input question: Select the correct sentiment of the following review: Though "The Sopranos" is yet another gift from the megahit "The Godfather" and sequels, which dramatized and to a certain extent glamorized the mafia, "The Sopranos" takes another tack. No suited up, classy mobsters here with homes in Lake Tahoe and stakes in Vegas casinos - these guys are goombahs, with a front of waste management, who deal with things that fall off the back of trucks, topless bars, protection money - in short, what the neighborhood mobs were all about.

Colorful characters dominate this series, which doesn't hold back on the sex and graphic violence. Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is a mob head with a wife and two children, living in New Jersey, who suffers from panic attacks as he tries to balance his biological family with his mafia one. To get to the bottom of his attacks, he sees a psychiatrist, Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), who is afraid of him and yet attracted to him at the same time. Tony's henchman - Paulie, his nephew Christopher, his Uncle Junior (the titular head of the mob), his good friend Pussy - are all fully fleshed-out characters.

As we learn going through the series, there are enemies not only from without, but from within, and one of those enemies includes Tony's sickly but horrible mother (Nancy Marchand), who convinces Junior that Tony is a danger to him. Tony's sister Janice, meanwhile, is searching for money in her mother's house with a stethoscope and a Geiger counter. Tony has mistress problems, and a wife (Edie Falco) who puts up with a lot because she loves him, all the while keeping ties to her Catholic religion. "The church frowns on divorce," she tells one woman contemplating a split. "Let the Pope live with him," is the response. As far as Tony's mistress problems, his psychiatrist points out that Tony is attracted to demanding women for whom nothing is ever enough, and asks him if it sounds familiar. Yeah, it sounds like his mother.

I'm of Italian descent, and yes, I'm sick of Italians being shown in a negative light and everyone assuming all Italians are mobsters. Yet you can't help liking this show, which is a constant reminder of our culture. (Thanksgiving, it's pointed out, isn't turkey and sweet potato pie - it's the antipasto, the manicotti, the meatballs and escarole, and then the bird!) Not to mention, the right-on pronunciation of words like melenzana (mullinyan), escarole (scarole), manicotti (manigot) etc. The only un-Italian thing about Tony is that he doesn't have a finished basement, something unheard of in the rest of my family (except my parents never had one either).

The standouts in this show are Gandolfini, as a ruthless gangster on antidepressants, Falco, who is brilliant as his wife, and Bracco as the tortured Jennifer. But everyone is excellent. If you can take the violence and the language, this is a great show, an unrelenting portrait of New Jersey mob life.
OPTIONS:
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output answer: positive

input question: Select the correct sentiment of the following review: I can't say how closely the film follows the novel, never having read the book, but since this clocks in at some six and a half hours it's a good bet that most of the base are covered or, at least, we can say with some certainty that this isn't a Reader's Digest condensed version.

The production values are high, well up to the standards of other BBC classic series like Inspector Morse and Sherlock Holmes. We can believe Dickens' London looked, sounded, and thought a lot like this. There are some occasional minor lapses -- some sportsman firing a pistol with a percussion cap in 1840 or 1820 or whenever this took place.

The acting too is to be applauded. Suzanne Burden is the polite and honest heroine who quietly goes about doing good. She's cute too, in a mature way, her beauty in her compassionate nature not in any flirtatiousness. Denholm Elliott is her guardian (and more than that, as it turns out). Burden and Elliott are two of the very few characters who are good in an unalloyed way. Another is a former sergeant forced to do evil by evil people. Another is a poor and helpless young boy.

I don't think anyone else could have written this. It's got all the earmarks of Dickens -- poverty, tragic deaths, capitalism in the raw, the generous rich guy in his gated home, hidden parentage, shadowy motives, and the impotence or outright maliciousness of the justice system. Well, not the justice system as a whole but the chancery, which was evidently a court that decided matters having to do with the distribution of property. (So I gather from Wikipedia.) It became so notoriously rigid and dilatory that it was thoroughly revamped in England in 1973. Twice, Elliott's character describes it as "a curse." The most impressive scene involves a money-scrounging creditor hounding a retired soldier in the latter's gymnasium during a fencing lesson. The sergeant is more masculine in the traditional sense than any other male character I remember from Dickens. The apoplectic money lender and renter is screaming threats from his seat and the sergeant turns towards him and does one delicate exercise with the saber after another, each advancement bringing him closer to his tormentor, while the scarlet-faced old creditor shrinks back into his seat.

A couple of things are missing. Often Dickens will stick in at least one or two amusing lines of dialog. ("Humbug!" or "The law is a ass.") Not here. "Bleak" house is the right title. Second, there are practically no Weberian "ideal types" -- no Mr. Micawbers or Artful Dodgers or Scrooges. Third, the atmosphere, the whole ethos, is relentlessly dismal. One tribulation follows another, usually having to do with money or some shameful peccadillo out of the past.

My God, it's depressing. It's as if the author were venting his spleen on everything he hated in the world he knew. Poverty, okay. He KNEW poverty. But one wonders what the chancery did to Dickens to deserve this kind of treatment.

Maybe I should add that I've just watched the first episode of the 2005 series -- and it's better in two ways. There is more zip in the direction, so the pace is a little faster. And the business of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce is explained satisfactorily right up front, instead of lurking about in the shadows as that mysterious "curse," so the plot is easier to follow.
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output answer:
positive