The Sopranos: Last Call
With less than 3 hours to go before the series finale, both Tony Soprano and Paulie Walnuts are favored to survive -- at least by online oddsmakers.
Given the legal vagueries of Internet wagering, I'm not going to confirm nor deny that I have placed any real money on this proposition.
I will say -- if a figurative gun were held to my head-- that my current guess is that Tony, at least, will survive. But at some horrific cost to his family.
As to Paulie, as they say in Italian, boh?
If you can't figure out the linked-to odds sheet, Phil "The Shah of Iran" Leotardo is more heavily favored to get whacked.
The Bodog.com bookies are not allowing any wagers on what is, of course, the question that overshadows everything: Is There Life After The Sopranos?
Only John From Cincinnati holds the answer. And he has yet to speak.
June 10th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Best wishes to all who are doomed to begin their withdrawal symptoms about 3 hours after the last episode has concluded. May you experience a speedy recovery. I have placed a “friendly bet” that Tony survives. Sure hope he does, or the settling of this bet may be a tad … well, I prefer not to lose. T-20 minutes and counting to launch. ~70 minutes to a possible “Oh-oh.”
June 10th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Marc, just thought you’d be interested to know your post from last Sunday (the first I heard the show’s swan song was tonight) inspired me enough to finally again renew my HBO subscription; last I had it was in 1991. I’ve always been just familiar and interested enough in the series to read about it and find it intriguing, but unfortunately never quite wealthy enough to see the original episodes or buy the box sets. With a good new job I’ve finally now just obtained, that will hopefully change soon.
One thing that’s always made me chuckle a bit about the show was its wordplay with names… such as of course the previously mentioned Phil ‘Leotardo’. Anybody suppose he’ll end up in a ‘tights’ spot tonight? )(sound of rimshot quickly followed by blizzard of tomatoes landing onstage
(PS also to Marc: to follow up on our previous conversation, and assuming you’ve had the chance to go yet, how’d you do at the Normandie 20/40 NL hold’em table? Big haul I suspect/hope.)
June 10th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Onion rings and parallel parking. Journey.
June 10th, 2007 at 7:40 pm
They went from Yeats to Eliot:
June 10th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Don’t get me wrong - I liked the whimper - and it made a wonderful point….
June 10th, 2007 at 8:11 pm
What a POS ending.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
“Onion rings and parallel parking. Journey.”
Awesome. Only one thing missing:
Furio.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
He was never going to be there, Meadow, any more than the Russian in the woods, yet another David Chase red herring.
The show was doing well enough til the last five minutes, which were a mistake.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
That was not at all a piece of shit ending.
It was absolutely brilliant - though I can see how someone could dislike the last five minutes. To me that whole scene (there were three different endings - who knows what’s on the floor?) had all the classic setups to a point of being over the top….to end it like that was amazing. The key was AJ talking about “Good times” - the show endeared its fans with its humor and absurdity - and what a fitting absurd endign - the joke is on us! A hint was the dialogue from the old TV/movie that was on at the safehouse talking aobut how TV writing is a “commodity.” Commodity fetishism indeed….
No Furio? I was waiting for Father Phil.
And I just remembered as well that in the first few episodes of the show Tony teaches Meadow - or tries to teach Meadow - how to parallel park….
June 10th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
John from Cincinatti - I tuned out after a few minutes…looks like New Age crap.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
That scene with the SUV crushing Phil’s noggin and the kid’s in the back seat rolling with bump was priceless. And I have to admit, the ending was superb. The tension was incredible–the music growing louder and louder, while the shifty suspect characters in the dinner moved about, and Meadow finally making her way in then nothing. Blank.
June 10th, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Actually, the joke is on you. There was a time when I thought this sort of thing was brilliant. Then I learned that many folks in Hollywood are just sort of making it up as they go along.
>The key was AJ talking about “Good times†- the show endeared its fans with its humor and absurdity - and what a fitting absurd endign - the joke is on us!
June 10th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Oh come on Bill, you don’t really believe they where thinking about JJ, Thelma, James and
Florida?
June 10th, 2007 at 9:12 pm
THE MOUNTAIN ROARED…and gave birth to a mouse! I did like the crushed noggin scene…it reminded me of the first season…which was the best.
June 10th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
You’re a fucking television writer ? Write a goddam ending to your stupid show. What an asshole David Chase proved to be….
June 10th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
So accidental brilliance makes something less brilliant?
