By Ella Taylor

I caught a lot of flack, most of it out of New York, for my negative review of Sex and the City. Outraged fans of the show and the movie accuse me variously of being “morbidly obese” (just pleasantly plump, I swear) and style-retarded (well, one does try); too young to appreciate the four shopaholics and a sexist, ageist cheap shooter for calling them middle-aged (I’m closer to assisted living than all four of them put together, as my comparisons to The Mary Tyler Moore Show will attest ); a bit angry (too right); and (did I dream it, ‘cause now I can’t find it?) a real bitch.

None of which has changed my assessment of the movie as a flabby shadow of its TV that reeks of disingenuous mixed message. Still, attention must be paid to the passion with which its fans defend SATC the show and the movie. I think one of the reasons is that, like Bridget Jones’s Diary (a movie I defended), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (which I loved as uncritically as today’s fans do SATC) and, in its retrograde way, Our Miss Brooks, SATC expresses the loneliness of urban single women, a potent contemporary theme in an age of hooking up. Only it glamorizes, and so trivializes that loneliness by gussying it up with endless partying and designer labels few of its audience can afford. That’s not cultural commentary — it’s pandering through advertising.

Read Ella Taylor's review of Sex and the City, with comments, here.

Her review also appeared in our sister paper, the Village Voice, with more comments, here.

Photo Craig Blankenhorn/New Line Cinema

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In 2007, LA Weekly film critic Scott Foundas was asked to contribute an essay about Sydney Pollack's early television work to an Italian-language book about the director published in connection with a retrospective at the Alba Film Festival. That essay appears below, for the first time in English.

There is little outwardly remarkable about the 1961-66 American television series Ben Casey, unless you count novelty: It is one of the earliest models of that now-familiar TV staple known as the medical procedural, in which there is no health emergency too great for a team of brilliant doctors (here led by the eponymous, fresh-faced resident) to solve in an hour of screen time (save, of course, for the occasional two-part episode). But there are moments when Ben Casey transcends the ordinary and enters into a realm of deeply humanistic grace, and a great many of them can be found in the episodes — 15 of them — directed by Sydney Pollack. On this, you will have to trust me, for these shows are not easily seen, and indeed to consider Pollack’s TV career is to be reminded of how, even in this age of DVD saturation, so much from the early years of the medium remains trapped in limbo.

I am thinking, in particular, about the Ben Casey episode entitled “A Cardinal Act of Mercy” (1963), in which the great diva Kim Stanley delivers a searing performance as a morphine-addicted trial lawyer; another, “For the Ladybug…One Dozen Roses” (1962), where Cliff Robertson is a battle-scarred fighter pilot who has lost the ability to fly and, with it, the will to live; and the enormously moving “Monument to an Aged Hunter” (1962), in which Dr. Casey must choose which of two patients to save using an experimental antibiotic — a legendary writer and philanthropist (played by Wilfrid Hyde-White) or a younger man of no particular importance. These are hours of television in which the medical drama may be resolved by the time the credits roll, but the moral and ethical questions weigh heavy into the night.

Read on...

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Sydney Pollack died over the weekend at age 73. Three years ago, Pollack spoke to LA Weekly's Scott Foundas about his career, the costs of making films, and his production company Mirage, which recently put out Michael Clayton, nominated for seven Oscars.

In this interview from April 2005, Pollack talked to Foundas about his latest directing effort, The Interpreter, in which he also acted. Pollack's production partner in Mirage, Anthony Minghella, died in March.

Declaration of Independents
Sydney Pollack is all for lowering costs, raising IQs
By SCOTT FOUNDAS
Thursday, April 21, 2005

The company is called Mirage Enterprises, but there is nothing illusory about the career of its CEO. For 40 years now, Sydney Pollack has been making movies in Hollywood, and for the past two decades Mirage has been the base from which he’s overseen production of his own films, as well as those of a Who’s Who of distinguished peers (including Anthony Minghella, Pollack’s partner in the company since 2000). It’s also been a launching pad for auspicious young talent like Steven Zaillian (Searching for Bobby Fischer), Steve Kloves (The Fabulous Baker Boys) and Ira Sachs (whose Mirage-produced Forty Shades of Blue won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year). All told, movies produced and/or directed by Pollack have earned some 80 Oscar nominations, with Pollack himself collecting Best Picture and Best Director statuettes for Out of Africa (1985). Not bad for a kid from Lafayette, Indiana, who started out wanting to become an actor and, in his spare time, has managed to work in that capacity for the likes of Robert Altman, Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick.

