Best Sopranos Tangent Episode Ever

1) The Russian (Season 3)

After a nearly eight-month interruption, I am finally finishing off my list of the best Sopranos tangent episodes ever (I was waiting for the second half of Season 3 to appear on On Demand).

Before I begin, here’s a refresher on the rest of the top five:
2) The trip to Colby(Season 1)
3) Tony, Paulie and Christopher Go to Italy (Season 2)
4) Tony meets his father’s gooma, Tim Daly gets into gambling (Season 5)
5) The FBI wiretapping episode (Season 3)

In this episode, a routine collection turns into a disaster when Christopher and Paulie are sent to get $5,000 from an alcoholic Russian giant. They get the money but antagonize him and end up killing him–or so they think. Since the Russian is “like brother” to Slava, Tony’s Russian money launderer, Tony orders Paulie to make the Russian disappear. They take him down to south Jersey, to the Pine Barrens, during the dead of winter. When they open the trunk, the Russian is still alive, and he’s pissed. They walk him out to the woods so he can dig his own grave, but he escapes. They shoot him but are unable to find his body, and end up lost in the Pine Barrens. They spend the night in the woods, sleeping in an abandoned van and eating frozen ketchup and relish packs for sustenance.

The irony of calling this episode a tangent is that at the time, we all thought this was vital to the plot of Season 3. When Christopher and Paulie are finally saved by Tony and Bobby–and they find that Paulie’s car is gone–we all assumed that meant the Russian was out there and would have his revenge. Visions of interethnic mob warfare danced in our heads, alongside the notion that perhaps Paulie had made an unforgivable mistake. But three and a half seasons and six years later, there have been no repercussions.

Unread Letters

Did anyone else find it odd that the National Board of Review yesterday called Letters from Iwo Jima the best movie of 2006–when the first review I know of only appeared in Variety the day after the National Board of Review’s list came out? Rotten Tomatoes only has one review; Metacritic doesn’t have a single one.

My problem with the National Board of Review publishing their list before anyone–including critics–have seen the movies in question is that they create a frontrunner, which is a particular problem during awards season when critics and Oscar voters tend to follow a herd mentality. Perhaps more of concern is that the 150 members often have terrible judgment; in 2004, they chose Finding Neverland as the best movie and didn’t even recognize Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. I’m also bothered by the Board’s lack of transparency; unlike all the American film critic societies, they don’t publish their membership. That always opens the door for shenanigans.

I’m not suggesting that Letters from Iwo Jima is bad movie–indeed, the Variety review makes it sound terrific, a subversion of the World War II war film genre–just that the NBR is giving it an unfair advantage come award season.

Where’s the beef?

Richard Linklater has taken a curious approach to his adaptation of Fast Food Nation, the bestselling nonfiction book by Eric Schlosser that helped spark America’s early-’00s disillusionment with McDonalds’ and its brethren. He’s turned it into a fictional account of a dozen souls tied to the fast food industry.

I imagine he figured two things: one, that Morgan Spurlock had already made the definitive documentary on the industry, Super Size Me, and two, audiences would be more responsive to a star-filled drama than a Frederick Wiseman-style expose. But as good as Super Size Me was–and it was excellent–the perfect complement to its personalized look at the nutritional horrors of McDonalds would have been a globalized investigation of the infrastructure that produces a 576-calorie Big Mac with 12 grams of saturated fat for $3.10. A documentary would have made visual what was implicit in both Spurlock’s movie and Schlosser’s book. Instead, Linklater has made a disjointed, unconvincing, unengaging, occasionally dismally acted mess that fails even to shock until its final minutes.