The Watch - Apple Officially Wades Into the Streaming Wars, Plus: ‘Us’ and ‘Dragged Across Concrete’ | The Watch

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

At the Apple event this Monday, the company paraded out all of the original content that will be available through their streaming service (2:09). They’re about to go up against not only streaming services, but cable companies as well (11:12). Plus, Adam Nayman on ‘Us’ and ‘Dragged Across Concrete’ (28:32). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Adam Nayman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Liz Kelly. As we approach the final season of Game of Thrones on April 14th, the ringer is providing me with a deep dive on the show's first seven seasons and what to expect from season eight. Up on the website, staff writers like Alison Herman, Alyssa Bresnak, Zach Kram, and many more are analyzing what loose ends the show needs to address in the last season. Up on the video side, our resident Game of Thrones experts, Mallory Rubin, and Jason Concepcion are breaking down the show's top 25 moments in the 25 days leading up to the finale. You can find each day's videos up on our social channels like Facebook and Twitter

and the compilation videos on YouTube.com slash The Ringer at the end of each week. And make sure to keep an eye out for even more Thrones coverage coming from us as we get closer to April 14th. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at The Ringer.com and joining me on the other line. It's Andy Greenwald Blues.

Oh, that surprised me. I see what you did there. I thought you kind of for a minute. Tim Apple came through and took Bob Disney's little channel title. It's weird, right? Like, I don't know. Of the two majorly disappointing nothing burgers of the last three days, which one was your favorite?

Apple pluse or Mueller pluse? Muler pluse. Obviously today, Andy and I are going to be talking about the Apple TV Plus rollout that happened today in Cupertino. And a little bit later in the episode, I'm joined by Adam Naiman to talk about us and dragged across concrete, the new movie with Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn.

We had a really interesting conversation about that, so stick around for that. But Greenwald, let's just like... Wait, wait, wait. I got to cut you off. Are you just assuming that I didn't see those movies this weekend? Are you just assuming that I didn't go to the Cinematheque to check out the latest releases?

Which one are you least likely to see? The Home Invasion movie or the movie... Okay, right. about two racist cops, and it's a two-hour and 45-minute crime movie. I feel pretty good about my choices to stay inside and started on my Fosse Varden screeners. I feel like I've made the right choices for my life at the moment, but that's not necessarily prescriptive. Yes.

Andy and I are treading water a little bit right now because a bunch of shows that we want to talk about are not on for another couple of weeks. So expect to hear a lot of Fossy Varden talk, a lot of Killing Eve talk leading up to Game of Thrones, obviously, in about three weeks. So, Chris, which show about magical dancers are you more excited about? Fossie Verdon or the OA Season 2? Dude, don't knock the OA Season 2. I'm kind of curious.

I'm really curious, mainly because, you know, we had a lot of fun talking about it, the first season. And I kind of can't believe they made a second season. And it's kind of amazing that Netflix now just buries stuff, right? Like, Netflix doesn't seem too psyched on having made a second season of the OA. Am I reading that wrong? I don't know. So I guess what would you constitute, what constitutes something they are psyched about?

Like, what's a show recently that you feel like you felt the sheer weight of Netflix behind? Treble Frontera, I believe, is how it's pronounced in the native Esperanto. Yeah. There were, look, I judge it like any, listen, Chris, I'm just one man. And like your normal, every work-a-day, every man, I judge things just for what I see in front of my eyes. And what's in front of my eyes are the giant billboards across from sunset from Netflix HQ. Right. Well, that is quite literally the bubble.

Yeah. And from here inside the bubble, I think they're still advertising triple frontier. We're like, nothing to see here. We're not stopping any shootings anymore, let alone shootings through the power of interpretive dance. That's right. That's right. Sorry for the spoilers for season one of the OA. But we should check it out.

