So much happens in any given episode of Sons of Anarchy it can be hard to know where to start.  Even though in each season the action does focus down to a core four or five characters, with a few constants (Jax, Gemma and Clay) and a few rotations (in the past, Chibs and Unser, now Bobby and Nero), with Tara always floating around in the background as the most unevenly written character maybe of any show I’ve ever given serious consideration to … there’s always a lot going on.  It’s helpful to have so many cards in play for Sons‘ incredibly complicated stories, though they can mange to veer too much into just a litany of plot points without enough character building.  But “Andare Pescare” actually slowed down for some telling conversations and interactions, which made it a fairly strong episode.  Hit the jump for why I don’t break into mausoleums — I’m not Tig!

Now here’s the stuff!  After a shaky few weeks, Sons of Anarchy gives us a great, dense episode that answers old questions, brings up new ones, and even has its own complete in-episode dramas.  Jax is at a breaking point with everything surrounding him, pressures from the club, his family, Pope, Eli, Frankie, Nero, the RICO case, the cartel … the list goes on and on.  Still, Jax keeps his cool, maneuvering his pieces to battle Clay as club business, meaning that the club could vote to exile him and kill him.  It ain’t easy bein’ a Son.  For more on the episode and why if you don’t do what I say then you’d better get used to living in a brothel, hit the jump.

Until the last few minutes of “Toad’s Wild Ride,” I was having a rather nice go of things.  Sons of Anarchy threw some weirdness at us this year, and a lot (and I do mean a metric crap ton) of violence, but in “Toad’s Wild Ride” there were some really interesting moments about loyalty and betrayal, especially bringing Juice’s story to the forefront.  Alliances change often on the show, but Bobby, Chibs and even Tig are firmly in Jax’s corner right now.  Clay is delusional if he thinks he could get back at the head of the table and past all of them.  I sincerely doubt, too, that Juice would ever fully back Clay in a coup, especially if Chibs was on the other side.  Still, seeing Clay carefully play Unser and Juice and the Nomads was fun to watch, especially the trick he pulled at Unser’s Airstream.  Clay is just as dangerous as ever, and now Jax knows that giving him a second chance was a mistake.  Of course, most of us would have thought the first time after someone tried to kill everyone we love but, you know, things are different in Charming.  For more on the wild ride and what Joel McHale has to do with it all, hit the jump.

It’s been a rough week for TV characters across the board, and I was desperately hoping that Sons of Anarchy would be just as weirdly funny as it was last week.  Alas.  Despite Jax telling Tara that it was a quiet day, nothing could have been further from the truth.  Everyone had something difficult to deal with and, in a surprisingly high number of cases, people died.  Murder, suicide, more murder … there weren’t any laughs in Charming for the Sons or anyone else.  “Senseless,” Tara says to Gemma, thinking back on her afternoon seeing Otto.  “It’s been that kind of day,” Gemma replies, not knowing the half of it.  But let’s pause and consider how truly senselessly violent and insane “Small World” was.  Hit the jump for my picking apart the deaths this week and how much we did (or didn’t) need them.

The outrageous comedy Frankie Go Boom, from writer/director Jordan Roberts, tells the story of Frank Bartlett (Charlie Hunnam), who tells himself that he’s holed up in the desert to write, but in reality is just hiding from his family, namely his brother Bruce (Chris O’Dowd).  A reckless but charming addict, Bruce has always enjoyed secretly filming Frank in all sorts of compromising positions and sobriety isn’t making their relationship any better.  And as much as Frankie tries to move on with his life, family just keeps sucking him back in.

At the film’s press day, actor Charlie Hunnam spoke to Collider for this exclusive interview about why he didn’t think he was right for this role, what finally convinced him to sign on, what made Ron Perlman the perfect actor for Phyllis, how it was to work with Lizzy Caplan, and giving CPR to a pig.  He also talked about what it’s been like to be a part of Sons of Anarchy and how bittersweet it is that they’re closer to the end of the show now than the beginning, and his desire to direct a film that he’s written for Tommy Flanagan (who plays Chibs on SOA) to star in.  Check out what he had to say after the jump.

