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I can swipe this story from Medford News Weekly...because I wrote it!
https://medfordnewsweekly.wordpress.com/2020/05/12/hotline-to-the-underground-may-11-2020/#more-1210
Now we go from the real world to the fictional world of Tony Soprano and his ultra dysfunctional two families. HBO has free viewings for some Comcast customers and watching this series the second time around I had forgotten how brutally violent and dark this gangster horror story truly was/is.
Probably not a smart idea to spend COVID-19 time watching a beyond-vicious bunch of angry individuals creating mayhem on your television set. You are the psychiatrist, Lorraine Bracco who migrated to Rizzoli and Isles as well as I Married A Mobster and Blue Bloods. Dr. Melfi is the psychiatrist obsessed with hearing first-hand tales of her gangster client, Tony Soprano. As the late Donald Westlake (of The Stepfather fame) told me, the script writing in the Sopranos is amazing (paraphrased.) Great scripts, terrific acting, and aspects of violence hard to imagine are mixed in with Jon Favreau, Frankie Valli, Lauren Bacall, Sir Ben Kingsley, Steven Van Zandt and many more. Bacall, who passed in 2014, got mugged in a 2006 appearance on The Sopranos. Mugging Lauren Bacall? Really? Tony Soprano is as ruthless as he is screwed up, and second spin around I am convinced that this show is The Munsters in the Twilight Zone.
When Uncle Junior makes a second attempt on Tony’s life the dream sequence is very much the Twilight Zone. Racism, homophobia, relentless battling at the family mansion as well as in the dens of sin where Tony reigns supreme all made for a re-launch of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” that they never saw coming.
Some trivia from IMDB – “
He and wife Maureen Van Zandt were married by (Reverend) Little Richard, with a wedding reception band consisting of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Gary U.S. Bonds, Little Milton and the wedding band from The Godfather (1972).”
RIP Little Richard Penniman this week.