It's just interesting to me that in this peak, glut, whatever TV, that now there's just so much that we're just yada yadaing second seasons of things that were quite noteworthy the first time around. It's fascinating. We'll have to check that out. Let's talk a little bit about the Apple TV rollout today, because this is obviously something that we've been chatting about on and off for the better part of 18 months, I would imagine,

since those first shows got announced the Jennifer Anderson-Rees-Witherspoon morning show and I believe the Damien Chazel show and Steven Spielberg is reimagining of amazing stories. I think we're among the first few, and they had announced that they'd be working with Jason Mamoa and J.J. Abrams on different things. So we've had this slow trickle,

and today we had an Apple event. Now, there were lots of other things that were announced by Tim Cook and team today, including a credit card extension of Apple pay that seemed to, I guess, A, B, like a hype beast credit card, but also something that was supposed to be much more secure than most credit cards, so shout out to them. And also a newsreader service that was essentially

going to be one subscription to rule them all service that would allow you to pay, I believe it's $9.99 a month. You can get subscriptions to dozens and dozens and dozens of titles. and then obviously there's the Apple TV rollout. And it has kind of multiple tiers here. But what I think we all thought was that Apple was going to try and create a Netflix competitor. And instead they are trying to create the new cable box. It seems like what they are really trying to do is get inside of a lot of already established behaviors on the part of consumers.

So whether it's paying for things like with a credit card or reading things, like having subscription. Insta Magazines, or watching stuff on TV, which is stuff we all of us do if you listen to the watch, Apple's trying to be the hub, right? And it's in some ways it's almost early internet behavior. They are now trying to position themselves as the portal. Now, it's a shift for Apple because they used to be such a hardware-defined company, I think, although they are known for things like iTunes and their iOS. But what are sort of your initial takeaways from this, from these announcements today, and we can get into the specifics. Well, it's interesting that you say iTunes, because iTunes was notable,

but iTunes is also mostly notable now for being a total cluster fuck, right? Like, I think that it, I think that Apple's sense of self and its defining trait, and it comes from Steve Jobs, I think, is that is the idea that you said, that they are going to be your everything. And that was always his idea, right? It was one box and everything would be inside of the box, and it would be a seal of the ecosystem. Everything would be there in your computer.

You wouldn't need outside apps. You wouldn't need to modify it or get into the motherboard or whatever. You would just have the box that worked and did everything for you. So in one sense, if you squint, this announcement, or at least what I can parse from it, is in keeping with that original ethos of the company. That they will be, people thought for a long time that Apple TV or whatever those words together meant that they were going to start making smart TVs and compete with like Samsung. In fact, what they're trying to do is become the new version of your TV, right?

They're going to be a place where you can watch their stuff and other people's stuff too. They're going to make it seamless and easy, I guess, to integrate your HBO subscription, potentially your Disney Plus subscription, whatever other over-the-top service you're interested in. And then have it beamed directly through one app through all the boxes of your choice, whether it's your phone or your TV or not. I guess the play here. What's hard, and you can hear the hesitation of my voice, is so many details are still TBD.

The leg up that they have is, obviously, they have many more shows already in the can, let alone in production than Netflix and Amazon did at this stage in their development. But we don't know the price, right? We don't know how the things are going to be delivered to our screens. We don't know whether they're going to dump whole seasons, whether it's all going to be available at once or not.

we don't quite know what we're going to be paying for, right? They just sort of assume that because we have the boxes and the screens, we are going to be paying for it. It's a kind of cockiness that is very typical for the company, but one that I think is coming off a little bit differently because they're acting cocky in an arena they've never played in before. Well, and they're about to go, they're not just doing battle with upstart thing, like an upstart company like Netflix,

although Netflix has obviously been around for a while and has a lot of money to play with. They're about to, I think, start doing battle with places like cable vision and spectrum and, you know, these sort of monolithic huge communications corporations and I think that that's a different arena to be in. I get the, I think if somebody was like,

what is Apple trying to do? I would say they are trying to create the infrastructure or architecture for how you watch television. And I don't know where the money is in that for them. I assume it's buying like the, on top of the table, the box, the Apple TV box. But it sounds like they'll also be building Apple TV into new Samsung and LG TVs. So, I mean, in some ways, they are becoming the new TV guide.

