$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 11, 2007 17:31:15 GMT -5
Someone left a bulletin on MySpace insisting Tony is dead, and here is his reasoning....this is from Mike the Cop (who used to be a regular on the Booker show on Free-Fm)
Whatcha all think?
Tony Soprano was killed....
In fact, the ending was genius if you've paid attention to the show or are just a fan of well developed well thought out plots that all tie together and have the memory of a champ to remember it all the ending was simple, he got killed, but let me tell y'all why and explain in detail... There was 4 people in the room total who had a reason to kill tony.....
The two black guys were paid before to kill Tony when his mother put a hit out on him but he was clipped in the ear in Season One.
The trucker at the booth near Tony was the brother of a Trucker, Christopher killed in DVD player robbery. We last saw the brother when he went to identify his dead brother's body.
And lastly, from the earlier seasons, the Italian man who was sitting at the counter stool, who the camera kept focusing in on, is Nikki Leotardo, Phil Leotardos nephew. He was in one of the early season episodes where Phil and Tony have a sit down....
Here is where the genius comes in....
When Tony walks into the Holston's, you see the camera focus on him, then it switches to his perspective, and you see him looking @ the booth hes gonna sit at...
Then the camera switches back to Tony's face, then it once again switches to his perspective, and it shows him looking @ the door and looking @ the people come in..... Everytime the door opens the chimes sound.......
Carmela walks in, Chimes. AJ walks in, Chimes.
This all happens while Meadow is parallel parking, still trying to get inside the restaurant....
At this point the camera switches back Nikki Leotardo who goes in the bathroom...
Then it goes to a scene where Meadow finally parks and starts running into the diner...
The door is about to open, Tony looks up...
and No Chimes...
No Music...
Everything just goes black...
In one of the early episodes of the Sopranos, Tonys is talking with Bobby about what it must feel like to die.
Bobby says, "at the end, you probably dont hear anything, everything just goes black!"
This idea was revisited in the second to last episode during the last seconds of it, when Tony is about to go to sleep and he flashes back to the memory of him and Bobby on the boat... "You probably dont hear anything everything just goes black"
So in the end, the Journey song was playing, the chimes on the door sounded but when Meadow came in, someone killed Tony.
This is the reason you didn't hear or see sh!t when he died.... it was from his perspective... and everything went black, then the credits.
bada bing!!
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 11, 2007 18:29:36 GMT -5
Unfortunately, that's all a nice little conspiracy theory, but given that there is no ending and it stopped mid scene, we have to assume he finished his onion rings and went home.
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Post by BigAl115 on Jun 11, 2007 19:12:43 GMT -5
I could swear there were chimes when meadow walked in ...thats why he looked up
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 11, 2007 19:34:39 GMT -5
I think Al's right. I watched again, and it sure sounds like a chime.
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Post by kingdzbws on Jun 11, 2007 19:48:57 GMT -5
Tony sleeps with the fishes!
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Post by BigAl115 on Jun 11, 2007 19:49:10 GMT -5
even if this guy is right..which im sure he not....That would be even more moronic that all 4 of these ppl were at the diner at the same time ...
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Post by grover on Jun 11, 2007 20:15:30 GMT -5
Actually, that's what's making me like the episode more and more. It's open ended, but in a good way.
I also love the other subtle things they had in there, like google eyed NY dude crossing over from Little Italy to Chinatown, representing him crossing over to help Tony.
Re-watching it made it a whole lot better. I still don't lie the choice of Journey as the final track, but I'll live. Those people who complain in the papers just don't get it, and so do most of the people who are really upset at this. That makes it a whole lot better.
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Post by BigAl115 on Jun 11, 2007 20:34:38 GMT -5
I just rewatched the ending and there def was a chime before he looked up ...
I would of loved to see the reaction at the party in Vegas where ppl watched the final episode with th entire cast ...
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Post by cactusjames on Jun 11, 2007 21:28:53 GMT -5
There were chimes for sure, and I dont hate it as much, but live or die, a more difinitive answer would have been nice.
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Post by grover on Jun 11, 2007 21:55:11 GMT -5
Actually, it wouldn't have been nice. It would have been cliche.
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Post by grover on Jun 12, 2007 0:09:08 GMT -5
I read an interview with Chase where the interviewer debunks most of the "that was Nicky Leotardo" theories floating around.
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Post by Jackass on Jun 12, 2007 2:47:26 GMT -5
It was a horseshit ending and everyone is justifying it so they don't feel like they got fucked by this guy for investing in ten years without a resolution.
