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Toma's Review Of: The Sopranos (1999–2007)
Short Summary Of My Review
The Sopranos is an – no the amazing television show. It has super complex characters, the most of which is Tony, and it finds beautiful ways to tell the story without explicitly showing it. The attention to detail is there and you can tell this is a project of love. 9.5/10.
Full Review
This was the first show I really watched closely, and it was the one that showed me I want to write about film, make film, and have film in my life forever. There is so much to tackle with The Sopranos, so I’ll start with the plot. The more I look at this plot the more complex it gets. On the surface, Tony is the new leader of a mob who has problems with anxiety. He seems to not really like killing people, and he doesn’t want his kids to know what he’s doing. As the series develops, the line of him not liking killing people and him being sociopathic gets blurred heavily. If you look at the show like this, like I did when I first watched the show, I thought the it was one season too long. Richie and Ralph are pretty similar as characters, and Richie has pretty negligible effects in the end. But, if you look at how they effect Tony, they are very different. Without Richie, Tony wouldn’t have been able to kill Ralphie or Vito which were much more emotionally taxing for him. Richie is the gateway drug into killing internal people. It also shows that none of the new-gen mobsters respect the old-gens who spent time in jail as the new-gens are "supposed to". It’s the same reason he’s fine with killing Feech La Manna. All the acting is great too, the only weak spot I can find is casting as Steve Buscemi as Tony Blundetto, because he just doesn’t fit with the real Italians in the Sopranos. His performance is also very replaceable. I guess that’s the price for the episodes he directed, which are the best episodes of TV ever made.
The directing in the Sopranos is the thing I nerded out about the most when watching the show for the first time. I don’t remember what episode this is, but Dr. Melfi is trying to look at Tony’s house, so she lifts the toilet seat in the bathroom to look out of the window, but before she lifts it she grabs toilet paper. I paused it (which made my parents annoyed) and said something like “Did you guys see that?! That’s the kind of directing that makes the world real. The kind of directing I want to do when I’m older.” I still think about that scene all the time. It was so simple, but it made Melfi a real person. Not a character, a person. And finally, you can’t talk about The Sopranos without talking about the Tarantino-esque music use. The episode with the White Rabbit sequence is amazing. He doesn’t say much, but so much is said. It’s the first time he gets Prozac, so he’s literally getting “mother’s pill”, but it’s also about him feeling like he doesn’t cut it as the leader of this-thing-of-ours, especially if he needs Prozac. The music at the end of the first episode of the Sopranos, a cover of The Beast In Me by Nick Lowe explains the whole show. It’s simpler then the Johnny Cash version, but it’s more painful and acoustic. More haunting. Comparing the cover of this song to the Johnny Cash version is like comparing him to the normal person. The beast in him can be interpreted as his anxiety, or later as his murderous rage. He suppresses it, but sometimes he has to let it out. Sometimes it “dresses up” as him. I can talk about this show forever, but that would make me a gagootz, so I will leave it here. The Sopranos has a great story that feels real, 9.5/10