Is that crazy? Did you say that? Well, I don't know. I mean, I want, let me just be frank. Like, the thing that I seem to be getting from what they're doing is something that I want. And I talk about this all the time. and, you know, if it earns me my old man badge, if I haven't already, so be it. I'll take it. Like, I am very into the idea of them helping me watch stuff, streamlining it for me. Like,

that is actually appealing to me. I would like to cut the cord. I would like to have an appropriate number of subscriptions and then have them all through one app. And I would like that app to tell me when the new shows are available. I find that very helpful. And I think that's smart. I don't, I don't think I'm the only old man or old woman who is desirous of that kind of interface. I don't like, you know, all, I don't like having unlimited choices all the time, including in what apparently are an unlimited number of apps and over-the-top services. I would like a hub. And if they've decided that their business strategy is to spend, you know, just a cool billion, which is nothing to them on original content, great. But if that is, if that original content is the icing to get

you to buy into the cake hub, okay, I get it. But I do think they have to tread carefully because for as much as we as a society are accustomed to Apple introducing us to magical things through gauzy 30-second commercials or stagey presentations from the stage in Cupertino,

this idea where they're like, we are going to blow your mind in a way that's never been blown before, here's a Octavia Spencer TV show and one from the guy who did Battlesaur Galactica. that's not the same as revolutionizing what telephones. Well, it's almost like this entire rollout of not only here's some original content, we're going to spend a billion dollars, yada, yada, but also along with that original content,

we're going to completely change the way you turn on and then experience television as you go through your day is the actual thing that they are revolutionizing and the real thing that they're iterating against. I will say this I don't have a lot of like I don't have like a lot of Silicon Valley experience but I do have consumer experience and I obviously do watch a lot of stuff and plenty of it is through my Apple TV now

and there are some like straight up practical hardcore like this shit doesn't work problems that I have with some Apple products right now and Apple products are dumb expensive and they have like a 25 month at the most shelf life seemingly, and the remote control doesn't really work. And that may speak to somewhat to my age,

but I also think that this is a huge investment to make if it's only going to appeal to early adopter tech savvy type people. Like, I don't know, I don't know if my mom could use an Apple TV remote, which may or may not matter to their bottom line, but I think it's worth mentioning. I think that's fair, but I also think that the Apple TV and the Apple TV be remote are secondary, if not tertiary, to the fact that everyone has an Apple phone.

Yes. Mostly knows how to work that. And that's what they're programming towards. But you're speaking to, I think, as much as a $1 trillion evaluated company can have Achilles' heels, but I think you've identified it. I mean, first of all, in the broadest strokes, I don't think they make stuff as well as they used to. They certainly haven't innovated to the degree that they did a decade ago in quite some time. Now, I don't know if any company will ever have. have like a one, two, three punch or four punch or however many punches they did when they just

changed basically how we do everything at the beginning of the century. So that's sort of a tough bar to clear again. But if you think about it, the brilliance of the phone was you made the box and then they opened, they gave people the key and opened up the playground enough so that what you did with the box was up to everyone else. The apps were developed by every other company or just random people in their basement all over the world. And the content, you know, and the usefulness, the utility came from there. What they're trying to do here is say that we control the box, but now they're also saying we're going to seed the box with things that you're going to absolutely need and are going to be the game changers. And that's a lot harder to do

when you're spending, when you're talking about television production or film production, which is incredibly expensive and incredibly chancy, right? I mean, the odds that one of these shows that they're spending all this money on, is the next great show or is a game changer, is infinitesimally small. And I don't even mean that as a dig against the people they've hired to do it. It's just, this shit is hard, and you can't predict it. Yeah, there's also some, having a little bit of flashbacks to the, I guess about seven or eight years ago, maybe nine, 10 years ago, when journalism started getting optimized for search engine traffic. And then obviously Facebook became the firehose of all website traffic

and everything was sort of starting to be built around. Would it catch on in an algorithm and would people find it in search and would people find it in their social media feeds? And that led to a lot of changes in the way we both write and read our news and just our writing in general. And then obviously Facebook tried to position itself as essentially the place people come to read. And that had so.

