Tube Steak: Conflicted on Sons of Anarchy

If hard-pressed to choose which show on television is the most uneven, it would be hard to imagine a show other than Sons of Anarchy taking that title. In its now four season run, Kurt Sutter and Company have struggled to maintain momentum while setting up each season's story arc, saddling viewers with a front-loaded handful of episodes in nearly every season that sap the viewer's energy. Nearly every season that has gone by shared this characteristic, and Sons often finds itself piling up episodes on the DVR after it hits the three episode mark, feeling far too much like an obligation.

Season Four was no exception to this trend.

In its fourth season, Sons of Anarchy had its two primary agents of narrative action looking to parlay a high-dollar/high-risk arrangement with the Gallindo Cartel into an lucrative exit from SAMCRO*. Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman) is trying to get one last payday before his arthritis succeeds in rendering him unable to ride while Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam, who finally got to cut his hair) is angling for an exit from the club for the sake of his family. The two establish that they share this goal and agree to steer the club into the Cartel deal in the first episode. Once this arc is set in motion, it takes forever to actually get off the ground, plodding along through plots and subplots that are too infrequent in their real pertinence to the story.   

*Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club, Redwood Original for the unindoctrinated.

[From this point on SPOILERS ABOUND. Read on at your own risk.]

As is typically the case, though, enough of these stories begin churning along, and the pace picks up to where the desire to watch the next episode is actually present. The conflict between Clay and Piney builds. Tara fans those flames and then decides to step right into the fire. The MC's involvement with the Cartel puts them into more and more peril as they get pass the point of no return. Juice and Otto give the Feds virtually everything they would need to take the club down with a RICO investigation. The truth about the demise of Jax's father, John Teller, gets closer and closer to reaching him and finally setting into motion what viewers have waited four years to happen.

Unfortunately, the season reaches its climax in its antepenultimate episode, where the club finds itself torn asunder and Opie shoots Clay for murdering his father. There are two long episodes that follow this in which Jax discovers that Clay has now killed two of the Original 9, John Teller and Piney, and tried to kill Tara (Maggie Siff) as well. The club is about to get descended upon by the Feds while the huge arms deal they brokered with the Irish and the Gallindo Cartel goes down.

And then everything goes off the rails.

Sutter elects to have SAMCRO get off scot-free because the Cartel is actually backed by the CIA, but the club can't extract themselves from the deal with the Cartel without being taken down by AUSA Lincoln Potter's RICO investigation that the Cartel has known about all along. And then there's the fact that the Irish will only deal with Clay, so Clay needs to live.

This is all such a huge cop-out. The introduction of the CIA to the whole equation was simply absurd. It was a convenient (read: lazy) out to absolve the MC of responsibility while extending the need for Clay to stay alive for asinine reasons. There were already some signs of trouble with the Juice's and Tara's respective storylines, which simply were not working, but these decisions were egregious errors in judgment.

I guess some of this should be expected. After all, Sons of Anarchy is basically just white-trash Hamlet if you threw Lady MacBeth into the mix*. It is a show that revels in the ideas that a motorcycle club is operating with the ulterior motive of keeping their hometown safe from drugs. It is a show in which that hometown is called 'Charming.' It is a show that spends roughly 45 minutes of each season engaging in the glorification of the utterly juvenile and patently inane activity of trying to ditch the cops.

*There is no way that Gemma is just Gertrude.

A show with such glaring faults still can jump the shark, though, and it's entirely possible that it happened when the fucking CIA rolled in and they were backing the fucking Cartel. Seriously? WTFuck?

Then to add insult to injury, Tara walks into the chapel at the end of the finale and assumes the position behind Jax--who had taken the President's seat at the table--that a young Gemma had taken behind John Teller in a photo seen earlier. As if the gesture wasn't overt enough, they had to dissolve to the original photo, treating the audience like simpletons who cannot connect two strikingly similar snapshots without having their hand held.

Honestly, it is hard to recall a situation in which a show had rendered nearly the entire thrust of a season moot in one asinine brushstroke, but Kurt Sutter managed to accomplish that feat and then prolonged the agony by searing that heavy-handed final editing choice into our collective memories.

It is hard to look into the future and see Sutter righting this ship. Trust has certainly been lost.

Man on Film: Season of the Witch

You take the good,
You take the bad,
You take 'em both,
And there you have
The joys of Nouveau Cage

There are some valuable things to be taken from Dominic Sena's new 'film' Season of the Witch; lessons, if you will.  In honor of the screenplay by Threshold show-runner Bragi F. Schut, I will forgo any and all attempts at constructing a coherent entry here, instead opting to write the bulk of this entry in bullet-points.

