The Sopranos: HBO Season 6 (Part 2 - The Final Episodes) [2007]

See Larger Image	List Price: £44.99 Our Price: £27.98 Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours Manufacturer: Warner Home Video Starring: Tony Sirico, Steven R. Schirripa, Aida Turturro, Michael Imperioli, James Gandolfini Directed By: Steve Buscemi, Danny Leiner, David Nutter, Alan Taylor, Steve Shill Average Customer Rating:
Audience Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over Binding: DVD EAN: 7321902178479 Format: PAL Label: Warner Home Video Manufacturer: Warner Home Video Number Of Items: 4 Publisher: Warner Home Video Region Code: 2 Release Date: 2007-11-19 Running Time: 540 Studio: Warner Home Video
Related Items The Sopranos: HBO Season 6 (Part 1) The Sopranos: Complete HBO Season 5 The Sopranos: Complete HBO Season 4 [1999] The Sopranos : Complete HBO Season 3 [1999] The Sopranos : Complete HBO Season 2 [1999]
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Little point for a review really...... Comment: This is the seventh box set taking the excellent 'Sopranos' to it's inconclusive conclusion. The final nine episodes included here are of the same high standard as those before it and continues the build up of tension started in Season six part 1. Anybody who has watched the show and has got to this late stage in the saga will not be needing a review to decide on a purchase, you're going to buy it anyway!!. To those people it is an excellent buy. i'm just a little disappointed that the cost has remained substantially higher than all the series before it. You've got to buy it to complete the set and they know that! For this point alone i've reduced the score to four stars. Customer Rating: Summary: There will never be enough superlatives for the Sopranos Comment: This last (half) series of the finest TV show ever made is actually one of its best (semi) seasons, so it makes some sense to review this masterwork from the (hopefully now spoiler-proof) end. The Sopranos finishes, indeed, as wonderfully as it began and carried on: constantly complimenting the viewer's intelligence, right up to the bitter-sweet dénouement. Yes, the penultimate episode is the proper narrative/dramatic "end," with its stunningly-staged assassination of Baccala and the calamitous (and, typically of the show, almost hilarious) near-fatal wounding of Silvio (to the sound of Nat King Cole, the sight of naked Bing bystanders and with hideous collateral damage to a passing motorcyclist). But the actual finale itself had to, er, not happen; in that typical Sopranos life-goes-on manner of astonishing observation of, and pleasure in, the less extreme, often seemingly mundane, and frequently drop-dead-laughing details of "family" life. (Examples, I'm sure, will crowd in on everyone who knows the show: Junior getting the hump with an unflattering court artist some series back; Junior's conviction, in this series, that his will-executor - an unseen character we know, only from Janice's brief reference, to have an artificial larynx - is from outer space; the ketchup bottle in the last ever episode... there are so many.) Individual episodes in this last set are also quite outstandingly brilliant. For me, number three ("Remember When"), is perfect Sopranos. It has an exquisitely-constructed counterpoint between a trip wherein Tony basically confronts Paulie with the problem of his trouble-making indiscretion about three series back, interspersed with the unfolding Cuckoo's Nest tragedy of Junior's inglorious "rule" of the mental health facility that is now his domain. The build-up of tension in these parallel worlds is breathtaking. Even as Tony finally asserts his scary authority over Paulie on an extremely uncomfortable boat-trip, Junior's "career" is meeting a sticky, violent end at the hands of a disturbed youth whose worship he has cultivated. The last shot of this episode, a track across one of those outdoor "pet encounter" sessions for Corrado's fellow-inmates, finishes on one of the most poignant images I've ever seen on TV, a devastating pan from the disfigured cat he's vacantly cuddling to the lost, toothless, living-dead face of Junior. Beautiful, dreadful. So: the final episode has a deliberate, but no less entertaining, sense of bathos to it. And this is Sopranos "anti-climax," remember, so it was always going to be a cut above. Indeed, to echo the quite credible references from other reviewers to its Shakespearian level of attainment, I have to say that the Sopranos' ending certainly puts it amongst the greats for all time - with no small hint of the Existential playfulness we've all come to treasure. In fact, this last series ends with the most vivid illustration of quantum physics since Schrodinger's Cat - really! Without getting into "spoiler" territory, I think we can confidently say (or not) that what happens "next" is entirely up to you/us. Or not: it's the audience ourselves who can most reasonably be considered to get "annihilated" in the series' last split second. Tony's "fate" won't be resolved until we reopen the "box" and look inside to see whether that Sopranos cat is alive or dead. The Uncertainty Principle in a nutshell - only the box gets switched off for us before we can look further. Mischievous David Case would probably deny it (just as he playfully pleads ignorance to the significance of all those oranges and eggs), but there is some exceptionally witty referencing going on. As Tony's fellow-patient Schwinn (the great Hal Holbrook) says early in the first phase of this final season, "reality" is only a perception of wave-forms and "we're all connected" (this in an episode that also features some Creationist nutters getting roundly