Sons of The Sopranos

Even to a casual observer it's fairly obvious from its advertising campaign exactly which demographic the American cable network FX was going after when it greenlit Sons of Anarchy, first shown on that channel in 2008. Emblazoned across countless posters on the London underground, featuring a couple of moody, automatic-toting greasers, is the assertion that the programme is "the natural successor to The Sopranos", and that it "steps into the dark terrain vacated by The Sopranos". Now, those quotation marks are misleading, in so far as I can't remember the exact wording and so technically they aren't quotes at all, but believe me when I say I've given you the gist. And it's from the Guardian so, you know, you have to take it seriously.

Anyway, that sounded like an okay thing to me. What I didn't expect is how literally they meant it. Basically, it is The Sopranos... if that show had been told from the viewpoint of Christopher Moltisanti instead of Tony. And if Christopher had been tortured by a conscience, instead of Adriana La Cerva and a fondness for the ol' chemistry set. And if instead of amoral New Jersey mafiosi they were all amoral California bikers.


Not pictured: Morality.

Take the show's central triumvirate of characters: Jax (Charlie Hunnam) takes the aforementioned Christopher role; related by blood to the Big Cheese, he's being groomed for the top spot... but he's beginning to have doubts. Following in the conniving footsteps of Junior Soprano is Jax's mother Gemma, the twist being that Gemma is played by a woman. (That woman being Katey Sagal, in what must be a towering performance because I actively despise her character. How do you despise Peg Bundy and Leela from Futurama? I don't know but I do.)
And then, as the head of the organisation slash family, we have Ron Perlman as Clay. Clay glowers a lot, smokes big cigars, and appears quite sweaty. He's Tony in leathers and without the symbolic dreams.

Clay also has a Silvio Dante stand-in to confer with - Bobby Elvis (Mark Boone Jr.), whose rendition of "I Can't Help Falling In Love" is a genuinely moving counterpoint to the various pieces of nastiness unfolding over the pilot episode's closing scenes - and a vicious hatchet man named Tig who makes Paulie Walnuts look refined. It has to be said that creator Kurt Sutter has soundly trumped David Chase in the evil sociopath stakes; I cannot stress this enough. Okay, so Paulie's a cold-blooded killer who's not averse to a bit of betrayal and casual prostitute-beating. Fine, whatever. Tig proudly does all that too, but his really big moment comes when, in a very uncomfortable morgue scene, he reveals to Clay that he is in fact a necrophiliac... and Clay barely even pretends to be surprised. Touche, Mr Sutter. It helps greatly that Tig is played by the incomparably sleazy Kim Coates, who I last remember seeing in Tony Scott's The Last Boy Scout, where he played the bin bags to Bruce Willis's dustman in The Greatest Scene Ever (see below).



Now. Having said all of that, I'm going to do the manly thing and completely backtrack. Well, not completely - the template is lifted from The Sopranos, but a template is all it is; you still need to make it sing and dance, which Sons of Anarchy most definitely does. The acting is great across the board. Perlman is superb - hard, violent, and resolute as his character's position needs him to be, there is just a hint of self-doubt swimming around in there, something which I hope season two will explore in some detail. And Charlie Hunnam manages to anchor the show with his portrayal of Jax by making his character likeable and sympathetic, something which his gait alone should render impossible (you'll see). I even had an Idris Elba moment when I realised he was from Newcastle. He does not sound like he's from Newcastle.

And, while it lacks the humour and subtext of The Sopranos, and is not to be taken as seriously as The Wire, it is at the end of the day about a hard-core god damn Motorcycle Club: they call themselves "Outlaws" and each other "Brother"; volumes and volumes of bourbon are drunk (from the motherfucking bottle); girlfriends are called "Old Ladies"; there are at least three other rival gangs trying to kill them and each other; Drea de Matteo is in it (big surprise). In short, it's a very promising start. If I ever manage to downl purchase season two, I'll be looking forward to seeing if they can keep it up.