some really negative impacts on a variety of industries. Like democracy? Like democracy? I don't think necessarily that Apple getting involved with like sci-fi television is going to have anywhere near the sort of effect that other development I just talked about would. But there's something very strange about the idea that there's also going to be within Apple TV Plus. This part of it is called channels, Apple TV channels. And that's where you can watch your HBO and your showtime and your Cynamax and your stars.

And presumably more and more channels will get added to that. What happens if Apple starts saying, hey, this is the kind of programming we want to have within our Apple TV channels? What happens if Apple is saying these are the kind of news programs we're willing to run? This is the kind of content we're willing to have on this box. What happens when everything has to start being shot maybe to be optimized to view on an iPhone? not that it isn't necessarily already, I don't know, but I'm a little bit concerned by the benevolence of Apple as a distributor of content

because I don't have very good experiences in the past with when someone comes along and says, we're going to make everything a lot easier, but by the way, we control what you see. Yeah, and also, I think you went to the more pressing and more potentially dangerous place. I was going to go to a slightly less dangerous place, but I think it still speaks to judgment and taste and giving all the power over to one company. Apple has sort of tricked people for a very long time into thinking that they're cool.

Yeah. Right? Because, and maybe that's not true. I'd actually be curious about younger listeners to the podcast because for me and probably for you as well, Chris, like Apple was the scrappy upstart when we got personal computers to do our homework in the 90s, right? Like people going to school in the 90s, like my school lab had Apple two Cs and two E's and maybe like one Macintosh. Yeah. So that's all I ever knew. They were educational computers.

And that was just about it. And every other month, it was a story in some magazine or newspaper about how the company was going to go bankrupt and be, you know, and go under. And so it was kind of like in as much as things that being cool and underdog versus pop, you know, major like major league and sellouts was a defining. trade of the 90s, Apple versus Microsoft or Apple versus PCs was part of that and part of our mindset behind it. And so when all of a sudden the IMAC came out and was turquoise and was cool and, you know, and suddenly iPods were in existence and in videos and everybody thought this was cool and amazing. Part of that was the carryover hangover of this company once having been a cool company. Fast forward 10 years and we're having bad late period U2 albums forced onto our phones.

Our $800 phones. Right. And it's like, Wait a second, you know, are we sure? Yeah. Because the thing that I got from today's announcement was a kind of very still baby boomer love of a top-down daddy's home, a tour filmmaking, which is to say, yes, it's awesome. Octavia Spencer is a part of this and there, and Reese Witherspoon and Sophia Coppola. But you knew Spielberg was going to be there, right? Like the Spielberg-J. Abrams School of this is, these are the guys in glasses who make the culture, is, deep, deep, deep DNA for company like Apple. And we saw some of that in those stories a few

weeks ago being like, well, they're being a little odd with the content they're making because they're concerned about how computers are portrayed and that they don't want things to be too edgy. You can't be this cool utopian Steve Jobs, John Lennon commercial baby boomer dream of corporate tech idealism and make the TV shows people want to watch in 2019. I just don't, I think those two things are in fundamental conflict and that's going to play out in a way that is going to directly, I don't know if it's going to directly affect consumers yet, but certainly we're going to be talking about that if we're talking about the content in the months and years to come. I agree with you. And I also would point out our buddy, Michael Peters,

retweeted this guy, Ben Carlson, who had a very funny, usually don't cite tweets on the pie, but he had a very funny tweet about, you know, the more things change, the more they stay the same, basically. He says, I can't wait to cut the cord and simply subscribe to Netflix, Disney Plus, Apple TV, Prime Video, HBO, Go, Stars, Star, Showtime Cinemax, Hulu ESPN plus YouTube TV, and Sling TV. This will finally help me reach my goal of becoming a minimalist. We still have a lot of shit we have to like kind of figure out here. That winds up being, and if you add on anything like AMC or FX, you know, FX's over the top

service or shutter or criterion or anything else that you're kind of adding in, you're getting right back up to what cable costs for most people. Yeah. And you still have to pay an internet bill. Yes. Yeah. And I don't know what AT&T and DirecTV's play is going to be, but part of it is going to have to be like you're paying for your internet anyway.

