I Woke Up This Morning, Reviewed ‘The Many Saints of Newark’

September 29, 2021

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The Many Saints of Newark (CREDIT: Warner Bros. Pictures/Screenshot)

Starring: Alessandro Nivola, Ray Liotta, Michael Gandolfini, Leslie Odom Jr., Vera Farmiga, Jon Bernthal, Michela De Rossi, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, John Magaro, William Ludwig, Michael Imperioli

Director: Alan Taylor

Running Time: 120 Minutes

Rating: R for The Typical Vices of Mobsters

Release Date: October 1, 2021 (Theaters and HBO Max)

Watching The Many Saints of Newark mostly just made me want to finally get around to watching The Sopranos. I’m a noted TV buff, so it’s been on my to-watch list for quite a while, but in this case the experience was a little more Pavlovian. As the end credits started rolling, they were accompanied by the familiar bass-and-drum intro of Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning,” aka one of the best TV theme songs of all time. It was as if this movie were just one long cold opening for the TV series it serves as a prequel for, and the only appropriate next step would be pressing play on the first episode. If the point of The Many Saints of Newark is indeed to get everyone who doesn’t already consider The Sopranos one of the greatest shows of all time to finally get around to checking it out, well, then, it kind of did its job.

But that’s a rather small-scale ambition for a two-hour movie. And I think it’s safe to assume that Sopranos creator David Chase had a lot more on his mind than that when co-penning this screenplay with Lawrence Konner. Essentially, this works as a sort of “Expanded Universe” addition to the Sopranos lore. Fans of the show get to discover the backstories of what their favorite characters were up to decades earlier in the midst of the 1967 Newark race riots. People will be pointing at their screens declaring things like, “Hey look, it’s Corey Stoll as a handsome young Uncle Junior!” And they’ll be wondering just how Vera Farmiga rounds out our understanding of Tony’s mom Livia. (Spoiler alert: she gets upset a lot at the men in her family.) And speaking of Tony, who can resist seeing if James Gandolfini’s son Michael can pull off the polo shirts just as iconically as his dad did? I know I can’t, and I only know about all this via pop culture osmosis.

As for how Many Saints stands by itself as its own particular story, it’s perfectly fine. It explores plenty of similar themes covered in countless other Italian-American mafia sagas, delivered with adequately convincing panache. The focus is not primarily on Tony, but rather Alessandro Nivola’s Dickie Moltisanti (father of Christopher, played in The Sopranos by Michael Imperioli, who narrates the film). Dickie is basically a model for manhood to a teenage Tony, which is a running concern in the midst of a whole lot of plot involving turf wars, mistresses, and stolen Mr. Softee trucks.

The most compelling moments are between Nivola and Ray Liotta as Dickie’s Uncle Sal (he also pulls double duty as Dickie’s hotheaded dad). Sal is the designated reformed mobster, dispensing Buddhist-informed advice to Dickie about “the Wanting” of life that leads to pain and suffering. Liotta’s casting of course calls back to his lead role in Goodfellas (in much the same way that Lorraine Bracco’s portrayal of Dr. Melfi did the same in The Sopranos). It’s during these conversations that Many Saints‘ reckoning with a long and inescapable tradition is most resonant. That tradition is basically impossible to escape, both for the characters living them and the pop culture creators and consumers drowning in them. We’re still stuck in this paradigm.

The Many Saints of Newark is Recommended If You Like: Sixtysomething actors inverting their most iconic roles, Accents as thick as gabagool, Violence punctuated by hairpiece-based comedy

Grade: 3 out of 5 Whackings

This Is a Movie Review: Terminator Genisys

August 5, 2015

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Arnie-Smile-Genisys

Terminator Genisys basically ignores the third and fourth movies in the series, but it should be noted that 3 and 4 do not really grapple with their predecessors, at least not very meaningfully. T3 backtracks on the message of T2, while Salvation merely fills in the blanks in a way that mostly stands on its own. Genisys, meanwhile, crisscrosses 1 and 2, while new machinations try to prevent or delay the victory or defeat of Skynet. It does not completely stand as its own thing, but there is so much thrown together (mostly gracefully), that it works as something. It manages to be fascinating, at least in an academic sense.

Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese’s interactions are colored by the knowledge of destiny, as they grapple with how to or how not to fulfill the roles that have already been set for them. It is a fairly effective treatise on the nature of stories in which the characters “know” what they are “supposed” to do. Emilia Clarke and Jai Courtney’s performances are not much more than serviceable, but maybe that is the point. Maybe in being locked into their roles, they cannot add too much extra color.

The most consistent draw of this series remains The Terminator himself. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on a bit of a hot streak in finding relaxed, playful subtleties in his performances, and that continues here, as his awkward cyborg smiles are just exactly right. Also, J.K. Simmons shows up as a beat cop who gets caught up in everything, and he is completely superfluous but very much welcome.

This Is A Movie Review: Thor: The Dark World

March 10, 2014

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Thor-The-Dark-World-Movie-2013-Review-Official-Trailer-Release-Date-1
While I surely enjoyed Thor: The Dark World, I also felt anxious for it to end for most of its running time, although that may have had to do with all the TV I was missing and would have to catch up on later.  But it may also have to do with the fact that at this point in the superheroic cinema game, the existence of each new movie like this feels so perfunctory.  In a weird way, The Dark World was one of the most encouraging and most discouraging entries in the genre.