the degenerate nu-pulp movies of S. Craig Zahler

because Dragged Across Concrete hits VOD today

I have a lot of affection for Brawl in Cell Block 99 but this one seems destined to test my limits

Hulked out vince vaughan beating up a car street fighter/MJ/basil fawlty style was fuckin lol

I think that's the first/only time I've really liked VV in anything.

good thread title

almost went w "retrograde" but it seemed too flowery

I was hoping Dragged would be on Netflix since I have a free month, but none of his movies are there. I'm intrigued, but not enough to pay $7 to see it on Amazon Prime.

Hmm, this is his latest as writer *and* director, right? I liked Bone Tomahawk a lot, and don't get the sort of retrofitted fascist tag it's earned. But he definitely seems to relish his role as provocateur. In the end I know the right-wing politics of Gibson and Vince Vaughn, but I don't know much about Zahler's viewpoints, just as I don't know about the politics of Don Siegel or Sam Peckinpah, either.

just watched Dragged, which has some arresting moments and details but holy fuck it does not earn that running time. Feels like it stretches out His Thing to the breaking point and well beyond. Its politics are thankfully inscrutable. (Yes, all the cops are reactionary assholes, but most cops are.) The only straightforwardly objectionable aspect is that the female roles are ornamental (or worse)

Gibson shouldn't be getting work at all, but the role undeniably suits him in more ways than one.

I p much liked CB99 til it became extra ludicrous in the last 10 minutes.

yeah Bone Tomahawk was a trip; I saw it at MoMA and he spoke after. Forgot it was the same guy.

supposedly Park Chan-Wook will be directing an old Western script of his for Amazon:

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/03/the-brigands-of-rattlecreek-park-chan-wook-s-craig-zahler-1202051690/

good thread title

― ebro the letter (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, March 22, 2019 7:43 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like this guy a lot; i think his movies are fundamentally sound and earn their very non-exploitation run times. that said, i think he might be starting to fetishize his role as "provocateur" and i don't think that bodes well for hs art.

btw he writes a lot of reviews of board games and prog rock albums on amazon.

arrrrrrmonnnnnddddddd

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/dragged-across-concrete-conservative-action-movie/

(NB i didn't read that b/c why would i? but you might be curious)

I knew it would be a rave before I opened it

armond is about as predictable as it gets

Gibson shouldn't be getting work at all, but the role undeniably suits him in more ways than one.

― Simon H., Friday, March 22, 2019 10:46 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's an excellent actor, i'm sorry to say.

wau, 162 minutes

it's good.

but yeah i had the same initial thought.

There's some stuff I'd have trimmed for sure. And it coulda ended in the fog.

Made it about an hour into Brawl... this morning. May come back to it later. It's not as slow as people described it as being, but it's certainly deliberate.

This review by Vern is good, and the comments are worth reading as well.

it certainly uh ramps up towards the end, that’s for sure

Finished watching Brawl, and I don't think I'll bother with Dragged Across Concrete. "What if Jim Jarmusch was Quentin Tarantino" isn't really my thing.

I enjoyed Brawl, it landed in a space between good Tarantino and good Abel Ferrara I thought

I have to admit that DAC has stuck with me, though I did begrudge the length quite a bit while watching it,

i liked DAC an awful, though i'm still not sure about the jennifer carpenter little side plot, which was brilliantly executed. it's the sort of thing that a studio film would have axed out at the first pass through a rough cut. the "point" (or desired effect) seemed to be to remind us of the human stakes of the stuff that is otherwise happening on the periphery of the central drama. but it also seemed to kind of curdle for me since it was also a smart-alec demonstration of zahler's willingness to shamelessly manipulate the audience, both for pathos and for shock. it felt a little michael haneke to me (absent the preachy politics). that's not a compliment.

i hope i was vague enough to avoid spoilers.

um, i meant *an awful lot

"brilliantly executed" lol

That particular segment reminded me a little bit of Twin Peaks S3, oddly enough.

Anyway, I see this particular narrative is forming:

Meet the Hollywood filmmaker who is making movies for the MAGA crowd https://t.co/tMj2WYzvai

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 24, 2019

xpost

oh wow i didn't notice that. yikes. i can totally see the twin peaks connection, in the way presents a situation full of pathos in a strange, cold, disorienting, seemingly dispassionate way.

