Who Really's Trying To Kill Tony?

I hate movie previews. I hate book covers. I hate learning about content I'm about to consume beyond the very general topic and perhaps a respectable review or two.

You know what I mean. Like those movie trailers that go "She was a mistress who wanted her husband dead. But then she fell for him again. She couldn't find the killer her lover had hired. Until she caught her husband in bed with the would-be killer. Death to Romance at a theatre near you." And they're showing you clips of the characters, the settings, the clues. Who decided that was a good selling technique? It's this very phenomenon that is part of the reason I can't sit through but three or four movies a year at the theater. Because you drop a quarter on the movie and snacks and then impatiently wait through the first hour and a half worth of the movie that delineates on the parts of the plot you've already learned.

Another thing that kills me in movies and TV is the utter insulting formulaic crutches that most directors and writers lean on. You know when you're watching a sitcom and you realize 3 minutes into it that you already know who's going to almost sleep with whom and who'll be forgiving whom and the only question is the props around which it will all get resolved?

Or the 'leave the camera focused on the prop left behind in the movie scene that will come back to haunt the protagonist' trick? Okay, great, thanks for telling me how the movie's going to end! Augh!


I'm going to speculate on here what I think is going on with the Sopranos storyline this season. Stop reading here if you don't want to know some of what's currently going on in show. You're forewarned.

One of the reasons I like the Sopranos (boy would my editors HATE the "lede" of this post and its Lez Zeppish rambling on) so much is because it's always done so smartly. It respects its audience enough to not dwell too much on the obvious. And I think it gave some subtle clues to a sideplot coincident with the Tony's realities storyline.

You know when that one white guy doctor walks into check on Tony and he sticks his hand in Tony's chest. What's with that whole repeated dialogue where Meadow keeps asking probing, almost doubtful questions of the dude. And then she asks him the name of Tony's antibiotics and he says one thing. And then Anthony gets in trouble for forgetting Tony's medication and it's another name. That doctor was a fake, man, sent in there by that one fat dude who's been hinting that if Tony is dead he'd be the man.

Just sayin' and speculatin'.