June 10th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I obviously didn’t mean “Good Times” I meant “godo times”
June 10th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
There’s nothing brilliant about a non-ending with a bad cut to black.
June 10th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Incidentally, as I was logging in tonight, I was dead certain cummings would have a post about how brilliant the Sopranos finale was. Further confirmation that it was little more than an insider conceit on the part of the writers. I could have tolerated a “whimper” ending if all the elements of a “bang” hadn’t been constructed so blatantly - clumsily even. Totally bogus and self-indulgent. No bang. No whimper. No “nuttin”… The last frame - after seven years of folks investing their time and emotional energy in the lives of these characters - was so lame and indecisive that I’m sure that 99% of viewers probably thought their cable signal had failed. Chase is dead to me…
June 10th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
Uh-oh. Reg has put a hit out on Chase. he best shy away from those Oyster Bay pay phones.
BTW
We were watching the Sopranos delayed about 15 mins on TiVo. We had also set the machine to record John From Cincinnati. When the screen went to black, we all started screaming, convinced that the TiVo had aced us out of the last minute.
June 10th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Yes, Marc, the show ended on a a badly executed cut to black. Totally incompetent.
June 10th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
QDP:
Havent made it to the ElDo yet. Im still half convalescing from my latest medical procedure and — no kidding- the doc has banned temporarily banned from me anything that might cause an adrenaline rush.
I havent yet disclosed this — but here goes. My last hospitalization was set off at the poker table ! No kidding. I honestly dont know if it was coincidence or not (50-50) but I all of a sudden experience a bout of tachycardia. As I said, might be mere coinicidence, but often that condition is induced by a jolt of adrenaline.
So for the next few weeks, at least, Im staying away from any felt. On the other hand, I’m happy to report that Ive kept up my practice by playing for play money on pokerstars.net. Can u believe I started out with $2,000 and now have $1.2 million? No joke. That tells you how bad the other players are!
If I feel up to it, however, I might re-enter the world of real poker with a splash. Ive been invited to participate in the 2007 WSOP Academy at Ceasars over 4th of July. Hellmuth, Hachem, Annide Duke and Greg Raymer among others. Not bad. Here’s the link.
http://www.wsopacademy.com/
June 10th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
… It’s too bad, because there were many good things in the episode before the final sequence. The AJ stuff was hysterical, Paulie was true to his character and not to the conspiracy theories, etc. There was no one who wanted to kill Tony who was left alive. So no, he didn’t get killed in the cut to black that was about like my thumb slipping on the camcorder. It’s a set-up for a movie deal.
June 10th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I thought the same thing - we were watching it an hour after the early broadcast. We’d decided to eat a good Italian spread and then watch at our leisure. I was finishing off a nice barbera I’d been saving. Lit up an Arturo Fuente. The wife smoked a little weed, as is her wont. We were enjoying ourselves. Thought it was a pretty good episode. As it drew to a close, we were totally teased by all of the ominious gimmicks during the restaurant scene. And then…what ? My DVR is screwed ? When I finally saw the credits come up over dead audio, it just seemed like a pointless prank. I proceeded to curse Chase through the credit roll. I was in such a bad mood, I’m not watching John until later in the week. I felt that a loving, faithful audience had been mildly abused.
June 10th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Hey Reg… totally off point: I envy your glass of Barbera. In the late 70’s I lived for three years in the Italian town of Alba, just a few minutes from Barbera itself. We had a cellar stocked with Barbera as well as some great Dolcetto D’Alba.
Back to The Sopranos; Well, yeah, in some ways I felt frustrated by the ending. Of course. But I’m not sure anything else would have really been more satisfying. More exciting, yes. But not so enduring. I think!
June 10th, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Okay, admidst no little flak, I just watched the closing sequence of the finale again.
We are definitely being screwed with.
All this tension is built up by Meadow’s great difficulty parallel parking her car. She’s always had trouble with that. Yet she has a luxury car without reverse parking sensors on it. Not believable.
The guy at the counter is Robert Patrick, with whom aficionadoes of the show are very familiar. If there is a real threat in that diner, he is it.
But he is in front of Tony, not behind him, when the lights go out. And the last time we see Robert Patrick, he’s looking at his menu.
The cut to black is so badly done it’s either simply incompetent, or simply screwing with the fans.
This show stretched out relatively short seasons for a year and a half and more while Chase and the other producers decided where the story was going.
Draw your own conclusions.
