A charmer? I found nothing charming about him (but then, I rarely react to characters on the screen in a personal way).
> he's sexy
Huh?
> We must have been watching different shows.
We watched the same show. I must admit that I do not respond to characters in films or television as if they were actual people with personal psychologies to respond to. The cutie who just walked past my door is sexy. Tony Soprano is a concoction of dialogue, gesture, movement in space. For me, after a few episodes, the gestures and movement became predictable -- nuance was replaced by rote repetition. All that was left for me was one of the more rudimentary levels of involvement: what happens next. And if plot is the only thing that changes from episode to episode, why bother to film it? Just send out an email summary of the story since the plastic elements of the medium are being ignored (unless you are arguing that the plastic elements of an art form are merely the handmaidens of narrative whose only function is to facilitate the delivery of plot. If that is the case, what stories are the notes in a Bach fugue, the brushstrokes in a Pollock painting and the images in a Brakhage film telling?)
> Apparently Brian didn't see Carmela's eyebrows
go up as she witnessed Tony at the therapist's
going on and on about how unloved he was as a
child.
I did. But the occasional undercutting of Tony by a subsidiary character does not offset the huge amount of time devoted to him (hence the heterophilic nature of the work). Tony is often in the middle of both the narrative and the frame (though in the latter case Tony's centrality may simply be a by-product of directoral indifference). There was one interesting moment at the end when Tony was talking to the guy in the wheelchair and he is framed so tightly that the top of his head is cut off by the top of the frame, as if he too were deficient in some way mentally. But every instance that hinted at visual intelligence was buried under an avalanche of moments where the camera was disported with little sense of logic (and I will admit upfront my suspicions regarding the "incompetencies-were-intended" aesthetic argument).
> It seems, though I could be wrong, that Brian
has a difficult time 'swallowing' narrative that
is ideologically aloof from his perspective.
I can swallow quite a lot, including narratives that I am aloof from or even those which repulse me. I recognize that I do not identify with or have any warm feelilngs about Tony (or any feelings whatsoever as a matter of fact. To me, that would be akin to having feelings for the musical note F#. The note F# and the character Tony Soprano are both part of a work that hopefully will provide me with aesthetic pleasure. But the presence of Tony Soprano or F# does not guarantee an experience of aesthetic pleasure. I may like the color blue, but I will not like a painting simply because the painter used blue in it).
Maybe if I shared Jerry's shocks of recognition or Doug's love/hate relationship with Tony, I would respond differently. But I can neither proclaim "Tony, c'est moi" nor respond to Tony as if he were real (and when I do experience shocks of recognition, I realize that they are a one-time experience. Upon subsequent viewings, the shocks dissipate as I am now familiar with the plot. I have argued elsewhere that the best films are more often than not plot deficient and tell simple stories. I have often found that there is a direct correlation between a high incidence of plot contrivance ["Can you believe what happened?!?!"] and a lack of mastery of the plastic elements of a medium).
THE SOPRANOS may be quite interesting from an sociological point of view (I often find that many old movies/television shows provide more anthropological insight than aesthetic pleasure). But the claim of greatness for THE SOPRANOS seems to rest on limited aesthetic evidence: a) it tells a good story I can identify with; and b) I can get involved with the characters. If only somebody had told Shakespeare: he needn't have bothered mastering blank verse.
Brian