as having imposed a moratorium on murder within the ranks, with the heads of New York's five families acknowledging that internecine killings are bad for business.
"Murders were ruled off limits in the '90s, after the Colombo war," said veteran mob chronicler Jerry Capeci, author of "The Complete Idiots' Guide to the Mafia." "Murders were out to keep the heat off."
That wasn't enough to save Rudolph "Cueball" Izzi, a 74-year-old reputed Genovese family bookmaker and loan shark. Izzi was found dead Thursday on a bed in his Brooklyn apartment, a single gunshot wound in his head.
Two days earlier, a Gambino family associate with a lengthy mob lineage was wounded in a drive-by shooting just 1 1/2 miles from Izzi's home. Robert DeCicco, 56, was winged while sitting in his car outside a Brooklyn pharmacy in a neighborhood that serves as the mob's heartland.
That shooting echoed the penultimate episode of "The Sopranos," where killers blasted at consigliere Silvio Dante in a car outside the New Jersey strip club that fictional Tony Soprano's gang uses as a headquarters.
There was one major difference: the television shooters were more accurate. Silvio ended up in a coma; DeCicco walked out of a police station hours after the attempt on his life. "I'm all right," he said while walking down the precinct steps. "I feel very good."
FBI spokesman Jim Margolin acknowledged the twin shootings raised the question of whether a mob war was possible. "I'm not aware that it's one we've answered," he said.
Several theories were broached: Gambling debts were involved. Revenge was a motive. The killings were linked. Or perhaps someone with a grudge against Izzi used the DeCicco shooting as a smoke screen to take him out.
No arrests were made in either case.
The murder try on Robert DeCicco was familiar, if unfortunate, terrain for his family. His uncle, Frank DeCicco, had lured Castellano to his death outside Sparks Steak House in December 1985. Frank, who became the Gambino family underboss, was killed four months later by a retaliatory car bomb.
Robert's father, George, continued in the family business after Frank's death, becoming a constant presence on the Mafia scene.
Hours after his son was shot, George DeCicco told reporters outside his home that an explanation was beyond him.
"You got all these crazy people, these terrorists doing crazy things," he said. "I'm shocked just like anybody else."
Thanks to Larry McShane
The Sopranos vs. The Chicago Outfit
Friends of ours: Frank Calabrese Sr., Nick Calabrese, James Marcello
Friends of mine: Soprano Crime Family, Frank Calabrese Jr.
As the "Sopranos" ends its lengthy run tonight on HBO, has the popular show gotten mob life right?
Here's a look at how the series has been right on the money, and when it hasn't, compared to the Chicago Mob:
On the money
1. Mob families are screwed up.
Look no further than Chicago's own Calabrese family. At the upcoming federal Family Secrets trial, the brother of reputed mob hitman Frank Calabrese Sr. will testify against him. So will Calabrese Sr.'s son, Frank Jr., who secretly recorded his father while they were in prison. Calabrese Sr. allegedly confessed to mob killings. To say there's bad blood in this family is an understatement.
2. The rules are the rules, until they aren't.
Tony Soprano is well known for enforcing strict discipline among his crew until his rules inconvenience him. The same attitude is true of many a Chicago Mob leader, observers say. The bosses make the rules -- and break the rules when it suits them.
3. I love you, and now I'm going to kill you.
This season, viewers were shocked when Tony Soprano suffocated his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti. But mob observers say such ruthless behavior is not unusual in the Mafia. When Frank Calabrese Sr. learned that his brother, Nick, might be cooperating with the feds, Calabrese Sr. allegedly gave his blessing if Nick got whacked, according to secret tape recordings.
Outta whack
1. The mob takes care of its own.
In the "Sopranos," mobsters always take care of families of crew members who die or go to prison. Not always so in Chicago. Promises are made but not always kept. Frank Calabrese Sr., for instance, allegedly did not take care of the family of his brother, Nick, while both were in prison, despite assurances he would do so. Calabrese Sr. let other family members down, too. Taking up the slack, reputed Chicago mob boss James Marcello allegedly made monthly payments of $4,000 to Nick Calabrese's wife. A lot of good it did him -- Nick Calabrese will be a key witness against Marcello in the upcoming trial.
2. Fashion sense
No offense to Chicago mobsters, but the wise guys in the "Sopranos" generally dress much nattier than typical gangsters here, observers say.
3. Mobster therapy?
It's always seemed a stretch to some mob experts that a mob leader would ever see a shrink. The secret prison recordings of Frank Calabrese Sr. are not filled with him wondering how he could have been a better father or discussing his panic attacks. At one point, he allegedly talks about spreading lime on a dead guy.
Friends of mine: Soprano Crime Family, Frank Calabrese Jr.
As the "Sopranos" ends its lengthy run tonight on HBO, has the popular show gotten mob life right?
Here's a look at how the series has been right on the money, and when it hasn't, compared to the Chicago Mob:
On the money
1. Mob families are screwed up.
Look no further than Chicago's own Calabrese family. At the upcoming federal Family Secrets trial, the brother of reputed mob hitman Frank Calabrese Sr. will testify against him. So will Calabrese Sr.'s son, Frank Jr., who secretly recorded his father while they were in prison. Calabrese Sr. allegedly confessed to mob killings. To say there's bad blood in this family is an understatement.
2. The rules are the rules, until they aren't.
Tony Soprano is well known for enforcing strict discipline among his crew until his rules inconvenience him. The same attitude is true of many a Chicago Mob leader, observers say. The bosses make the rules -- and break the rules when it suits them.
3. I love you, and now I'm going to kill you.
This season, viewers were shocked when Tony Soprano suffocated his nephew, Christopher Moltisanti. But mob observers say such ruthless behavior is not unusual in the Mafia. When Frank Calabrese Sr. learned that his brother, Nick, might be cooperating with the feds, Calabrese Sr. allegedly gave his blessing if Nick got whacked, according to secret tape recordings.
Outta whack
1. The mob takes care of its own.
In the "Sopranos," mobsters always take care of families of crew members who die or go to prison. Not always so in Chicago. Promises are made but not always kept. Frank Calabrese Sr., for instance, allegedly did not take care of the family of his brother, Nick, while both were in prison, despite assurances he would do so. Calabrese Sr. let other family members down, too. Taking up the slack, reputed Chicago mob boss James Marcello allegedly made monthly payments of $4,000 to Nick Calabrese's wife. A lot of good it did him -- Nick Calabrese will be a key witness against Marcello in the upcoming trial.
2. Fashion sense
No offense to Chicago mobsters, but the wise guys in the "Sopranos" generally dress much nattier than typical gangsters here, observers say.
3. Mobster therapy?
It's always seemed a stretch to some mob experts that a mob leader would ever see a shrink. The secret prison recordings of Frank Calabrese Sr. are not filled with him wondering how he could have been a better father or discussing his panic attacks. At one point, he allegedly talks about spreading lime on a dead guy.
Music on The Sopranos - When the Music's Over
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
At one point early on in Sunday night's The Sopranos ("The Blue Comet,") special agent Harris says to Tony about the weather, "End of times, huh? Ready for the Rapture?" After what soon followed in this penultimate episode, that comment feels almost not apocalyptic enough to encompass all the carnage that ensued. It was an explosive and powerful episode that sets up a series finale that's sure to be talked about for ages (and consider that your spoiler.)
It's something else, though, that Agent Harris confides to Tony that kick starts the episode: Phil has set in motion plans to take out Tony and a few of his friends. Tony quickly ditches the gabagool sandwich in his hand (remember that meat was a catalyst of his first panic attack,) and gets 'management' together. At a meeting, they decide to hit Phil first, and then Tony and Sil crack up Bobby with some slow-mo boxing moves. The whole scene is backed by Pietro Mascagni's "Intermezzo" from Cavalleria Rusticana, which was used as the title theme to Scorsese's Raging Bull, making for a goose-bump-inducing moment. The piece was also used in Godfather III, in the scene where Michael Corleone's daughter dies, a dangerous reference if intended. Writer Terry Winter cleared that up yesterday at Slate:
...the use of Cavalleria Rusticana is Raging Bull and Raging Bull only. Godfather III does not exist for me. It ceased to exist at 3:30 pm on Christmas Day, 1990, when I walked out of the first ever showing at the Kings Plaza Shopping Center Multiplex in Brooklyn, utterly heartbroken at what I had just witnessed.
When Bobby delegates the hit on Phil to Paulie into the back room of The Bing, The Door's "When the Music's Over" is playing, which is both odd and appropriate. Odd to think that anyone would choose to strip/dance to the 10-minute long experimental jam, and appropriate in the sentiment that it is almost over for the series. When Paulie then delegates the job to Patsy, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's "American X" is playing, featuring the lines you?ve sold your soul but it?s only a fake / you?d kill yourself for a piece of the take, making me think, again, that Paulie could be playing both sides here.
Later, when Sil and Paulie figure out that the hit was screwed up, the Madder Rose song "You Remember" plays, and a couple lines from the song are highlighted: No one knows how to turn this thing around / it's moving faster now, be quiet and I'll tell you about the sound. There's obviously no 'turning back' now, but Tony's crew finds ways to 'turn their back' on the danger. First Bobby gets taken out in spectacular fashion (while purchasing a Blue Comet train replica train set,) and we're reminded that while he's come a long way from being Junior's driver, he's still a naive little kid at heart.
