Films This Week 10/01/21
by Gary Palmucci | 1st October 2021 | Gary's Corner
We’re continuing our current lineup of Virtual Cinema for one more week, with some new titles due later this month. ‘The Sopranos’ prequel film The Many Saints of Newark finally arrives in theatres this weekend – though few in my ‘hood seem to be playing it, perhaps due to its simultaneous availability on HBO Max. Reviews are mixed (Indiewire described it in part as “‘Sopranos’ fan service” and the NY Times’ Manohla Dargis was wholly unsympathetic); the track record of feature films that try to emulate successful TV shows is spotty at best. But another recent NYT article about the series’ newfound popularity among younger viewers reminded me how seldom I’m able to resist, whenever I’m trolling YouTube, sampling a vintage snippet of bloody mayhem or confrontation.
During its 1999-2007 run on HBO, the series “The Sopranos” became a sort of polestar for me. I watched much of it with my son, who was a junior high student in season one, and midway through college by its still-hotly-debated finale. As Tony Soprano and his family, friends and partners in crime each year descended ever deeper into violent darkness, my son made the inevitable trek from adolescence into early adulthood. The world of New Jersey gangsters was thankfully far removed from ours, yet the series’ dramatic arc seemed to mirror the sharp jabs of disillusionment that my son must have been facing as he moved into his twenties, and that also seems to permeate so much of American life in this new century.
I think that’s why the series keeps finding new generations of viewers and has inspired this cinema spin-off from its creators. As for my son, now in his mid-thirties, he got married last month – a joyous event. Over the summer he reported that he and his fiancée were rewatching a certain classic TV series – in its entirety….
Gary Palmucci, Film Curator
New Plaza Cinema