Read the rest of the Foundas' article on Pollack here.

Also, LA Weekly contributor Chuck Wilson has a nice appreciation of Sydney Pollack on his own blog Flickers. Click here to read Wilson's piece.

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On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the International Documentary Association polled its members (themselves filmmakers, industry executives, and academics) to determine the 25 best documentary films of all time. The results, announced publicly last week, span more than 50 years of movie history, from Alain Resnais' landmark 1955 Holocaust film Night and Fog, to the pioneering cinema verite works of Frederick Wiseman (Titicut Follies), DA Pennebaker (Don't Look Back), and the Maysles brothers (Salesman), to such contemporary classics as Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line and Ross McElwee's Sherman's March. And what of Michael Moore? Fret not: he's there too--three times in fact. When the IDA contacted me earlier this year to ask if I would write an essay about the number one film on the list, director Steve James' magnificent Hoop Dreams, I happily accepted the assignment. That text appears below. Essays on the other top-ten films, written by the likes of Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan and documentary filmmaker George Butler, can be found here.

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The orange-and-black striped ball spins through the air, hovers uncertainly at the net, and in that seemingly endless instant, entire lives hang in the balance. Not just those of the young, uniformed men on the court, but of fathers and brothers who once dreamed of NBA stardom themselves, of mothers who send their sons out into dangerous streets each day and pray they will come home alive, and of coaches who burn with desire for conference titles and state championships. Indeed, no other movie has ever made us feel the agony and potential ecstasy of a single jump shot, or even a free throw, in quite the same way as producer/director Steve James, cinematographer/producer Peter Gilbert and producer/editor Frederick Marx's Hoop Dreams.

We are not long into this extraordinary record of five years in the lives of two young, inner-city Chicago basketball stars before we realize that--for Arthur Agee and William Gates--each time they reach for the basket they are reaching for a college scholarship, for a future outside of the ghetto, for a better life. Yet, for all the time Hoop Dreams spends on the court, and in the lion's den of fast-talking college recruiters, what lingers most in the memory 13 years after the film's release are those quotidian moments in which James, Gilbert and Marx so richly evoke the everyday realities of lower-class African-American life: a neighborhood playground that has become a haven for drug pushers and addicts; a family living by the light of a single lamp after the electricity has been disconnected; and, in a moment at once joyful and devastating, the baking of a cake to celebrate an 18th birthday in a place where far too many kids don't live to see 18.

Hoop Dreams was a landmark documentary in several respects: One of the first feature-length films shot entirely on video, it helped to usher in the DV revolution, while its $8 million theatrical gross (the highest for any non-music documentary at that time) suggested untapped big-screen potential for nonfiction films.

Then, in what can only be called a sinful omission, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences failed to include Hoop Dreams among the five nominees for that year's documentary Oscar, sparking widespread accusations of clubbiness and outright fraud on behalf of the Academy's documentary-nominating committee, and instigating reforms in the process that would ultimately lead to the creation of a special documentary branch and long-overdue nominations for the likes of Errol Morris and Michael Moore.

Hoop Dreams did, however, manage to score an Oscar nomination for film editing--only the second time a nonfiction feature has been thusly recognized, and a reminder that few films of any sort have ever carried three hours of screen time with such breathtaking efficiency. When it is over, you crave more, as one does when savoring the last morsels of a particularly satisfying meal, or upon reading the last sentences of some great and expansive novel. The word "epic" is applied to movies so offhandedly nowadays that it has nearly lost its meaning, but Hoop Dreams is one of the few that merits the term an epic not just about the popular religion of sports, but about the vicissitudes of race and class, and the steep price of admission to the American Dream.

