In Which We Believe That God Has Spoken Directly To Ron Perlman

His Left Hand

by DICK CHENEY

Ron Perlman's goatee looks like a hand covering his mouth. He is left handed, so it is his left hand that he raises in a public fountain where the police find him, speaking in tongues. In the opening scene of Hand of God, his pert body receives enlightenment from his God, a traditional beginning to many Bible stories. Executive producer Marc Forster's Amazon pilot purports to make fun of this tale. Hand of God is a roundly pessimistic take on this inspiring yarn.

You see, Perlman's character is from Texas, which means he is probably a bad person. Ron's wrinkles portray a judge named Pernell who used to give everyone maximum sentences - before God spoke to him. 

I was recently told by someone that Barack Obama is an atheist, which I have to admit surprised me. If someone made me president, I'd be sure think God wanted good things for me, and was probably planning for me to enter into a long term relationship with a woman completely different from my wife in every way, say, a prime minister of another country.

Dana Delany plays Ron's wife. They are rarely in the same frame together, because it is really hard to believe the two are a couple. Ron has sex with an African-American prostitute in his judge's chambers, but then he thinks better of this act. He's been enlightened, and having sex with a woman for money is wrong. The woman has to hear her client say, "I think we should just talk from now on." Ron seems sad to do it, but he can't cheat on his wife anymore.

European artists like Forster are obsessed with Westerns, which was kind of a sideways version of the south. Now they've turned their back on people like Pernell. Unfortunately, I can think of no redeeming quality of such a person, either. Perlman's character degrades everything around him in pursuit of God's wishes, which does not seem so terrible in theory, but is in practice devastating.

Pernell's daughter marries a Jewish woman who wants to take him off life support after he tries to kill himself, after watching his wife raped by a police officer. (This is what Forster thinks law-abiding citizens of America do with their time.) Pernell disobeys her wishes and keeps his son alive, believing the young man can communicate with him, using the power of the Lord, who the rapist is.

Pernell's fellow churchgoers include men and women of color. Pernell finds he relates to them better than the other people in his life, who have only a cursory connection to the Lord. 

That people who believe in God go against his principles is not a contradiction in terms. Ron turns ugliness into its own farcial weaponry on those who understimate him. Whatever gruff charm he has left is kind of like the final snarl of a working hound. 

Austin, TX makes for a flaccid setting, probably because the show is not shot there and because Forster knows nothing of whatever charm might be had in the city. Hand of God does not know whether to condemn belief or consider it a cause roughly on the same level as justice. It is as mixed up as its protagonist.

As bad as the Amazon-funded Hand of God is, it should have been a lot campier, with Perlman in gothic robes and a subplot about Dana Delany's addiction to drugs. Camp really needs to come back; where is Wayne Koestenbaum when we actually need him for once?

This past week was saved by a female performance that will echo through the eons. Kristin Connelly's performance as the wife of Harry Houdini had to be seen to be believed. I invited a lot of my friends over to watch this woman. She was incandescent:

This is what she wore right when the doctor tells her Houdini isn't going to make it. I mean the costume design on this thing was the most moving part of the magician's journey. There's also a moment where she screams at Houdini, why did I marry a Jew? The entire story is quite dramatic. It's weird that Kristen Connolly and Ellie Kemper are two different people, and not twins.

There's a really odd scene in Houdini where Houdini kisses his mother on the lips. It turns out to be the smooch of death, because I guess she died when he went on tour in Europe. The History Channel really brought it this time. I wonder if there was actually a newspaper that said this:

The paper would probably looks authentic, were it not for the motto, "All the News That's Fit To Print." I guess the inaccuracy would be forgivable, I mean William Randolph Hearst was not that big of a dick, and Aladdin was actually a wonderfully effective thief.

Kristen Connolly's effortless line readings were the highlight of this ten-cent production, but Adrien Brody was not terrible himself. His hair was electric, and he made Houdini seem very condescending and obsessive. The actors who played Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife were also excellent:

Campy biopics haven't been this impressive since the Celine Dion biopic with Joe Pantaliano. If you have a chance, treat yourself to that gem. I think the TV Guide network airs it every Kwanzaa.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. Visit our mobile site at thisrecording.wordpress.com.

