I like Zahler but this honestly sucked

adjusting the frame rate and having no audio make the fights look way worse

Exactly correct. Concrete was such bloated trash, could have cut a literal hour out of that movie.

Concrete was so fucking slow and poorly paced. What is the awful dialogue too? Mel was great but this movie needed a completely new edit. also some of the DP work was really bad

>i need more action shooty

Finally someone says it.

i actually like long movies. I even kinda liked the 4h cut of Dances with Wolves. But they need to have something to actually show, a reason to be that long. Dragged across Concrete didn't have that. There was nothing happening. No nice cinematography, no interesting still shots, nothing. It was just long for the sake of being over long.

the only thing they shouldve cut was the dumb cunt going back to the bank

I'm a leftist and love Zahler movies.

Agreed except it didn't really carry as far as I would have hoped it would have

like you know, its not for everyone

I wouldn't say the dialogue was that bad but it does slide into cheese territory more than a couple of times. That just makes it better for me though. My favourite line in the whole movie is "talk correct, or get raped". Fucking gold.

no

Same. Well, I'm more of left leaning actual non-"woke" liberal so I'm not going to get butthurt over the subtleties of having an evil abortionist as a secondary villain in Cell Block. I haven't seen Dragged Across Concrete but it's got Mel in it so it's safe to assume there's at least a little of that in there too. Personally I didn't see any right wing politics in Bone Tomahawk though. I mean, they even go out of the way to have that guy from Fargo playing an educated college professor native american who makes it absolutely clear that the troglodytes aren't representative of the rest of his people and even they loathe and fear them.

Definitely the weakest of the three, but I loved Vaughn caving in beaners' skulls.

i watched it 4 times and bumped it to 10 out of 10. it's simply a perfect film: clear motivations, smart characters, good dialogues, slick cinematography, no loud noises. vince vaughn killed it. like i said, a perfect picture.

what was political about bone tomahawk?

Right wingers can't make movies, there I said it

nothing. americans are sick to the core. the whole america is one big reality tv show. the ratings are what the social credit score is in china.

t.

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>Yas Forumstards are so incredibly stupid they fall for this bait immediately and without even thinking
>in a Zahler thread

Watch shot caller instead

i'm as far from right wing as one can possibly be and i think his movies are fun as hell.

so you're wrong and probably a pussy

that movie is garbage tho

really? i think i liked it even more than bone tomahawk. still haven’t seen dragged across concrete. the fight scenes are so damn satisfying. not much of a story but i don’t think there’s really meant to be. i loved it.

you love it or you hate it. I thought it was fucking awesome.

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Kill yourselves. Thanks!

>left winger on Yas Forums

Fuck off no one wants you here

its problematic depiction of homicidal retarded cavemen

Dragged>Brawl>power gap>Bone

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i've been here longer than you. maybe you should eat my dick.

How the fuck did this film have right wing politics injected into it? Oh wait, it didn't, you're just one of those retards that decide to completely arbitrarily associate a movie with one side of politics. Like how Joker is considered a right-wing movie for no fucking reason.

>his movies are fun as hell.

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unlikely

t. newfag election tourist

>nothing. americans are sick to the core. the whole america is one big reality tv show. the ratings are what the social credit score is in china.
What's your point faggot?

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they're like jackie brown era tarantino - before tarantino became a parody of himself - where the genre references are more about mood and feeling rather than overt aesthetics.

if that's not fun for you, that's honestly too bad.

Been here since 2011....

>no loud noises

They let you use the computer in the old folks home?

Wtf they mad an scp movie?

Kind of, Jackie Brown was an adapted screenplay, as were all of Tarantino's best movies. You're dead on but you seem to have missed the fact that the boundary is between the movies Tarantino made with co writers and co creators and the formless, verbal diarrhea scripts he inflicted on mankind after BIG HARV bought enough PR outlets to convince the average Yas Forums cineaste he was somehow an autist genius despite much evidence to the contrary that he was merely an able genre director like Frankenheimer or McTernan.

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Thank god i'm not the only one who thought Dragged Across Concrete was a huge disappointment.
I'd love to do a fan edit of that one and trim the fat big time.

it's easily his worst. way too long and the ending sucked.