It looks like director Guillermo del Toro’s much-anticipated Monsters vs Mecha movie, Pacific Rim, is about to get a graphic novel companion.  Penned by Travis Beacham (Clash of the Titans), the same screenwriter behind the feature, the graphic novel will be put out through Legendary Comics and will be available before the film’s July 12th, 2013 release date, as its story is a prequel of sorts.  Del Toro talks about the decision to release the comic as a prequel rather than adapt the movie after it debuts.  See what the director had to say, along with a brand new poster for Pacific Rim after the jump.

Tonight was the first time Sons of Anarchy made me laugh — and I mean really laugh, hard — in a very long time.  It’s something I’ve been moaning about for ages: yes the show is about a hardcore motorcycle gang, but one of the things that makes it so engaging is its bizarre, dark humor.  But what the scene starring Venus van Damme showed us more than anything was not only that the MC can still have fun despite the truly horrific things that have happened to them recently, but that there are alternatives to Clay’s violent approach to everything.  There are ways to threaten and blackmail that don’t include dressing up Fat Jake (Joe Caniano) from Boardwalk Empire (crossover moment — they’d better watch their backs or Al Capone is gonna get ‘em!) in some kind of S&M scene with a transsexual bouncing on him, sure, but that wouldn’t be as fun.  For more on these shenanigans and some of the darker moments of the week, hit the jump.

This week, Sons of Anarchy gave the club — and us viewers — some time to mourn, regroup, and refocus.  Jax wants to move to club away from “the shit that’s killing us” and try and get back into business with girls instead of guns and drugs.  The dealings with Pope have caused the club to reconsider itself, which is certainly a good thing.  The “blood for blood” retaliation that they were focused on under Clay has seen its day, and it was a great little moment when Chibs and Jax put their guns down to prevent a “hood war.”  As Chibs sagely said, “we’ve got to stop killing each other over a bit of gash.”  Speaking (derogatorily) of women, they were at the forefront of “Stolen Huffy” and did not get the good side of anything, but what else is new in Charming?  It’s a dangerous place to be a bit of a gash.  For more on that and why everyone seems to have a Gemma-sized problem right now, hit the jump.

With only two more seasons left, following this current one, to tell the show’s story, things are getting very, very real on the hit FX drama series Sons of Anarchy.  Never one to shy away from going there when the story calls for it, show creator Kurt Sutter did just that, in the game-changing episode “Laying Pipe,” opening up emotional ramifications for the rest of the season.

During this recent interview to discuss the events of that episode, executive producer Kurt Sutter talked about when he knew the character’s fate and how the actor found out, the motivations for the character’s actions, the mood on set while shooting that scene, how it will affect Jax’s (Charlie Hunnam) leadership and the emotional relationships of the club going forward, what’s to come for Juice (Theo Rossi), whether audiences will ever soften to Damon Pope (Harold Perrineau), whether a confrontation between Jax and Clay (Ron Perlman) is inevitable, and why seven seasons is the right amount of time to tell this story.  Check out what he had to say after the jump, and be aware that there are spoilers.

Since I have to save the heavy, spoilery shit until after the jump I’ll start off by taking a moment to comment on some of Sons of Anarchy‘s lighter fare, which amidst everything else actually got a little screentime in this episode.  Something that has been sorely missing from the series in its last few seasons is the trademark humor that made it so uniquely engaging to begin with.  We got hints of it tonight, with Juice “graduating” and Gemma beating the crap out of Ashley Tisdale from Disney’s High School Musical (file that under dark humor, and how many women has Gemma assaulted at this point?)  Sons continues to get darker and darker, and with it, much of the weird fun has been snuffed out.  Remember when Bobby was really Bobby Elvis?  And Tig was afraid of dolls? (one of my favorite recurring plot points) and Gemma took Half Sack’s girl out with a skateboard?  Those were the days.  Maybe they weren’t as big a part of things as I seem to think, but they made such an impact I remember almost every one.  For other unforgettable moments that you’ll wish you didn’t see, hit the jump.