Then, even as Sil and Patsy are in the process of 'going to ground,' they're still caught unawares outside The Bing (while listening to Nat King Cole's "Ramblin' Rose.") Why wouldn't Sil have a gun on him? Does he think that Phil's goons will respect The Bing? As the carnage is going on, Chase makes sure to have patrons and strippers (still naked) from The Bing outside gawking at the scene. It serves as a nice "F-You!" to the Soprano lookie-loos who only watch for the violence and the occasional nudity - Chase has never shied from publicly loathing their patronage.
While Phil is an arrogant prick, the bumbling by Tony's crew validates much of Phil's complaints about the New Jersey family and their way of doing business. Meanwhile, Elliott (Peter Bogdanovich) is also an arrogant prick who's problems with Tony are validated. Elliott is not only similar to Phil in that regard, but also in his success at eliminating Tony's support, as he helps push Melfi into giving up on Tony. Her abandonment of him in his time of need was a long time coming, given the history of their relationship, but the timing couldn't have been worse as a realistic resolution. It's hard to believe that Yochelson & Samenow's "The Criminal Personality" can close the book on that part of the series so quickly.
So it's just Tony and Paulie left, holed up in some nondescript safehouse. And as Tony tries to sleep clutching the semi-automatic rifle that dearly departed Bobby got him for his birthday, we hear the Tindersticks song "Running Wild" through the credits. It's the perfect moody, foreboding piece of work to end the episode, and while Chase uses the instrumental version, the lyrics to the song are relevant:
Running wild through my mind that I can't sleep tonight Like a child, like a child I have no place to hide Running wild, is there no ending for the...
Playlist: The Sopranos - Episode 620
1. "We Belong Together" - Robert & Johnny - Phil Leotardo sets plans in motion at his social club
2. "Intermezzo Stafonico (from 'Cavalleria Rusticana')" - Pietro Mascagni - Tony, Bobby, and Silvio talk and horse around at Vesuvio's
3. "Sympathy" - Keith Jarrett - Dr. Melfi and friends discuss her patient at a dinner party
4. "When The Music's Over" - The Doors - Bobby summons Paulie to the backroom of The Bing
5. "American X" - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Paulie and Patsy talk at The Bing
6. "Nuages" - Django Reinhardt - The Sopranos catch up with Artie and Charmaine at Vesuvio's
7. "You Remember" - Madder Rose - Silvio and Paulie read the news at The Bing
8. "Ramblin' Rose" - Nat King Cole - Shootout in parking lot of The Bing
9. "Running Wild" - Tindersticks - Tony goes to sleep
Thanks to Drake LeLane
At one point early on in Sunday night's The Sopranos ("The Blue Comet,") special agent Harris says to Tony about the weather, "End of times, huh? Ready for the Rapture?" After what soon followed in this penultimate episode, that comment feels almost not apocalyptic enough to encompass all the carnage that ensued. It was an explosive and powerful episode that sets up a series finale that's sure to be talked about for ages (and consider that your spoiler.)
It's something else, though, that Agent Harris confides to Tony that kick starts the episode: Phil has set in motion plans to take out Tony and a few of his friends. Tony quickly ditches the gabagool sandwich in his hand (remember that meat was a catalyst of his first panic attack,) and gets 'management' together. At a meeting, they decide to hit Phil first, and then Tony and Sil crack up Bobby with some slow-mo boxing moves. The whole scene is backed by Pietro Mascagni's "Intermezzo" from Cavalleria Rusticana, which was used as the title theme to Scorsese's Raging Bull, making for a goose-bump-inducing moment. The piece was also used in Godfather III, in the scene where Michael Corleone's daughter dies, a dangerous reference if intended. Writer Terry Winter cleared that up yesterday at Slate:
...the use of Cavalleria Rusticana is Raging Bull and Raging Bull only. Godfather III does not exist for me. It ceased to exist at 3:30 pm on Christmas Day, 1990, when I walked out of the first ever showing at the Kings Plaza Shopping Center Multiplex in Brooklyn, utterly heartbroken at what I had just witnessed.
When Bobby delegates the hit on Phil to Paulie into the back room of The Bing, The Door's "When the Music's Over" is playing, which is both odd and appropriate. Odd to think that anyone would choose to strip/dance to the 10-minute long experimental jam, and appropriate in the sentiment that it is almost over for the series. When Paulie then delegates the job to Patsy, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's "American X" is playing, featuring the lines you?ve sold your soul but it?s only a fake / you?d kill yourself for a piece of the take, making me think, again, that Paulie could be playing both sides here.
Later, when Sil and Paulie figure out that the hit was screwed up, the Madder Rose song "You Remember" plays, and a couple lines from the song are highlighted: No one knows how to turn this thing around / it's moving faster now, be quiet and I'll tell you about the sound. There's obviously no 'turning back' now, but Tony's crew finds ways to 'turn their back' on the danger. First Bobby gets taken out in spectacular fashion (while purchasing a Blue Comet train replica train set,) and we're reminded that while he's come a long way from being Junior's driver, he's still a naive little kid at heart.
Then, even as Sil and Patsy are in the process of 'going to ground,' they're still caught unawares outside The Bing (while listening to Nat King Cole's "Ramblin' Rose.") Why wouldn't Sil have a gun on him? Does he think that Phil's goons will respect The Bing? As the carnage is going on, Chase makes sure to have patrons and strippers (still naked) from The Bing outside gawking at the scene. It serves as a nice "F-You!" to the Soprano lookie-loos who only watch for the violence and the occasional nudity - Chase has never shied from publicly loathing their patronage.
While Phil is an arrogant prick, the bumbling by Tony's crew validates much of Phil's complaints about the New Jersey family and their way of doing business. Meanwhile, Elliott (Peter Bogdanovich) is also an arrogant prick who's problems with Tony are validated. Elliott is not only similar to Phil in that regard, but also in his success at eliminating Tony's support, as he helps push Melfi into giving up on Tony. Her abandonment of him in his time of need was a long time coming, given the history of their relationship, but the timing couldn't have been worse as a realistic resolution. It's hard to believe that Yochelson & Samenow's "The Criminal Personality" can close the book on that part of the series so quickly.
So it's just Tony and Paulie left, holed up in some nondescript safehouse. And as Tony tries to sleep clutching the semi-automatic rifle that dearly departed Bobby got him for his birthday, we hear the Tindersticks song "Running Wild" through the credits. It's the perfect moody, foreboding piece of work to end the episode, and while Chase uses the instrumental version, the lyrics to the song are relevant:
Running wild through my mind that I can't sleep tonight Like a child, like a child I have no place to hide Running wild, is there no ending for the...
Playlist: The Sopranos - Episode 620
1. "We Belong Together" - Robert & Johnny - Phil Leotardo sets plans in motion at his social club
2. "Intermezzo Stafonico (from 'Cavalleria Rusticana')" - Pietro Mascagni - Tony, Bobby, and Silvio talk and horse around at Vesuvio's
3. "Sympathy" - Keith Jarrett - Dr. Melfi and friends discuss her patient at a dinner party
4. "When The Music's Over" - The Doors - Bobby summons Paulie to the backroom of The Bing
5. "American X" - Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Paulie and Patsy talk at The Bing
6. "Nuages" - Django Reinhardt - The Sopranos catch up with Artie and Charmaine at Vesuvio's
7. "You Remember" - Madder Rose - Silvio and Paulie read the news at The Bing
8. "Ramblin' Rose" - Nat King Cole - Shootout in parking lot of The Bing
9. "Running Wild" - Tindersticks - Tony goes to sleep
Thanks to Drake LeLane
Three Alternate Endings to The Sopranos Shot
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
The HBO series on Sunday night concludes its eight years of mob maneuvering, metaphor-laden dream sequences and mad exclamations of "Marone!"
Questions abound as the series finale nears. (Stop reading here if you're living on DVR or DVD time.) The gathering storm finally touched down in the penultimate episode that aired Sunday, where Phil Leotardo's New York family killed Bobby Bacala (in an instantly classic death scene) and left Silvio Dante clinging to life in the hospital.
Our last image was of Tony Soprano locked away in a barren, upstairs bedroom, drifting off to sleep with an automatic weapon draped across his chest. Everyone -- and it really does feel like everyone -- is wondering what fate lies in store for Tony.
Critics are weighing in, polls have been cast: Will Tony live or die? Other theories revolve around the Feds: Will he turn rat to save himself, or could Tony still be arrested? And what role will his son, A.J. play in the conclusion?
"Sopranos" creator David Chase reportedly filmed three different endings to the finale to help keep the conclusion secret. Chase has always reveled in denying audience expectations (most memorably by never returning to the escaped Russian), and likely delights in foolhardy pundit prognostications. But it's fun to try anyway.
Back in 2001, Chase was illuminating about his approach to the ending while speaking to Rolling Stone magazine: "The paradigm of the traditional gangster film is the rise and fall. You have to ask yourself: Do I want to bother with that paradigm?"
The bloodletting of the second-to-last episode has some -- including unlikely "Sopranos" blogger Brian Williams (whose day job is anchoring NBC's nightly news) -- predicting a finale low on action. "We need to be as prepared for ambiguity as we are prepared for certainty," says Williams, a New Jersey native who has blogged about "The Sopranos" on Slate.com. In his posting Tuesday, he called these days leading up to Sunday's show "the longest week of our lives."
"I have learned in searing fashion never to try to predict what goes on in David Chase's mind," adds Williams.
Nevertheless, the enormous build up (just about everything has gone badly for Tony lately) and the great secrecy of the ending suggest that Chase still views the finale as -- to put it simply -- a big deal.
