So I watched the trailer. Very much looking forward to the film.

Has anyone heard anything about the first screening that was supposed to have taken place in Austin?

Found this interesting article this morning including a few words from Chase on the Sopranos ending:

'I thought the episode itself might have been kind of a dud, but it wasn't. I was proud of it. I was satisfied that we'd done something.

'What I didn't understand was that the ending would be so talked-about that it would completely obliterate the rest of the episode that came before it. No one ever even saw it, talked about it, mentioned it or anything about it - and I think didn't even interpret it correctly because all they talked about was that ending. I did not know that would happen.

'I think a lot of people thought they were being made a fool of, that I was being really meta - is that the word? - and postmodern or just showing my quote-unquote "contempt" for the audience or going "Ha, ha, ha. It's just a TV show."

'None of that was what was going on. That was the best ending I knew to come up with and I thought it said some things but people didn't get it because they were angry. Or maybe it wasn't executed well.

'I do wish that connection had been made better. To me the question is not whether Tony lived or died, and that's all that people wanted to know: "Well, did he live or did he die? You didn't finish the show. You didn't answer the question." That's preposterous.

'There was something else I was saying that was more important than whether Tony Soprano lived or died. About the fragility of all of it. The whole show had been about time in a way, and the time allotted on this Earth.

'That whole trip out to California was all about that - what people called a dream sequence. And all the dream sequences within the show. Tony was dealing in mortality every day.
'He was dishing out life and death. And he was not happy. He was getting everything he wanted, that guy, but he wasn't happy.

'All I wanted to do was present the idea of how short life is and how precious it is. The only way I felt I could do that was to rip it away. A
'nd I think people did get it. It made them upset emotionally, but intellectually they didn't follow it. And that could very well be bad execution.
'Did Tony die or didn't he die? Well, first of all, it really comes down to this: There was, what, six seasons of that show? Seven? Am I supposed to do a scene and ending where it shows that crime doesn't pay?

'Well, we saw that crime pays. We've been seeing that for how many years? Now, in another sense, we saw that crime didn't pay because it wasn't making him happy. He was an extremely isolated, unhappy man.

'And then finally, once in a while he would make a connection with his family and be happy there. But in this case, whatever happened, we never got to see the result of that. It was torn away from him and from us. I forget what my point was.'

(REPORTER: That the meaning of the show didn't have to be there in that final moment. It was there all along.)

'Exactly. That's what I felt. It's really about time, to me - just to me - and love. What else do we have in this universe? It's a cold universe.

'People said, "Oh, the show is so dark," and it posited the notion that nobody ever changes. That was never my intention. Change is hard to come by, and like most of us, he wasn't trying hard enough.

'People said, "Oh, it got worse and worse and worse." I think he's the same guy in the beginning as he was in the end. Maybe had a little bit more capacity for compassion for people, I don't know.

'I said it's a cold universe and I don't mean that metaphorically. If you go out into space, it's cold. It's really cold and we don't know what's up there.

'We happen to be in this little pocket where there's a sun. What have we got except love and each other to guard against all that isolation and loneliness?'

I was about to post that article. Take away the philosophical Carl Sagan experience rambling about the universe and what you're left with is Chase didn't know what to do with the ending. David, you gave us a resolution on every other character in the mob, it's not preposterous to ask for one for the main character.

Thanks for the heads up on the article, DH. I read your excerpt but not the whole article, and I'm so swamped and behind with Christmas prep I can't take time to read it now. I'm glad he said this, however, because it's been a huge part of my disappointment with, certainly, the discussions that dominated this forum in the aftermath:

To me the question is not whether Tony lived or died, and that's all that people wanted to know:

I think his comments about change and about Tony not trying very hard are interesting as well, especially because of the radical spiritual awakening/shift in consciousness I've undergone in the last three years. If I can attest to anything about that process, it's that "change is hard". Actually, way, WAY more than hard, and you have to want it the way hi-performance athletes want to win championships and gold medals. So even though I thought Emily Nussbaum's article (The Long Con) was one of the better critiques on the meaning of the ending, I may be softening on that stance now. Tony many times betrayed that he wanted change, but he didn't want it enough to actually achieve it.

I look forward to reading the whole article, probably after Christmas.