“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
– Tony Soprano
On January 10, 1999, pay channel HBO launched the pilot episode of The Sopranos, the show that would change television forever. Before this ground breaking phenomenon, movies were far superior to television in terms of intelligent writing, production design and the actors involved. The Sopranos changed all of that.
‘The Sopranos wasn’t the first show to break all the rules’, write Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall in their book ‘The Sopranos Sessions’ (see also Oz and Twin Peaks for example), ‘but it was the first show to do that and still become a massive, enduring hit.’
But what is so good about The Sopranos? Maurice Yacowar in ‘The Sopranos On The Couch’, writes: ‘For openers: it’s brilliantly written, performed, and filmed. Each episode has the polish of an excellent feature film – with a tighter yet more complex, resonant script than most. The show is also relentlessly entertaining. The characters are engrossing, the plot twists astonishing but coherent, and the dialogue mined with ironies and poetic resonance quite beyond what we are used to hearing on the boob tube or even on the commercial cinema these days. Unique for a television series, details connect not just across the hour but across a season and beyond. The viewer has to dig for links and meanings beyond what’s spelled out on the surface and is often left with mysteries. That makes the show more like European cinema – and a complete departure for American television. At the same time, The Sopranos provocatively raises major questions about how and why we live.’
In 2021, I published the ultimate The Sopranos tribute. You can read the highlights from this tribute below:
- My Sopranos Obsession: Final Analysis
- My Favorite TV Episode of All Time
- The Sopranos: 10 Favorite Episodes
- The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments
- The Sopranos Ending Explained: Tony is not Definitively Dead, but his Future Looks Bleak
And if you still haven’t seen the show, it is not too late! It is still available on HBO. Seriously, you’d be a douchebag to miss it.
The greatest Christmas Double Bill in history! Bruce Willis stars in the role that made him a super star: John McClane is an old style hero: smoking cigarettes, cracking jokes and killing bad guys. The first Die Hard (1988) is considered the greatest action film of all time. Why is that so? I tried to analyze it and came up with this. First of all; it is really, really tense. John McClane (Willis) is locked up in a building with a bunch of heavily armed and completely ruthless German terrorists. What are the odds of survival? Minimal. This is survival action optimally done. It is fun to watch a guy – who is not really scared of death, but definitely no narcissistic psychopath either – face impossible odds. Secondly, the screenplay is intelligent and the casting is terrifically done. Part 2 is off course (this is the sequel after all) BIGGER! It takes place at an airport, which is taken over by terrorists who want to free a South American dictator (Franco Nero) who is landing soon. Groovy! In a magazine article on an airplane read by one of the characters, a picture is shown of Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) in Lethal Weapon 2. This is a sequel that was indeed even better than the original. Die Hard 2 is not, although you could argue for it. Film critic Roger 
Ebert thought so and wrote 
airplane crash. Thereby, they make the main baddie – William Sadler – even worse than Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) in the first one. Still, Die Hard 2 loses momentum a little bit during the second half (especially after the clever plot twist) and therefore I still think the first movie is superior. The endings of both movies give you this very warm Christmas feeling indeed. In part 1, John meets his pal Al for the first time, and then Al kills Karl and proves he is ready again for joining the force (he got a desk job after accidentally shooting a thirteen-year old kid with a fake gun). In the second movie, John blows up the plane with terrorists and thereby creates landing lights for all the other planes that were close to crashing, including the one that carries his wife. Then he tells her he loves her so much and they carry off in a modern sledge accompanied by Frank Sinatra’s ‘Let It Snow’. It makes me all warm inside and the same goes for the fantastic first part ending.Therefore, Die Hard is just the greatest Christmas movie ever. Die Hard 2 adds to the fun.
FRAGMENTEN UIT HET SCHEMERLAND 