Consider This from NPR - Our Picks For TV Shows And Movies You Should Watch This Holiday Weekend

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

As people across the U.S. celebrate Thanksgiving and enjoy their long holiday weekend, Consider This provides listeners with a list of TV shows and movies to binge over the holiday weekend. One of them is the HBO breakout hit The White Lotus, featuring Michael Imperioli in a lead role for season two of the show. Viewers might best remember Imperioli for his previous role as Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos.NPR's Erika Ryan takes a deeper look at the arc of Imperioli's career.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. Hey, Consider This listeners. Today's episode is a break from the news on this holiday week. Whether you're full from a Thanksgiving feast or just taking advantage of some well-deserved time off, we've got some recommendations for TV shows and movies you could binge this long holiday weekend. And PRTV critic Eric Deggans has a few to start us off.

So I'm a serious science fiction nerd. So one of my recommendations for the weekend has got to be two of the best science fiction shows that are on TV right now. One recommendation, two shows. First of them, Star Wars Andor on Disney+. It takes place in the Star Wars universe, and it sort of tells the story of the start of the rebellion that rebels against the Empire and all the big movies. And it's gritty, it's realistic, there's no Jedis, there's no magic, and it's an incredibly engrossing story, and I

really recommend people check it out. All right, next, Eric recommends Star Trek Strange New Worlds on Paramount+. It shows the adventures of the Enterprise before Captain Kirk took control as captain. So we get that Star Trek series where they have an adventure every episode. They're out in the galaxy meeting new people, doing new things. It's the closest thing amongst the new Star Trek series to the old Star Trek series. And if that's not enough sci-fi for you, Eric notes there's a new Guardians of the Galaxy holiday special streaming on Disney+. Okay, holiday specials are always hokey, and this one is no exception. The setup is that Chris Pratt's character, Star-Lord, you know, came from Earth. He remembers Christmas and is sort of wistful for it. So his compatriots in the Guardians of the Galaxy want

to create a very special Christmas for him, so they decide to try to connect him with his childhood hero, Footloose star, Kevin Bacon. And I can't say anything more without giving away huge spoilers, but it is really funny. Reportedly, James Gunn, the director and writer, came up with this after they made a joke on set while they were filming one of the movies that, hey, we should do a holiday special with these characters. And then he went off and wrote one. Eric also recommends a documentary, Is That Black Enough For You, written and directed by Elvis Mitchell. It focuses on the history of blaxploitation films were so revolutionary. He has everyone from Sam Jackson to Harry Belafonte talking about these films, Larry Fishburne. So you get a contemporary look at a really classic genre and you get to relive these great moments from these wonderful films.

So it's a great way to sort of go back and relearn about how this genre affected the course of not only cinema, but Black culture. Consider this. There's a lot of binge-worthy content out there, including the second season of one of the hottest shows of 2021. We'll hear from one of the stars after the break. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Thursday, November 24th. mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wyze app today or visit Wyze.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The White Lotus was such a hit last year that HBO renewed it as an anthology series. Season 2 premiered last month, and it was just renewed for a third.

There are some big names in the show, like Jennifer Coolidge, Aubrey Plaza, and Michael Imperioli. And if you don't know who that is, you might be familiar with the name Christopher Moltisanti, as in the hot-headed protege of TV mob boss Tony Soprano. You're going to take this family into the 21st century. We're already in the 21st century, though, T. Whatever you say, T, I'd follow you into the gates of hell. The Sopranos has been off the air for 15 years, but Rolling Stone recently called it the best TV show of all time. NPR's Eric Orion talked to Michael Imperioli about his evolution

from playing a mobster to a different kind of monster. The Sopranos creator David Chase has his theories about why Christopher Moltisanti has stayed a fan favorite. I think it has something to do with the fact that he knows that somebody's trying to sucker him, exploit him. He may have to do it, but he has a really good bulls**t sense. Chris, you know me. What could you possibly do to me that I haven't already been through? I'm positive we'll think of something. And Michael Imperioli played a convincing mobster on screen,

winning an Emmy for the role and being nominated four more times. You ever feel like nothing good was ever going to happen to you? Yeah, and nothing did. So what? Especially considering he's nothing like his character. He's 56 with gray hair now. He never stopped working after The Sopranos. Theater, film, network TV, pilots, some good, some bad. That's in his own words. But it keeps coming back to Christopher, a mobster with other aspirations for life. He's somebody who was always trying really hard, whether it was to be a mobster and to get sober or to be in a relationship, to climb the ladder of success, to write a screenplay. He, he had a lot of aspirations, and he actually did the work.