Most dramas and sitcoms that bid adieu with a much anticipated finale do so without the weight of passing a final judgment on its main character. In this way, the ending of "The Sopranos" might have more in common with the conclusion of "Sex and the City" than it would appear.
In that show, whether Carrie Bradshaw would remain single or get hitched was always the question. Likewise, whether Tony is -- as he claims in therapy -- "basically a good guy," is the perpetual conflict of "The Sopranos."
The way things have gone this final season, it appears Chase has decided Tony is beyond redemption. Tony has essentially given up on his "mama's boy" son and killed Christopher Moltisanti, his virtual son and heir apparent. Just before that harrowing suffocation, Tony and Christopher drove while a version of "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd played: "The child is grown/ The dream is gone."
Dr. Melfi, too, has given up on Tony. She abruptly terminated their therapy sessions after being persuaded by recent psychiatric studies that talk therapy doesn't rehabilitate but emboldens sociopaths. That she could wonder whether it all was worth it might reflect Chase's own doubts in so long humanizing such a violent, corrupt figure.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, James Gandolfini acknowledged that he also has lost faith in his character. Asked whether he likes Tony, Gandolfini said, "I used to. But it's difficult toward the end. I think the thing with Christopher might have turned the corner."
"It's kind of one thing after another," he added. "Let's just say, it was a lot easier to like him before, than in the last few years."
Killing Tony would perhaps restore morality to the series. Can someone who so regularly breaks the law and murders even his closest friends be allowed to walk? Or will a more deeply cynical view pervade, where Tony's crimes are tolerated, or at least unpunished.
Sydney Pollack, the revered filmmaker ("Tootsie," "Out of Africa") who played a one-episode part on "The Sopranos" earlier this season as a disgraced doctor turned hospital orderly, believes the series will end in tragedy.
"Something bad is going to happen," says Pollack, who expects to see Tony die. "I don't know, but I know that David Chase can be counted on to surprise us -- or not -- but at least to do something that's bold and not safe."
A.J. has become a critical character in this, the second leg of the sixth season, which has so largely revolved around themes of legacy and parenthood. He is essentially the wild card in the combustible mix of characters heading into the finale. Will A.J.'s newfound conscience lead him to turn his father into the cops? Will Tony have to make a decision between saving his son or saving himself?
Tony's sporadic interactions with the FBI agent have led to conjecture that Tony might flee to the police. His conversations with the agent have been limited, though, and it seems possible they constitute nothing more than a red herring.
The different possible conclusions for "The Sopranos" could forever color fans' memories of the show. For a series that has always preferred a realistic messiness to tidy plot resolutions, grand fireworks would be against Chase's nature.
"There'll be people who will like the finale and people who won't like it," Chase recently told Entertainment Weekly. "But I think that if people look at what the show was, or could even watch the whole story again, they'll understand what the ending is."
Whatever the outcome, the one thing that is clear, is that "The Sopranos" -- often hailed as the greatest show in the history of television -- will conclude Sunday. As Tony is fond of saying, "End of story."
The HBO series on Sunday night concludes its eight years of mob maneuvering, metaphor-laden dream sequences and mad exclamations of "Marone!"
Questions abound as the series finale nears. (Stop reading here if you're living on DVR or DVD time.) The gathering storm finally touched down in the penultimate episode that aired Sunday, where Phil Leotardo's New York family killed Bobby Bacala (in an instantly classic death scene) and left Silvio Dante clinging to life in the hospital.
Our last image was of Tony Soprano locked away in a barren, upstairs bedroom, drifting off to sleep with an automatic weapon draped across his chest. Everyone -- and it really does feel like everyone -- is wondering what fate lies in store for Tony.
Critics are weighing in, polls have been cast: Will Tony live or die? Other theories revolve around the Feds: Will he turn rat to save himself, or could Tony still be arrested? And what role will his son, A.J. play in the conclusion?
"Sopranos" creator David Chase reportedly filmed three different endings to the finale to help keep the conclusion secret. Chase has always reveled in denying audience expectations (most memorably by never returning to the escaped Russian), and likely delights in foolhardy pundit prognostications. But it's fun to try anyway.
Back in 2001, Chase was illuminating about his approach to the ending while speaking to Rolling Stone magazine: "The paradigm of the traditional gangster film is the rise and fall. You have to ask yourself: Do I want to bother with that paradigm?"
The bloodletting of the second-to-last episode has some -- including unlikely "Sopranos" blogger Brian Williams (whose day job is anchoring NBC's nightly news) -- predicting a finale low on action. "We need to be as prepared for ambiguity as we are prepared for certainty," says Williams, a New Jersey native who has blogged about "The Sopranos" on Slate.com. In his posting Tuesday, he called these days leading up to Sunday's show "the longest week of our lives."
"I have learned in searing fashion never to try to predict what goes on in David Chase's mind," adds Williams.
Nevertheless, the enormous build up (just about everything has gone badly for Tony lately) and the great secrecy of the ending suggest that Chase still views the finale as -- to put it simply -- a big deal.
Most dramas and sitcoms that bid adieu with a much anticipated finale do so without the weight of passing a final judgment on its main character. In this way, the ending of "The Sopranos" might have more in common with the conclusion of "Sex and the City" than it would appear.
In that show, whether Carrie Bradshaw would remain single or get hitched was always the question. Likewise, whether Tony is -- as he claims in therapy -- "basically a good guy," is the perpetual conflict of "The Sopranos."
The way things have gone this final season, it appears Chase has decided Tony is beyond redemption. Tony has essentially given up on his "mama's boy" son and killed Christopher Moltisanti, his virtual son and heir apparent. Just before that harrowing suffocation, Tony and Christopher drove while a version of "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd played: "The child is grown/ The dream is gone."
Dr. Melfi, too, has given up on Tony. She abruptly terminated their therapy sessions after being persuaded by recent psychiatric studies that talk therapy doesn't rehabilitate but emboldens sociopaths. That she could wonder whether it all was worth it might reflect Chase's own doubts in so long humanizing such a violent, corrupt figure.
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, James Gandolfini acknowledged that he also has lost faith in his character. Asked whether he likes Tony, Gandolfini said, "I used to. But it's difficult toward the end. I think the thing with Christopher might have turned the corner."
"It's kind of one thing after another," he added. "Let's just say, it was a lot easier to like him before, than in the last few years."
Killing Tony would perhaps restore morality to the series. Can someone who so regularly breaks the law and murders even his closest friends be allowed to walk? Or will a more deeply cynical view pervade, where Tony's crimes are tolerated, or at least unpunished.
Sydney Pollack, the revered filmmaker ("Tootsie," "Out of Africa") who played a one-episode part on "The Sopranos" earlier this season as a disgraced doctor turned hospital orderly, believes the series will end in tragedy.
"Something bad is going to happen," says Pollack, who expects to see Tony die. "I don't know, but I know that David Chase can be counted on to surprise us -- or not -- but at least to do something that's bold and not safe."
A.J. has become a critical character in this, the second leg of the sixth season, which has so largely revolved around themes of legacy and parenthood. He is essentially the wild card in the combustible mix of characters heading into the finale. Will A.J.'s newfound conscience lead him to turn his father into the cops? Will Tony have to make a decision between saving his son or saving himself?
Tony's sporadic interactions with the FBI agent have led to conjecture that Tony might flee to the police. His conversations with the agent have been limited, though, and it seems possible they constitute nothing more than a red herring.
The different possible conclusions for "The Sopranos" could forever color fans' memories of the show. For a series that has always preferred a realistic messiness to tidy plot resolutions, grand fireworks would be against Chase's nature.
"There'll be people who will like the finale and people who won't like it," Chase recently told Entertainment Weekly. "But I think that if people look at what the show was, or could even watch the whole story again, they'll understand what the ending is."
Whatever the outcome, the one thing that is clear, is that "The Sopranos" -- often hailed as the greatest show in the history of television -- will conclude Sunday. As Tony is fond of saying, "End of story."
While Most Like Tony, New Jerseyans Like 'The Sopranos' Most
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
Although both New Jerseyans and the rest of the nation like Tony Soprano, New Jerseyans watch the show set in their back yard more often and are more tolerant of its sharper edges, according to a new poll released today.
The poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMind comes with HBO set to air the final episode of "The Sopranos" on Sunday. The survey compared New Jerseyans' views of "The Sopranos" to the nation's views and found everyone - by a 2-1 margin - wants to see Tony Soprano survive the end of the series.
Those who have watched many episodes are twice as likely as casual viewers to prefer that he live, although views are split among his continuing as a mobster, going to jail, turning honest and other ideas.
"Perhaps they see a glimmer of goodness in him," said Gary Radford, a communications professor at Fairleigh Dickinson. "Perhaps they identify with his constant struggle to keep his family and his business together in the jungle that is mob life."
New Jerseyans seem to really like the series set in their world. Three of five New Jersey voters have watched the show, compared to two of five nationally, with New Jerseyans more likely by a 54 percent to 30 percent margin to have watched "many episodes."
The poll found 90 percent of New Jerseyans know the show is set in their state, compared to 56 percent nationwide. And New Jerseyans are less likely to agree with charges the show is too sexually explicit, has excessive violence, glorifies organized crime and portrays Italian-Americans in a negative way.
For instance, 42 percent of New Jerseyans agree the show has vulgar and offensive language, compared to 47 percent nationwide. Also, 24 percent of New Jerseyans agree the show cast Italian-Americans in a negative light, compared to 27 percent nationwide.