Why not just take these cable channels to? I don't know. I don't know how long that works or what, you know, who's buying, who's selling. But we are way, way, way, way, way far away from any kind of resolution here. Before we transition out of this, did you see, I mean, I know that we had gone over some of the early show announcements a week or so ago when the New York Times ran that story, but was there anything that came out today or that you noticed today that you wanted to underline? No, I mean, I think that the person who, there's a bunch of things that I think

are interesting. I, for some reason, find myself incredibly cynical about a lot of the stuff that would be in the drama, not even drama department. I find myself very cynical about a lot of these titles, and I don't know why. I think it's because I'm naively thinking too much about the interference of the corporation with the final sort of product. I'm curious about the Damie Chiselle show. I'm curious about the Sophia Coppola show.

I'm, you know, or films rather. The Damien Chazel is a TV show. That's another thing that I think is actually kind of pretty interesting I was going to ask you about was if you look at some of the mock interfaces Apple put up, they really are melting the distinction between TV and movies. Yeah.

So I thought that was fascinating. But Netflix is already sort of in front of that, right? I mean, do you feel, is the experience of pressing play on Triple Frontier different than pressing play on Grace and Frankie in any appreciable way? No, not, it's not different. I would say everything that happens after you plus press play is different. I mean, again, I haven't seen Grace and Frankie. I'd like to think they're very similar.

Yeah. I don't know. Was there a show that you were particularly, fired up about? I'm very concerned about one thing, which was the only announced piece of children's programming. Did you read this? Did you hear about this? It's a program called Helpsters.

And it says featuring a new puppet named Cody, Sesame Workshop, obviously the people who bring a Sesame Street, or at least bring my home Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop's first Apple series is pitched at preschoolers and will aim to teach them helpful skills like. coding. That's fucking dystopian. That is dystopian. Can I just put a pin in human reality for a second and be like a hundred years ago a new radio play starring boss tweed encouraging children to work in slaughterhouses? This is so dark to me. I know. It is so dark to me. Does Cody suggest a way you can make a killer app, you know, just by like looping? people's credit card numbers and making them buy extra lives?

Like what are we doing here? I can't wait to like the first commercial where like it's like a newborn baby and they put the baby in the mother's arms for the first time and then someone leans over and just puts AirPods in. Yeah, just like, what if midway through the second season of every Apple show, we just casually notice that all the characters have data ports holes in the back of their heads like the fucking Matrix? Yeah.

Just to get everyone used to it. Yeah, oh, fuck. It's like, oh, that's just my lightning in-out cable. No worries. I just think, I got to say, Chris. I mean, I know everyone who's listening to our show right now, who, by the way, we're so grateful for, are listening perhaps on their, what do they call, air buds?

They're listening on an iPhone via the Apple podcast app on their AirPods. Sure. So you're doing that, and that's great. But I got to say, I definitely deplugged a little this weekend because, you know, maybe things weren't. working out so great on the political front. And it was the right move. It was the right move. Maybe I'm not a helpster, but I feel like it was healthier. We'll obviously be talking about any other developments that come out of this stuff. And I'm sure we'll have some follow-up conversations

about it. Andy, thanks for calling in. Let's call Adam Neiman now and talk a little bit about us and dragged across concrete. Will you, Chris, you know, will you let me know what the next shows we're watching for our podcast are? Like, you know, I can give you my assistant's email address if you just want to let her know. Sure. Just so I'm on board with you and the rest of the watchsters. It's just Andy at Godzilla for America.com, right? All right.