...the reviews that criticize this film for its purported reactionary bias seem to be honing in on the most obvious lines of dialogue (e.g. the scene w/ don johnson). but the bias is there in the whole way the structure of sympathy is organized. we're supposed to feel for the two cops, i think, because zahler grants them some very understanable, putatively sympathetic motivations. gibson wants to move his family out of a rough neighborhood; vaughan wants, i guess, to be able to be a better provider and just a more suitable prospective husband to his girlfriend(?). they both complain about money being tight, even though we see vaughan for example in a pretty swanky condo.

i don't know what police detectives' salaries are like everywhere, but in the big cities where i've lived, they have it pretty good, all things considered. they tend to live in suburban or quasi-suburban neighborhoods (sometimes, in cities that require cops to live within city limits, there are entire semi-exclusive UMC enclaves basically populated with cops and firefighters). they also tend to have union protection, good benefits, etc. which is not to say that such folks can't have legit problems, including money problems. but the film seems to go out of its way to render equally worthy of our sympathy the somewhat dubiously realistic "money problems" of the cops and the seemingly much more urgent problems of the black ex-con. it's not the end of the world -- i really liked the movie -- but it's probably a better example of the film trying to tilt the audience toward sympathy toward a pair of reactionary cops than the on-the-nose dialogue which seems more defensibly "realistic" as the sort of thing those reactionary cops would say in reponse to being put on leave b/c of an incident of brutality.

The interview is not actually that damning (and Nick Schager, who I like a lot, did a fine job); the headline/subhead is deliberately provocative. That said, some of his statements are tough to take seriously in their sheer naivety.

also, this line from the same outlet's review of the movie:

Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn) are caught on tape applying excessive force to a Hispanic prisoner in handcuffs, in the form of Ridgeman grinding his boot into the man’s neck until it emits a cracking sound. (During the bust, Ridgeman and Lurasetti also mock a scared, naked Latina suspect, claiming they can’t understand what she’s saying due to her accent. Both scenes are played for laughs.)

convinced me most/many critics don't understand that depiction is not endorsement. Neither of these scenes struck me as funny or attempted-funny.

tbh the average post-Jackie Brown Tarantino movie is just as, if not more problematic than any Zahler movie

i think those scenes meant to be /both/ funny /and/ unsettling.

xpost

i think that's mostly true, and it points to two things:
1) zahler seeding the film with lines seemingly drawn from social media arguments baits critics into observing things that they would let slide in other films;
2) it's not the 1990s anymore.

I just saw "Brawl in Cell Block 99" (I'd put it off a while). Liked it. Can't exactly say why it occurred to me, but I think Zahler and Ari Aster would have a lot to talk about.

I read the Rattleborge script floating around on the interwebs and it is delightful (if you‘re into mansplaining, ten-dollar words and bizarre Salo-level cruelty)

I watched Dragged Across Concrete and there's something about Zahler that inspires *thoughts* so here are some. (I've only seen this and Bone Tomahawk, though my brain continues to insist that Green Room is a Zahler film.)

Time - this was simultaneously too long and not long enough. His insistence on the various side/backstories meant too much was tangential and ill-considered, and, like Simon said, this particularly impacted on the female characters. I did like the slow pace, though; part of me wants to say, it's ambient, like Michael Mann, but I think the truth is that it's the promise of violence that gives the film its shape. It's Zahler; you stay with it because of foreboding and the knowledge that something unspeakable is coming.

Violence - about that. I was kind of surprised at the relatively tame nature of the violence at the start. We're used to all sorts of horrific police brutality and this was humiliating and vile but I was a bit disappointed. The same with the 'assault' against Ridgeman's daughter. This may say more about me. The 'gang' at the centre of it were weird, underdeveloped and uninteresting. Their violence was affectless and it veered into camp in places. I'm largely blank in my reaction. What was with the precise anatomical knowledge? (That scene was grim. Christ.)

Exploitation - the cry against Zahler is his (alleged?) portrayal of reactionary politics and the sense that's he trolling but we're fine with what he does to bodies. The bank scene was disgusting and the treatment of the hostage is next level. Because it's exploitation cinema we let it go?

Motifs - the stuff with the lions is intentionally shit and underplayed? I can't imagine what it's doing there, really. And that final scene in the house by the sea - it's like a scene from The Good Place in its hypereality. Which I guess is the point.

I like that he cast two reactionary arseholes in the main roles. I'm going to be generous and say that he's fucking with us, and them.

Also, music! I literally can't remember the score for Bone Tomahawk but the music in this (the whole sound design, really: Vaughan eating that sandwich. Jesus.) is weird. Before I just read that Zahler helped compose much of the original music, it felt deliberately jarring, now it just feels, I don't know, ugly.

It’s been more than three years since “Dragged Across Concrete,” but Zahler has started pre-production on his next film, an Elephant Man-style puppet movie. This ambitious new project is based on his own book, titled “Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric of an Anomalous Child”, a gothic tale that he will bring to the big screen with the help of his new creative partners, The Jim Henson Company.

The film is said to be an orphan's tale. Zahler has even described it as "a little bit “Elephant Man”, and a little bit “Eraserhead." Its main protagonist will be an animatronic puppet. The film is said to be three hours long, shot in black-and-white and Dickensian in nature.

definitely not the next move i expected from him. a little bit david lynch, and a little bit also david lynch