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| glencar |
Wow, that was boring! |
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| glencar |
It was more like an Omaha summit than a gangster show. |
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| gimmekeef |
Initially very pissed off....But maybe the blank screen was Tony getting whacked....Show never recovered its momentum after long haiatus...Last 20 episodes with maybe 3 exceptions were too laid back..Hell should left Carmello in France for chrissakes... |
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| Joey |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Wow, that was boring!
I thought my television went out -- either that or Sparky ate the cable .
Sparky : " WHOOF ! "
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| glencar |
Yes, that was my feeling too! Meadow should have been killed as she bored us. |
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| monkey_man |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Meadow should have been killed as she bored us.
Only after she expored her sapphic side with some girls from the Bing! |
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| Saint Sway |
the final 8 episodes were akin to the final 8 songs at a Stones show:
predictable and boring
same old shit, different episode
the writers copped-out on that ending
worst than that though was that they wasted 30 minutes of the shows FINALE on AJ
so typical
the show really suffered from WAY too many pointless episodes
lets all be thankful its over and that we're not tuning in next week to watch 3/4 of the show wasted on 4 scenes about how Meadow lost her library card and 5 scenes of Silvio's wife's dentist appointments and 3 scenes about how Janice's kids won't mow the lawn.
like Glencar said, the show was much more of a boring Omaha Summit than a hard-hitting mafia show
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| glencar |
I think putting the focus on Grumpy was a huge mistake. The kid should have been allowed to die in that pool! There was way too much of that crap on this episode & not enough of Tony & his own questions about howe he got where he was. And yes, Monkey Man, sapphic adventures would have been much more interesting. Actually (sniggle!) that was what I thought at first would happen when Camela opened the door on Meadow & her now-good-student girlfriend. Alas, it turned out she had jut become an A student. |
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| Joey |
quote:
glencar wrote:
I think putting the focus on Grumpy was a huge mistake. The kid should have been allowed to die in that pool! There was way too much of that crap on this episode & not enough of Tony & his own questions about howe he got where he was. And yes, Monkey Man, sapphic adventures would have been much more interesting. Actually (sniggle!) that was what I thought at first would happen when Camela opened the door on Meadow & her now-good-student girlfriend. Alas, it turned out she had jut become an A student.
One Word : " Entourage !!!! "
Sassy Boots ! ™ |
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| Jeep |
Different ends on east coast and west coast broadcast !!!!!!!!!
http://4tvs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=2911#2911 |
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| PartyDoll MEG |
BORING!!!
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| Joey |
quote:
Jeep wrote:
Different ends on east coast and west coast broadcast !!!!!!!!!
http://4tvs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=2911#2911
Funky ! |
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| pdog |
I had low/no expectations and was not let down. I did have a problem with The Journey song, god that band sucks... |
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| mrhipfl |
Sadly I have never seen even one episode of that show. |
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| Joey |
quote:
pdog wrote:
I did have a problem with The Journey song
funny ! 
Good Postin' |
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| gimmekeef |
No...Journey was perfect..lame ass band for a lame ass ending..... |
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| Joey |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
No...Journey was perfect..lame ass band for a lame ass ending.....
You are on FIRE ! |
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| Chuck |
A tragic narrative without catharsis---brilliant! Chase whacked the audience! |
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| glencar |
quote:
pdog wrote:
I had low/no expectations and was not let down. I did have a problem with The Journey song, god that band sucks...
Sadly, that was the best of the 3 choices he had to choose from. Cheapest clearance charges? |
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| 72Tele |
I liked it. David Chase played you fans like a fiddle. |
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| Joey |
" David Chase played you fans like a fiddle. "
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| Left Shoe Shuffle |
If Meadow had of those cars that parks itself we'd have found out what happened before they ran out of film... |
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| FrankiePeppers |
How can anyone detract from the excruciating tension in the last scene? The editing was great and the lyrics to the song were perfect. It had all the makings of Tony getting whacked. The scene makes it perfectly clear that Tony's life will always be looking at the door to see who's coming through and never feeling completely comfortable. Overall it was a good episode and followed the premise of the show, Tony dealing with both families. I would have rolled the credits over them eating dinner rather than cut to black. |
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| Chuck |
2nd to last song was Little Feat's 'All That You Dream':
I've been down, but not like this before
Can't be 'round this kind of show no more
LOL. |
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| glencar |
A little long...
What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.
"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.
"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to god," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."
In that scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid song) with no resolution.
"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.
Some fans have already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
"I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.
"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."
Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."
(Earlier in the interview, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the '60s.)
Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:
Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.
Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)
Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.
Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9.
"If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.
Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?
"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "To me, that's Tony."
Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?
"I'm the Number One fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"
One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox.
"It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."
Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies.
"It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."
Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:
-After all the speculation that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.
"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," says Chase of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.
-Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.
"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "The majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."
Also, the apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn't true.
"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."
-I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."
-Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony?
"I think Butch was an intelligent guy, he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."
-Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, Tony killed at least, one if not both of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.
Alan Sepinwall may be reached at [email protected]
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| egon |
speaking of "finale"
how many more series of LOST have i sit through?
Please tell me series 4 will be the last.
Will there every be an episode that gives more answers
than it raises questions?
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| gimmekeef |
Yeah it was a rip for most fans...but anything from Sopranos is better than the shitty new John From Cincinatti that debuted after...What a crock that surfin waste of time is....Even Al Bundy wont save it... |
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| Joey |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Yeah it was a rip for most fans...but anything from Sopranos is better than the shitty new John From Cincinatti that debuted after...What a crock that surfin waste of time is....Even Al Bundy wont save it...
Amen !
Even the Documentaries on the Discovery Channel beat THAT crap !!! |
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| glencar |
quote:
gimmekeef wrote:
Yeah it was a rip for most fans...but anything from Sopranos is better than the shitty new John From Cincinatti that debuted after...What a crock that surfin waste of time is....Even Al Bundy wont save it...
I kept hearing howe we would "love it or hate it" but howe about those of us who nodded off during it? |
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| glencar |
LOST allegedly has 4 more seasons. I checked out early in Season 2 & I'm one who usually has a high loyalty to shows. |
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