Categorie archief: Televisie

The Sopranos Features

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

By Jeppe Kleijngeld

The Sopranos, the greatest TV-show ever made, had a revival in recent, pandemic times. Not only did super fans like me rewatch the show en masse, it managed to attract a whole new generation of viewers. The number of times it was streamed went way up. Millions of youngsters dived into the world of Tony Soprano and his two families and loved every minute of it. Not only that, but two of the show’s main cast members – Michael Imperioli and Steve Schiripa – made the defining podcast about the series called Talking Sopranos. And several of the show’s original makers, including showrunner and creator David Chase, made a prequel movie called The Many Saints of Newark, which will be released in The Netherlands on November 11.

It is, in other words, safe to say that The Sopranos is very much back. To honour the revival of this absolute classic, I will publish some juicy content about the show in the coming weeks. Get ready to be immersed in The Sopranos once again.

Content


● The Sopranos Features: Introduction


● My Sopranos Obsession: Final Analysis


● The Sopranos: 10 Favorite Episodes


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 100-91


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 90-81


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 80-71


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 70-61


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 60-51


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 50-41


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 40-31


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 30-21


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 20-11


● The Sopranos – 100 Greatest Moments: 10-1


● The Many Saints of Newark (2021, Review)


● The Sopranos Ending Explained: Tony is not Definitively Dead, but his Future Looks Bleak


● Video: The Sopranos – A Quantum Mechanical Ending


● Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos

My Favorite TV Episode of All Time

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

You know that we do take-away.
We deliver too.
Open twenty-four hours, babe.
Just waiting on a call from you.

The Sopranos
Episode 26 – Funhouse (Season 2 Final)

Directed by
John Patterson

Written by
David Chase & Todd A. Kessler

Regular Cast
James Gandolfini … Tony Soprano
Lorraine Bracco … Dr. Jennifer Melfi
Edie Falco … Carmela soprano
Michael Imperioli … Christopher Moltisanti
Dominic Chianese … Corrado ‘Junior’ Soprano
Vincent Pastore … Salvatore ‘Big Pussy’ Bonpensiero
Steven Van Zandt … Silvio Dante
Tony Sirico … Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtieri
Robert Iler … Anthony ‘A.J.’ Soprano
Jamie-Lynn Sigler … Meadow Soprano
Nancy Marchand … Livia Soprano

Guest Players
Jerry Adler … Herman ‘Hesh’ Rapkin
Federico Castelluccio … Furio Guinta
John Ventimiglia … Artie Bucco
Dan Grimaldi … Patsy Parisi
Frank Pellegrino … Frank Cubitoso
Robert Patrick … David Scatino
Louis Lombardi, Jr. … Skip Lipari
Matt Servitto … Agent Harris
Sofia Milos … Anna Lisa
Maureen Van Zandt … Gabriella Dante
Toni Kalem … Angie Bonpensiero
David Margulies … Neil Mink
Nicole Burdette … Barbara Giglione
Tom Aldredge … Hugh DeAngelis
Suzanne Shepherd … Mary DeAngelis
John Fiore … Gigi Cestone
Robert Lupone … Bruce Cusamano
Barbara Andres … Quintina
Sig Libowitz … Hillel
David Anzuelo … Flight Attendant
Kathleen Fasolino … Meadow’s friend
Ray Garvey … Airport Guard
David Healy … Vice Principal
Ajay Mehta … Sundeep Kumar
Jay Palit … Indian Man

Wrap Up
Tony is feeling pretty good, despite his mother busting his chops after Janice left. He solves it by giving her airline tickets of the Scatino bust-out, so she can go and visit an old aunt (aunt Quinn, the other miserabile). He’s earning good enough money with a prepaid phone card scheme to buy Carmela a mink coat and he’s not so depressed anymore. Another reason for Tony’s untroubled state-of-mind is the demise of Richie, ‘All my enemies are smoked’, Tony tells his crew optimistically during a diner. But it is too good to be true, his unconsciousness tries to tell him. He gets food poisoning the day after. And in a fever dream Silvio tells him, ‘our true enemy has yet to reveal himself’, in true Al Pacino style. Silvio is even wearing the maroon vest Pacino wore in The Godfather III.