June 10th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Sorry, but I don’t feel screwed with, at all. What kind of ending would everyone feel satisfied with? A blood-bath? Wouldn’t that be cliche?
June 10th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
No bloodbath was necessary. The time for violence had passed within the logic of the show. What was required was an ending, not a bad cut to black that fan boys can pretend was art.
June 10th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Its not a matter of “fan boys”. It was art, that is something with whcih no one could object. There was an ending. Tony and the family ate together, like at the end of almost every Sopranos season. It was an ending of the show, not of the character’s trajectories. This is what I got out of it. I find it strange that people think they’re owed something at the end of a work of art of any kind. You got what David Chase intended. Whether or not you liked it, its another person’s singular vision.
June 10th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
MC - This one was the real thing, but I usually drink a decent affordable California-ized version, Montevina from Amador County which you might enjoy in the absence of something more authentic. I love Barberas - once long ago on a hunch I put away a 1975 Louis Martini Sonoma Barbera, the year my first kid was born, and we drank it in 1996 on his 21st birthday. It was splendid. Now he’s gonna be a dad in a few months, so I’m planning to put a couple of good 2007 bottles away for the little guy’s 21st and hope that I last as long as the vino to enjoy it with them. If not, it’ll provide them with an occasion to toast the old man and tell a couple of stories on me. (Beats a random cut to black.)
June 10th, 2007 at 11:12 pm
Hahahaha.
June 10th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Bill.. Im gonna review the episode tomorrow. Yeah, we got yanked around pretty brazenly by Chase. But why not?
June 11th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Oh, don’t get me wrong, there were many terrific things in the episode. I was engrossed, frequently laughing, and enjoying it most of the way, though with about 20 minutes left it dawned on me that there wasn’t really an ending coming, at least, not one in sight. I think we got this elaborate contrivance at the end because he didn’t have an ending.
June 11th, 2007 at 7:00 am
All I can say is: waddayagonnado?
June 11th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Having had a chance to actually think about this, rather than simply react, here’s my test of just how crappy the ending was. Take yourself back to the finale of the previous show. It was powerful - the image of Tony sitting on the bed with his automatic weapon. But “an hour” later, where have the writers taken you ? Sure there was good stuff in the episode, but compare the ending to the final image of the previous episode (or ANY episode). Then tell me it didn’t suck as a way to wrap Tony’s reign as the king of cable…
After producing the greatest soap opera (sans the soap commercials) in American history, Chase goes for the kind of ending to his project that film students think will set their movie apart because it doesn’t follow traditional dramatic conventions. While Chase has been brilliant at colliding conventions, he’s never really moved outside of terrain that’s familiar - even if it’s not totally familiar in the context its being presented. He’s kidding himself if he thinks that just stopping the camera was a fitting finale to what he had nurtured for nearly a decade. It wasn’t even a decisive and coherent choice if his intent was to end on a mundane moment. Too many fans are arguing that the lights went out for Tony and us at precisely the same moment. Nor was it well done if the cut to black was a “subtle” way to signal Tony’s taking a bullet to the brain.
My bet is that the “average” Soprano fan (which eliminates the TV critics and folks who were attracted to the show because it was a metaphor for something or other that made them feel comfortable watching a very classy soap opera) felt cheated by the ending. Which is too bad, because their loving the show is what allowed Chase to have such a great run.
June 11th, 2007 at 9:41 am
I don’t even watch the Saprano’s yet I know what really happened at the end. The film broke and the person in the projection room spliced it together, cutting out the end.
Actually, I did hear some interesting discussion this morning on FOX & Friends, which I’m sure that all of you missed, on the final shots which could lead you to all sorts of conclusions. The one that sounded good to me is that what’s his name eating onion rings had ratted on his friends and had entered the witness protection program and that some guy near him was a bodyguard and that the person rushing into the eating place has bad intentions and that we’re supposed to guess what happened until they come out with the movie.
Did you watch the French Tennis Open? I can’t stand players who pump their fists.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Nikki Finke is right. Can you say “Sopranos - the Movie?”
Still you could have wasted your time watching the Tony Awards.
And on ESPN the commenters were complaining that they missed the finale to watch the Spurs crush the Cavaliers. Guess LeBron need more seasoning.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Don’t talk to me about Barbera! During the Sopranos I had a 1988 Barolo which made the show even less artistics.
