The Many Saints of Newark (Sopranos prequel, Alan Taylor, September 24, 2021) Movie • Page 9

Nearly spit my drink out at “he never had the makings of a varsity athlete”

 

The dumbest callback is Uncle Junior saying the exact same line when he slips in the rain as he did when he fell in the shower.

 

Lol yup

 

man.

that was terrible.

 

Yeah, idk, I REALLY enjoyed the first hour of this. Then it started to feel surreal in a way like Sopranos fan fiction. The riots were kind of a plot device. The caricatures eventually rubbed me the wrong way. It ends on such an underwhelming note. I need to think about it.

 

Yeah i will agree that the first half hour/40 mins felt pretty good but then it just went full turn into callbacks and fan service. Sil was cringe bad, and Paulie was so so so badly forced. That final scene was just - my god.

 

Yeah some real strange editing choices too. I almost couldnt hear Tony at certain points, like his mic was muffled. And why did we need Christopher narrating from beyond the grave when the movie barely features him?

 

The narration took me out of it from the first scene lol

 

aren't dickie and tony canonically the same age lol

 

It wasn’t great but I enjoyed it. Felt like a several mini episodes in a row. The dude that played dickie looked like a cross between Christian Bale and Al Pacino. Vera was great as Livia. I like John Magaro but his Sil was so so bad.

 

i don't think i've seen Nivola on screen since A Most Violent Year

 

I really enjoyed this and didn't have issues with the ending but yeah I don't know how they allowed Silvio to be so cartoonish and cringey and also give him so many lines, I feel like Paulie was barely in it and that was for the best.

Joey Diaz was also distractingly bad.

Corey Stoll and Vera Farmiga were fantastic. So was Michael Gandolfini, really. Did anyone else think both kid and teenage Tony talked a lot like AJ?

 

bernthal was good too but he almost always is

 

this was great. dude who played Sil was terrible, but that's my only real knock against it

Michael, Vera Fermiga, Jon Bernthal and Corey Stoll were all phenomenal and Ray Liotta in this universe just feels right

 

How did you watch it? VPN and accessed HBO Max?

 

I uhhh illegally acquired it with the intention to buy the DVD/Blu-Ray whenever it's available lol

 

Corey Stoll nailed it, same with Vera Farmiga. Sil got played like an SNL sketch tho

 

I’ll probably do the same lmao

 

It probably would have worked better as a show. You end up with three competing narratives that don't always line up. The Harold plotline is particularly thankless because the audience wants to see the characters they spent years with.

I was interested in seeing some older gangsters that had only been alluded to in the show, but then the one that hangs around them that gets shot is supposed to be Big Pussy's father. That is from the George Lucas school of prequel writing.

 

I love Vera but i didnt even think she was great here.

 

This was a bit disappointing. I enjoyed it mostly just because it was nice to see another Sopranos world story but even that is tainted by the narration and overplaying to the fans by forcing in famous lines. The scene with Tony and Livia at the school with the counselor was a bright spot.

 

It’s interesting that Dickie never mentored Tony in the way the I thought was referred to in the show. Tony made it seem like Dickie was a mentor in the same way Tony was to Christopher, i.e. taking him under his wing in the crime syndicate. Instead he would just take him to movies as a kid, show up to his birthday, and talk to him about getting in trouble in school.
This also makes me want to go back and watch the episode where Tony tells Christopher who killed his father because uh he clearly lied right?[\spoiler]

 

That whole ‘twist’ was maybe the dumbest thing about the movie, but i will say junior having someone killed just for laughing at him is 100% his brand.

 

I’m gonna let myself assume Tony never even knew “what happened” because it was probably very easy for them to make up the story Tony then told Christopher. However, when you think back to that episode and that scene, the cop insisting Christopher is being lied to and set up is now a lot more interesting.

 

They had to have the Delfonics song playing when Tony was given the speakers. They had to have Tony knock over Carmela during the fight just like he did when he fought Bobby. They had to have the scene with Johnny shooting through Livia's hairdo. It just felt like checking off boxes of moments from the show.

The decision to paint Dickie sympathetically, showing that his reputation as a drug addict comes from the pills found on his dead body, is a little weak since these are a group of people who sit around and tell stories all day. There had to be more to it than what was found on his body for Christopher to call his dad a junkie near the end of the show.

Junior killing Dickie is really on the edge of plausibility. Of course, Junior is not above killing people over petty things or even trying to kill family members, but it feels like it is trying to retroactively add a layer to the show which isn't really there considering how little Junior and Chris interact. You can be charitable and say that Livia convinces Junior to spare Chris because of her relationship with Dickie, but that is about it.

The film hides the killer, but it almost certainly wasn't the cop because Junior would not want that identity to get out and if it did he would be implicated. Whether or not Haydu actually killed Dickie like Tony said was always a nice bit of mystery that didn't matter too much because it was more about Tony permanently bonding Chris to him.

It always felt like Junior's quickness to kill people in the first season was part of his aging and irritability, which is a bigger part of the film's characterization of these people. People tend to dive deeper into their tics or eccentricities as they get older, or even develop new ones, which is why young Paulie and Silvio acting like the most exaggerated versions of their older characters is so silly. Livia does it best because we can see the roots of that miserable old lady in a more composed and socially integrated adult. Johnny was always a bit of an empty vessel so you can't really go too wrong there. Young Tony is a mixed bag too because by this point they have had about a dozen boys playing young Tony that there is not too much consistency.