William Roberts, chair of Fairleigh Dickinson's Public Administration Institute and author of several books on modern Italian history, is among those agreeing with that sentiment. "'The Sopranos' certainly showcased some of the best talent in the profession," he said. "However, the show helped to perpetuate one of the more problematic and stereotypical images of Italian-Americans."
The poll of 776 randomly selected voters nationwide and 602 New Jersey voters was conducted from May 29 through June 3 and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Although both New Jerseyans and the rest of the nation like Tony Soprano, New Jerseyans watch the show set in their back yard more often and are more tolerant of its sharper edges, according to a new poll released today.
The poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMind comes with HBO set to air the final episode of "The Sopranos" on Sunday. The survey compared New Jerseyans' views of "The Sopranos" to the nation's views and found everyone - by a 2-1 margin - wants to see Tony Soprano survive the end of the series.
Those who have watched many episodes are twice as likely as casual viewers to prefer that he live, although views are split among his continuing as a mobster, going to jail, turning honest and other ideas.
"Perhaps they see a glimmer of goodness in him," said Gary Radford, a communications professor at Fairleigh Dickinson. "Perhaps they identify with his constant struggle to keep his family and his business together in the jungle that is mob life."
New Jerseyans seem to really like the series set in their world. Three of five New Jersey voters have watched the show, compared to two of five nationally, with New Jerseyans more likely by a 54 percent to 30 percent margin to have watched "many episodes."
The poll found 90 percent of New Jerseyans know the show is set in their state, compared to 56 percent nationwide. And New Jerseyans are less likely to agree with charges the show is too sexually explicit, has excessive violence, glorifies organized crime and portrays Italian-Americans in a negative way.
For instance, 42 percent of New Jerseyans agree the show has vulgar and offensive language, compared to 47 percent nationwide. Also, 24 percent of New Jerseyans agree the show cast Italian-Americans in a negative light, compared to 27 percent nationwide.
William Roberts, chair of Fairleigh Dickinson's Public Administration Institute and author of several books on modern Italian history, is among those agreeing with that sentiment. "'The Sopranos' certainly showcased some of the best talent in the profession," he said. "However, the show helped to perpetuate one of the more problematic and stereotypical images of Italian-Americans."
The poll of 776 randomly selected voters nationwide and 602 New Jersey voters was conducted from May 29 through June 3 and has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Six Pack of Mob Hits on The Sopranos
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
The characters who inhabit the modern mob world of The Sopranos endure a precarious existence. Death lurks around every corner - taunting even the most firmly established players. And when these sad saps eventually meet their makers, we find it incredibly hard to turn away. So in honor of the HBO show's finale (9 p.m. Sunday), we're paying tribute to the whackings that kept us buzzing around the water cooler. Here's a chronological list of the hits that were especially hard to forget.
1. Richie Aprile (Season 2): Janice Soprano may have fallen prey to some bad men in her life, but she's nobody's punching bag. So when former fiance Aprile administered a few blows before dinner one night, Janice retaliated by calmly firing two shots into his chest. Little brother Tony helped clean up the mess, sending Aprile to the chopping block at Satriale's and loose cannon Janice back to Seattle.
2. Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero (Season 2): Talk about a fateful trip. When Tony learned that his most beloved crew member had turned FBI informant, he invited him on a boat ride into the abyss. But hand it to Pussy for facing death like a man. After failing to talk his way out of the situation, he asked his executioners for one saving grace: to avoid shooting him in the face. Tony and his captains riddled his body with bullets instead and cast him overboard, dooming him to spend eternity swimming with the fishes.
3. Ralph Cifaretto (Season 4): A victim of one of the longest, most gruesome, most deserved beatings of the series, a drawn-out, drag-out brawl that ended with Cifaretto's head being stuffed into a bowling bag. And the worst part? The secretly bald (and apparently vain) Cifaretto (who drew Tony's wrath for allegedly killing the racehorse Pie-O-My) was buried without his wig.
4. Adriana La Cerva (Season 5): Poor, naive Ade. Believing love could conquer all, the show's hottest Mafia girlfriend turned mole confessed to her beloved Christufuh, hoping the made man would agree to life in the witness protection program. Instead, he ratted her out to his one true love. The last we saw of her, Adriana was crying and crawling away from a gun-wielding Silvio Dante in the middle of the woods, shots filling the air as her desperate face faded from the screen.
5. Tony Blundetto (Season 5): Call it a mercy killing. Blundetto was doomed the minute he rubbed out Phil Leotardo's brother, Billy. Though he initially rebuked Phil's call for retribution, Tony eventually did the deed himself, saving his cousin from a far more brutal death. Blundetto's demise came quickly, after Tony surprised him at a farmhouse hideout with a shot in the face.
6. Christopher Moltisanti (Season 6): In the end, Tony turned on his most loyal soldier, sure that his nephew had become his biggest liability. When Christopher, high on heroin, crashed his car on a deserted road, Tony decided to solve his problem, suffocating the severely injured Moltisanti and never shedding a tear.
Thanks to Erika Gonzalez
The characters who inhabit the modern mob world of The Sopranos endure a precarious existence. Death lurks around every corner - taunting even the most firmly established players. And when these sad saps eventually meet their makers, we find it incredibly hard to turn away. So in honor of the HBO show's finale (9 p.m. Sunday), we're paying tribute to the whackings that kept us buzzing around the water cooler. Here's a chronological list of the hits that were especially hard to forget.
1. Richie Aprile (Season 2): Janice Soprano may have fallen prey to some bad men in her life, but she's nobody's punching bag. So when former fiance Aprile administered a few blows before dinner one night, Janice retaliated by calmly firing two shots into his chest. Little brother Tony helped clean up the mess, sending Aprile to the chopping block at Satriale's and loose cannon Janice back to Seattle.
2. Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero (Season 2): Talk about a fateful trip. When Tony learned that his most beloved crew member had turned FBI informant, he invited him on a boat ride into the abyss. But hand it to Pussy for facing death like a man. After failing to talk his way out of the situation, he asked his executioners for one saving grace: to avoid shooting him in the face. Tony and his captains riddled his body with bullets instead and cast him overboard, dooming him to spend eternity swimming with the fishes.
3. Ralph Cifaretto (Season 4): A victim of one of the longest, most gruesome, most deserved beatings of the series, a drawn-out, drag-out brawl that ended with Cifaretto's head being stuffed into a bowling bag. And the worst part? The secretly bald (and apparently vain) Cifaretto (who drew Tony's wrath for allegedly killing the racehorse Pie-O-My) was buried without his wig.
4. Adriana La Cerva (Season 5): Poor, naive Ade. Believing love could conquer all, the show's hottest Mafia girlfriend turned mole confessed to her beloved Christufuh, hoping the made man would agree to life in the witness protection program. Instead, he ratted her out to his one true love. The last we saw of her, Adriana was crying and crawling away from a gun-wielding Silvio Dante in the middle of the woods, shots filling the air as her desperate face faded from the screen.
5. Tony Blundetto (Season 5): Call it a mercy killing. Blundetto was doomed the minute he rubbed out Phil Leotardo's brother, Billy. Though he initially rebuked Phil's call for retribution, Tony eventually did the deed himself, saving his cousin from a far more brutal death. Blundetto's demise came quickly, after Tony surprised him at a farmhouse hideout with a shot in the face.
6. Christopher Moltisanti (Season 6): In the end, Tony turned on his most loyal soldier, sure that his nephew had become his biggest liability. When Christopher, high on heroin, crashed his car on a deserted road, Tony decided to solve his problem, suffocating the severely injured Moltisanti and never shedding a tear.
Thanks to Erika Gonzalez
Soprano Fans Mob Filming Locations
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
Every Saturday afternoon, the staff at the Satin Dolls go-go lounge clears the bar of matchbooks, coasters, napkins and anything else not nailed down because a sold-out tour bus is on the way from New York. But the luxury coach heading for the nondescript, windowless building on a busy stretch of New Jersey highway isn't carrying rowdy bachelors with Bacchanalia in mind.
Soon, about four dozens fans of the hit television series "The Sopranos" file into the club, which since 1999 has doubled as the show's notorious, mob-run strip joint, the Bada Bing.
"Everything gets stolen off the bar, even if it doesn't say 'Satin Dolls' or 'Bada Bing' on it," said club manager Rouz, who, like the scantily-clad young women working the brass poles behind the bar, prefers to be known by just his first name.
HBO broadcasts the series finale of "The Sopranos" on June 10, and locations made famous by the saga of a northern New Jersey mob boss struggling to keep both his "families" in line attract flocks of fans.
"The 'Bada Bing' brings extra attention from people who wouldn't normally go to a go-go bar," Rouz said. "Most of them come in and have a look, then buy some merchandise and leave. And they don't know about the state laws."
Rouz was referring to the poetic license taken by the show's producers regarding New Jersey's policy on topless dancing and establishments that serve alcohol: you can have one or the other, but not both.
So while Tony Soprano and his crew sit in "the Bing" and plot their latest crimes amid a gaggle of topless dancers, Satin Dolls patrons are entertained by girls wearing bikinis and lingerie, albeit of the skimpiest variety.
One of the tour bus visitors is Paul Rickard of Inverness, Scotland, who says his rabid devotion to the show has little to do with the mob-related plot lines. "It's about family, food and togetherness," he said between sips from a beer. "The mob is just a job, a distraction. Despite scenes of extreme violence, the show is about love."
