SOPRANOS Season 6: Season Finally!!!.. Episode 12: "KAISHA" - Page 33

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

You have the job on the books, but nobody really expects you to show up and actually work. Essentially it's one of many ways to siphon money out of a legitimate enterprise. Easier to explain than outright payola.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Right. Even last episode, Tony was arguing with Phil over the construction sites that Vito used to have and he told him "my guys need those no shows for the health benefits and the W2's" or something to that effect. I think when Vito and the others were sitting around the site were jobs where they had to punch in, but not work. I remember Tony and Vito negotiating for "X many no shows and the rest onsite" that season. But they are essentially the same thing - Mob payoffs to keep the Unions in line.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

This season started off so strong for the first batch of episodes and then the Vito thing happened and it hasn't recovered in my opinion since better storylines took a back seat to this.

Episode 11 was a let down for me. Glad to see the Vito chapter closed but it took way too long to happen. Paris was a reminder that the wives are superficial and not above reproach themselves. Fine, we've always known that so let's move on.

I'm coming around to those who believe that this season was "padded" to get the extra episodes. Unlike prior seasons, I don't see me watching the finale wishing it didn't have to end. Instead, barring some really good writing in E12, I'll just be happy its over so I can pull the plug on my HBO subscription.

If Vito is how Chase wanted to create the dissention b/ NY and NJ, fine, but it could have been done in 1 episode, 2 tops, rather than stringing it for more than a month.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

-did Carmela actually suggest Tony fool around when she approached him about going to Paris? she was like 'hey it'll be good for you too, you can do whatever boys do...' no wonder Tony didn't feel guilty and was finally able to let loose

-i thought it was hilarious when they were talking about Vito's killing the next morning: 'i wish i'd borrowed money from that guy' - then a closeup of the guy who borrowed money from him (obviously he tipped off Phil)

-i'm glad to see Tony finally (hopefully) getting through to AJ; for a while i was expecting AJ to try to commit suicide - a screwup up with a successful sister, who knows his friends only like him because he's the boss's kid - he has to lie to them about doing 'business', then when he actually tries taking out Uncle Jr he fails miserably. he doesn't seem to value the rest of his life if he's willing to go to jail for murder.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

I have to agree. The season did start fairly strong and got better for a couple of episodes afterwards but hit the wall when the Vito storyline started to happen and quickly faded from there.

The Sopranos are over with and so is my HBO subscriptionl.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

"since it's governemnt-funded projects"

Tony made a joke about this in a earlier season, about how the govt will be paying the bills. I think it was one of the earliest episodes when Christohper said "garbage was their bread and butter" and Tony replied "not anymore".

"This season started off so strong for the first batch of episodes and then the Vito thing happened and it hasn't recovered in my opinion since better storylines took a back seat to this."

I agree as well. Things went downhill and Vito started getting so much time after taking off.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

i'm glad the vito storyline won't be a major story anymore. it wasn't too interesting, and took too long to pay off so little.

i'm really interested to see what AJ ends up doing. can't get enough of tony slapping him around, he is pretty annoying sometimes. i noticed a similarity between tony and AJ though. when tony asked AJ about what he wanted to do in the future, and tony (or carmela?) said something like "what about event planning, you mentioned you wanted to do something with that" and AJ said he never said that. i saw this as tony pulling a 180 concerning the nursing home/retirement community. livia would say "i'm not going in a nursing home!" and tony would yell "it's a retirement community!" but this season, tony was in dr. melfi's office, and she said something about putting his mother in a retirement community, and tony yelled "it's a nursing home!" seems they both have selective memory. makes me wonder if AJ's panic attacks will ever come back.

CJ

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Will Carmela leave Anthony ?
Its been speculated here in this thread and elsewhere. After watching Cold Stone again, I could see how that could be interpreted.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Line of the week:

"I loved him like a brother-in-law"


This is the kind of comment that I don't get at all. Does anyone pay attention to this show? The Vito storyline hasn't even started paying off yet. His disgrace, his death, the fall-out from that will echo through the rest of the series - but it had to be set up first. In order to mean anything to the characters, in order to mean anything to us, we had to see it unfold. And sometimes it is about the journey, not the destination. Sometimes I think people would like the see the teaser of a TV show followed immediately by the tag, with none of that time-wasting story in between.

Regards,

Joe

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

rest of the series? there's 9 episodes left. and how do you even know it will pay off at all? not every story with the main characters goes somewhere, nevermind someone like vito. before the gay thing, we didn't see him that much, even though he was an important character. i'm sure there is more to be said about it, but i know to 'expect the unexpected' with this show.

if i were to guess, i'd say the rest of the series would focus quite a bit on the changes tony experienced as kevin finnerty. apart from the season finale, they have 8 episodes to wrap up the entire series, and i would guess not that much will have to do with typical mob stuff. sure, the vito thing was a big deal, and we now see what happens to a gay member of the family, even a captain. but i think a lot of the remainder of the series will have to do with AJ and carmela. the fun is sitting back and watching.