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Although it isn't as well-known as, say, Grauman's Chinese in Hollywood, or the Grand Théâtre Lumière in Cannes, the Sala Leopoldo Lugones on the tenth floor of the Teatro San Martín in downtown Buenos Aires belongs on any list of the world's great movie theaters. A permanent screening facility for the Argentinian national cinematheque and a regular venue of the annual Buenos Aires Festival of International Independent Cinema, the Lugones is celebrating its 40th anniversary next month. To mark this historic occasion, the Lugones' excellent chief programmer, Luciano Monteagudo, asked a sampling of critics (including this one), filmmakers, and other Lugones faithful to write brief reminiscences of the theater for a commemorative supplement of the newspaper Página/12, where Monteagudo is also the film critic. The results appear in today's issue. For those who can't read Spanish, my contribution (originally written in English) appears below.

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La Lugones y yo

When we speak about the movies we love, too often we fail to mention the places in which we saw them, though the two entities are hardly independent of one another. Perhaps this is an antiquated idea in an age when the next generation of cinephiles—if there is to be one—will have grown up watching movies on laptops, video iPods, and those other lamentable descendants of Edison's single-viewer motion-picture machines. And yet, I would propose that for those of us who still relish to see movies on the big, public screen, in the company of a few hundred (or perhaps just a few dozen) strangers, the right cinema can make a great movie seem that much greater.

The Sala Leopoldo Lugones is one such cinema—one of the world's greatest, in fact. It is not the biggest, or the most palatial, or the most state of the art. (Nor, I should add, are most of the films that are shown there.) It is, rather, warm and lived-in, a bit battered by time, and as comfortable as the weathered loafers our feet may prefer to a pair of gleaming new ones. Its chief quality is one that can not be drawn on architectural blueprints, but which is similar to a quality possessed by the world's great cathedrals. It is a feeling one gets upon crossing the threshold, a shared feeling of being that says this is a place where others like you—the true believers of cinema—have come throughout the decades to worship at the altar of the flickering light. To take the metaphor one step further, getting to the Lugones requires an ascension—ten flights, to be exact, either by slow-moving elevator or, if one is less lucky, by staircase, after which you are sure to feel penitent for whatever earthly sins you have committed.

My own first visit to the Lugones occurred in April of 2004, during the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema—a true annus mirabilis during which the Lugones played host to retrospectives of John Ford, Glauber Rocha, Jonas Mekas, and James Benning, as well as sidebar of rarities (including Frank Capra's silent The Matinee Idol) on loan from the Cinematheque Francaise. Some of those days I entered the building at mid-day and did not re-emerge until well after dusk. And I have since returned to the Lugones many times, during subsequent editions of the BAFICI, and in my own mind whenever I have reflected back on movies seen there. We are a fundamentally transient people, we cinephiles, wandering the earth in search of new moviegoing horizons. So we must, like all pilgrims, seek adoptive homes in various far-flung corners of the globe, and the Lugones is one in which I know I will take shelter again, as soon as the needle on the compass points due south.

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A veteran critic turns rookie programmer for the 45th New York Film Festival
By Scott Foundas
From The Reeler

On Monday, July 30, as I arrived in New York for my first tour of duty on the New York Film Festival selection committee, I received an e-mail announcing the death of Ingmar Bergman -- one of two devastating blows that would be suffered by the world film community before the week was out (or even half-over). A fortnight -- and some 60 or 70 movies vying for a coveted NYFF slot -- later, I felt assured that, despite the doomsday tone of many Bergman and Antonioni obits, cinema itself was still very much alive and well, and that anyone claiming otherwise simply wasn't looking very hard.

Indeed, for two weeks in Manhattan, I did little else but watch movies, staggering the seven blocks from Lincoln Center back to my hotel most nights in a kind of euphoric daze, my thoughts abuzz with the movies and pieces of movies I had seen in the hours prior, my brain feeling as though it needed a rub down. Looking back on it now, I can say without hesitation that it was the tougher (if also the most rewarding) of the two jobs I have worked in the thick of a sweltering East Coast summer -- and if I tell you that the first was putting roofs on houses underneath the Florida sun over the three months between my freshman and sophomore years of college, that should help put things into perspective. There are, of course, people out there who believe that watching movies for a living fails to qualify as "real" work. To which I say: Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.