Moon (2009)

Moon was co-written and directed by Duncan Jones (or Zowie Bowie, as his not-in-any-way-under-the-influence father David originally named him), and produced by Sting's wife Trudie Styler, but there is nothing rock and roll about this cult classic-to be. (Unless you count Chesney Hawkes's "I Am The One And Only" blaring out of an alarm clock at various stages - a cruel and unusual wake up call, to be sure, but a cute touch by Jones for reasons that soon become clear.)

Instead, it’s a thoughtful, introverted character piece with only one character - well, one human character and a robot. Well, a robot and two human characters who are in fact the same person... It’s that kind of film.

Sam Bell, played by the mighty Sam Rockwell, is an employee of Lunar Industries, mining moon rocks containing solar power (Earth’s main source of energy in the future the film depicts) on a three year contract that has almost run its course. He sends and receives pre-recorded messages to his wife back on Earth, he communicates with his corporate bosses, but other than that he’s been alone the whole time, except for a sentient robot called Gerty.

As he readily admits, he’s beginning to get a bit flaky. However, talking to plants and seeing phantom girls in your favourite armchair is one thing; waking up one day to find another actual person walking around wearing your slippers is quite another, especially if that other person is you. From this point on the film alternates between each Sam's points of view, and the question is soon asked: which is the real Sam Bell?



Like a lot of the best science fiction, Moon is less concerned with the world it has created than it is with those who inhabit it, and, while the moon base set is impressive in it’s minimalist, functional realism, and the lunar landscape itself realised through good, old-fashioned and - you should pardon the pun - earthy models, as opposed to CGI, the story is more about Sam Bell and his inner turmoil than it is with any of those trappings. It could have taken place miles under the ocean, for instance - it would have been a lesser film, but the story would still have worked.

At its heart the film is about simple human desire for redemption. At one point, Sam tells Gerty that his wife had left him prior to his arrival on the Moon, only to give him a second chance. He admits he has done wrong, but avoids specifics, as if he cannot bring himself to talk about them, even after three years of contemplation.

In a key scene, it’s implied that he may have been violent: the brooding, intense "new" Sam - as we shall call him for the purposes of this article - instigates a tussle with the other. When he injures him, new Sam reacts in shock, as if unable to comprehend what he has done - an echo, perhaps, of a similar reaction in the past. It is telling too that, before the standoff escalates into violence, he insists the old Sam put down a knife he had innocently been using to whittle a model, as if he knows what they are both capable of.

But he’s wrong about that. The original Sam is a vastly different person now, as expertly symbolised in something as simple as their respective exercise regimes: for new Sam it’s a punch bag and skipping rope, the tools of a boxer, a fighter... but we only ever see old Sam on a treadmill.

This difference is even more starkly revealed in the physical deterioration that the first Sam begins to undergo, alongside the mental disintegration that is arguably already underway in the film‘s opening minutes; even as his spiritual and emotional rejuvenation comes to an end, his body itself starts to disintegrate, placing in jeopardy his capacity to ever experience that which his transformation was necessary to obtain: a reunion with his wife and child, who he has never met.

Sam Rockwell is great in the dual role. His career has taken a strange trajectory: his first brush with widespread critical acclaim was in 1997’s Lawn Dogs; then George Clooney fought Miramax tooth and nail to cast Rockwell in his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, which should have made him a star. But despite delivering a superb, tightly-wound performance as real life Gong Show host and serial bullshit-artist Chuck Barris, that never quite came to pass, and Rockwell has instead settled pleasingly into a pattern of character actor (and often the best thing on show) in high-profile pics like The Green Mile and Frost/Nixon, interspersed with leads in small-scale indies that take his interest (Moon was in fact written specifically with the actor in mind).