CJ

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Like many have said, if Chase used the Vito story to bring about a fued between Jersey and New York than it was garbage writing/stupid/lazy/ just plain not interesting. You pick, but if we had to watch however amount of screen time to come to a point that could of been reached with much better writting and a quicker resolution.

Yeah, once/if the war of the two families gets going it will be exciting(should be anyway), but to use the Vito story to get there was just stupid and I sure as hell expected more from The Sopranos.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Don't all Sopranos fans know that!

This has always been the biggest complaint of the series.
Characters and stories come and go as if they were afterthoughts.
Throughout the history of this show, there's been a "who's who" list
of "Whatever happened to...?"

Of course, this has become the biggest debate amongst fans.
Some, like me, are pissed off that storylines go nowhere and
are often unresolved. Others love the fact that Chase keeps
this show a character piece and doesn't rely on patching holes
in the storyline.

...all I know is that there's a Russian guy still running around
in the Jersey Pine Barrens.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

No more Johnny Cakes!

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

I think what has so many people bothered is that the whole Johnny Cakes storyline in NH didn't have to happen at all. If they would have had Vito outed by the two collection thugs and Phil cap him before he left Jersey, would the series have lost anything? It would have picked up in exactly the same place.

If on the other hand, you are a fan of the show and love the character development even if it does not figure as necessary content to a longer running storyline, are you happy with the Johnny Cakes storyline in and of itself? Personally, I am ok with some loose ends and character stories. I am fine that they decided to show Vito in NH. I liked the symbol of him transitioning back into "the life" and killing a guy along the way. But... I also think they spent far too long on NH. They could have gotten the same message across with far less screen time.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

"I think what has so many people bothered is that the whole Johnny Cakes storyline in NH didn't have to happen at all. If they would have had Vito outed by the two collection thugs and Phil cap him before he left Jersey, would the series have lost anything? It would have picked up in exactly the same place."

I believe many people are missing one of the main points of this aspect of the storyline. Vito was slowly finding a new life, a happy life, one that would permit him to finally live freely. The new relationship(s), the new town, even the food were all contributing to this new-found happiness. However, when it came down to earning a living, Vito just couldn't settle for real job. He was willing to give up his new 'home' and even risk death just because he couldn't live outside of the mob lifestyle. That, to me, is pretty powerful.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

And.. that leading him to his death has Led Tony to his Impasse because he has to retalite due to one of his made guys getting whacked. And on the Other side since it was Tony's Duty to Whack him and he did'nt it will also bring Consequences. Which add to the layer that was already there because of Tony's Cousin, that he had to whack so that Phil would'nt whack him. In this way you can see Tony's Motivations. It's not so much he cared about Vito, it's that he did'nt want to give into Phil becasue Phil Made him Whack his cousin.

The Sopranos is so richly layered that it saddens me that it's dismissed as poor story telling because you don't see them give everything a tied up ending. The Russian Mobster in the Pine Barrens is meaningless, it's what ripples in the storylines of the characters occured due to that Mobster.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

But, Dave, if you look at what you just wrote, all of that could happen without any scenes in NH. They all could have happened off camera. I'm one of the people that doesn't need nice neat endings to every story thread. I just don't think there needed to be as much time spent in NH onscreen for the point that I got out of it, that Vito was the catalyst to a conflict. I liked the transitions between the two lifestyles, but I didn't need as much of the love story. I agree that Jim brought up a good point about how much Vito loved his new lifestyle, but still couldn't turn his back on the life. He also came back because he missed his kids, but I take Jim's point.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Reminds me of the conversations about Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. Those who hated it said it was unbelievable, trivial and bad writing for a "whodunnit". Those who loved it did not see a "whodunnit", but a richly layered character piece about life, death, redemption and damnation. It was like two sides arguing two completely different movies. It went from "What is the symbolism of Dave's mutterings about vampires and werewolves" and "What is the meaning of the unfinished name in the sidewalk" to "How come Kevin Bacon never caught Sean Penn, there's no ending without that happening" and "He didn't seem concerned about his daughter, Clint has to show us that or else we don't know".

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

"and i would guess not that much will have to do with typical mob stuff"

I disagree. We'll see NJ and NY tensions growing and prob being resolved in the last 8.

My guess is Phil will be gone with Little Carmine being put into the top NY position - a happy ending for Tony becuase hes a pushover.

I still think its a possibility for Tony to take a less active role as the series winds down splitting control with Christopher.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Thanks for the "No show job" clarifications. I figured it was something of the sort, but didn't know the details.

About Vito, at the risk of repeating myself, my problem with his storyline is that the guy is just neither likeable nor (biggest offender!) interesting in the least. To me anyway. I enjoyed that plot on an intellectual level, but not an emotional one, and am not sorry to see it end.

--
H

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

And that is a matter of taste and (as they say) personal preference, and that's fine. It isn't just fine, it is inarguable. You cannot debate matters of taste, they just are. You like chocolate ice cream, I like vanilla. I cannot persuade you by logic that vanilla is, as a matter of objective fact, the superior ice cream flavor.

