Good to see Hollywood taking a chance on industry outsiders like Cooper Hoffman
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The Many Saints of Newark
This did not have the makings of a varsity prequel
Watched Cry Macho before the Chapo podcast and it is absolutely terrible just like Chapo said. I know directors have hits and misses but this doesnât even feel like an attempted miss. It feels like a direct to video C quality movie.
Wat
Mediocre at best imo, and some really weird choices like Chrissy narrating from beyond the grave, wtf was that
I also read that the character Clint plays is supposed to be late middle-aged, not ancient.
I didnât like The Many Saints of Newark either. I know itâs its own thing and maybe it will grow on me, but after bingeing the series over the past week, I found the movie dull and disconnected from the show despite most of the characters being fully formed but younger versions of themselves. With the exception of Tony ofc. This is his Vader origin story I guess.
And about Tonyâs turn to the dark side, here was someone with a working moral compass despite his love for Dickie and seemed all ready to live a normal life in reaction to said Dickie making a point of avoiding him at the urging of his fatherâs murderous twin. But in comes Silvio who (like Tonyâs school counselor who did all the tests) recognizes Tonyâs smarts and leadership abilities and talked Dickie into meeting Tony at Holstenâs but then not showing up bc he died. Then the pinky swear at the funeral. Simple. Itâs a shame none of this ever came up with Melfi later on. Or maybe it did. Who cares at this point.
Regarding Dickie, the murder scene with his father was absurd, even for this genre and he was killed by Junior for laughing at him when he slipped on some stairs? Really? Tbf I could missed something bc I was bored to tears by the end and was zoning out.
And thought the actor who played Johnny Boy was a terrible choice.
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Underwhelming
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I thought the reviews of Many Saints had me prepared, but it was still worse than I expected. Now I want to see a Sopranos movie made by Tim Van Patten.
The problems are too numerous to list, and the whole is even worse than the sum of its parts. With that said, my favorite scene:
Young Tony: Hello, Baby Christopher, it is I, your Uncle Tony!
baby cries
Young Tony: It is almost as if that baby knows Iâm going to kill him someday!
Old Woman, ominously: Some say that babies know things, like if someone who is holding them will someday kill them in the aftermath of a car accident!
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From the Wikipedia:
That actually sounds like an interesting movie. It seems like they took the least interesting parts of this idea and grafted them onto the Sopranos mythology to come up with something that just isnât very good and is certainly not necessary.
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Iâm probably going to watch this tonight, but Iâve gotta say this thread has got me extremely disappointed in advance.
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Yeah dont go in with high hopes. Im getting neg reviews even from long time hardcore Sopranos fans
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Holy shit I just learned that Tim Van Patten was Salami on The White Shadow, mind officially blown.
Iâm another disappointed Sopranos fan after watching the many saints of Newark.
felt the entire plot of the movie was basically pointless.
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is it worth watching?
if youâre a fan of the series, probably. come in with low expectations though.
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Vera Farminga nails Livia, Corey Stoll is pretty good as junior. Thereâs some âgoodâ fan service bits. Adds zero substance to the sopranos canon
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Spoiler
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Assorted thoughts:
I immediately want to compare this experience with El Camino. In both cases, youâve got a legendary TV series followed up several years later with a highly-anticipated movie. I thought El Camino was fine, kind of fun, and almost entirely forgettable. Other than how fat Todd got - thatâs kind of burned in my brain.
For some reason, I actively disliked MSoN. I think itâs because it was more ambitious - trying to set up a compelling backstory for a beloved show, rather than just adding an epilogue. But it didnât actually do that? We see that Livia is a completely damaged mom, and how that likely influenced Tony. But we already knew that, and we donât see any evolution of that personality. We see that Tonyâs father didnât play much of a role, even when he was out of jail. I guess weâre supposed to see that Dickie Moltisanti was a stand-in father and a big influence on Tony, but I donât feel like that was actually developed - just the general idea that Dickie liked the kid and Tony looked up to him.
And as for Tony, we see that heâlike every other high school kid in the worldâstruggles emotionally and has both good and bad inside. He steals an ice cream truck! But he gives the ice cream away to kids for free! Much complexity! But again, not really any evolution of that character, just a sniveling teenager. (Much like AJ turned out to be, and AJ was a terrible character - probably the worst in the series! Not a character you want to re-create.)
And for some reason, they tried to tack on a huge storyline with Harold McBrayer and riots that didnât go anywhere. That could have been interesting, but like everything else in the movie wasnât developed at all. Maybe itâs the nature of movies versus episodic TV, but this movieâexactly the opposite of The Sopranosâdidnât let anything simmer and develop at all. Just a bunch of scenes stitched together to tell an uninteresting story.
Actors that were good:
I thought Uncle Junior was fantastic. Didnât try to perfectly emulate Dominic Chianese, but really captured someone who I could see developing into him.
Leslie Odom, Jr. - I didnât care about this character very much, but he did a good job. Actually, I only didnât care about him because of the way it was shoe-horned in to the movie. I probably would have enjoyed an entire movie focusing on him.
Livia Soprano - Vera Farmiga did great, but she was also very confusing to me because she looked so much like Edie Falco. Which I guess is a pretty cool way to imply that Tony ends up marrying his mother.
Gandolfini, I guess? I hated this character because he was so whiny and unlike the Tony we saw in the series. But at the same time, this whiny insecure person was exactly the heart of Tony, so in some ways he captured that idea perfectly. Meh
Ray Liotta I thought was too over the top as Dickieâs dad, but then I liked him as Uncle Sally.
Everyone else was meh, except for Silvio. Who was absolutely terrible and should feel bad. I guess thereâs the question of whether itâs the actorâs fault or the writersâ fault, but he was like a bad impersonator. I understand that Silvio was already kind of a caricature in the series, but this was a low-quality caricature of that caricature. Just dreadful.
Honorable mention for badness:
-The approximately 230 times that someone exclaimed âWhhhoooaaaaâ in that exaggerated Paulie Walnuts fashion.
-The Christopher/Tony introduction. My thoughts in sequence:
- Christopher cries when near Tony: âAhh, thatâs pretty nice. Establish this damaged relationship right from the start, even if you donât provide any particular reason for it.â
- Tony says âI donât know what it is, itâs like I scare him or something.â: Ok, yes, I got the point already. But maybe some people were eating a sandwich or playing sudoku and didnât pick up on the idea. So hammer the point home, I guess.
- Random lady announces ominously that some babies can see things from the other side: Oh for fuckâs sake. [Throws beer can at the TV.]
Also, Artie Bucco was apparently one of the people who stole the ice cream truck? I had no idea until I read a review after I watched the movie.
Am I glad I watched it? Thereâs no right answer. Iâm extremely disappointed in it, but I donât think I could have handled the FOMO of everyone else watching. Even with all the bad reviews, Iâd probably still end up saying, âAaah, who cares what others think. Iâm confident that Iâll enjoy it.â But no.
Probably the best part of the movie was when it faded into the opening âWoke Up This Morningâ music. [Kind of like Vader coming in at the end of Rogue One, but only 15% as cool.] But if thatâs the best part of the movie, itâs not a great sign.
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Yeah the fact that they filmed this over 2 years ago and sat on it for so long and still thought it was a good idea to poop out that Christopher scene should tell you everything.
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