They hyped thiis last seaon as "It all comes down to this" like it was going to be resolved. We were all used to multiple story lines that never got cleaned up, but it's just complete malarky to foist a non ending onto the loyal audience.
In all seriousness, this show became the very thing that it tried not to be: trite and hackneyed. That final episode is proof positive that it not only jumped the shark, but it let Joanie Love Chachi.
However: I did like how the FBI dude was bitching at his wife on the phone about having to work so much, and he got a bit of Tony's sympathy for being on the anti-terror tip, but it turned out he was banging a big muff agent. LOL!!
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 12, 2007 6:11:27 GMT -5
An attempt to not be cliche doesn't mean stopping in the middle of a scene. Chase owes the viewers some sort of closure. Or at least, don't leave them hanging. That was an arrogant slap in the face.
It totally jumped the shark at some point in Season 5 and definitely by the Johnny Cakes plotline.
This show once took nearly 2 years in between seasons. That was a big time dick move.
Instead of leaving the viewers wanting more, Chase left them wondering why they wasted a decade for this.
You don't have to tie up every plotline in a bow, but this was terrible. Not the worst finale I've ever seen by a long shot. Dallas, Quantum Leap, & Sliders all pissed me off far more. But this one stunk.
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Post by IronHorse4 on Jun 12, 2007 6:40:49 GMT -5
Tom's post, which is an e-mail that has been going around the last 24 hours or so, is malarky. No knock on Tom -- he's just posting the scuttle.
That guy at the counter wasn't Nikki Leotardo. He wasn't credited as Nikki Leotardo. That guy was a local pizza shop owner that they hired lke the day before they shot that scene. He gave some interview a while back about how he looked the part, and his role was simply to walk in, look suspicious, then go into the bathroom, and.....he couldn't say anymore.
I think Chase was setting things up for a movie. Meadow is going into criminal law. She'll defend Tony in 4 years when the movie comes out. Maybe be his consigliere or something.
What's that you say? Gandolfini doesn't want to play Tony anymore? Ask him again in 4 years when he can't get another job because he's typecast as Tony Soprano. Unless they start making a new string of mob movies and he's the new Pacino or DeNiro.
Chase wants to make movies. His whole life he's wanted to do it. He hates television, despite his wild success in that medium (he says as much in Vanity Fair a couple of months back). I'm not saying it's a guarantee he makes a movie out of this, but he certainly left the door open.
And he knows it would make a shitload of money.
I don't know that any of this makes him a creative genius or anything, and it still pisses me off how it ended, but I'll understand it if they make a movie out of it.
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 12, 2007 7:08:25 GMT -5
Thing is though, they hardly needed an ending that lame to make a movie. This wasn't exactly a cliffhanger. It's very easy to assume they finished their meal and went home.
One comment I read was it was like reading a book and tearing out the last page.
The shows I mentioned before with shitty finales were Sliders, Quantum Leap and Dallas. All three ended on cliffhangers. Real cliffhangers. All three really could have used reunion movies, but Dallas was the only one that actually did it to date.
So nothing is guaranteed.
This was a slap in the face to the fans who watched that show since 1999. They didn't need an ending like that to leave people wanting more.
Look at Star Trek. No finale at all, and the movie franchise is still going 40 years later.
The Sopranos was popular enough the warrant a movie without a shitty ending.
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Post by Domi on Jun 12, 2007 7:54:46 GMT -5
You're all on crack. The finale was perfect; any other ending wouldn't have been true to what this show has been over the last 8 years. Life doesn't have closure and neat little endings, which is the whole point of this show. Everyone who wanted a big bang at the end has been watching the wrong series all along.
The brilliance of this ending is also completely negated if it becomes a mere cliffhanger to a movie.
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 12, 2007 7:57:07 GMT -5
Life doesn't end in the middle of a sentence either.
You don't need a big bang to end the show. But to end it in the middle of a scene was not brilliant. It was snotty.
And life does have closure and endings. It's called death.
What is not true to life is fading to black in the middle of a scene.
There was nothing brilliant about that ending. It was just arrogant on Chase's part.
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Post by cactusjames on Jun 12, 2007 10:21:19 GMT -5
The last sentence was "I ordered a plate for the table", not mid sentence, and that linbe is fucking brilliant.
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Post by 9 on Jun 12, 2007 11:09:01 GMT -5
"I ordered a plate for the table" is fucking brilliant? Way to set the bar high!