"Holloway (Hey Love)" - Wildcat! Wildcat! (mp3)

"Garden Greys" - Wildcat! Wildcat! (mp3)

In Which We Ride On God's Great Motorcycle

Love of Leather and Country

by DICK CHENEY

Sons of Anarchy
creator Kurt Sutter

I always wondered what happened to the British kid in Undeclared. (I assumed porn.) Then I was gchatting with Grover Norquist last year, and he was telling me about his favorite show, Sons of Anarchy. On Sons Charlie Hunnam portrays Jackson Teller, the vice president of his motorcycle gang and the practitioner of the worst American accent outside of Simon Baker. Grover bought me the show's first three seasons on DVD as a thank you present for a bunch of jokes I wrote him about Ezra Klein. That gift changed my life.

where are all the girls, did they attend West Point or something?

At base, Undeclared and Sons of Anarchy showcase essentially the same concept. Both concern groups of friends a little too overeager to explain how virulently heterosexual they are, adding up to something of a these ladies protest too much, methinks type situation. Each show concerns a counterculture not commonly exposed to the mainstream light; in the case of Undeclared the fact that college is a gigantic scam perpetuated by Fredric Jameson and Judith Butler, and in the case of Sons of Anarchy the fact that a motorcycle gang is basically an enigmatic cover story for a bunch of guys to ride on big metal phalluses.

I never understood the appeal of a motorcycle before, and I still don't. For a show concerned only with people devoted to the speedy vehicles, Sons of Anarchy hardly ever shows the members of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club Redwood Original (SAMCRO) admiring or enjoying their motorcycles. As transport, the devices are convenient because they can be ridden fast and hidden easily, but these jockeys don't seem to care much for their steeds. They're more into quietly serving out jail time and absolute monogamy.

"Do they force you to read The Daily Beast in here?"

Hunnam's Jackson Teller had a high school relationship with Tara (Mad Men's Maggie Siff) that engendered a love that never abated. Despite the fact that he turned into a drug-running, guns-abusing freak like his father, she's still attracted to his hard pecs. Even after he cheated on her with an adult film performer, she was still fine with it and raised his children without complaint, then went to her job as a hospital surgeon. And that's not all!

Listening to the British Hunnam pridefully spout the various details of the arms trade is about as believable as imagining that a University of Chicago educated doctor would ever copulate with him, but that's part of the fun of Sons of Anarchy. As the show's current season came to a close, the union has been so insanely ludicrous that the Sons of Anarchy writing team has the couple communicate only through cliché, as with this charming exchange from the penultimate episode of the season:

TARA: Tell me you love me.

JACKSON: I love you, Tara.

(pause)

Do you love me?

TARA: If you make it stop I will.

(pause)

I love you Jackson.

Jesus, did none of these people watch Tell Me You Love Me? Clearly not, or they would have cast Adam Scott as a rogue biker named Frederick de la Santos and I wouldn't have to watch him tongue kiss Amy Poehler anymore. Why not embark on a crossover episode, like when Urkel hit that girl on Step by Step with his car?

the fact that Ed Bundy remarried is the cherry on top of this situation

Jackson's mother Gemma Teller is played by Married... with Children's Katey Sagal as an aggressive, controlling presence in the lives of her son and husband. She reminds me of my wife Lynne if every third sentence out of Lynne's mouth was, "Don't hurt my baby." Her ongoing feud with Drea de Matteo was the highlight of the show's first season, although the fact that Drea did not get naked and that they never showed her shooting up heroin or bearing Jackson's baby somewhat lessened my interest in the storyline. 

"Tell me what you really thought of the second Hellboy."