Read on...

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By Mel Yiasemide

In its opening sequences at a packed Directors Guild Theatre last Monday, Michael Moore's Sicko had the crowd laughing with disbelief as a dumbfoundingly boyish President Bush lamented that "too many OB/GYN's aren't able to practice their love with women all across the country."

The laughter, and the tears, continued throughout, as Sicko's overriding point, that the world's wealthiest country must provide free, universal health care to its citizens – with Britain, France and Cuba as chief examples – was delivered with a potent mix of searing truth and comedic revelation.

Post-screening, a black-clad, baseball-capped Michael Moore took to the stage for a Q&A after being introduced by director Ron Howard, the evening's MC.

"We just came back from San Pedro Street in front of the Rescue Mission," Moore explained. He had set up a giant screen at Skid Row and broadcast Sicko to the homeless people there. "Our big L.A. press conference is... tomorrow night. But I wanted to have the first showing at Skid Row. It was really something.

"I've been really bothered by the security camera footage when I first saw it," he continued, referring to a scene in Sicko that shows a disoriented old homeless woman circling L.A.'s Skid Row sidewalk after being
dropped off there from a nearby hospital.

When director Howard opened the floor up to questions, it was clear that most of the audience loved this movie and strongly backed its cause. "What do we do?" asked one man. "Support SB 840," Moore answered quickly, referring to the California Universal Healthcare Act authored by Senator Sheila Kuehl. "And HR 676," its nationwide counterpart.

"We spent two and a half months reading more than 25,000 e-mails," he said of the overwhelming public response to his call for health care horror stories when he was researching this film. That's when Sicko's goal became clear: "Saving ten lives isn't gonna do it. Don't chase one company, but the system. We have to talk about who we are as a people. I can't understand why a society does this, why it allows nine million kids to have no health insurance."

"What's your answer going to be when people bring up the inevitable issue of treating illegal immigrants?" another audience member asked.

Moore's reply was simple: If a person needs medical attention in this country, we can – and should – give it, no questions asked. If America can afford to spend trillions fighting a war in Iraq, and an embargoed, impoverished Cuba can provide citizens and noncitizens alike with some of the most renowned medical care in the world without charge, so can we. "Maybe we should ask ourselves, what would Jesus do?"

He talked about the time he staged a health care Olympics on his NBC show TV Nation: He had dispatched film crews to hospitals in Florida, Canada and Cuba, in a real-time experiment to see which country's medical team could fix a broken bone fastest and cheapest. "Bob Costas and Ahmad Rashad did a play-by-play. Cuba won. She set the bone correctly, charged nothing. Canada almost won, but she charged the guy $15 for crutches. She came in second. We got a call from standards and practices: 'Cuba can't win.' 'They did.' 'Not on NBC. We can't show it.' We actually switched it on the show – Canada won.

"I can't believe I actually took a boat to Cuba," said Moore, about the trip – documented in Sicko – in which he travels to the Communist state with three insured Americans whose own country has let them down in their search for adequate, affordable treatment of ailments they developed after volunteering at Ground Zero. "Now here I am in trouble with the government because I went to Cuba. I'm under some kind of investigation with criminal penalties for violating the embargo act or something."

Moore recalled the time a set worker at the 2003 Academy Awards called him an asshole, just after he'd won an Oscar for Bowling for Columbine, then denounced Bush for declaring war on Iraq, an act of unabashed honesty that got him booed off the stage. Years later, that same man ran into Moore again on a different film set. He approached Moore to tell him he was profusely sorry for what he had done, and for ruining his Oscar moment.

"It's okay, I told him. You believed your president. You should be able to believe your president."

Moore implored Republicans and Democrats to come together to build a universal health care plan that does away with insurance companies and other middlemen: "I really want to reach out to people who don't necessarily share my political views. All Americans should be able to see a doctor and not have to
worry about paying for it."

Sicko will undoubtedly build the kinds of bridges between America and other countries that so many U.S. films and media outlets have failed – or refused – to do.

Says Moore: "Fox News called it brilliant and uplifting last week, and I thought, 'Are they trying to ruin me?' "
Also read Ella Taylor's review of Sicko.