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Post by Chris on Jun 12, 2007 11:14:33 GMT -5
"Life doesn't have closure and neat little endings" - television shows do! Television shows, movies, books...all have "neat little endings" because they don't have the opportunity to drag out plots they way real life does.
By that logic Moby Dick, Gone With The Wind, The Godfather all suck because they unrealistically resolve all conflicts in the end.
My take on the ending of that show was that the final scene did have resolution - not the blaze of glory resolution most people had anticipated, but what we were shown was meant to be a microcosm of Tony's life as we'd come to know it through the years of watching this show - occasionally fires break out and Tony has to fight them (the Phil Leotardo situation, the Ralphie situation, the Ritchie situation), the ever-present nagging legal issues hanging over his head, but all in all Tony keeps on chugging through life....the simplicity of sitting down and putting up the facade of a normal family life - eating a plate of onion rings with his still whiny, still spoiled son, a sham of a marriage, an idealistic wannabe revolutionist daughter who underneath it all is prissy and sheltered to the point that she can't even parallel park a car. Basically the resolution was....business as usual.
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 12, 2007 11:15:32 GMT -5
You said "Dick" heh heh
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Post by Domi on Jun 12, 2007 12:25:48 GMT -5
"Life doesn't have closure and neat little endings" - television shows do! Television shows, movies, books...all have "neat little endings" But there's no rule that they have to. The Sopranos, especially, was a show that made its own rules. By that logic Moby Dick, Gone With The Wind, The Godfather all suck because they unrealistically resolve all conflicts in the end. That's not what I said at all, and you've made it pretty obvious that you didn't do very well at maths in high school. Basically the resolution was....business as usual. EXACTLY, and I don't know why so many people are upset about that. Because the ending is open to interpretation? Although given that so many people didn't understand that this is a show about a family masquerading as a show about the mob, and NOT the other way around, the amount of vitriol being spewed is to be expected.
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Post by Chris on Jun 12, 2007 12:31:55 GMT -5
"That's not what I said at all, and you've made it pretty obvious that you didn't do very well at maths in high school."
Well, I have a math minor and degree in Computer Science with an emphasis on scientific programming...and I am part of a team that develops financial planning calculators for a well-known financial planning software company - methinks I might have retained a thing or two from "The Maths." As I recall, you are the one who seemed to have some pretty significant logic gaps in your probability theories over on Section39.com regarding bunting.
Anyway, I do agree with your assessment about the closure of the Sopranos not being reason to be up in arms. I expected more from the final episode, but I am glad it didn't end up in a scene from Rambo.
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 12, 2007 12:36:46 GMT -5
There's no rule that they have to have closure. But ending in the middle of a scene is just bad writing. It could have ended like an ordinary episode. No worries.
I don't have a problem with the ending being business as usual. The problem is that it was left in the middle of a scene and was abrupt. That's not revolutionary, brilliant, or intellectual. It's just lousy writing.
This was not the worst finale I have ever seen by a long shot. But it was not a good one.
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Post by Domi on Jun 12, 2007 12:37:07 GMT -5
I don't understand how you got "if A, then B" from my statement is all.
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Post by Chris on Jun 12, 2007 12:41:11 GMT -5
"so many people didn't understand that this is a show about a family masquerading as a show about the mob, and NOT the other way around" -- I think this is a pretty astute observation and, to be quite honest, I never really thought about in in those terms.
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MSBNYY
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Post by MSBNYY on Jun 12, 2007 13:59:47 GMT -5
The one thing I will say is that the ending of the show doesn't take away from how great the first four seasons were. Seasons 5-6 were not on the same level, and were lousy at times, but had their moments too.
Just because I don't like the idea of ending a long running series in the middle of a scene doesn't change what the show accomplished in its heyday.
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Post by cactusjames on Jun 12, 2007 14:39:07 GMT -5
Yes, the last line was brilliance, it's showing how they never have peace, there is always unrest, but Tony does what he has to in order to keep his family together, including ordering a plate of onion rings for his family in advance. If that doesn't sum up the last 9 years of the show, you didn't get the show my friend. And you think it was a conincidence the food was rings? What's a ring represent, a circle, unity, a binding shape, totally representing the backbone of the show.
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Post by Chris on Jun 12, 2007 14:41:19 GMT -5
Deep
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$heriff Tom
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Post by $heriff Tom on Jun 12, 2007 14:45:35 GMT -5
LOL!
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