Sagal's first serious dramatic role is a mixed bag. (I'll be scrambling my metaphors a lot in this paragraph.) Her ongoing marriage to show creator Kurt Sutter has hardly engendered goodwill among the fanbase, and including her original music was another fly in the ointment. The fact that her husband (Ron Perlman) beat the shit out of her and all she did was frown a lot constituted the final straw for me, however. Sagal actually enlists her son to kill her husband, but he has to leave him alive because of the CIA. Fortunately this storyline doesn't seem likely to go all Boardwalk Empire but I still get kind of creeped out by the way she looks at Hunnam.

just tell everyone you got into INXS there for awhile juicyEven when Sons of Anarchy gets silly, like when they debuted Tom Arnold as a wacky pornographer, the show usually redeems itself. There are actually many moments when Sons of Anarchy crosses conventional lines, such as when valued club member Juice tried to hang himself from a tree with a steel chain. You don't often see a suicide attempt on cable television these days, although god knows the British host of The X Factor should give it a shot. Also, there should be a specific viewer warning for having to see Ron Perlman's exposed belly.

To join the Sons of Anarchy, a member has to get a back tattoo. If they leave the group, they have to get it inked over or removed. I believe the Church of Scientology and the Heritage Foundation have a similar policy. The most common method of leaving the SoA is by death, and this season's death march has already claimed club founder Piney (William Lucking, not that it matters now). Ron Perlman shot him in the chest with a shotgun because he had an incriminating letter, setting up the weathered veteran as the show's biggest heel.

Also on the death list was poor Herman (The Shield's Kenneth Johnson) whose main crime was being cast on the doomed NBC version of Prime Suspect. Most of The Shield, Deadwood and Oz have taken their own place in Sons of Anarchy; you'd be surprised to know how few actors there actually are in the world, maybe 600 total not including Tom Cruise or his wives. They get thawed out of cold sleep every Tuesday.

get it????

Last night the show's many concurrent storylines converged in a not-so shocking season finale. When we had last left club president Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman), he was lying motionless in a hospital bed after being shot in the stomach by Piney's son Opie (Ryan Hurst). Instead of actually having the balls to kill off the most famous actor on their show, Sons of Anarchy creator/actor Kurt Sutter (below as incarcerated member Otto Delaney) chickened out and left Clay alive.

Jackson Teller had long calculated a plan to leave his club in the dust, move to Portland and start up a bed & breakfast with his wife. Instead, in the season's climactic finale scene, he ascended to the presidency of his little club. He explained the change of heart by saying that it would be one thing to simply abandon his club, but another to destroy it completely. I sympathized with him for the first time then because it's the same way I feel about having to watch the second season of Game of Thrones. Then again, how could it be as bad as A Dance With Dragons?

Jackson's tough decision is the exact same as Kurt Sutter's. When you make a beautiful piece of art, the second hardest thing to do is to leave it behind entirely like Larry David and Seinfeld, but the most painful thing to do is turn it into something unrecognizable. Sons of Anarchy lost its way a little bit this year by not changing enough in seasons past. Any character, no matter how finely drawn, becomes stale after we see them in identical situations over and over again. Consciousness change through repetition is only another myth perpetrated by the American political process.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about The Walking Dead and Boardwalk Empire. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Honey Girl" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

"Little Birds" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

"The Devil's Sake" - Jolie Holland (mp3)

In Which We Get This Show On The Road

Drive Angry (3D)

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

Drive
dir. Nicholas Winding Refn
100 minutes

For the first ten minutes, Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive is a fantastic movie: tense and thrilling, with a meticulous, soft spoken getaway driver, The Driver, pushing his way through Los Angeles, gunning through lights, across bridges, pulling off hairpin turns to hide the car from the all-seeing helicopter eye in the sky, only to pull into a parking lot chocked with L.A. Clippers fans, the easiest place to disappear. Most importantly, what gives the sequence suspense is the diegetic cue of the Clippers game on the radio, fighting for airspace with the police CB. Those voices give Driver's driving purpose, and the audience can imagine that played out on Ryan Gosling's placid, smooth face.

But after that scene, Driver keeps driving, and the neo-80s synth squalls and gurgles that pass for an updated Pretty in Pink soundtrack take over the film, and more importantly, swell with importance during any scene where Driver drives. Drive is a movie with air quotes around it, a European reimaginging of American noir with a John Hughes fixation and a hard-on for style over anything approaching empathy or character.

