Yeah, Yeah, So What?
In a recent chat with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, Sopranos godfather & creator David Chase acknowledged for the second time that Tony Soprano was indeed “hit” in the final seconds of the last episode, “Made in America,” which aired on 6.10.07.
Chase’s first acknowledgement happened during a 2018 q & a with “Sopranos Sessions” co-authors Matt Seitz and Alan Sepinwall. Chase accidentally let it slip that Tony died in the final minute, and even cursed at Alan and Matt for making him cough this up.
Does anyone recall that in the immediate aftermath of that 6.11 airing, a lot of people didn’t know what had happened, and some declared that the ending was inconclusive?
N.Y. Times columnist Alessandra Stanley, 6.11.07: “David Chase’s last joke was on his audience, not his characters. Tony, Carmela and A. J. are gathered at a diner in a rare moment of family content that cried out for violent interruption. A shifty-looking man walks in and eyes them from the counter, then, in a move echoing a scene from The Godfather, ominously enters the men’s room. Outside, Meadow is delayed, trying to parallel park, then begins walking toward the restaurant.
“Nothing happens. Credits. What?”
N.Y. Post headlines — ‘SOPRANOS” FINALE WHACKS FANS…SHOW’S FINALE FIRES ‘BLANKS’…DARK SCREEN CAPS DISAPPOINTING WRAP…PHIL’S GRISLY HIT IS THE LONE HIGHLIGHT.
Here’s what I wrote minutes after the episode ended:
“Tony Soprano lives on in perpetual dread and uncertainty — unpunctured, undead, and prevailing after a fashion. That, for better or worse, is what the final episode of The Sopranos left viewers with this evening.
“And anyone who writes in complaining that I’m spoiling the party by writing this can go stuff it. A comprehensive sum-up piece by the AP’s Frazier Moore went up at 11:50 pm eastern, Nikki Finke ran a negative reaction piece even earlier, and finale details are all over Monday morning’s N.Y. Post.
“So far there seems to be disappointment out there that a hitman’s bullet or at least some sort of bad-karma payback didn’t befall bossman Soprano, although I’d suspected this might be how the last episode would end.
Maria to Natalie: “Suck It Up”
That long-simmering, much-whispered-about rumor about Kirk Douglas having sexually assaulted Natalie Wood at the Chateau Marmont in the summer of 1955…that story has been confirmed by the late actress’s younger sister, 75 year-old Lana Wood, in a forthcoming memoir called “Little Sister” (Dey Street, 11.9).
Lana spoke of the assault during a multi-part podcast that streamed in July 2018, but she didn’t name Douglas.
At the time of the incident Douglas was 38 and Wood had just turned 17. The get-together had been arranged by their mother, Maria Zakharenko, who thought that “many doors might be thrown open for her, with just a nod of his famous, handsome head on her behalf,” according to Lana, who was around eight at the time.
AP: “It seemed like a long time passed before Natalie got back into the car and woke me up when she slammed the door shut,” Lana writes. “She looked awful. She was very disheveled and very upset, and she and Mom started urgently whispering to each other. I couldn’t really hear them or make out what they were saying. Something bad had apparently happened to my sister, but whatever it was, I was apparently too young to be told about it.”
“According to Lana, Natalie did not discuss with her what happened until both were adults and Natalie, after describing being brought into Douglas’ suite. She told her sister, ‘And, uh…he hurt me Lana. It was like an out-of-body experience. I was terrified. I was confused.’
“Lana recalls Natalie and their mother agreeing it would ruin Natalie’s career to publicly accuse him. ‘Suck it up’ was Maria’s advice.
“Douglas’ son, actor Michael Douglas, said in a statement issued through his publicist: ‘May they both rest in peace.'”
“Send Dems To Woke Detox Center”
Reported by The Hill‘s Joseph Choi….
James Carville: “What went wrong is just stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that…people see that.
Suburbanites in Virginia and New Jersey “pulled away” from such “wokeness.”
“It’s just really has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something. They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”
“We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries and change laws. These faculty lounge people that sit around mulling about I don’t know what…They’re not working.”
“Wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. It’s hard to talk to anybody today — and I talk to lots of people in the Democratic Party — who doesn’t say this. But they don’t want to say it out loud.”
Steers and Queers, Part 2
The Power of the Dog (Netflix, 12.1 — formerly 11.17) is a chilly and perverse cattle–ranch drama that insists over and over that it’s a very bad thing for toxic males to suppress their homosexuality. (HE agrees.) Campion is a top-tier filmmaker and there’s no disputing that this is a quality-level effort, but Dog‘s milieu is grim and stifling and melancholy, like the dark side of the moon.
Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is excellent as the enraged and closeted Phil — a variation on Daniel Day Lewis‘s “Bill the Butcher” in Gangs of New York or “Daniel Plainview” in There Will Be Blood. The older-looking Kirsten Dunst, 39, delivers the second best performance. The fleshy, rotund, moon-faced Jesse Plemons plays Cumberbatch’s gentler, kinder brother. And don’t overlook Kodi-Smith McPhee as Dunst’s delicate teenaged son.
Note: The following National Lampoon piece, written by John Weidman, appeared in July 1971.