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Wednesday at 8, if you can make it. Sounds intriguing.

Straight from Austin, Texas, A German and A Mexican Tour showcases work from filmmakers Katja Straub and Miguel Alvarez. Both love, tell, and collect stories - narrative or documentary - always with an emphasis on visual exploration. Their rather non-traditional shorts range from personal documentary to narrative film, from experimental to cinema verité. Drawing upon their unique cultural roots, Katja and Miguel offer up stories of Bavarian weather candles, inherited music toys in the forest of Latin America, imprisoned African magic in Berlin, and the like. FILMMAKERS IN ATTENDANCE!

 Read about at Chicken Corner. 

More details to be had at the Echo Park Film Center website.

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O.C. Weekly's Luke Y. Thompson has made the trek up the 5 to watch a bunch of movies, and blog from the Los Angeles Film Festival.

Chasing Ghosts and Iranians – June 25

Cool Cats and Bad Kitties – June 24

Dancin' to the Jailhouse Doc – June 23

Lost Girls and Mighty Black Men – June 23

Or read them all at OC Weeky's Navelgazing blog.

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St. Eligius Hospital turns out to be an autistic child's fanciful daydream; a suicidal J.R. Ewing fires a revolver, possibly at himself, possibly at the beady-eyed demon in the bedroom mirror; the Seinfeld gang gets put on trial for their supposed lack of humanity. Television history is rife with final episodes of landmark, long-running series that have left loyal fans feeling dazed, confused and royally pissed-off. Judging by the published reports, it would seem that Sunday night's series finale of The Sopranos has now joined those infamous ranks. But it doesn't deserve to, and I would argue that all those out there in TV land who have spent the last 48 hours cursing the name of series creator David Chase never really understood or appreciated what made The Sopranos so great in the first place.

In Las Vegas, where I spent the weekend leading up to and including the Sopranos finale, even those individuals who didn't have money riding on the outcome could scarcely keep themselves from speculating about it. Would Tony graduate to that great pork store in the sky, the way his loyal lieutenant (and brother-in-law) Bobby Baccalieri had just the week prior? Would he live, only to lose another loved one — this time maybe a blood relative — to the family business? One friend of mine, the legendary movie producer and sales agent Jeff Dowd (in town for the annual Cinevegas film festival), said he was sure that Carmela Soprano, finally having had her fill of Tony's shenanigans, would herself take up arms. But then again, Dowd added, he had it on good authority that Chase had filmed multiple endings to the episode just to throw potential spoilers off the scent. So, really, anything could happen.

Anything, I suppose, except for nothing at all. Indeed, even the best Vegas odds makers hadn't given a moment's thought to the possibility that, after eight years and 86 hours of ground-breaking television, The Sopranos might sign off forever with one of the greatest fragmentary non-endings since Franz Kafka's The Castle trailed off in mid-sentence. In that moment, in the Palms hotel suite where I was watching the episode with Dowd and a dozen or so other industry types, the disappointment was pea-soup thick, and by the next morning the newspapers were filled with acid-tongued anecdotes about Sopranos viewing parties from coast to coast at which those in attendance, puzzled by Chase's abrupt cut to black in the middle of the episode's final scene, held their collective breath at what they felt certain was a momentary interruption in their cable service.

The Los Angeles Times reported that at one high-ticket gathering in Hollywood, Florida, where fans had paid hundreds of dollars to watch the finale in the company of select cast and crew members, a woman stood up and shouted "What the hell was that anyway?" — a scene doubtless repeated in living rooms across America. Meanwhile, even some professional critics were busy holding Chase's feet to the fire, accusing him at best of having copped out or, at worst, of having played some sadistic joke on his legions of worshipful viewers. In another Los Angeles Times article, this one headlined "Sopranos: What was that all about?", the critic Mary McNamara opined that "Ending a series with the social weight of The Sopranos is not an enviable task, but end it must, and not with the sophomoric gesture of a blank screen."