Things certainly quieted down this week in Charming (if by quiet one means car chases, fights with police and visits to porn sets, and I do).  SAMCRO is still struggling with some of the remnants of last season with Tig’s inadvertent murder of Veronica Pope and the wrath of the Niners, as well as the club’s involvement with the Galindo cartel, the Irish and the CIA.  Then of course there are the new threats of the break-ins and the RICO case that Otto brought upon them (plus whatever Clay has up his sleeve, and you know it’s something).  SAMCRO really can’t catch a break, but just as too many chefs spoil a broth, too many open-ended threats to the club make the show more about running from place to place then about the relationships among the characters we’ve become so invested in.  For more on that and why nothing says true love like capital murder, hit the jump. If you missed our review of season five of Sons of Anarchy, get caught up here. 

Well that certainly opened with a bang. There were many of us in the SAMCRO fandom who feared the series was beginning to lose some of its luster during its meandering third season spent partially in Ireland. But not all who wander are lost — enter Season Four, which had the best cold open of any to date for SOA, and brought things (mostly) local again, focusing on club politics and betrayals (some of them quite severe). The end of the fourth season was compelling (Jax taking the clubs’s reins with a totally badassed-up Tara in support, a direct callback to Gemma and JT), but what made it even better was all that it set up for Season Five. Clay, The King, is not dead, the club is not rid of outside influences (in this case, the CIA via the Galindo cartel); they’re still running guns and drugs, and the members themselves, and their families, are in constant danger. Though there was no time jump from the end of last year’s run to the start of this one, things are already incredibly busy and incredibly dark. For a reminder of where things left off last year and a look at how things kicked off with the new season, hit the jump.

Since first debuting footage at this summer’s Comic-Con, director Guillermo del Toro has maintained “radio silence” on his upcoming monster movie Pacific Rim.  He stated at Comic-Con that they wouldn’t be breaking that silence until the holidays (ie. when the first trailer debuts in front of The Hobbit), but today a few new images have hit the web to hold fans over.  The story finds humans towards the end of a losing battle against giant monsters called “Kaiju.”  In order to combat the creatures, humans have developed their own giant human-controlled robots called “Jaegers.”  In this batch of images, we see more of Charlie Hunnam and Idris Elba in their robot pilot uniforms as well as a peek at some of the destruction that will be on display in the film.

Hit the jump to check out the images.  The film also stars Charlie Dayb, Rinko Kikuchi, Max Martini, Rob Kazinsky, Clifton Collins Jr., and Diego Klattenhoff.  Pacific Rim opens on July 12th, 2013.

A new trailer has gone online for Deadfall, the debut crime-thriller from screenwriter Zach Dean  that stars Eric Bana (Star Trek) and Olivia Wilde (TRON: Legacy).   Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters), Deadfall follows a brother (Bana) and sister (Wilde) who flee from a casino robbery gone wrong.  Making a run for the border, they draw an innocent family and the local law enforcement into their ordeal.  Deadfall also stars Charlie Hunnam, Kate Mara, Sissy Spacek, Kris Kristofferson and Treat Williams.  The film opens December 7th.  Hit the jump to check out the synopsis, trailer and poster.

The first trailer and poster for the comedy 3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom have landed online.  Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy), Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids), and Lizzy Caplan (Party Down) star in the pic which is described as “a comedy about two brothers a girl with a broken heart, a sex tape, an angel and a pig.”  Though this could very well delve into farce territory, the ridiculous situations in the trailer are actually pretty funny thanks to the innocent charm of Hunnam and overall stupidity of O’Dowd.  We also get the chance to see Ron Perlman playing a transvestite, so there’s that.

Hit the jump to watch the trailer.  Written and directed by Jordan Roberts, the film also stars Chris Noth, Whitney Cummings, and Nora Dunn.  3, 2, 1… Frankie Go Boom will be available on iTunes starting September 10th and will have a limited release on October 12th.