Was kind of a really stupid plot, but fun.

>Thank god i'm not the only one who thought Dragged Across Concrete was a huge disappointment.
Yeah you can both take the butplug out of your mouths and breath again ha ha, nobody should risk a long take anymore when they could just cross cut to a tranny getting her dick cut off payoff shot ha ha

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not really sure what you think i missed. i happen to agree with everything you wrote.

based schizo poster

The fuck are you talking about?
I'm all for long movies (love Stalker and I prefer the Redux cut of Apocalypse Now over the theatrical) but my god, Dragged Across Concrete feels like a 100ish minute film stretched out to almost three hours.
Even Brawl in Cell Block 99, which does have a longish running time, has much superior pacing to Concrete.

I agree with you too, only that "before he became a parody of himself" seems to imply that he "sold out" rather than ran out of people to rip off. But no probs bro, we are copacetic :)

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>much superior pacing to Concrete
Try watching some decent heist movies Zoomer, than tell me why the pacing is off.
>Key point
He breaks into prison retard.

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>By lucky coincidence, I caught up with S. Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 the same week that pandering governors Andrew Cuomo and Ralph Northam both jumped the shark on Roe v. Wade to promote infanticide in the name of states’ rights.

>Of all the violent incidents in Zahler’s grindhouse thriller, the grisliest was a gangster’s repeated threat to dismember a woman’s in utero fetus “limb by limb.” It resembled a politician’s heartless manipulation, the cunning use of law as extreme social engineering — in this particular case, to control the baby’s father, the film’s protagonist, Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn), a two-fisted white Southern Christian who is not just an action-movie hero but an archetype of today’s media-disenfranchised electorate.

>Abortion in movies isn’t necessarily a Juno-cute part of the culture war. Consider that Zahler specializes in the grotesque, which makes him an apt, even prophetic, reporter on emotionally driven issues; his schlockmeister approach successfully challenges news-journalist sanctimony. He works in macabre genres (see, for example, the cult favorite Bone Tomahawk), but now the macabre — the horror of legalized pre- and post-natal murder, endorsed by governors — has become politically feasible.

>Maybe we never suspected how monstrous, ugly, and destructive political representatives could be or that our fellow citizens held such vengeance in their public personas; now Zahler showcases this dismaying truth. The vicious and brutal Brawl in Cell Block 99 is worth seeing because no other contemporary movie goes so daringly deep into the cruel absurdity of Millennial #Resistance.

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>Think about the current impasse between the executive and legislative branches of government. It can be easily symbolized as an ideological brawl: American citizens (both those furloughed employees and those who awaited a hostaged State of the Union address) are emotionally pummeled, turned into collateral damage. Zahler’s film humanizes such conflict through Vaughn’s tow-truck-driving Thomas, a working-class guy who pursues personal dignity but finds himself entangled in a rocky marriage, drug-dealing, and the prison system.

>We first see the back of his shaven head bearing the vein-blue tattoo of a Saint Thomas cross. It initially recalls the berserk fanaticism of DeNiro’s cryptic full-body tattoos in Cape Fear, but Bradley’s single religious symbol pinpoints contemporary Christianity’s embattled status; his personal agony equates to class distress in this remarkable characterization.

>Vaughn’s towering physicality and calm-under-pressure temperament show seething intelligence. Viewers who recall that shocked-appalled look Vaughn gave Meryl Streep during her pompous (“overrated”) political grandstanding at the Golden Globes may infer a critique of liberal class-based vanity. Vaughn’s puzzled expression, caught unawares (a thinking man’s curiosity), questioned the self-pitying audacity of social-justice show-offs. It powers this film’s exploration of their now routine prison-industrial-complex pieties.

>Bradley’s incarceration ordeal is central to the film’s political allegory. The Redleaf maximum-security prison is described by Don Johnson’s Warden Tuggs (a performance of equally uncanny credulity) as a “minimum freedom” facility; it represents society’s officially authorized — ideological — madhouse. (The warden’s discipline order, “Give him some justice,” is dark satire indeed.)