Swiss tourist Antony Simone, sitting just down the bar from Rickard, says he's dreading a world in which he won't have fresh episodes to look forward to. "I would like no end, because the Mafia has no end," he says.
While "the Bing" has played a central role throughout the show's run and understandably attracts a fan following, any association with "The Sopranos" can prove a boon for business.
Pizzaland, a few miles south of Satin Dolls in North Arlington, appears for about one second during the show's opening credits. Despite never actually being in an episode, the already-thriving neighborhood favorite saw pizza sales spike once the show gained popularity.
The surprise to owner Paul Pawlowicz was how big a slice of his revenues now comes from shipping pizzas nationwide. "They get shrink-wrapped, put on dry ice, and shipped overnight," Pawlowicz said as he pulled a steaming pie from the oven. "This week alone I've shipped pizzas to Texas, Louisiana and California, and I've sent 58 pies to a guy in Safety Harbor (Florida) this season alone."
"Hey, it's good pizza," he says, then adds a line that would be right at home in an episode of the show: "Once I get a customer, I got 'em for good."
Interior scenes of the Soprano family home are actually shot on a soundstage in the New York City borough of Queens. But exterior shots, often showing Tony in an open bathrobe shuffling down his steep driveway to pick up the newspaper, are set at a "real home" in the affluent town of North Caldwell.
No federal agents taking pictures or waiting to have a "talk" with Tony were seen parked in front of the house on a recent drive-by. But the code of omerta was in effect for two carloads of fans circling the cul-de-sac to have a look at the house: both sped off quickly when approached for a comment.
While most of the well-known locations on the show are actual commercial establishments, Satriale's pork store in Kearny has never existed. Signage and the large pig that sits atop the brick-faced building were put up only for filming, and the site that saw its share of sit-downs and dismemberments will soon be whacked itself: Kearny officials say the town's planning board has approved an application from the owner to turn the property into condominiums.
Whether sight-seeing fans will continue to seek out "Sopranos" locations after the show's finale remains to be seen. But tour bus guide Marc Baron of On Location Tours (http://www.screentours.com), who has been an extra in several episodes, is optimistic. "There is such an interest from overseas fans and the popularity of the show has only grown since it began showing on A&E," Baron said, noting the cleaned-up reruns now showing on another cable station. "I think we've got a good five years left."
Thanks to Christian Wiessner
Every Saturday afternoon, the staff at the Satin Dolls go-go lounge clears the bar of matchbooks, coasters, napkins and anything else not nailed down because a sold-out tour bus is on the way from New York. But the luxury coach heading for the nondescript, windowless building on a busy stretch of New Jersey highway isn't carrying rowdy bachelors with Bacchanalia in mind.
Soon, about four dozens fans of the hit television series "The Sopranos" file into the club, which since 1999 has doubled as the show's notorious, mob-run strip joint, the Bada Bing.
"Everything gets stolen off the bar, even if it doesn't say 'Satin Dolls' or 'Bada Bing' on it," said club manager Rouz, who, like the scantily-clad young women working the brass poles behind the bar, prefers to be known by just his first name.
HBO broadcasts the series finale of "The Sopranos" on June 10, and locations made famous by the saga of a northern New Jersey mob boss struggling to keep both his "families" in line attract flocks of fans.
"The 'Bada Bing' brings extra attention from people who wouldn't normally go to a go-go bar," Rouz said. "Most of them come in and have a look, then buy some merchandise and leave. And they don't know about the state laws."
Rouz was referring to the poetic license taken by the show's producers regarding New Jersey's policy on topless dancing and establishments that serve alcohol: you can have one or the other, but not both.
So while Tony Soprano and his crew sit in "the Bing" and plot their latest crimes amid a gaggle of topless dancers, Satin Dolls patrons are entertained by girls wearing bikinis and lingerie, albeit of the skimpiest variety.
One of the tour bus visitors is Paul Rickard of Inverness, Scotland, who says his rabid devotion to the show has little to do with the mob-related plot lines. "It's about family, food and togetherness," he said between sips from a beer. "The mob is just a job, a distraction. Despite scenes of extreme violence, the show is about love."
Swiss tourist Antony Simone, sitting just down the bar from Rickard, says he's dreading a world in which he won't have fresh episodes to look forward to. "I would like no end, because the Mafia has no end," he says.
While "the Bing" has played a central role throughout the show's run and understandably attracts a fan following, any association with "The Sopranos" can prove a boon for business.
Pizzaland, a few miles south of Satin Dolls in North Arlington, appears for about one second during the show's opening credits. Despite never actually being in an episode, the already-thriving neighborhood favorite saw pizza sales spike once the show gained popularity.
The surprise to owner Paul Pawlowicz was how big a slice of his revenues now comes from shipping pizzas nationwide. "They get shrink-wrapped, put on dry ice, and shipped overnight," Pawlowicz said as he pulled a steaming pie from the oven. "This week alone I've shipped pizzas to Texas, Louisiana and California, and I've sent 58 pies to a guy in Safety Harbor (Florida) this season alone."
"Hey, it's good pizza," he says, then adds a line that would be right at home in an episode of the show: "Once I get a customer, I got 'em for good."
Interior scenes of the Soprano family home are actually shot on a soundstage in the New York City borough of Queens. But exterior shots, often showing Tony in an open bathrobe shuffling down his steep driveway to pick up the newspaper, are set at a "real home" in the affluent town of North Caldwell.
No federal agents taking pictures or waiting to have a "talk" with Tony were seen parked in front of the house on a recent drive-by. But the code of omerta was in effect for two carloads of fans circling the cul-de-sac to have a look at the house: both sped off quickly when approached for a comment.
While most of the well-known locations on the show are actual commercial establishments, Satriale's pork store in Kearny has never existed. Signage and the large pig that sits atop the brick-faced building were put up only for filming, and the site that saw its share of sit-downs and dismemberments will soon be whacked itself: Kearny officials say the town's planning board has approved an application from the owner to turn the property into condominiums.
Whether sight-seeing fans will continue to seek out "Sopranos" locations after the show's finale remains to be seen. But tour bus guide Marc Baron of On Location Tours (http://www.screentours.com), who has been an extra in several episodes, is optimistic. "There is such an interest from overseas fans and the popularity of the show has only grown since it began showing on A&E," Baron said, noting the cleaned-up reruns now showing on another cable station. "I think we've got a good five years left."
Thanks to Christian Wiessner
Friday, June 08, 2007
Will Final Sopranos Whack HBO's Identity Too?
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
It's difficult to remember now, but way back in the mid 1990s during a crazy little century called the 20th, HBO was a network far more renowned for its longform production and documentaries than its series. Sure, it had "The Larry Sanders Show," possibly the most magnificent character comedy in recorded history, but "Larry" drew abysmal ratings in appealing to something of an elitist taste.
The three shows that would come to define the quality-rich HBO brand -- "Sex and the City
," "The Sopranos
" and "Six Feet Under
" -- didn't arrive on the scene until 1998, 1999 and 2001, respectively. Nothing that came before ever brought the mighty Time Warner premium cabler anything close to the consistent acclaim and cachet supplied by this threesome.
Movies, minis and docus are great for collecting Emmys, but once they've run, they've run. Series are the gift that keeps on giving. Yet it hasn't escaped notice that aside from "Entourage
," HBO is pretty much fresh out of even semi-buzzworthy series product of late.
And so we find that Sunday's much-hyped "Sopranos" series capper represents far more than simply the hour that will determine Tony Soprano's ultimate fate. It's the true end of an era for the network that birthed he and his goombas. Even before HBO programming guru Chris Albrecht's troubles that led to his ouster, the network has been unable to restock its ranks with new stars. The golden touch has turned closer to silver.
This is not a new observation, of course. And particularly this week in coinciding with the "Sopranos'" permanent fish-sleeping expedition, the eulogies mourning HBO's untimely demise are sure to come in waves. It really isn't as bad as all of that, however. For one, the original series cupboard isn't barren, what with "Entourage," the polygamy primer "Big Love
" returning next Monday and another season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm
" rolling out later in the year. As well, critics continue to sing the praises of "The Wire
," though they seem to be the only ones watching it.
There's also the new stuff: the David Milch paranormal surfer fantasy "John From Cincinnati" (premiering Sunday), the comedy "Flight of the Conchords" (arriving June 17) and the psych-themed half-hour drama "In Therapy" (coming this fall) that appears to recall the brilliant but shamefully short-lived 1991 six-parter "Sessions" that Billy Crystal wrote and produced for HBO.
It all sounds just swell, though there is now the distinct sense from HBO not of a front-runner's cool confidence but a boxer who has lost the sting in his jab and is unleashing a less-effective barrage in the hope something connects. Such is the towering height of the bar this network has set.
Yes, a retooling was inevitable. They can't all be winners, and "Carnivale" and "Lucky Louie" weren't. Yet more than that, aside from "The Sopranos" and the recently departed "Deadwood," even the schedule-stickers just aren't generating the kind of hyper-awareness that befits HBO's sterling reputation. As a result, FX ("Rescue Me," "The Shield," "The Riches," "Nip/Tuck") and Showtime ("Dexter," "Weeds," "The Tudors," "Brotherhood") have been able to swoop in and virtually eliminate any perceived qualitative gap while carving out their own unique niches.
Does any of this really matter to HBO? Financially, it's probably negligible. But in terms of perception and esteem -- both essential elements in keeping subscriber churn to a minimum while maximizing water-cooler chatter -- it's huge.
Unfortunately, coolness isn't a commodity that can be purchased outright or Bill Gates would be the hippest man on Earth. HBO hasn't lost its identity, merely its groove. It's simply going to take it a while to get it back.
