There's another point of contrast: The Wire is a lot more warm and human than The Sopranos (or at least I think so). I mean, The Wire is full of venal, corrupt, flawed and downright evil characters, but the show very rarely seems to sit in judgement of them. The Sopranos, on the other hand, has a cold, detached,…

The weirdest bit of the Father Phil/Rosalie scene is how he's wearing her dead husband's watch as he comforts her. That's a whole other level of creepiness.

Second-best line from that episode:

End credits
Re-watching the series, I didn't remember there being such a sense of ominous foreboding at the end of the season. Maybe it's hindsight at knowing what's to come?

Les Miserables: Money Never Sleeps

We're inside the Bro-Douche Event Horizon here.

The scene in question: http://www.youtube.com/watc…

The tracking shot through the Ministry of Information, with paper and workers flying around everywhere, proceeding up the stairs to Ian Holm overseeing it all. Great stuff:

Brazil owes a pretty obvious visual debt to The Apartment, particularly in the office scenes.

As good as The Sopranos is, I actually liked it when they occasionally expanded the circle of characters beyond "wiseguys in tracksuits". The episodes in the hospital in Season 6, where they meet the rapper and his entourage (not Massive Genius, different guy), and the evangelicals, and the physicist with cancer, put…

The X-Files and Law & Order are the ultimate in "hey-it's-that-guy" shows. Just about every jobbing actor in America has had a guest spot on one or both of those shows.

Plenty of shows do the recasting thing with actors they like: most obvious example I can think of is Garrett Dillahunt in Deadwood (two different characters in two different seasons). Also, the guy who played Vito in The Sopranos showed up as a bystander before he was introduced as Vito.

Beasley's "The Rise Of Modern Japan" was recommended to my undergrad class. Very good for an introductory text.

Criminal: The Sinners
Bought this run in single issues (to check out the essays on crime fiction in the back of each comic), and I was pretty sure the "mystery" was cleaned up at the end of the second issue. From then on, it became a dramatic irony thing, where each set of characters is unaware of the other's plans.…

I read Douglas Wolk's "Reading Comics" not so long ago, and that book ranks Seven Soldiers among Morrison's finest work. I'll definitely look into picking it up if it's in a better format.

Marius B Jansen's The Making Of Modern Japan?

Fuck Gerard Butler and his smug, bag-of-walnuts-looking face.

I find it perfectly plausible that other mobsters don't speak about colleagues of theirs who are in jail - it may be considered bad luck, or an uncomfortable reminder of what could be their own fate someday.

In defence of this episode, one pitch-perfect element is the scene where Meadow tells her parents. It's acted so well, with that teenage mixture of outrage at the unfairness of the world and refusal to believe that adults will understand anything you're going through. And it drives home the worst aspect of it - that…

Funniest damn sitcom since Arrested Development. This is a sad day.