For the moment, I'll reserve comment on the sophomoric gestures of some published arts criticism and just say that what I personally find most surprising isn't how The Sopranos ended, but that anyone — least of all the show's supposed die-hard fans — would have expected anything different. Here is a series that, since its inception, has always taken the road less traveled, that managed to invoke a lifetime of mob-movie clichés while simultaneously transcending them. It was a meta-mob-movie in which the characters learned how to be gangsters from watching White Heat and GoodFellas and the Godfather trilogy, and in which family matters were forever intruding upon Family matters. Within the seemingly restrictive boundaries of an exhausted dramatic genre (Was it even possible to care about the petty tribulations of old-fashioned gangsters in the midst of the Enron era?), Chase managed to weave a great American epic about the burden of power, the indignity of old age, the terror of children that they will grow up to become their parents, and, of course, the inability of modern medicine to cure all that ails us (especially existential crises). And yet, people expected Chase to end things...how exactly? With the funeral of Tony Soprano? With Carmela and the kids joining the Federal Witness Protection program? With Artie Bucco deciding to sell the Vesuvio and the whole cast gathering together to sing "Auld Lang Syne"?

No matter what Chase did, of course, it was never going to be to everyone's liking. What he did do, however, strikes me as one of the boldest strokes in a series that was never short on radical gestures. Contrary to the abrupt plug-pulling that some have accused it of being, the final scene of the final Sopranos was in fact a carefully plotted and ingeniously executed distillation of Chase's three greatest themes: work, death and blood ties. Nothing hasty or unplanned about it. We are, as at the end of so many episodes, gathered for a Sopranos family dinner — not at home or at the Vusivio, but this time at Holsten's, a real ice-cream parlor and diner located in the Brookdale section of North Jersey. Tony, the first to arrive, sits down in a booth and, after contemplating several selections (including "I Gotta Be Me" and "In a Lonely Place") punches up some classic Journey on the jukebox. One by one, Carmela, AJ and Meadow arrive, while Chase reminds us, with each nervous ring of the door chime and each menacing cutaway to the mysterious stranger eyeing Tony from the counter that, for this family, the specters of execution or imprisonment forever loom like the sword of Damocles. Then, just as Steve Perry prepares to once more tell us to not stop believing, Chase does exactly that — he stops, effectively leaving it up to each individual viewer to decide whether the lives of some of the most memorable characters in the history of American fiction end over a plate of onion rings or go on and on and on and on.

You can call that a cop-out if you so desire, but to my mind the failing of the final Sopranos isn't Chase's — it's the audience's. Reading those Monday-morning reports of disgruntled viewers assailing cable operators with reports of service outages, I was reminded of something the director David Lynch said to me last fall when we were discussing his most recent (and most widely misunderstood) film, Inland Empire. "Some people really like to know what everything is," he said of viewers ruffled by his own penchant for loose ends and elliptical narratives. "I don't know how they go through life, because life has so many things that are abstract, but they do, and they just like to know — they've got that kind of mind, or being." The comparison is apt, I think, because outside of Lynch, Chase is one of the few contemporary American filmmakers to have actively embraced surrealism and abstract expressionism as part of his aesthetic, and the 21-episode farewell season of The Sopranos could well be considered his Inland Empire, from Tony's comatose Kevin Finity dream to those final seconds of silence and black.

What the reaction to The Sopranos finale rather dishearteningly proves is that many in the show's audience really were watching every week to see who might get whacked next instead of, you know, how David Chase would further push the aesthetic envelope of dramatic television storytelling. It also says something larger (and even more disheartening) about a culture that has been conditioned — perhaps in schools that fail to meet the minimum standards we should demand for our children's education, perhaps by the small-mindedness and lack of ambition in most movies, novels, plays, etc. — to believe that proper stories have distinct beginnings, middles and ends and that anything which departs from this formula is, for lack of a better word, wrong. It says something about an audience that prefers a passive form of spectatorship to an active one, that wishes to sit back and be told exactly how to think and feel at every given moment — an attitude, I would argue, too often carried forth from the cinema or the TV room into the voting booth. And it says something about people who long for closure in things — like human relationships — that are by their very nature forever in flux. As David Chase applied the final strokes to his masterful canvas, it became clear that he had created a Jackson Pollack in a world that prefers Norman Rockwells.

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