Sopranos 6/10 -- THE END

The series didn't start with a hard cut in the middle of a song, or dialogue.

So, to me, the move last night was significantly different than "we picked up in the middle of his life and we left the same way."

The fact that he tried so hard in the episode to fool us over and over again (Tony in the proverbial casket in the open, seasons fluctuating wildly it seemed with some scenes shot through a filter, AJ and Rhiannon with dialogue that double-entendres into a possible double suicide, Butchie walking down Little Italy on his cell, Meadow running across the street at the end with the oncoming traffic audio ratcheted way up) makes me feel like he sort of flipped us off with the hard cut.

Again though, not to butcher DD's baby: The show more than surmounted Chase's arrogance (and, yes, having guys get shot in the head and then disappear in the snow and steal a car is FUCKING arrogant).

The casting and the writing were singular.

Unparalleled.

 

Like at the end of Sideways, when homeboy walks up the stairwell to her door and knocks ... and then it fucking fades to black. That kind of thinking/overthinking?

 

DD.

You are clearly a leader of the pack with your incisive reviews of this material.

But BTE is merely throwing the opposite viewpoint back with approximately the same hubris that has been exhibited on this thread the other way over and over again.

 

Or even Castaway, which ends with Tom Hanks sitting at an intersection trying to decide which way to go?

 

What a fitting ending.

From episode one, the show was about Tony and his life. He struggled to manage his family life with his family life for six seasons. This year, he began to insulate himself, to get ready for a stint in the can.

Look what he did! He killed Christopher, who was the son he always wanted, once he realized that Chrissy was nothing more than a drug-abusing fuck up. Outmanned, he won a gangland war with New York. His family is together; Meadow's going to end up being a mob lawyer and A.J. will run clubs that Tony has a business interest in. He's the big winner.

Yet, he's still not comfortable. He's still paranoid.

And always will be.

 

Yes they did.... the ziti almost had me jumping through the screen

 

Here's a link to a picture of a sunning Paulie being approached by the cat. It's not the greatest of qualities, but it's the best I have. If anyone else out there has a better one, please post cuz I wanna make it my desktop background.

http://i82.photobucket.com/albums/j262/mrsnickerz/PaulieCat.png

 

Where was that paranoia manifested in this masterful ending?

 

Try the look on his face when he tells Junior that he used to run North Jersey, or the look on his face when Meadow tells him that if she hadn't been his son, she'd probably be a doctor.

 

That's fine. I believe me, I see the value in the devil's advocate view. But personally, I've never (or at least rarely) tried to snark at others for viewing the series differently than I do. The whole "you think you're so smart, you'd call this brilliant if David Chase farted in your face" line of thinking is a weak intellectual argument. And the equivalent of it is "you're so stupid, you just watch this show to see guys get shot in the face and kill, fuck and fight." Which is why I threw that back at BTS. I posted her several months ago that I thought the ending was going to be ambiguous. I felt like we wouldn't know what happened to Tony, and you would get to decide based on how you watched the series. If you watched it for the art house film-making and the deconstruction of the human mind, then you can watch the ending and think "Tony's life is always going to be filled with dread."

If you watched it for the gangsterism, then you can interpret the final as the guy is going into the bathroom and coming out with a gun to blow Tony away. That the screen going to black is him getting shot. It wasn't perfect, but it was probably the best Chase could do to please the two very different groups of people who watch the show.

 

Paranoia?

This word you keep using. I do not think it means what you think it means.

 

Thanks BG. I can't see it at work, but I'm sure it's what I was looking for,