Talk to you later, man. By the way, tough times in the campaign this week. We were really, really running. Who could have seen Mayor Pete coming, man? Godzilla was a real deep state kind of guy, you know? And I just feel like the events of the last few days have thrown in four a... Well, you guys could not have controlled the viral footage that got out where to follow up Mayor Pete, someone asked Godzilla to speak Norwegian and he just burned them to the ground with his voice of fire?

That was tough. Look, the thing is, I always knew that was going to be a problem. It was always a risk we ran with the candidate that we've chosen. But honestly, I would still vote for the fire breathing monster over. Okay, I'm sorry, what's this? I'm hearing, I got to go. I got to go. Later, man.

Bye. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Bud Light. Did you know not all alcohol products are required to list their ingredients? That was news to me. Bud Light is changing the game. They believe that we deserve to know our beer's ingredients, so they put an ingredients label right on the packaging. Bud Light, brew with hops, barley water and rice,

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You know, if you've seen us, you know that Jordan Peel is kind of operating at a different frequency from pretty much any other filmmaker right now. I can't wait to check out what he does with The Twilight Zone. Obviously, a hugely influential show on everything from X-Files to Black Mirror to basically post-war American popular culture, but it does feel really ripe for reimagining, given the digital world that we live in, given all of the paranoia and anxiety that I think everybody feels these days, and I can't wait to see what Jordan Peel does with it. I really, this cast is pretty dynamite, so I have a lot of high expectations.

You got Jacob Tremblay and his prime Jordan Peel. Don't mess it up. Cross over into another dimension April 1st, only on CBS All Access. You can visit CBS.com slash watchtzee to redeem your free trial today. That's cbs.com slash watcht Z, W-A-T-C-H-T-Z-L-L-L-A-T-Z to redeem your free trial of CBS All Access. Hey guys, about to get into my conversation with Adam Nehman about the movie's Us and Dragged Across Concrete. It is a spoiler-filled conversation. So if you have not seen us, like, say, Kaya, you might want to skip this conversation.

just because it's full of spoilers. Adam and I talk a lot about the meaning of the film and the ending. But fair warning. We do talk about spoilers and we talk about spoilers and drag to cross concrete. So maybe it's just a podcast you listen to after you've seen those movies. It's up to you. I am now joined by my buddy Adam Naiman. Adam obviously reviews and writes about film for The Ringer. He is also the author of the indispensable, I would say. Cohen Brothers book, this book really ties the films together, which you can, is a great stocking stiffer, although you would need an enormous stocking, and it's not anywhere close to Christmas, but Adam is here today with me to talk a little bit about us

and a little bit about a movie called Dragged Across Concrete, which I watched this weekend, partially because of Adam's super compelling review on The Ringer last week. So Adam, thanks for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. And for plugging the book a good nine months before Christmas. I know. I have points on the package. You know what I mean?

I expect a little bit of a kickback. I'm a little bit of a kickback. reticent to tie us and Dragherst concrete together. Yeah, of course. They are fairly different movies, obviously. I think you could, I mean, you could generally say they're about America. And I guess, like many movies, they're about dissents into hell. But I think that it's interesting that they more or less came out the same weekend.

And I think it's really been interesting to watch the conversation around both of these movies. But let's start with us. I know that there's like, there was so much anticipation around this movie in a way that I think that whatever problems you or me or anybody might have had about it, I think there's like a general,

really goodwill towards this film because it's so exciting to see original genre filmmaking at this level that provokes this much thought and features such incredible performances. Yeah, I think that goodwill is something that Jordan Peel has like, it's a combination of like cultivated

and earned, and he certainly hasn't abused it with up. I mean, and I think builds on some of the promise of get out, even if I don't like it as much. It's, in a lot of ways, it's an improvement and an advancement, but I think it just lacks the absolute clarity and ingeniousness that he hit upon with some of the ideas in the earlier movie. But it's definitely exciting to see a sort of filmmaker emerge who's not just confident and kind of on it,

but who has like the resources and the support stuff that he's doing. You know, he's a good in that sense. Even if as you said, there's some things about the movie itself that I'm ambivalent about. And the reviews across the board, I think while positive,

you know, have picked up on some of those same maybe flaws. Yeah, I mean, this movie has definitely caused, sparked the most interesting debate of a film in our ringer slack that I've seen in a really long time.