Thanks to Ray Richmond
It's difficult to remember now, but way back in the mid 1990s during a crazy little century called the 20th, HBO was a network far more renowned for its longform production and documentaries than its series. Sure, it had "The Larry Sanders Show," possibly the most magnificent character comedy in recorded history, but "Larry" drew abysmal ratings in appealing to something of an elitist taste.
The three shows that would come to define the quality-rich HBO brand -- "Sex and the City
," "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under" -- didn't arrive on the scene until 1998, 1999 and 2001, respectively. Nothing that came before ever brought the mighty Time Warner premium cabler anything close to the consistent acclaim and cachet supplied by this threesome.Movies, minis and docus are great for collecting Emmys, but once they've run, they've run. Series are the gift that keeps on giving. Yet it hasn't escaped notice that aside from "Entourage
," HBO is pretty much fresh out of even semi-buzzworthy series product of late.And so we find that Sunday's much-hyped "Sopranos" series capper represents far more than simply the hour that will determine Tony Soprano's ultimate fate. It's the true end of an era for the network that birthed he and his goombas. Even before HBO programming guru Chris Albrecht's troubles that led to his ouster, the network has been unable to restock its ranks with new stars. The golden touch has turned closer to silver.
This is not a new observation, of course. And particularly this week in coinciding with the "Sopranos'" permanent fish-sleeping expedition, the eulogies mourning HBO's untimely demise are sure to come in waves. It really isn't as bad as all of that, however. For one, the original series cupboard isn't barren, what with "Entourage," the polygamy primer "Big Love
" returning next Monday and another season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" rolling out later in the year. As well, critics continue to sing the praises of "The Wire," though they seem to be the only ones watching it.There's also the new stuff: the David Milch paranormal surfer fantasy "John From Cincinnati" (premiering Sunday), the comedy "Flight of the Conchords" (arriving June 17) and the psych-themed half-hour drama "In Therapy" (coming this fall) that appears to recall the brilliant but shamefully short-lived 1991 six-parter "Sessions" that Billy Crystal wrote and produced for HBO.
It all sounds just swell, though there is now the distinct sense from HBO not of a front-runner's cool confidence but a boxer who has lost the sting in his jab and is unleashing a less-effective barrage in the hope something connects. Such is the towering height of the bar this network has set.
Yes, a retooling was inevitable. They can't all be winners, and "Carnivale" and "Lucky Louie" weren't. Yet more than that, aside from "The Sopranos" and the recently departed "Deadwood," even the schedule-stickers just aren't generating the kind of hyper-awareness that befits HBO's sterling reputation. As a result, FX ("Rescue Me," "The Shield," "The Riches," "Nip/Tuck") and Showtime ("Dexter," "Weeds," "The Tudors," "Brotherhood") have been able to swoop in and virtually eliminate any perceived qualitative gap while carving out their own unique niches.
Does any of this really matter to HBO? Financially, it's probably negligible. But in terms of perception and esteem -- both essential elements in keeping subscriber churn to a minimum while maximizing water-cooler chatter -- it's huge.
Unfortunately, coolness isn't a commodity that can be purchased outright or Bill Gates would be the hippest man on Earth. HBO hasn't lost its identity, merely its groove. It's simply going to take it a while to get it back.
Thanks to Ray Richmond
Tony Soprano: Hero and Villain
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
Director David Cronenberg once told me that back in the eighties, when he was trying to make his version of "The Fly" — the one where Jeff Goldblum turns into a gooey monster — a studio head said it wouldn't work; he said he didn't think audiences could deal with a hero who is also the villain.
Scary, huh? There goes "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." There go the most fascinating characters in literature.
Television, where fathers were supposed to know best, was even less friendly to moral ambiguity — which is why "The Sopranos" was a landmark.
When we first met James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano in 1999, he seemed to be evolving. He was seeing a psychiatrist; he was coming to terms with his life. He was a gang boss, sure, but he had a crazy narcissistic mom, he cared about his kids, he wasn't a sociopath, like his nephew Christopher. And then came the episode where he took his daughter Meadow to Maine to see a college and spied a rat, an ex-gangster relocated by the witness protection program. Tony saw the man had a wife and kids and hesitated — and we knew he wouldn't kill him.
Only he did.
No matter how much we empathized with and lived vicariously through these characters, creator David Chase made sure to slap us awake — to remind us they were terrible people. Tony ordered the murder of the one entirely sympathetic character, Drea di Matteo's Adriana.
Last season, Joseph Gannascoli's Vito was discovered to be gay, taboo in Mafia culture, and he fled to New Hampshire — how could we not be touched by the sad sack's plight? Only then, he shot a man whose car he hit while driving drunk.
Even Edie Falco's Carmela is tainted. Earlier this season, the budding realtor worried a rainstorm would ruin the sale of a house she'd had built. That shoddy edifice could stand for the Sopranos' way of life: rotted by self-interest, its collapse inevitable.
It makes you think of the ways most of us compromise, in big and little ways, for the sake of self-interest — and how our own lives, as Americans, are unsustainable.
No one knows if in the last episode Tony Soprano will die. Who could write his epitaph? Not Chase — he needed more than 80 hours to take the measure of the man. But I know this: Our perceptions, our lives, our culture is enriched by a hero who is finally a villain.
Thanks to David Edelstein
Director David Cronenberg once told me that back in the eighties, when he was trying to make his version of "The Fly" — the one where Jeff Goldblum turns into a gooey monster — a studio head said it wouldn't work; he said he didn't think audiences could deal with a hero who is also the villain.
Scary, huh? There goes "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." There go the most fascinating characters in literature.
Television, where fathers were supposed to know best, was even less friendly to moral ambiguity — which is why "The Sopranos" was a landmark.
When we first met James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano in 1999, he seemed to be evolving. He was seeing a psychiatrist; he was coming to terms with his life. He was a gang boss, sure, but he had a crazy narcissistic mom, he cared about his kids, he wasn't a sociopath, like his nephew Christopher. And then came the episode where he took his daughter Meadow to Maine to see a college and spied a rat, an ex-gangster relocated by the witness protection program. Tony saw the man had a wife and kids and hesitated — and we knew he wouldn't kill him.Only he did.
No matter how much we empathized with and lived vicariously through these characters, creator David Chase made sure to slap us awake — to remind us they were terrible people. Tony ordered the murder of the one entirely sympathetic character, Drea di Matteo's Adriana.
Last season, Joseph Gannascoli's Vito was discovered to be gay, taboo in Mafia culture, and he fled to New Hampshire — how could we not be touched by the sad sack's plight? Only then, he shot a man whose car he hit while driving drunk.
Even Edie Falco's Carmela is tainted. Earlier this season, the budding realtor worried a rainstorm would ruin the sale of a house she'd had built. That shoddy edifice could stand for the Sopranos' way of life: rotted by self-interest, its collapse inevitable.
It makes you think of the ways most of us compromise, in big and little ways, for the sake of self-interest — and how our own lives, as Americans, are unsustainable.
No one knows if in the last episode Tony Soprano will die. Who could write his epitaph? Not Chase — he needed more than 80 hours to take the measure of the man. But I know this: Our perceptions, our lives, our culture is enriched by a hero who is finally a villain.
Thanks to David Edelstein
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Soprano Ethical Lapses Debated
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
Therapists, we've long known, are among the biggest fans of The Sopranos.
So pleased were they with the credible therapy scenes between Tony Soprano, pop culture's most famous mobster/patient, and the appealing Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco, that the American Psychoanalytical Association once gave the show and Bracco an award. But professionally speaking, they could only scratch their heads at the latest developments on HBO's hit drama, which aired its penultimate episode last weekend.
Just as Tony Soprano's life seemed to be imploding with dangerous speed — in short, just when he needed some really good therapy — Melfi and her own therapist made some highly questionable moves. Not only therapists were distressed. Some patients were actually furious when they showed up for appointments this week, said one New York psychoanalyst.
"You wouldn't believe the outrage I am hearing," said Dr. Arnold Richards, who'd missed the episode, but was filled in by his patients. He was talking about a serious ethical lapse by Elliot Kupferberg, played by Peter Bogdanovich, at a dinner party full of therapists. Across the crowded table, the character callously revealed — over Melfi's protests — the identity of her star patient.
"Mind-boggling," pronounced Richards. "I do not recall ever being told the name of a patient in treatment."
Colleagues agreed. "That dinner party was just very upsetting to me," said Dr. Joseph Annibali, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in McLean, Va. "What he did was outrageous. He's never had control of himself, and this just fits in with that."
Why did Kupferberg commit such a sin? He didn't think Melfi should be treating Tony, whom he considered a manipulative psychopath. Be that as it may, his disclosure was "a very egregious ethical violation," said Dr. Jan Van Schaik, chair of the Ethics Committee at the Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Institute.
"A patient needs to know that what gets said in the doctor's office stays there," said Van Schaik, who's never witnessed such a violation. "I've been at gatherings where people talk about patients in a more disguised form. Even that can be inappropriate. A good therapist should do the best they can to protect the anonymity of patients."
It's a shame, Van Schaik added, because "prior to Sunday's episode, The Sopranos was the best portrayal in the popular media of a therapist-patient relationship." Annibali agreed: "We're so used to seeing therapists presented as incompetent hacks. Or as people who are more disturbed than their patients!"
What's been nice about Melfi, the Virginia therapist explained, is that she's a complex and caring figure — she's not ideal, but she tries to help Tony even as she struggles with the idea of treating him.