Pussy’s not feeling so well. He has to give his phone card earnings straight to FBI Agent Skip Lipari. He didn’t get food poisoning though, even though he ate at the same restaurants; an Indian place and Artie Bucco’s. Tony suspects Artie’s shellfish, but when Artie calls Pussy they find out he doesn’t have any symptoms, while they had different courses at the Indian place. Tony starts dreaming again, about him at the boardwalks. First he dreams that he sets himself on fire in front of his friends because he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer (‘what if they’re wrong?’). Then he dreams that he shoots Paulie Walnuts during a card game. He discusses the meaning with Dr. Melfi in a dream therapy session, while he also talks about Pussy. ‘Pussy’ in multiple ways.

Tony knows something is not feeling right about Big Pussy. He also knows someone has to get whacked, because of the Paulie dream. In another dream sequence, a fish who looks and talks like Big Pussy tells Tony he has been working with the federal government. Tony still doesn’t want to believe it, but when he wakes up he knows what has to be done. A little later, Tony and Silvio come by Big Pussy’s house to pick him up to help them buy a boat. Tony, still sick, pretends to get another attack and goes into the upstairs bathroom. While Silvio keeps Big Pussy downstairs with Angie, drinking coffee, Tony searches the bedroom. He finds what he was looking for; wiring equipment and tapes. When Tony comes downstairs he says, ‘who’s ready to buy a boat?’

Paulie Walnuts is waiting by the boat and Pussy is getting nervous. The boat departs and when open water is reached, Pussy is taken below deck, where Tony confronts him with his betrayal. After denying it, Big Pussy has no choice but to confess. He knows his number is up. And after a last round of tequila with his friends, the inevitable happens, Tony, Paulie and Silvio shoot Pussy and he drops dead in the cabin. His body is placed in a bag with weights and entrusted to the Atlantic Ocean.

When Tony comes home, his mother calls to tell him that she is being held by airport security for the Scatino tickets. Not much later the FBI comes by with a warrant. Just when Tony is handcuffed, Meadow comes in with her friends, one day before her graduation. Luckily Tony gets off easy but he is still concerned. The season ends the way it started, with a montage of all the Soprano crew’s businesses, such as Barone Sanitation, the Jewish owned hotel, the phone card scam and David Scatino who’s divorced, broke and leaving town. The scene is scored by The Rolling Stones with ‘Thru and Thru’, an insanely great choice.

At Meadows graduation party the whole Soprano cast is present and it’s one big happy family again. Tony stands alone in the living room, smoking a cigar and reflecting on recent times. The final shot is from the ocean, where Pussy sleeps forever.

Why Great?
This final episode of the second season is extremely well written and directed. It is a powerful and surprising final episode that reminds of a Greek tragedy. Tony has to make his hardest decision yet. This is totally necessary in his leadership position, but he was also the one who loved Big Pussy most whose death is therefore a great loss for him. And for the viewer as well. Pussy’s passing and the dream sequences leading up to it are so far the most exciting and memorable moments of the Soprano saga.

When I first watched ‘Funhouse’, I just couldn’t believe it. I was hoping for a terrific episode to wrap up the season, like season 1 did with ‘I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano’. A conventional finale that neatly ties up the remaining storylines, although The Sopranos was never conventional. ‘Funhouse’ did something else entirely. By adding twenty minutes of dreamtime I got much closer to Twin Peaks than to the mob films it originally seemed to be based on. It does resolve the main remaining story – that Big Pussy is indeed ‘singing’ for the feds – but it does so in a brilliantly surprising way. By delving into the main character’s subconscious and making him realise the ugly truth his conscious self couldn’t accept.

Michael Imperioli (who plays Christopher) has a theory*1 about the episode. That Tony didn’t have food poisoning at all, but that it was the knowledge that he had to kill his friend that made him so sick. And killing his friend he does. The scene on the boat, of which the interior scenes were shot in a studio, is a dramatic highlight of the show. Brilliant acting by the cast, especially James Gandolfini and Vincent Pastore as Pussy. It’s ridiculous that season 2 didn’t win the major Emmy Awards that year, but they weren’t ready for The Sopranos yet. The show has been groundbreaking from the beginning, and this episode really took it to another level again.