And I think it's basically, comes down to what is your reading of the film? And so few films these days actually warrant or demand much of a reading outside of their surface narrative and sort of deciding what that is. But, you know, I think that Peel has been purposefully and interestingly opaque about what he thinks his movie is about. Now, you can piece together in different interviews these. You talk to Sean on the big picture. The interview we did with Jonah Weiner on the Wall Street Journal, I believe, was really interesting. I think it was in the Wall Street Journal. It might have been Rolling Stone. I'll check myself on that. But, you know, a lot of it is about economic disparity. A lot of it is about certain

more metaphysical concepts of the kind of binary existence that you can live in this country. If you had to, if I forced you into a corner at a cocktail party and I was like, what's us about? What would you say? I mean, you know, if you ask me what else was about, I would say that it is probably best looked at as the line that the other, the other, the Peter Njango, the one referred to in the character and the credits as red says this idea of we are Americans, right? And I think it's a movie that is sort of about that, but it's also a movie about the urge on a filmmaker's behalf to say something like that

and kind of make a statement like that. The history of this idea of genre movie is social commentary going back to Romero, you know, this idea that zombies are this all-purpose, is much more tolerable, the less conscious it seems on behalf of the filmmaker. Yeah. And so part of me is really admiring Peel for wanting to use genre the way people like Romero did or Polansky and Rosemary's baby, basically all the sources he's cited to quote-unquote make a statement about the times or about the country.

But that insistence on making a statement is so at odds with the things that he's tweeting and saying where he's just like, it's a horror movie. I'm sort of trying to make it scary. And I would say that for me, what the debate is, it's not what the movie is about. It's sort of just, you know, to be elevated to use that stupid phrase of elevated horror, or does it need to be a metaphor? Does it need to be coherent? Or can it just gesture at things?

Yeah. These are the sorts of discussions I've been having with people since seeing the movie. Like, you know, does it have to be more? And if it's trying to be more and doesn't quite come together, do you hold that against it? Yeah, and, you know, it's 1999 movies week on The Ringer, so I've obviously been thinking a lot about movies like Fight Club and The Matrix and Eyes Wide Shut and all sorts of films that have been going to be written about on the site this week and that you can read about right now. And, you know, I recently did a rewatchable's about The Matrix Live. And, you know, there's plenty of things in the Matrix that don't make any sense.

But the filmmakers created a world in which the fact that those things didn't make any sense didn't matter. And I think that ultimately is my main criteria. of us, which I should say up front, I had a blast watching, I think has uniformly great performances, especially Lepida, but additionally, really, really big fan of both Elizabeth Mosses, possibly even a bigger fan of rosé chugging Elizabeth Moss than the silent scream one. But if I had a critique of the film, it would be the movie's entertainment value is somewhat dependent and tied to, tethered even, two hits coherence. And so we're going to talk a little bit about,