That is, until this last episode, when she ... dumped him.
"We're making progress," Tony protested, genuinely shocked. "It's been seven years!" But Melfi had reluctantly read a study, brought to her attention by Kupferberg, claiming that therapy doesn't actually help sociopaths — it further enables their bad behavior by sharpening their manipulative skills. Demoralized, guilt-ridden and almost speechless with hostility, Melfi literally showed Tony the door.
A tidbit that had some therapists buzzing this week: it turns out the study is a real one — albeit hardly new — from authors Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, psychiatrists specializing in the criminal mind. But the way the fictional Melfi shoved aside her patient was anything but real, therapists said.
"You don't just drop a patient like a hot potato, even if you conclude they aren't responding to therapy," Annibali protested. "She should have taken several months to do it."
For Richards, the development just didn't ring true. After seven years, "only NOW she figures this out? My sense is that there was some narrative purpose for (series creator David) Chase to end this relationship."
As in the fact that there's only an hour left to the entire story? That Tony's life is crashing down around him, and one by one, by death or rejection or his own murderous hand, he appears destined to lose everyone close to him? Maybe. But Annibali said he'd heard that Bracco may be appearing in the final episode next Sunday. Which means there may still be time to reverse her professional missteps.
"My hope," Annibali said, "is that she and Tony will get together again."
But for one certified expert on both therapy AND The Sopranos, that wouldn't make sense, dramatically speaking. Around halfway through the show's run, Tony's therapy started failing, said Dr. Glen Gabbard, professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and author of The Psychology of The Sopranos.
Perhaps it was because Chase himself went through years of therapy, and has publicly expressed ambivalence about its usefulness. In any case, at the busy psychiatry clinic where Gabbard works, the talk this week is about how Melfi should have ended things with Tony years ago.
"The therapy had to end," Gabbard said. "It was getting more and more futile."
"He's just not getting any better."
Thanks to Jocelyn Noveck
Therapists, we've long known, are among the biggest fans of The Sopranos.
So pleased were they with the credible therapy scenes between Tony Soprano, pop culture's most famous mobster/patient, and the appealing Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco, that the American Psychoanalytical Association once gave the show and Bracco an award. But professionally speaking, they could only scratch their heads at the latest developments on HBO's hit drama, which aired its penultimate episode last weekend.Just as Tony Soprano's life seemed to be imploding with dangerous speed — in short, just when he needed some really good therapy — Melfi and her own therapist made some highly questionable moves. Not only therapists were distressed. Some patients were actually furious when they showed up for appointments this week, said one New York psychoanalyst.
"You wouldn't believe the outrage I am hearing," said Dr. Arnold Richards, who'd missed the episode, but was filled in by his patients. He was talking about a serious ethical lapse by Elliot Kupferberg, played by Peter Bogdanovich, at a dinner party full of therapists. Across the crowded table, the character callously revealed — over Melfi's protests — the identity of her star patient.
"Mind-boggling," pronounced Richards. "I do not recall ever being told the name of a patient in treatment."
Colleagues agreed. "That dinner party was just very upsetting to me," said Dr. Joseph Annibali, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in McLean, Va. "What he did was outrageous. He's never had control of himself, and this just fits in with that."
Why did Kupferberg commit such a sin? He didn't think Melfi should be treating Tony, whom he considered a manipulative psychopath. Be that as it may, his disclosure was "a very egregious ethical violation," said Dr. Jan Van Schaik, chair of the Ethics Committee at the Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Institute.
"A patient needs to know that what gets said in the doctor's office stays there," said Van Schaik, who's never witnessed such a violation. "I've been at gatherings where people talk about patients in a more disguised form. Even that can be inappropriate. A good therapist should do the best they can to protect the anonymity of patients."
It's a shame, Van Schaik added, because "prior to Sunday's episode, The Sopranos was the best portrayal in the popular media of a therapist-patient relationship." Annibali agreed: "We're so used to seeing therapists presented as incompetent hacks. Or as people who are more disturbed than their patients!"
What's been nice about Melfi, the Virginia therapist explained, is that she's a complex and caring figure — she's not ideal, but she tries to help Tony even as she struggles with the idea of treating him.
That is, until this last episode, when she ... dumped him.
"We're making progress," Tony protested, genuinely shocked. "It's been seven years!" But Melfi had reluctantly read a study, brought to her attention by Kupferberg, claiming that therapy doesn't actually help sociopaths — it further enables their bad behavior by sharpening their manipulative skills. Demoralized, guilt-ridden and almost speechless with hostility, Melfi literally showed Tony the door.
A tidbit that had some therapists buzzing this week: it turns out the study is a real one — albeit hardly new — from authors Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, psychiatrists specializing in the criminal mind. But the way the fictional Melfi shoved aside her patient was anything but real, therapists said.
"You don't just drop a patient like a hot potato, even if you conclude they aren't responding to therapy," Annibali protested. "She should have taken several months to do it."
For Richards, the development just didn't ring true. After seven years, "only NOW she figures this out? My sense is that there was some narrative purpose for (series creator David) Chase to end this relationship."
As in the fact that there's only an hour left to the entire story? That Tony's life is crashing down around him, and one by one, by death or rejection or his own murderous hand, he appears destined to lose everyone close to him? Maybe. But Annibali said he'd heard that Bracco may be appearing in the final episode next Sunday. Which means there may still be time to reverse her professional missteps.
"My hope," Annibali said, "is that she and Tony will get together again."
But for one certified expert on both therapy AND The Sopranos, that wouldn't make sense, dramatically speaking. Around halfway through the show's run, Tony's therapy started failing, said Dr. Glen Gabbard, professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and author of The Psychology of The Sopranos.
Perhaps it was because Chase himself went through years of therapy, and has publicly expressed ambivalence about its usefulness. In any case, at the busy psychiatry clinic where Gabbard works, the talk this week is about how Melfi should have ended things with Tony years ago.
"The therapy had to end," Gabbard said. "It was getting more and more futile."
"He's just not getting any better."
Thanks to Jocelyn Noveck
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Tony Soprano, Family Guy
Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family
In the pilot episode of “The Sopranos,” which Home Box Office first aired on January 10, 1999, a thickening son of Essex County, New Jersey, reluctantly visits Jennifer Melfi, a psychiatrist, at her office in Montclair. His name is Anthony Soprano and he has been depressed.
Tony lives in a “French provincial” McMansion in North Caldwell with his wife, Carmela, and their children, Meadow and A.J. He works as a “waste-management consultant,” as he all too modestly informs his doctor; in fact, his interests extend to the docks, “no show” construction jobs, paving and joint-fitting unions, an “executive card game,” a sports book in Roseville, loan-sharking, coffee-shop and pizza-place protection rackets, truck hijacking, HUD scams, fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck consumer goods, a strip club in Lodi, and extensive holdings in real estate, vinegar peppers, and gabagool. The New Yorker
Tony Soprano, as everyone in north Jersey and beyond has come to know, is the head of the Di Meo crime family. He has been suffering from panic attacks. Business is uneven. His associates and his children lack focus. His uncle resents his authority. His wife resents his late-night romps with yet another goomah. And his mother, the Medea of Bloomfield Avenue, never loved him (and may yet give the signal to have him whacked). The pressure is really something. Just recently, he tells Dr. Melfi, he was short of breath, tingly inside—“It felt like ginger ale in my skull.” He collapsed while grilling pork sausages on the barbecue:
And so began Tony’s quest for a renewed sense of family, heritage, coherent truths, mental health, and a prime cut of the Esplanade construction projects. “The Sopranos,” the richest achievement in the history of television, comes to an end June 10th, after eighty-six episodes. It has been with us a long time—longer than the Bush Administration (and nothing seems more interminable than that).
In his first hour onscreen, Tony, played by James Gandolfini, still had a modest shock of hair and a Gleasonesque lightness to his step. He had not yet achieved the menacing rhino plod that would come with time, anxiety, and fifteen thousand buttered bialys. We’d yet to glimpse his rages, and his accent was less mobbed up, almost refined. He sounded more Summit than Newark.
Nevertheless, to an astonishing degree the characters and the ideas––comic, dramatic, and social––in “The Sopranos” were in place from the start. Even though its creator, David Chase, never had the luxury of a novelist’s control of length and narrative destiny, he has rarely faltered. The show evolved in the manner of a sprawling social novel of the nineteenth century, constantly sprouting new plotlines, developing recurring jokes, images, and characters. Dickens would have seen a kinsman in the creator of “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri. Besides, there are fewer dull patches in “The Sopranos” than there are in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood
”––all due respect.
Like John Updike’s Rabbit series or Philip Roth’s novels of the past decade, “The Sopranos” teems with the mindless commerce and consumption of modern America. The drama and the comedy are rooted in the particulars of life as it is lived from the Pulaski Skyway to Bergen Avenue, and yet the larger events of the world are never completely sealed from view. There are always televisions playing in the background––the local news in offices and hospital rooms, the “Hitler channel” in Tony’s living room—and so world politics is the undercurrent rumbling beneath the ordinary nights in New Jersey. History echoes the domestic catastrophes. As Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri put it with dire resignation, “Quasimodo predicted all of this.”