Riveting “What If?” Proposition
A director-writer friend has shared a brilliant premise for a new theoretical Ryan Murphy political docudrama. Everyone and their parents would want to watch this — it would burn up Twitter. Here it is…
“Rather than rehashing a blowjob fracas, if Ryan Murphy had any vision and showmanship, he would dive right into a miniseries depicting what would have hypothetically occurred if the January 6th insurrection had succeeded in taking over the Capitol and had stopped the electoral confirmation of Biden’s victory over the beast. Would it have been Taps or Red Dawn or Wild in the Streets?”
“Neither Obscure nor Anodyne”
Bret Stephens‘ “Why Democrats Are In Trouble” (11.3) should be retitled “Why Robin D’Angelo Needs To Wear Dark Sunglasses, Put On A Fishing Hat and Move to Central America For Nine Or Ten Years”:
Matt Taibbi: I met people who didn’t care about “Critical Race Theory,” if they even knew what it was, but were still offended by the existence of a closed Facebook group — the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” — that contains six school board members and apparently compiled a list of parents deemed insufficiently supportive of “racial equity efforts.”
Still others were troubled by a controversy involving the process by which an outside consultancy called the Equity Collaborative came to be hired, at a cost of roughly $500,000, to conduct an “equity assessment” based on a report of racial insensitivity at one school.
There is a version of that latter story that is almost too comical to be believed — one reason I have to go back is to nail down those particulars — but it’s undeniable there are Loudoun County parents, many of whom are high-powered professionals working at banks or white shoe law firms, who initially smelled a rat on the finance side and only later worried about the politics.
Also complicating the “Lee Atwater” narrative is the role of Asian and South Asian parents in yesterday’s results. “A lot of immigrant families came here specifically for the school system,” is how one Indian-American parent put it to me yesterday. “When you start messing with [the school system], and say, we don’t have a say, that’s when people who’ve always voted Democratic will flip on them.”
Reporting about Asian and South Asian families upset about new initiatives to deemphasize admissions criteria like test scores has often been dismissive or caricatured, and that certainly seems to have been the case in Loudoun County, where a significant portion of the people seriously being cast today as dupes answering a dogwhistle are immigrant, minority residents who’ve given Democrats their votes for decades.
Boston Is No Longer Boston
Michelle Wu‘s victory means that a new Boston attitude has begun to take hold, and to HE that feels like an interesting and exciting thing.
You could go so far as to say that the old clam chowder-and-saltine crackers Boston is slipping away. The Irish Boston of whiskey-drinking legend. The Boston captured in The Friends of Eddie Coyle. The Tip O’Neill, Honey Fitz, lunch-at-Locke-Ober’s Boston. The Boston that The Verdict‘s Paul Newman lived and worked in. The Boston that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in. The Boston that Jack Nicholson‘s Whitey Bulger character exploited and terrorized.
If Wu is smart, she’ll steer clear of C.R.T. advocacy in Boston-area schools.
Idiotic Action Writing
I’m only posting this (10.31.21) as an example of how utterly silly and stupid the basic action realm has become.
Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum, terrified of the cat, are sitting rock still. Then the cat strolls over to the kids’ SUV, the boy slams the driver door shut, and the girl, trembling with terror, opens up a can of cat food and thereby releasing the tangy aroma. Why would anyone with even a modest amount of brain cells do such a thing? Is she an idiot?
This leads to the cat knocking their SUV on its side. Then a shouting Neill gets the cat’s attention by holding a can of sealed cat food. Then he tosses it, etc. The cat can’t smell the sealed cat food, and it can’t open it either so what’s the point? I’ve lived with cats all my life so don’t tell me.
In short, the CG is better than decent, but the OwlKitty guys (1.7M subscribers) are morons in the screenwriting department.
Naked Man on Sidewalk
Yesterday Tatiana was on a TV commercial shoot in downtown Los Angeles. The area was swarming with homeless people and other wretched-refuse types. Out of the blue she spotted a buck-naked white guy — late 30s to early 40s, good physical shape, relatively attractive — casually walking on a nearby sidewalk, and then waiting at a stop light and crossing the street like any average citizen. Q: “Was he wearing sneakers of flip-flops?” A: “I didn’t notice.”
Comer Should Be In Supporting
I’m not saying Jodie Comer‘s Last Duel performance isn’t a lead — it is — but she’d have a better shot at winning if she was in the Best Supporting Actress category, and nobody would have an argument with her performance being so categorized.
All Hail Wokester Slapdown
With 83% of the Virginia vote tally, Greg Youngkin (R) has 53% (1,426,017) vs. 47% (1,263,758) for Terry McAuliffe (D). It’s a very bleak omen for what may happen in the 2022 midterms, and, in Virginia at least, a clear rejection of wokester policies as far as education (CRT) is concerned. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow: Virginia women went roughly 50-50 in the 2020 Presidential race, but they voted against McAuliffe, 57% to 43%, on the race-education issue.
Friendo: “Democrats will probably not get the message. They should but they won’t. They have to stop listening to Twitter. Everything and everyone is racist to the wokester left (Thomas Jeffersons statue being removed from NYC’s city hall, etc.) and moderate Americans are finally pushing back. I was surprised it was such a decisive win though — 51.9% to 47.4%. They all said Virginia would be a squeaker.”