Finest Moment: Pussy on the Brain
Tony is having fever dreams while suffering from bad food poisoning. All dreams have certain elements in common; danger, cancer (destruction from inside out) and Pussy. It all leads up to this final dream; the dream in which Pussy – in fish shape, but it really looks like Pussy! – reveals to Tony that he is working for the government. It is in moments like this that The Sopranos is at its most powerful; using a dream as a method to really push the plot forward. In the first season, when his mother wanted him whacked, Tony was in denial and started fantasising about a Madonna. But he didn’t acknowledge the truth until he heard his mother speak on the FBI tapes. Now, Tony has learned to listen to his subconscious. He has been having a strange feeling about Pussy for a long time and now he is open to the ultimate truth. When he wakes up he knows. The fish is also a brilliant find. In a macho gang like the Sopranos, it is considered unmanly to betray your friends. Therefore, it is Pussy – the guy with the feminine name – who’s a rat. There is also a pussy joke in there, pussy smells like… you get the picture. The reference is also to death, as in ‘sleeps with the fishes’, and it foreshadows Pussy’s ultimate resting place, the ocean. This dream is the perfect crossover between the series’ essentials; the mob and psychiatry.

*1 Talking Sopranos Podcast, episode 26 – Funhouse.

Paulie Gualtieri’s Father Russ is Mentioned in David Chase Movie ‘Not Fade Away’

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

This blog is for die hard Sopranos fans only. People interested in Paulie Walnuts and his real father Russ.

It is about David Chase – the absolute legend who created The Sopranos – and his feature debut Not Fade Away, and a subtle reference it contains to The Sopranos.

I figured this nugget of knowledge would be online somewhere, but lo and behold, I couldn’t find it anywhere… So it appears that I have the honor of being the first to report it. Here it goes:

In the 69th episode of The Sopranos ‘The Fleshy Part of the Thigh’(*1) Paulie’s aunt Dottie – a nun – tells him she’s not who he thinks she is: “Paulie, during the war I was still a novitiate. I was helping out at the U.S.O.(*2) and there was this soldier – Russ. And he was so lonely… I got pregnant. I had a baby. Paulie, it was you. You’re my son.”

It turns out that the woman who raised Paulie – Nucci – was actually his aunt. When he hears this news, he gets furious and cuts Nucci off. That is, until the resurrected and upbeat Tony reminds him of everything she did for him, like getting him out of trouble time and again when Paulie was a kid. In the end, Paulie decides to keep paying for her stay at Green Grove retirement community by blackmailing the poor sap Jason Barone(*3).

Five years after the final season of The Sopranos aired, tv veteran David Chase made his directorial film debut with Not Fade Away, a movie about a band that tried to make it, but never did, in the sixties. It’s a little indie movie with a terrific soundtrack which Stevie Van Zandt (who plays Silvio Dante in The Sopranos and was a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band) helped to arrange. Yes, you can expect The Beatles, The Stones, Bo Diddley, Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues and many more. The film is not great, nothing like The Sopranos in terms of superb acting and writing, but it’s very watchable.

The reference to Russ occurs when main character Douglas has dinner with his father (Chase regular James Gandolfini). They talk about why he never got drafted (he was producing goods useful for the war effort). Then he mentions some friends who did go into the army. “Tom with the one leg missing. Iwo Jima. And our buddy Russ. He never left that island.”

The Battle of Iwo Jima took place in 1945, which means Paulie’s biological father – if he was indeed a soldier who died there – would have had to conceive Paulie with Dottie before that year. This timeline aligns perfectly with the story. As a result, Russ Fegoli, who some fans speculate could be Paulie’s father, cannot be his biological parent. After all, Fegoli is still alive during the events of The Sopranos, while Paulie’s father is confirmed to be deceased.

So, Paulie, if you’re somehow reading this: your dad died at Iwo Jima. My condolences, friend. But hey, you turned out alright in the end.