No matter how funny or blatantly cartoonish some of the supporting players are (Steve Van Zandt’s Silvio Dante seems less like a human being than an animated Fellini figure), the mobsters and their families in “The Sopranos” are a recognizable reflection of all of us. The epic is peopled with every variety of twenty-first-century character imaginable: mobsters, yes, but also shadow communities of smug and equally troubled psychiatrists, disillusioned F.B.I. agents and cops, neurotic priests, immigrant “caregivers,” screen-addled teen-agers, earnestly self-indulgent Columbia students. It is an Essex County of Italians, Irish, blacks, and Jews, but also of new immigrants: Koreans, Russians, Ukrainians, and Arabs. Other television series have guests, character types who make a purposeful one-night stand and are then replaced with new types in new situations. In “The Sopranos,” characters arrive and take full human shape; children grow into adults—and sometimes, without explanation, like a Russian mobster fleeing through the snowy woods of the Pine Barrens, they inexplicably disappear and frustrate our TV-shaped need for lessons and resolution. It doesn’t matter that we come to “like” Adriana La Cerva. Chase has no use for our sentiment. He kills it off with a .38.
“The Sopranos,” like its predecessor, Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” is about the ruthlessness of petty lying crooks, but the beat-downs, strangulations, and shootings are the least of the violence. Chase is merciless with his exposure of the ordinary disappointments and tragedies. He has immersed us for years in an examination of addiction, twelve-step recoveries, teen-age depression, modern pharmacology, suicides, sexual indulgence, family betrayals, financial manipulation, accidents, heart attacks, strokes, death and dying––and always, afterward, the inability to summon a language to equal the emotion. “Whaddya gonna do?” is the shrugging motif. A young, healthy thug dies reading a magazine on the toilet. An S.U.V. flips over on a rain-slick road. “Whaddya gonna do?”
Michael Corleone almost convinces us, in his autumnal walk with Kay Adams, that he is the moral superior of a senator. Chase’s vision is darker, and as we descend into the death spiral of the final episodes it only gets worse. Just when we begin to grow too fond of Tony, when we get all gooey about his plight as a misunderstood son and overextended executive and father, Chase has him do something to undercut our sympathy. After his son, A.J., has tried to kill himself by pulling a plastic bag over his head, tying a cinder block to his foot, and jumping into the family’s back-yard swimming pool, Tony explains to Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) that A.J. survived because the rope was too long. Maybe he’s just “an idiot,” he declares offhandedly, his paternal grief mixing with loveless dismissal. “Historically, that’s been the case.” Even Tony’s clear-eyed and maternal wife, Carmela, played by Edie Falco, is willing to set aside her occasional outbursts of umbrage for the price of an Hermès scarf. “They say it’s the best,” Tony informs her, as the marital storm passes.
Everyone in “The Sopranos” has grown older (and we along with them). One after another, the made men and crew members disappear from the stage—an accelerated version of what happens naturally. “Hope comes in many forms,” Dr. Melfi tells Tony in one of their first sessions. “Well, who’s got the time for that?” he replies.
The end is a mystery, but we know one thing: “The Sopranos” defied Aristotelian conventions. It is a comedy that ends with a litany of the dead and missing. Whaddya gonna do?
Thanks to David Remnick
In the pilot episode of “The Sopranos,” which Home Box Office first aired on January 10, 1999, a thickening son of Essex County, New Jersey, reluctantly visits Jennifer Melfi, a psychiatrist, at her office in Montclair. His name is Anthony Soprano and he has been depressed.
Tony lives in a “French provincial” McMansion in North Caldwell with his wife, Carmela, and their children, Meadow and A.J. He works as a “waste-management consultant,” as he all too modestly informs his doctor; in fact, his interests extend to the docks, “no show” construction jobs, paving and joint-fitting unions, an “executive card game,” a sports book in Roseville, loan-sharking, coffee-shop and pizza-place protection rackets, truck hijacking, HUD scams, fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck consumer goods, a strip club in Lodi, and extensive holdings in real estate, vinegar peppers, and gabagool. The New YorkerTony Soprano, as everyone in north Jersey and beyond has come to know, is the head of the Di Meo crime family. He has been suffering from panic attacks. Business is uneven. His associates and his children lack focus. His uncle resents his authority. His wife resents his late-night romps with yet another goomah. And his mother, the Medea of Bloomfield Avenue, never loved him (and may yet give the signal to have him whacked). The pressure is really something. Just recently, he tells Dr. Melfi, he was short of breath, tingly inside—“It felt like ginger ale in my skull.” He collapsed while grilling pork sausages on the barbecue:
TONY: The morning of the day I got sick, I been thinking. It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came in too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.
DR. MELFI: Many Americans, I think, feel that way.
TONY: I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me. But in a lotta ways he had it better. He had his people. They had their standards. They had pride. Today, whadda we got?
And so began Tony’s quest for a renewed sense of family, heritage, coherent truths, mental health, and a prime cut of the Esplanade construction projects. “The Sopranos,” the richest achievement in the history of television, comes to an end June 10th, after eighty-six episodes. It has been with us a long time—longer than the Bush Administration (and nothing seems more interminable than that).
In his first hour onscreen, Tony, played by James Gandolfini, still had a modest shock of hair and a Gleasonesque lightness to his step. He had not yet achieved the menacing rhino plod that would come with time, anxiety, and fifteen thousand buttered bialys. We’d yet to glimpse his rages, and his accent was less mobbed up, almost refined. He sounded more Summit than Newark.
Nevertheless, to an astonishing degree the characters and the ideas––comic, dramatic, and social––in “The Sopranos” were in place from the start. Even though its creator, David Chase, never had the luxury of a novelist’s control of length and narrative destiny, he has rarely faltered. The show evolved in the manner of a sprawling social novel of the nineteenth century, constantly sprouting new plotlines, developing recurring jokes, images, and characters. Dickens would have seen a kinsman in the creator of “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri. Besides, there are fewer dull patches in “The Sopranos” than there are in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood
”––all due respect.Like John Updike’s Rabbit series or Philip Roth’s novels of the past decade, “The Sopranos” teems with the mindless commerce and consumption of modern America. The drama and the comedy are rooted in the particulars of life as it is lived from the Pulaski Skyway to Bergen Avenue, and yet the larger events of the world are never completely sealed from view. There are always televisions playing in the background––the local news in offices and hospital rooms, the “Hitler channel” in Tony’s living room—and so world politics is the undercurrent rumbling beneath the ordinary nights in New Jersey. History echoes the domestic catastrophes. As Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri put it with dire resignation, “Quasimodo predicted all of this.”
No matter how funny or blatantly cartoonish some of the supporting players are (Steve Van Zandt’s Silvio Dante seems less like a human being than an animated Fellini figure), the mobsters and their families in “The Sopranos” are a recognizable reflection of all of us. The epic is peopled with every variety of twenty-first-century character imaginable: mobsters, yes, but also shadow communities of smug and equally troubled psychiatrists, disillusioned F.B.I. agents and cops, neurotic priests, immigrant “caregivers,” screen-addled teen-agers, earnestly self-indulgent Columbia students. It is an Essex County of Italians, Irish, blacks, and Jews, but also of new immigrants: Koreans, Russians, Ukrainians, and Arabs. Other television series have guests, character types who make a purposeful one-night stand and are then replaced with new types in new situations. In “The Sopranos,” characters arrive and take full human shape; children grow into adults—and sometimes, without explanation, like a Russian mobster fleeing through the snowy woods of the Pine Barrens, they inexplicably disappear and frustrate our TV-shaped need for lessons and resolution. It doesn’t matter that we come to “like” Adriana La Cerva. Chase has no use for our sentiment. He kills it off with a .38.
“The Sopranos,” like its predecessor, Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” is about the ruthlessness of petty lying crooks, but the beat-downs, strangulations, and shootings are the least of the violence. Chase is merciless with his exposure of the ordinary disappointments and tragedies. He has immersed us for years in an examination of addiction, twelve-step recoveries, teen-age depression, modern pharmacology, suicides, sexual indulgence, family betrayals, financial manipulation, accidents, heart attacks, strokes, death and dying––and always, afterward, the inability to summon a language to equal the emotion. “Whaddya gonna do?” is the shrugging motif. A young, healthy thug dies reading a magazine on the toilet. An S.U.V. flips over on a rain-slick road. “Whaddya gonna do?”
Michael Corleone almost convinces us, in his autumnal walk with Kay Adams, that he is the moral superior of a senator. Chase’s vision is darker, and as we descend into the death spiral of the final episodes it only gets worse. Just when we begin to grow too fond of Tony, when we get all gooey about his plight as a misunderstood son and overextended executive and father, Chase has him do something to undercut our sympathy. After his son, A.J., has tried to kill himself by pulling a plastic bag over his head, tying a cinder block to his foot, and jumping into the family’s back-yard swimming pool, Tony explains to Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) that A.J. survived because the rope was too long. Maybe he’s just “an idiot,” he declares offhandedly, his paternal grief mixing with loveless dismissal. “Historically, that’s been the case.” Even Tony’s clear-eyed and maternal wife, Carmela, played by Edie Falco, is willing to set aside her occasional outbursts of umbrage for the price of an Hermès scarf. “They say it’s the best,” Tony informs her, as the marital storm passes.
Everyone in “The Sopranos” has grown older (and we along with them). One after another, the made men and crew members disappear from the stage—an accelerated version of what happens naturally. “Hope comes in many forms,” Dr. Melfi tells Tony in one of their first sessions. “Well, who’s got the time for that?” he replies.
The end is a mystery, but we know one thing: “The Sopranos” defied Aristotelian conventions. It is a comedy that ends with a litany of the dead and missing. Whaddya gonna do?
Thanks to David Remnick
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