For I am persuaded...

I’ve been mulling over what I find persuasive. The deeper stuff is a little too slippery to get much of a grasp on, so why not start with the superficial?

Brian Tallerico persuaded me to buy Dragged Across Concrete, a movie I hadn’t heard of before his blurb over here. The element that intrigued me was Tallerico’s opening gambit:

The turnaround time from theatrical to VOD to physical media gets faster every year. Take the latest from S. Craig Zahler, a film that didn't even have a release date a couple months ago, but has already spun through arthouse theaters and is now available on the home market. As the line between film and television gets blurrier, one wonders if things like this will even get any theatrical at all in the near future.

Oof — I feel that. Speaking as someone parked in the boonies, critics like Tallerico are regaining status for exactly this reason — slobs like me don’t have access to arthouse theatres. It has to capture Tallerico’s attention for it to capture mine.

Anyway, he segues from this to his closure, in which he describes the movie — twice — as “divisive.”

And that’s it.

I looked at the cast list — Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Michael Jai White, Don Johnson. Perversely intriguing if not especially promising. What sort of director would gamble a studio film on a pariah like Gibson in this day and age? Check the director — S. Craig Zahler, who he? Brawl In Cell Block 99 I’d heard of and had meant to follow up on. Okay then ... add to cart.

After an umpteenth day of rain with a spotlessly clean house all to myself, I finally took off the cellophane, popped in Dragged and hit play.

"One more 'Bare in the Big Blue House' pun, and so help me..."

For two and a half hours I felt like I was caught in a very unpleasant dream — one I absolutely had to follow to conclusion. The ten minutes that followed those two-and-a-half hours were the only real disappointment, but not fatally so. I will definitely watch this again.

The less you know before you go in, the better, so I will save my short and mildly spoilery critique for the very end of this series.

I next went to MetaCritic to see what was “dividing” movie critics. Short version: the concern was less is it a poorly made movie but more is Zahler trying to gin up a little sympathy for the troglodyte MAGA POV?

That was not my experience, but if your nerve endings are more frayed than mine your results might vary. I have some further thoughts on the matter which I hope to get to, but first:

Again with the blue...

“FULL-STACK SOCIOERGONOMICS!” — oh, you are so going to want to come back for this! Tomorrow, hopefully...