*1 – In this excellent episode Tony discusses the implications of quantum mechanics in the hospital where he is recovering from a gunshot wound. While watching a boxing match with a gangster rapper and a rocket scientist, the scientist John Schwinn (Hal Holbrook) tells him: “It’s actually an illusion those two boxers are separate entities. Their being separate entities is simply the way we choose to perceive them. It’s physics. Schrodinger’s equation. The boxers, you, me – we’re all part of the same quantum field. Think of the two boxers as ocean waves or currents of air – two tornadoes say. They appear to be two things right, two separate things? But they’re not. Tornadoes are just the wind stirred up in different directions. The fact is: Nothing is separate – everything’s connected. The shapes we see exist only in our own consciousness.”

At the end of the episode, the makers pull a neat editing trick by making it appear as Tony and Paulie are in the same space while we know they’re at entirely different locations. There’s a reason why this is still my Nr. 1 show.

*2 – The United Service Organization (U.S.O.) was established in order to provide social clubs on America’s military bases during the Second World War. Located in Central New Jersey, Camp Kilmer is a former United States Army camp that was activated in June 1942 as a staging area and part of an installation of the New York Port of Embarkation. The Hostesses of Camp Kilmer were given an unofficial title, the ‘Kilmer Sweethearts’. These hostesses provided a wide range of services including serving food, dancing with the soldiers, and probably other services as well like the one aunt Dottie provided for Russ. They also visited sick and wounded soldiers in America’s hospitals. The U.S.O. also organized shows for Allied servicemen both at home and abroad. Many big stars of the era volunteered to participate in these shows.

*3 – For four grand a month! I don’t know what salary this guy makes, but I would have to steal every month to be able to pay him. Luckily there is no mob where I live.

TV Dungeon: I, Claudius

Posted on by Jeppe Kleijngeld

(1976, UK)

Director: Herbert Wise
Written by: Robert Graves (novels), Jack Pulman
Cast: Derek Jacobi, Siân Phillips, Brian Blessed, John Hurt, George Baker, Margaret Tyzack, Ian Ogilvy

Mini Series (13 Parts)

‘let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out’

Marvellous BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ novels about the Julio-Claudian dynasty as seen through the eyes of the unlikely emperor Claudius. Not a slight task to transfer this fascinating period of history to the small screen. But they pull it off with some brilliant production design, acting and writing.

Every episode (except for 10) starts with an aged Claudius flashing back in time. From the beginning of the dynasty when Augustus was emperor until the rulership of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius himself and finally Nero. Brian Blessed stars as Augustus, a decisive emperor with a talent for leadership. His reign takes place in a time of conquest when Rome was still rich and powerful. The scheming wife of Augustus, Claudius’ grandmother Livia, poisons everybody that has a claim on the position of Caesar until the time is right for her son Tiberius to rule. One by one the members of the imperial family are killed off by Livia. All except for Claudius who has a disability, but is held for a much greater fool than he really is.

The cast of this great mini-series is top-notch. Derek Jacobi does a fantastic job as Claudius. A man whose weaker points don’t withhold him from becoming a great leader. Even though it is by a great coincidence that Claudius gets to wear the Caesar robe. Claudius’ rulership follows the horrible reigns of Tiberius (excellent performance from George Baker) and the insane emperor Caligula. The poisonous Livia is portrayed by Siân Phillips, whose evil schemes are a joy to behold. John Hurt gives a terrifying performance as the utter mad Caligula whose very presence is constantly threatening to Claudius and others. By pursuing his mad ideas and his obvious fondness for sadism and incest (he marries his sister Drusilla) he makes an even scarier villain than Livia. There are also early performances from Patrick Stewart and John Rhys-Davies amongst others.

There is quite a lot of violent and sexual content although not everything is explicitly shown. Still for a TV series from the seventies it is quite shocking. Even this day it possesses the power to make some jaws drop observing the extravagance of the old Romans. Being a TV production there was no budget for grand settings à la Spartacus and much of the series plays indoors. Still all the sets look beautiful and give the series something theatrical.

To this day this remains one of finest mini-series ever made. A definite must-see to those who enjoy historic drama, intriguing plots and superb acting.