I refuse to feign interest in a Rolling Stone article, but this tweet from Phil Purser-Hallard – and they’re all tweets, as even the dank one himself knows – is as dull as the story it objects to. To watch The Sopranos as “macho gangster pulp” is to admit you watched it in the most boring way possible, and worse, that you’re proud of it.
If Thelma Schoonmaker‘s contribution to Martin Scorcese’s filmography has been overlooked in the discourse around whether his values are inferior to those of The Carphone Warehouse Disney, Sheila Jaffe and Georgina Walken’s influence on The Sopranos should be harder to miss. The show’s brilliance is determined by the way its casting marries the traditionally macho (veterans of the mob movie canon, actors who lived the life) with the artsy and effete (alumni of Hal Hartley movies, Coen Bros films, and the stage). The fact that at least some of these actors existed in both worlds is one of the canniest observations the show makes from its first episode onward.
To dismiss the efforts of Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, Lorraine Braco, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Steve Buscemi, Nancy Marchand, Drea de Matteo, Aida Turturro, and – yes – James Gandolfini as mere machismo is real baby brain stuff. Perhaps it’s excusable if you didn’t follow what was going on because you were busy hand-crafting clown shoes out of some contrary opinions you bought in 1999. It’s possible that if you watched the show that way, this is all you would see:
It’s all you’d deserve, really. As for the rest of us, well, we’re still busy pondering matters that transcend such dull binaries.
Blue Box // Recorder 