EW review: Chilling 'Sopranos' season
By Scott Brown
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- "Someone has to pay. 'Cause she was a good girl."
Chilling line. And it's not from "The Sopranos." It's Emmy winner Drea de Matteo on "The Sopranos: The Complete Fifth Season's" commentary track for ''Long Term Parking,'' the episode where her character, Adriana La Cerva, enters (consider this your spoiler alert, cave dwellers) that great witness protection program in the sky.
It's a place all members of the extended Soprano family are heading, at various speeds. That's what we feel in the fifth season of the suburban gangster drama, which was so conspicuously lacking in the fourth: that hurtling mortal velocity.
You can feel it in the moral seesaw of cousin Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi, an actor who seemed too ready-made for the show at first). You can feel it in the long plummet of ''recovering'' junkie Christopher (Michael Imperioli) and his engagement to Adriana, whose covert and halfhearted cooperation with the FBI has been tick-tick-ticking toward disaster since season 4. And you can feel it in Tony and Carmela (James Gandolfini and Edie Falco), two massive characters restored to their full wide-screen monstrosity, two massively talented actors about as car-crash magnetic as they've ever been.
On the other commentaries, guest directors Buscemi, Peter Bogdanovich and Mike Figgis reveal how a sense of dread is built, block by block. (Bogdanovich, with his Hawks 'n' Hitchcock anecdotes, has an especially good time demonstrating how a judicious cut can govern mood.)
The grave gapes in every chapter of The Sopranos, but now, blessedly, the moral heat has returned after a season on simmer. Someone, and likely everyone, will certainly have to pay. But as far as penance goes, death ain't got nothing on life.
EW Grade: A-
'Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman - The Complete First Season'
Reviewed by Jennifer Armstrong
Superman's tights clinging to Dean Cain's buff bod, the Daily Planet's intrastaff rivalries, Lex Luthor's shady dealings ... all decent reasons to relive "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman - The Complete First Season."
But the real soul of the show is Teri Hatcher, as the icy reporter whose heart melts only for her superhero. ABC's fantasy-dramedy captured Lois' side of the classic comic-book tale, thanks to the quirky ingenue's scene-stealing ability to display steely strength one minute, snappy comic timing the next, and gooey romanticism after that -- the same killer combo that's helped Hatcher grab the most attention (not to mention the Golden Globe) among Wisteria Lane's fetching "Desperate Housewives."
Once you get past how unforgivably dumb our otherwise sharp Lois must be not to figure out that Clark is Superman, it's a joy to watch her fall so obsessively for a man she knows nothing about ... kinda like watching Susan fall for mysterious plumber/criminal Mike a decade later.
EXTRAS We'll rescue you from the for-diehards-only pilot commentary by giving you the highlights: (1) "Hercules' " Kevin Sorbo was a contender for Cain's role; (2) Cain looks good with his shirt off. The documentary is also strictly for completists, and the bit on visual effects -- given how cheesy they look by today's standards -- is more funny than fascinating.
EW Grade: B
'Beyond the Sea'
Reviewed by Charles Curtis
He sings! He dances! He produces, writes, and directs! Oscar winner Kevin Spacey nursed this baby for more than five years and created ... a problem child. "Beyond the Sea" is a choppy film, in which the fantasy-reality combo sometimes works -- like in an impromptu musical sequence about Bobby Darin's courtship of Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth) -- but at other times falls flat (like when he confronts his child-actor alter ego).
EXTRAS A basic making-of doc (prosthetic nose alert!) and a dry commentary track with Spacey and producer Andy Paterson explaining why they strayed from the standard biography style. In an effort to justify the fictional plot of Darin directing his own biopic, Spacey says he likes film-within-a-film biographies like "8 1/2" and "All That Jazz." His pet project is a celebration of Darin, not a brutally honest portrait. Sure, we're all for artistic interpretation, but would some live concert footage of the real crooner be too much to ask for?
EW Grade: C
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