But that is exactly what people who accuse the writers of "bad storytelling" are doing and exactly why I object so much to their posts. (And can we, for Pete's sake, just freakin' drop the Russian McGuffin in the Pine Barrens, already? He was barely a character. He wasnt' a story, he wasn't a thread, much less a dropped one. He was a freakin' plot device in a story about two other characters. Let's have a moratorium on any future references to him, shall we?)

It isn't "bad writing" when the plot turns in a direction that I don't personally happen to like, or focuses on a character I don't find interesting. (Which in my case would include boring, one-note Johnny Sack and the loathesome Phil Leotardo who can't die soon enough to suit me.) It is bad writing when too much of the plot relies on coincidence, or when characters take actions to advance the story that seem to lack motivation or contradict their earlier behavior. Those are cases where you can appeal to objective standards of storytelling and judge the work you're reading or viewing. "I don't like Vito" isn't. And I find it laughable when people who have clearly never written and produced successful TV shows themselves attack talented men and women as "bad writers" because everything on the screen does not suit their own idiosyncratic tastes. If I don't like cauliflower and that turns out to be an ingredient in an unfamiliar dish I order at a restaurant, I don't go on the internet when I get home that night and tell the world what a bad chef that restaurant has.

And that's exactly the kind of thing that way too much of this thread (and the Lost thread) has turned into. "I'm disappointed with this season because I has less of what I like" is a perfectly reasonable post. (Although why we need to see that same post after every episode that continues to disappoint is another question.) "This season SUCKS and the writers are incompetent morons because they aren't writing exactly the show I want to watch" is less so when you boil it down to its essence.

Regards,

Joe

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Well, some people like "Freddy Got Fingered" too.

Most people hate S4 of The Sopranos. It seems that the people who like/don't mind the Vito storyline are in the minority.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Wow. I missed that poll.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Whining the loudest does not a majority make. It is simply true in the nature of things that people unhappy with anything will make more noise than those who are content. I support computer networks. Nobody calls me to tell me how well their computers are working and how happy they are with their programs. They generally call when they're pissed off about something being wrong. But that doesn't mean 100% of the users on my network are unhappy or that 100% of the computers experience problems every day.

There may be more posts about people being unhappy with some parts of the show, but I'll bet if we did a count we'd find that most of them were from the same few people who complain a lot, rather than from a "majority" even of the posters in this thread - completely setting aside the giant universe of Sopranos fans who don't post here or anywhere else on the internet.

So I'd like to see that poll, too. Or maybe comparative sales figures for the season 4 DVDs versus the others. My guess would be that there probably wasn't much difference, but that's just a guess. I don't know, so I'm hardly in a position to make some kind of absolute statement on the subject.

And once again, I'm not arguing personal likes or dislikes. I'm objecting to the laughable claim that if the show doesn't appeal to a given individual that there is something objectively wrong with the show.

Regards,

Joe

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

Well if the same people who loved the show and are now turning away(not liking it nearly as much), than maybe there is something wrong with the show.

I would like to see a poll regarding the Vito story.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

i think when Tony offered Christopher the wine, he was testing him - seeing how much discipline he had. Chris failed.

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

In addition to all of the above, "no show" jobs are a way for mobsters to hide illegal income. With a "job" and a W-2 you can file a tax return and account for some of your money. Don't forget, they got Al Capone on tax evasion. You can bet none of the real mob guys have ever forgotten that.

That was one of the sticking points for Tony in the sale of the hauling company. He needed to make sure he kept his consulting job and that magic W-2 because it allowed him to show a legitimate source of income to explain his lifestyle.


"Chase won't go anywhere with this..."

Yeah, that Chase, what a hack.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Phil is gay. Could that possibly put the whole Vito storyline in a different light. Could there be layers of foreshadowing? Irony? Hypocricy? Could this help Tony bring Phil down without starting a major NY/NJ war? Could that be the Vito story paying off?

No.

That could never happen in the remaining episodes. 'Cause Chase is such an incompentent. He couldn't possibly have plans to use what he has established so far in any kind of coherent conclusion.

Regards,

Joe

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

No war? Yikes... lotsa folk are gonna be pissed off .

I was gonna post earlier today, asking why so many people seemed to be taking than damn war for granted. You would think we were in 1914 europe . It seems every other post mentions "the coming NY/NJ" war like it's a given... unless Chase has specifically hinted at this, could this be a case of collective wishfull thinking?

I have nothing against the propect of a war, but I am having something of a hard time imagining that with 8 eps left, Chase would want the last stretch to be colored with events in such a conflict with the basic premise of the show.

--
H

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

All day today, the line about Tony & AJ kept going through my head.. about him "and some other jerk off doing chit-chat" still hilarious

Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 11: "Cold Stone"

come on now. if you have ever criticized someone's work outside of your own profession, you're an instant hypocrite. i think chase is doing a good job with the series, but your logic is totally flawed.

this is exactly my point of view.

CJ