He wasn't slack about those things. That drive seems to be one of the few things Imperioli and his character have in common. Michael Imperioli is now appearing in a lead role in another hit HBO show, The White Lotus. Welcome to the White Lotus in Sicily. Its second installment takes place in Italy. Imperioli is Dominic Di Grasso, an Italian-American man traveling back to the motherland with his

father and son to visit the village of their ancestors. This is his first major role in some time. Meanwhile, The Sopranos is enjoying somewhat of a revival at the moment. There is a prequel, The Many Saints of Newark, which came out last year, and COVID lockdowns presented the opportunity to revisit the show. HBO's parent company said Sopranos viewership went up 179 percent early in the pandemic, and that's in part because some of those viewers are finally old enough to enjoy it. A lot of shows don't get that kind of second wind, you know what I mean? So for young people in their late teens and early 20s to be discovering it, not just discovering, but really passionate about their love for it, is kind of remarkable and makes me very happy.

Along with the new fan base came memes. On TikTok or in Twitter jokes, Christopher specifically has become a fan favorite with Gen Z. And Imperioli is laughing right along with you. I do. I get a kick out of it. I mean, I take it as a very high compliment to be the subject of people's memes. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.

Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese's famous 1990 mobster film, was one of Imperioli's first movie roles. It's part of why Sopranos creator David Chase wanted to work with him. He had come from good fellas, and so, you know, in my head, he was very cool. He plays Spider, a bartender that gets shot in the foot and later killed by Joe Pesci's character. Hey, Spider, can you wait over here? Bring me a cup of water. We found out immediately that it was Pesci, it was De Niro, and Ray Liotta. It was just somebody we felt immediately that he understood intrinsically who Spider was,

and he understood the situation and the atmosphere. Director Martin Scorsese told me while filming Spider's death scene, Imperioli accidentally crushed a glass in his hand and was sent to the hospital. Scorsese didn't want to make him redo the scene, but the actor insisted. We were really taken by the fact that he was so dedicated. You want to get it just right. And he improvised so well with Pesci in character, in context of that world. He was not acting.

He was behaving in it. You know, I always considered him one of the finest we had worked with. Spider is only on screen in Goodfellas for about five minutes total, but fans still love and remember him decades later. Why? He was so truthful that you can't forget him. You just can't forget the kid. Now, over 30 years later, that kid, or at least the actor behind him,

is also a published fiction writer. His coming-of-age novel, The Perfume Burned His Eyes, came out a few years ago. He's also a lead singer. I feel like Michael sort of represents a pure artist. He's genuinely into making art, sort of expressing a statement. That was Imperioli's bandmate, Elijah Amaton, who plays bass in their rock band Zopa. Recently, they've been touring since Imperioli moved back to New York from L.A. during the pandemic. Zopa's crowds are undeniably made up of a few Sopranos diehards.

But that's fine by them. Amitin actually didn't know who Imperioli was when they first started playing together. If you only know him from films or TV, you really have a very skewed idea of what he's like, actually. He described Imperioli as a quiet, humble guy, regularly lost in thought. Part of that might be that Imperioli and his wife are Tibetan Buddhists. Zopa, their band name, translates to patience in Tibetan.

In my 20s, all I did was try to be, you know, successful at my work. You know, you kind of think these things are going to complete you as a human being because you work so hard towards them. And then when they come and come to fruition, you think that that should be an end in itself. And it's not. He says he picked up martial arts as a way of kicking some bad habits, tobacco, alcohol and more. That also led him to meditation. During the pandemic, he started regularly streaming meditation classes for anyone to join, for free, simply to share his practices. Session two, meditation 101.

Thank you for joining me today. And on YouTube, you can find Meditation with Michael Imperioli. Let us start with the nine purifying breaths. I look at Buddhism much more like a science than anything else, than a religion or even a philosophy, kind of a science of mind really. So in that way, it's been very helpful just to live. Michael Imperioli has over 100 acting credits on IMDb. Many of them you probably haven't seen. The ones you have, most of them have one thing in common.

Imperioli is playing an Italian-American, and he says he doesn't feel typecast. Well, it doesn't get old if it's something that's good. Throughout my career, I've always done a lot of things that nobody really sees. So I never really felt stereotyped. When you're doing things that are less commercial, the people making them have more leeway in casting. They're a little bit more imaginative and take more risks and cast you not just based on the surface thing or the immediate perception of you. Imperioli knows he'll always be known as Christopher Moltisanti. And honestly, he's okay with that. Look, it's very hard to work as an actor, period, like as a profession and have some kind of longevity in this business. And it's even harder to create a character that people remember you for.

But David Chase, the man responsible for the character that supposedly defines Michael Imperioli, he disagrees. I'm glad it makes him happy, but it's also not exactly true. We don't know what he's going to be remembered for. That's David Chase talking to NPR's Erica Ryan. The first four episodes of season two of The White Lotus are on HBO. And by the way, if you're looking to watch a holiday classic, there's always a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, which is streaming for free on Apple TV Plus through this weekend. What kind of a Thanksgiving dinner is this? Where's the turkey, Chuck? Thanks for watching. have a happy and safe thanksgiving it's consider this from npr i'm ari shapiro