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The Sopranos: Boca (Review)

Boca pretty much interrupts a hot streak of first season Sopranos episodes. It serves as a reminder that the show might have brought the medium into the twenty-first century, serving as a massive influence on televisual storytelling over the past decade, but the first season was still a product of nineties television. Boca feels strangely like a stand-alone episode, a strange artefact from some parallel universe where David Chase and his team decided that The Sopranos might work just as well as a piece of episodic television, rather than as serialised narrative.

Boca feels like one of those “ripped from the headlines” issue-conscious pieces of television drama, as if we’re watching The Sopranos by way of Law & Order. Of course, the script still has the show’s wit, and the episode plays into the series’ themes, but Boca feels a little strange. It’s not a bad piece of television, but it’s the first episode of The Sopranos that feels like it could have been repurposed from something else.

Old love...

Old love…

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Michael Clarke Duncan, R.I.P.

It’s very strange to hear that an actor who really emerged during your life time has passed away. I was actually already an aspiring movie buff when Michael Clarke Duncan gave his breakout performance in The Green Mile. Duncan, of course, had been around for a while before that. He’d been working in the entertainment industry even before he decided to seriously pursue acting as a career – the early nineties saw the guy working as a bodyguard for Will Smith among others. He turned earnestly to acting in the mid- to late-nineties, and had a small but memorable role in Armageddon that led Bruce Willis to recommend him for The Green Mile. In many ways, I watched Duncan become a recognisable screen presence, and I was very shocked and saddened to hear of his passing.

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