*****SPOILER ALERT*****

• The central point of this film is casting Nicolas Cage as Jesus.  His character Behman's origins are unknown, having no home or family to go back to.  Hinting at immaculate conception?  I think so.
• Christ Behman sees the atrocities being committed in the name of his father and walks away from organized religion.  In this case, it is the Catholic Church.  This seems to imply that Nic Cage Christ does not approve of the ways in which his Father's words are being misconstrued to serve the Church's own ends--at least within the construct of this film--that are not in line with His Message.
• Dominic Sena has cited Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal as the primary source of influence (Andrew O'Hehir covers this with aplomb at Salon) for Season of the Witch.  Stopping there would be selling Sena & Co. short, though.  The film clearly owes plenty to Henri-Georges Clouzot's Wages of Fear and Martin Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ.  All three are all-time great directors.  Dominic Sena directed Gone in 60 Seconds, Swordfish, Kalifornia, and Whiteout.  While the temporal spacing of his releases could lead one to draw comparisons to deliberate contemporaries like Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, or even Terrence Malick, the fact that there is so much time that passes between their respective releases does not actually equate to a similar level of artistry in Sena's films.  
• The reality of this Nouveau Cage World we live in is that sometimes the films he does are crafted by artisans who are out of their depth.  I can see what made Nic Cage want to make this film.  With the Bangkok Dangerous remake, he had clearly been a fan of the original; Next, of the Philip K. Dick short story; this, The Seventh Seal.  I've long defended Cage's choices of the past decade, as I know he is simply doing the films he wants to do.  Unfortunately, the other talent involved isn't always up to the task.  I am sure Cage enjoyed working with Sena on Gone in 60 Seconds.  Directing an ADHD car thief movie doesn't necessarily qualify a director to helm a medieval homage to an Ingmar Bergman film.  
• Wolf- and witch-punching abounds.
• One has to wonder what the film was like before the reshoots.  From all accounts (and this interview with Cage), it seems as though the studio wanted a wide scope.  I'd imagine most of the stylistically disparate Crusade battle scenes in the first act were added via reshoot.  While they frame the conscientious objection of Behman and Felson, it was probably unnecessary, and perhaps spelled things out too clearly.
• This probably doesn't matter as the dialogue is, um...  sometimes not so good.
• Fortunately, as with any Cage movie, there is something that you can take from it.  Here?  Uh, Nic Cage is a knight.  AND JESUS.  He saves the fucking world from the plague.  
• Season of the Witch also takes the standpoint that more witches should have been burned.  While Andrew O'Hehir in the aforementioned Salon column took issue with that, I embrace it.  This is like anti-Spielberg.  Oh, there is no getting up on the soapbox and preaching about some cause--in this case the burning of witches.  Not here.  If more witches had been burned, they may have gotten to the root of the bubonic plague.
• And the root of that plague?  Not a witch.  Hell no.  The Devil (more or less).  So, in short, Jesus hates organized religion for co-opting the message of his Father to kill innocent women and children, is imprisoned as a deserter by the Church, is coerced into transporting an alleged witch to trial by monk jurists, and then defeats Satan, driving the plague from humanity and saving the possessed girl.
• Some jaded dicks may point to accents in the film.  For the most part, Cage affects a vaguely British accent.  The slow-reading priest who accompanies them on their journey is British.  Ron Perlman basically talks like Ron Perlman.  The only thing that really sticks out is the weird accent that Stephen Graham is speaking in.  It is almost as if he was still in character from playing Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire, but I assume that it is a slightly more Jewish/Yiddish take on things, which is weird and possibly racist.  The only reason I labeled accent hawks as jaded dicks is that at a certain point I think pinpointing people for accent work in medieval-and-earlier films is absurd.  The standard accent for such fare is a broad British accent, but why? Whose brilliant idea was it to decide that everyone who lived in the whole of Europe except for the French spoke with a British accent before the turn of the 17th century.  That's how they spoke in Ancient Rome?  Of course...  Maybe there is a rationale to this that I am not aware of, but I kind of doubt it.  Explanations are welcome in the comments section.
• The ultimate question in regards to this film is this: How do you feel about seeing Nic Cage as Sir Jesus in a pro-witch-burning movie?  I'd say for this guy, that's still a movie I'd have to see.

This is the trailer from a year ago, pre-reshoots.  Honestly, I think the studio fucked this film over to at least a small degree.

Even if this isn't a great film, Cage fans still only have to wait until next month from the surer bet to be awesome Drive Angry.  It's the film that Cage seems to have done for fear that Ghost Rider 2 wasn't going to happen, only it is just as much a trashy exploitation film in all the best ways (and has the beautiful Amber Heard).