And here he is presented with what is surely the ultimate acting challenge: carrying an entire film with nothing but props and stand-ins to bounce off and react to, and never once allowing phrases such as “split-screen” or “trick photography” to enter the audiences mind. What’s more, the two Sams may be poles apart in terms of temperament and character development but they are still intrinsically the same person, and he never lets us forget that. It’s a performance imbued with tortured nuance and impotent bluster in equal measure, and in any kind of fair world Rockwell would have been battling it out with District 9’s Sharlto Copley for the 2010 best actor Oscar (Jeff Bridges having already won his for The Big Lebowski).

(A word here about Kevin Spacey, who provides the voice of Gerty the robot - as a sentient computer programme charged with the safety of a human counterpart, the similarities between Gerty and 2001’s HAL are obvious and inevitable, and Jones realises this; far from a piece of billboard-pleasing stunt-casting, using Spacey to articulate Gerty cleverly plays to audiences expectations - if the thing sounds like both John Doe and Keyser Soze, of course it’s gonna be malevolent.)

But it’s not the robot or the moon buggies or the lunar landscape that carry Moon over the line into territory populated with excellent, humanist science fiction debuts such as Primer and Pi; it’s the premise of a man prepared to accept responsibility for past mistakes, to atone for them in the only way he knows - by penance, by committing to a purgatory amongst the stars just a floor or two below Heaven - only to find that with redemption does not necessarily come salvation...

At least, not for both versions of yourself. I'm pretty sure this is a message unique to Moon, so catch it if you can.

Winston

As I clicked on the link in the “General” section of the Gumtree job page, the ghost of Winston Churchill tapped me on the shoulder once again.
“Another fundraising job?” he asked, the 45-year old Highball on his breath far more tangible than he.
“Yeah. Look, this one pays £12 per hour… plus BONUSES. And it says you get to ‘meet new and interesting people‘.”
“And shoot at them?”


My muse.

“No, it’s… it’s actually to save people. Maybe. It doesn’t really say.” And it didn’t. It just mentioned the word “ethical”, over and over. But whose ethics were we dealing with? Whose?
Winston sighed, like an exasperated statesman, like I imagine he used to sigh at Hitler and those guys before slapping them with an exaggerated advance on one of the fronts somewhere.
I expected something brutal - not physically violent, but certainly scathing and reminiscent of his finer insults. It was just too bad, I supposed, that no-one else was around to bear witness… I would not be entering the annals of putdown history, that grandiose roll call of folk who had gained everlasting notoriety as the recipient of one of Sir Winston’s eviscerating jibes, like the woman he called an ugly bitch that one time when he was shitfaced.
But when he spoke, his voice was gentle.
“Stephen,” he said, waving his hand in the vague direction of the Gumtree ad, “this is not for you.”
“No, it really isn’t.”
“Approaching strangers in the street all day? Chatting to them? Come on…”
“I know. I’d laugh if I wasn’t so miserable.” I moved to slam closed the laptop - but his hand stayed mine. My God, I thought, he can be solid when he wants to be.
“Now this is not the end,” he said. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
“Wha-?”
“Nothing. Look, you should start a blog.”
“Why? Listen Winston, I got to get paid-”
“Exactly. So you should start working on your web presence.”
I let his words sink in, like a dry sponge absorbing some kind of liquid, probably water: blog… web presence… web log… a BLOG! Sure, why not? Except…
“What would I write about?” I asked him.
“Fuck should I know? What kind of things are you interested in?”
“I dunno… sports, movies, music, that kind of thing?”
“Well there you go. I bet hardly anyone’s writing about that sort of stuff.”
I shook my head in wonder, amazed at how this great man, who I had never even met whilst alive, had managed to turn my own life around with such ease. He must have noticed my expression, and read it, because just then he shot me a look, and the look said: “It wasn’t me, Stephen… it was you.”
“And remember,” he then said, aloud, “History will be kind to me… for I intend to write it.”
“Hey, that’s a good one.”
“Yes,” he said, his ghostly presence beginning to fade before my eyes. "It is."
“You said that once before, right?”
“Yeah it’s still valid though.”
“No arguments here.”
“Kind of appropriate, don‘t you think?”
“No doubt.”
“Good. Ahem.”
And then, like that, he left me forever… or did he?