Watching it felt like watching a Paul Verhoeven film dedicated to making fun of America, with nothing pointed at the center, just an exercise in nothingness. Worst of all, Drive doesn't understand the art of driving, the necessary relationship that Americans have with their cars and the mythology of the open road.

Driving is an art — it is an art of being completely zen, in the moment, and it's also one of those wonderful, private/public spaces where the world can see you, but you're safe. You can be yourself. Gosling's Driver is a man with no name, no discernible personality, and when he's asked what he does, he replies, "I drive." The scene goes on, with Gosling and his love interest, Carey Mulligan, just staring at each other like two adorable puppies.

But if a driver is defined by driving, then why doesn't he give away any feeling or emotion when he's behind the wheel? Why isn't he playing silly pop songs on the radio, occasionally singing along to Delilah's radio show while midwesterners and the elderly talk about the people they've lost? Because Drive is a boring film about driving, filming Los Angeles like it's a Miami Vice movie, barely daring to have any cool stunt driving scenes — after all, why have them, when you can have a scene with Ryan Gosling staring off into the distance in a way that may indicate meaning or existentialism? Refn films Los Angeles like he's making fun of it, like it's an ugly, squalid little hellhole of ironic signs and darkness.

The taciturn, nearly catatonic vibe of Gosling's Driver means that there's a big, empty hole at the middle of the film. Drive is assembled for maximum mystery and intrigue — who is this guy? Where does he come from? What does he want? But Gosling offers nothing, instead making the Driver another variation on his Lars and the Real Girl character, which made Drive feel like Lars and the Real Girl 2 most of the time. The blankness — not even a Mona Lisa smile of intrigue in there — is in stark relief to the weathered, character-filled face of Bryan Cranston, who fluttered around as the only real source of geniality and good cheer in this morose little film. (Walter White 4-eva!)

Between Gosling's obviously super-deep quiet man routine and the girlish Carey Mulligan sticking out like a sweet little squirrel in a role clearly meant for a woman with gravity and less of a milky English rose bellwether of good decorum and breeding (not for nothing is Gosling hooking up with Eva Mendes right now, an actress with womanly gravity), the romance, set to synth songs and googly-eyed glances, is nothing worth protecting.

So when the old ultraviolence comes into play, the film accelerates from boring to moderately bonkers — Driver has gotten in a pickle, you see, and Carey Mulligan may quite possibly die, so all sorts of crime and ketchup blood smears go off for the sake of a plot.

Most of the violence is cartoonish. Nothing feels like it matters, because there's no there there, no sense of inevitability, no thrust to what's happening. The villains loom (and Albert Brooks is the latest comedian to be overrated for being serious in a movie, clearly he's ripe for his Bill Murray role in a Wes Anderson-wannabe film), Christina Hendricks brings soulfulness and vulnerability to a role that's entirely too short, and more cool things happen because they look interesting.

Driver goes after Ron Perlman in his stunt driver face mask, creating an uncanny valley effect, Driver's sweet satin jacket with the scorpion on the back gets more and more blood stained and nobody seems to notice or care (the best joke in the film). And then there's that other borderline great scene — Driver kisses Mulligan's character in an elevator, the sort of kiss you write sonnets and poems about, a kiss where something's happening, and then he beats the shit out of the potential hitman in the elevator, crunching on his skull to the point of disgust. And Carey Mulligan just stands there. Perhaps, however, maybe all of this silence, this lack of Refn telling you, the audience what to think, is meaningful. It doesn't read as such — it's empty, goofy style, a total mess.

To its credit, however, it's an interesting mess, and not necessarily a disposable one. But really, if you're trying to make a movie that's entertaining, that has some guts to its structure, you don't have your hero use four of his twelve lines talking about "the scorpion and the frog" when there's a scorpion on his jacket. It's really on-the-nose and groanworthy, just like the closing song that calls the Driver "a real human being, and a real hero." Yes, it's sort of funny, but it's definitely in air quotes, and it has no interest in making the audience feel and marvel at anything. Just a passing giggle.

Elisabeth Donnelly is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about My So-Called Life.

"Pretty in Pink" - The National (mp3)

"Bring On The Dancing Horses" - Echo & the Bunnymen (mp3)

"Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" - The Smiths (mp3)