[teh b0lly!!1]

Finally got around to watching The Many Saints of Newark. Being a huge Sopranos fan, I was apprehensive about this. It's very challenging to have a whole new cast play a whole universe of characters so fully inhabited and developed by the original cast. Almost every character on the Sopranos is very round and there are a lot of callbacks to the show here, some more obvious and some less. Sometimes it also ends up feeling a little bit forced but I guess that's to be expected from a feature like this.

More than anything else I see this as David Chase's farewell tour to all these characters that are obviously still in his flesh and blood. He's a special writer imo. The characters are mostly very consistent with who they were on the show. This feels like a particularly dense, double length Sopranos episode. Alan Taylor also directed some episodes for the show and I thought he did a decent job overall of keeping the show's tone but also being a slightly more cinematically romanticized and glam-y version of it, especially seeing as the film takes place in the 60s\70s.

In the original show I always got this sense like David Chase deeply loved James Gandolfini somehow. Their work together, the writing and acting and direction combined created one of the greatest antiheroes ever, imho. Simultaneously beautiful and ugly in equal measures, as weak as he is strong, you can't look away from him making every wrong choice. James Gandolfini’s presence and amazing acting made that entire show possible, because he was so in tune with the character, Chase could really go places in his writing, and trust that it will all fall into place around Gandolfini.

In that sense, his son’s presence in the film as young Tony justifies the existence this film in a similar way. He just has the same blue moon in his eyes. It’s pretty wild. It really does just seem like Tony Soprano as a young kid. The type of de-aging you cannot fake. An authentic cinematic pleasure that occurs very rarely. Seeing his face and eyes react to things, it’s like, it lines up perfectly with the Tony we’ve watched for 6 seasons. It’s simply there. He's not the finest actor, but it works just because it's him.

There’s some nice little touches, like how Tony’s mother Livia looked a lot like Carmela when she was young (actually Livia has always been one of the most well written characters on the show, and she's written just as well here). Corrado’s arc. Or how Tony does the same things as a teenager as AJ and gets told off in the same undeterring ways. Many parallels and I'm very sure this will reward multiple viewings.

You can't really call this a perfect A+ movie, it's not that, and some characters sometimes feel a little like a caricature of themselves. The acting can be hit and miss. But I still loved it. In a world full of endless bullshit, this film comes across to me as a true labor of love, a real passion project. A passing of the torch, and honoring that prolific friendship with a lot of respect and gratitude. I love David Chase more than any other modern day showrunner and I wish there were more people like him around.