satirised). So: that very last blip-out shot of Tony in the diner marks our own "disconnection" from the Sopranos' universe, an untidy switch-off that marks a proper anti-climax, weakly rhymed with the HBO "click-off" logo or the "stylus yank" cut-off at the end of every opening credits). It's that deliberate, that random. Maybe they all go to Paris, as Tony did in his near-death experience (the Eifel Tower beacon tantalisingly visible from an "American" hotel window) and as Carm actually does (only to encounter dead Adriana in a boulevard... and elsewhere ask Ro whether the place really exists when they're not there). The last episode even playfully gives us a supernaturally "aware" cat to plague Paulie in our last glimpses of him! Fantastic stuff - and all this in a "gangster" show that, during its time with us, has given us some of the funniest, most violent, tender, groovy and jaw-droppingly original moments we've ever had the pleasure of witnessing in a TV programme! The whole thing on box set - get it. Watch it. And, if you care at all about the cultural future, keep it as a bequest for your kids, along with all the other great complete works of which we might avail ourselves. Customer Rating: Summary: The End Comment: The sopranos is my all time favourite series ever to be on telly,its great and this for me was the best series out of them all.my favourite character died NO not tony,and the episods were very strong,will miss it but can always watch it back. Customer Rating: Summary: End of an Era Comment: One of the best drama series of all time comes to a quite brilliant, and on reflection incredibly satisfying end. Of course the end scene drove many people used to neat Hollywood endings mad, although this seems so disappointing that fans of this series appear to have learned nothing about serious intelligent drama not following formulaic structures. Indeed, if you think about the last scene a bit and its openness is part of the point of the whole series. For my money, the explanation of the final scene is easy- it's when the FBI, and thus by association, our (the camera's, the audiences') surveillance stops. There's no 'the bloke in the toilet's an assassin who comes out and whacks them all/ FBI man who arrests them all/ is a terrorist who blows them all up' or whatever other overly formulaic theory has been out there on the interweb, the show has been from the first to the last scene so much more intelligent and layered than that. Ignore all that, and just enjoy one of the best examples of television as an artform you'll ever see. Customer Rating: Summary: Who Shot J.R.? Comment: The Sopranos is the Shakespeare for the modern age; Res ipsa loquitur. The Sopranos has a bit of Hamlet thrown in there (Tony's relationship between his mother and his uncle; especially when they want Tony killed) and there exists an element of Richard III. Snobs may balk at the idea of a drama about a bunch of New Jersey mobsters and one of the great playwrights in history, but Shakespeare is, simply, a writer of dramatic theatre. Theatre is to be seen by the masses, not read in stuffy libraries. Only the passage of time and its historical Elizabethan importance has elevated it to a higher cultural conscience. All that The Sopranos needs is time. Added with a dose of Greek Tragedy, (like Shakespeare did) to pepper things up, and let it simmer away with tension, honour and tragedy. The first three episodes of part2 are slow and dull. Eventually we see Uncle Junior ending his days doped up without much dignity, isolated from `his world' due to him shooting Tony. His only friend is a troubled young man who looks on at Junior as a hero, a sort of Randle Patrick McMurphy who looks like Larry David. Bobby rises through the ranks and gets whacked for his troubles. Bobby is one of the nicest characters in `the family' and probably the only one who doesn't deserve to get killed, even despite the unavoidable killing he did on Tony's orders so they could get a shipment of cheap pills to arrive earlier. The second part of the season obviously ties up a few ends, I did not really like the `fade to black' ending initially, but then i realised its brilliance. It gives us a slimmer of hope that the saga may be continued one day, but with Big T's crew mostly in the morgue that might be a bit difficult. In fact, despite the ending scene, the last episode is a weak episode, possibly in the series. It could have ended just as good in the episode that preceeded it, with Tony sitting on the bed in the safe house, rifle in hand, scared and uncertain about his future. Twenty five years ago, American television was a running joke in British culture and our media. We went `ahh, bless them' for America's corny and low-brow tacky programmes and dire sitcoms (with the exception of Cheers, Roseanne, and a few others). Whilst we were hooked on Dallas and Dynasty, our snobbery meant that we also laughed at them in equal measure, especially at their unlikely storylines and over-the-top climaxes. Not any more! The BBC has become a national joke with its dumbing down and its over-the-top political correct madness. Pains me to say it, the shoe is now on the other foot. The Sopranos isn't politically correct, far from it, but it offers us paradoxical parallels that surprise us, as well as Tony - in an earlier series, Tony has a gripe over black people, especially some 'crackheads', yet the only man he couldn't bribe was a black police-officer, a man who risked his job to remain morally and legally honest in the process. It is these complex scenarios that help show American culture to the rest of the world. It is, in this way, more about America's society than it is about the mob. More Reviews