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>The title’s symbolic prison is presented outside of reality — an expressionist dungeon where fairness, brotherhood, and civilization are reduced to mankind’s cruel nature. (Luis Buñuel once quipped, “You can judge a society by the way it treats its prisoners.”) Going from one institution called the Fridge to the Redleaf compound, Bradley enters a cobalt-blue color scheme that gets darker, evoking and mocking Robert Redford’s prison flicks Brubaker and The Last Castle. (Bradley’s All-American eccentricity also exposes the pseudo-sophistication of TV’s Breaking Bad.) His masculine grievance opposes bleeding-heart weakness in every extraordinary scene.

>These are not face-saving, progressive, hipster fallacies. The harsh fantasy symbolism represents an insightful discovery for writer-director Zahler, who cracks open the sophomoric sadism popularized by Quentin Tarantino to make a film that is an unflinching reflection of our current social insanity. Its brilliance comes from Zahler’s sympathy for the newly disenfranchised — not simply the forgotten American but the “deplorable” who has been denied the advantages of ruling-class privilege. Despite Tarantino’s jokey homages to grindhouse movies and blaxploitation fare that cocoon adolescent viewers from real-life complexities, he has never produced authentic characterizations like Bradley’s interactions with black and white prison guards (a beautifully cast multiracial bureaucracy), which ring true to both the cynical sensibilities and sensitive yearnings that are basic to American plurality — and which yahoo moviegoers learn from social experience.

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I've never seen a Zahler film, but I saw him being compared to Tarantino, is that true and if yes, how?

>Zahler fulfills their secret regard for morality-tale retribution — and it is thorough. Bradley embodies this need like such preceding movie icons as John Wayne and Joe Don Baker — large-frame Americans (thinking he-men) who acted out national tensions and common desires across superficial ethnic differences. Zahler’s violence exceeds the action genre’s usual macho toughness. His narrative setups may take too long and sometimes overindulge sadism as if his only point is to spook us, but his moral perspective, that the independence of individual American men is always under threat from other men and social competition, is compelling and surprisingly moving.

>This extreme violence (from Bradley’s destroying a car with his bare hands to his stomping on the back of a drug dealer’s head and dragging the man’s face across a concrete floor) characterizes Zahler’s unruly, visceral wit. His impetus is not just anti-authoritarian. It’s anti-hypocrisy, perhaps the gift of a true conservative, because it replaces liberal sanctimony with a modern equivalent of John Wayne–Clint Eastwood righteousness. It’s almost Straw Dogs for this millennium.

>After Zahler’s previous film Bone Tomahawk, I never wanted to see another film by him. But last week’s bonkers political reality has given the director’s horror specialty expressionist power — it felt like the only accurate cultural response to the normalization of murderous madness. I celebrate the catharsis of Cell Block 99 for dramatizing the personal virtues imperiled by venal officials and partisan social arbiters as well as by fate. Updating the sensibility of mid-20th-century noir, it sounds a Millennial alarm for the precious gift of life that is cruelly bartered by politicians who think like criminals.

Think the "good" exploitation films of the 70s that used genre catharsis to address social anxieties
Tarantino but not a 12yr old edgelord

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>Dragged Across Concrete starts with a metaphoric title that vividly conveys the feeling of suffering, bitterness, and struggle. Director-writer S. Craig Zahler (Brawl in Cell Block 99) extends that sympathy to several different characters: veteran cop Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson); his partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn); and Henry Johns, a.k.a. Slim (Tory Kittles), an ex-con petty crook they encounter as part of an elaborate bank robbery.

>Zahler’s observation takes us past these men’s ethnic, age, and sociological differences to find common depth. All are strivers. Each man is subject to dubious choices. Zahler’s crime-and-stakeout plot shows these men making personal decisions out of various, overlapping needs: Ridgeman fends for his wife and child and pursues the professional entitlement he hasn’t received. Lurasetti acts out of training and loyalty. Slim’s lifelong habit is to oppose every situation that threatens to do him in. This might seem schematic, but Zahler’s filmmaking compels a viewer’s interest by concentrating on ethical suspense. At every moment you wonder: What will this man do next?