June 11th, 2007 at 11:57 am
To me the Sopranos ending was the converse of the last super-highly anticipated series ending, Seinfeld. In that show, the writers confronted the fans of their characters with their narcissism which had almost reached the level of sociopathy, while remaining funny. The show literally passed judgment on these characters, who few of us really thought of as bad people, or even as having any moral dimension at all.
In the Sopranos, we saw people doing, tolerating, aiding and abetting terrible things, and it (that is, Tony) seemed to be getting worse by the week. Whatever judgment there was to be was through Dr. Melfi last week. In the final episode, all we got definitively was a pleasant family meal taking place during a post-adolescent respite from the family wars. No judgment at all…but of course there remained the prospect of devastating blowback from all sides.
June 11th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
You’re the man Hank. My tastes are pretty plebian by wine affcianado standards. (Also big on Zinfandel.) But, as with endings to TV shows, I like what I like.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
A nice Stag’s Leap Riesling. That’s my choice.
June 11th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
HBO hit back to back homeruns last night.
The final episode of the Sopranos was…just another episode of the Sopranos, and that’s what is ingenuous about it. Fifteen million subscribers wanted a resolution; blood, heads on a platter. I credit David Chase for having the brilliance to go against conventional wisdom here. What the audience got instead was the Soprano family sitting down to a meal together…can there possibly be a more appropriate ending to this show?
And against all odds (I loved Deadwood and nearly flipped my wig when it was announced that it was ending in favor of a new Milch project), I got a huge kick out of John from Cincinatti. Quirky, irreverant, and some fantastic camera work. Story is a little slow, and somewhat ambiguous, but the characters were so amusing that I am definitely going to continue watching to see if it unfolds further. I would have to give John from Cincinatti a grade of a very high B+, pretty high grade considering that I was expecting nothing.
June 11th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
And though I might sound rather over-the-top in my praise of Chase and his show, but contrary to what you say, Reg, I never considered the Sopranos to be a soap opera sans soap commercials. To me, each episode was like a one hour movie that stood by itself. The first episode that I ever saw was the second episode of season three. I wasn’t really confused at all. In fact, according to a somewhat recent Vanity Fair article on Chase, He had originally intended for the last episode of Season Four (White Caps, I believe it was called) to be the series finale, only after the fact, when he didn’t know if he wanted to do a season five. And then, the final episode of season five became the “last episode,” until he changed his mind again and decided to do another season…Life goes on, and I guess maybe the good news is that I am not as apparently obsessed with this show as others are, because I am content to let it go…and I considered myself a huge fan.
June 11th, 2007 at 4:08 pm
Go to Wikipedia which has a decent entry on the “soap opera” genre and you’ll find a near-perfect description of the Sopranos, in terms of narrative style and content. I have nothing invested in the concept and consider it as valid a form as any other (there’s nothing inherently artful about feature films) but Sopranos conformed to the convententions of a soap opera, not a bunch of really good movies that could stand on their own. That doesn’t diminish the show overall - frankly I think it’s a form that’s potentially more revealing of the layers of human character and complex relationships than a feature film.
June 11th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
“A nice Stag’s Leap Riesling. That’s my choice.”
They go especially well paired with a serving of Herzog, Fassbinder or even Reifenstahl…
June 12th, 2007 at 11:36 am
No Wim Wenders?
June 12th, 2007 at 1:58 pm
Ever since Coppola had a diner named “Wims” (his pun on an SF all-night diner chain long gone called “Zims”) located in the bottom floor of his Zoetrope building in North Beach years ago, I’ve always thought more along the lines of a cup of steaming old-school java as the perfect complement to Wenders.
June 12th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
“Go to Wikipedia which has a decent entry on the “soap opera†genre”
Thanks. So far, I am only up to the “C’s” in my wikipedia reading…just read about calamari - it sounds yummy - and I will soon be learing about the word calamity.
June 12th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Reg, are you willing to listen to a counter arguement from a guy who didn’t even see it?
A) It sounds like Chase did what he did with each previous season, had the real climaxes in the last couple of episodes and used the final as a sort of coda, with an open ended calming down, “one door closes” sort of deal.
B) Chase observed the truest show biz axiom of them all: “Leave them wanting more.”
June 12th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
I don’t want any more. Just thought he botched the task he’d set for himself.
June 13th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I have though over the ending and her you go
I think T Carm and AJ got wacked.Medow got missed thanks to not being able to park she will be the chosen one sil will come out of his coma and sil and pauley will be her captains
and she be boss
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