>Zahler is interested in how grave circumstances bring personality to light. “Action is character,” Walter Hill decreed, and Zahler thinks in action-movie terms. His violent scenarios take time to unravel in order to find the essence of individual behavior, through either stress or the mundane. In Zahler’s narratives, every moment is fateful.

>The opening scene of Slim, just out of prison and enjoying carnal relief with an Asian-American hooker, portrays rude diversity. But there’s a personal aspect to their hook-up that is so believable, their convergence feels like e pluribus unum. It’s a brief encounter such as John Dos Passos might conceive, but only a pop-culture eccentric would dare.

An aside: I think the soundtracks for brawl and dragged are fantastic

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Just the violence really. I don't know why anyone would compare the two.

>It is Zahler, unlike other modern directors making noise about race and representation, who introduces the most credible black male movie character this decade. Tory Kittles has the talent and good fortune to bring emotional substance to a figure most often seen as a SamJack cutup. (Slim’s facial scar suggests a deliberate rebuke to The Wire’s Omar.) He’s sullen because he’s frustrated, a man society has infantilized — dragged across concrete just as the empathetic police chief (played by Don Johnson) reasons that Ridgeman has “scuffed pavement too long.” Slim’s retreat into a video-game jungle parallels the real-life “Street Safari” that he must traverse with similar cunning. Beneath his profanity lie intelligence (Zahler gives him a brilliant gaffe, saying “exacerbate” when he means “exasperate”) and brotherly compassion. Kittles’s warmth suggests the young Morgan Freeman we never got to see. Gibson and Vaughn’s characterizations, presenting the ethos of white-American-male struggle, are equally solid, but Kittles’s principled thug seems new.

>At last, we have an American filmmaker who has experienced Tarantino and got past it. Zahler’s surprisingly felt art is not predicated on movie violence, even though genre violence is his métier. Despite Zahler’s heightened form of crime fantasy, Dragged Across Concrete presents a strangely naturalistic worldview. Instead of imagining how heartless — or “cool” — mankind can be, Zahler looks for hidden virtues in each situation, no matter how bizarre. Ridgeman, Lurasetti, and Slim shift between being foes and allies. Dare I say, Zahler dramatizes what, in classic Westerns and crime films, used to be considered their Americanness.

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>Most Hollywood movies — post-Tarantino — distract us from viewing American life as a unique experience. Zahler gravitates toward the violent and the outré as comic aspects of American greed and lust. But he doesn’t stop there, as Tarantino does. Zahler’s characters are full of yearning (uncorrupted desire and love). That explains the plot digression about an anxious new mother (Jennifer Carpenter) reentering the workforce. Her fate triggers the heroic rescue action that will determine each man’s familial resolve.

>“We’re it!” Ridgeman and Lurasetti realize when they reach a point of no return and must do their duty, true to their professional oath and to each other. This story of urban chivalry makes Dragged Across Concrete a homegrown alternative to the contemporary war movie that Hollywood has been unable to conceive, having lost the will to dramatize American unity, obligation, and valor.

>Now that Hollywood has conceded to almost total triviality, propagating insipid forms of comic-book, video-game escapism, only a few movies (Mom and Dad, Vox Lux, Ray Meets Helen, The Mule, and David Ayer’s fine cop movie End of Watch) touch on the panic that lies beneath our distressed social relationships. Media-driven, our public lives disorient us from moral principles. This is what politicians misrepresent when spouting the cliché about “existential threat” — it’s a highfalutin means of cheap persuasion. But Zahler understands what that really means: His protagonists Ridgeman, Lurasetti, and Slim, law-enforcers and lawbreakers alike, come together in their alienation. They are in constant search of spiritual satisfaction and for nearly three hours, Zahler pays rapt attention to their quest.

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If anything I got a leftist vibe from it. The experienced injun killer died for fighting the troglodytes like regular injuns, whereas Patrick Wilson survived because he took the time to understand how they thought and operated.

Its his most liberal movie because he took the enemy and alienized it, turning them from being injuns into savage troglodytes, made it essentially a zombie movie rather than a darker "The Searchers"