I guess if you haven't figured it out already, we'll go into spoiler territory here, but the two rather expository speeches that are given about the sort of existence of this underworld in the tunnels and what the tethered are and what has sort of prompted this uprising among them I think works much better

in terms of it being like a a toolkit for a reading of the political nature of the film, but not so great as storytelling for what is actually happening at the bottom of that escalator. Yeah, I would agree with that. And that's sort of what I mean, but I totally agree. And that's that question of, you know,

if a movie stakes out territory where it has to make sense, you know, literally, and it doesn't, does that, you know, obviate or exclude its kind of figurative power? It's kind of metaphorical intent. And, you know, my heart sank a bit at the exposition. My heart even sank a little towards the end. And I thought some of the movie's emphases were in a weird place. I wrote in my piece that I even thought that last shot,

which some people are reading as quite powerful. And I think as an idea is quite powerful, I thought felt weirdly borrowed from another movie from a few years ago called The Invitation directed by Karen Kusama. I do think the movies, if not entertainment value, I think its ultimate satisfaction value, is tied to things adding up. I've read too many people compare it to Amnigh-Shammelan,

but that's who it made me think of because there is a twist that is kind of necessary to complete not just the narrative logic of the movie, but like the emotional logic of the movie and just the whole existence of the story. And, you know, I think while that twist is satisfying, some of the mechanics about getting us there are... And, you know, as I tried to say in my piece, and I don't know what you think of this,

Get Out has some of that same wonkiness, but like the core idea is so ingenious reality stripping away its skin. When the movie says what's going on, you're like, wow, that's really brilliant. In us, I find it be that moment. And I wouldn't say they cancel each other out, but it just feels somewhat muddled to me, even if a lot. The movie, you know, you mentioned the invitation. another movie that I thought about while watching us was 10 Cloverfield Lane, which I think is rather underrated. It's obviously sort of an extension of the Cloverfield universe, and it came out a couple years ago. Dan Tractenberg directed it, and Damie Chazelle had a hand in the screenplay for that.

And the thing that that movie did that I thought was really interesting was limiting the perspective of its characters until the very last moment where you get the sense that the, you know, essentially the final few frames that what's happening to the Mary Elizabeth Winsman's, dead character is in fact happening. A, it is really happening, and B, it's happening all over the place. And that moment happens a little bit earlier in the third act of us, where you're made aware, okay, this is a global or national phenomenon. And I think it breaks people's brains a little bit because the reveal that this is a nationwide phenomenon, the reveal that everybody has a tethered essentially, and that those tethered are of all come up above ground, you just get distracted and you start asking all sorts of questions about like, well, what are the responses to this? And what does that mean? And how did they get these jumpsuits? And I think if you're operating,

it depends on whether you want to reverse engineer your enjoyment of the movie. Because it makes you ask all these questions about the meaning and because Peel has basically said, I know what I think it's about, but I want to hear what other people think it's about. And I've heard like really, really compelling readings. Like I can't remember the origin of this, but on Slash film, there was a back and forth, and I believe one of the writers had a point that he felt like it was about the election and that the red jumpsuits were the Republicans kind of rising up and electing Trump, and it was this sort of moment of seeming betrayal, but also, you know, a lot of people who were like, you thought that I was always going to just feel underused and underutilized

and shunt it off to the side, and now this is my rejection of that. That's one reading of it. I think there's a lot of stuff in there about economic and social mobility and the escalator kind of represents that. No matter what you're reading of it is, I think you start to sort of pick at the plot points because you're trying to bend it towards what you think the movie is about. And then also because since it becomes such a major part of the story, you can't help but be a little bit of a Monday morning quarterback about some of the narrative decisions. No, you can't. And that's one of the reasons, again, it's not just about relentlessly comparing these, but Get Out keeps the story so small. And with the exception of the cutaways to his friend really keeps it from Chris's point of view, even the explainer part of Get Out where he sort of watches the instruction video about how and why it's happening to him. Because it's

from his point of view, it's kind of like both very immediate and the fact that it's a little vague doesn't matter. I mean, it's really just him trapped in a basement and how he's going to get out. And I think you're quite right that when you enlarge it to the scope of a kind of national allegory or a kind of zombie movie outbreak, because rhythmically and beat-wise, I think that has a lot of a zombie movie in it. It has a lot of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead and movies like that in it. Yeah, when you make it that big, you kind of do beg those logistical, those logistical conceptual questions. That said, I mean, I'm in agreement with you,

but if someone were to say the ideas in it and the provocation of it are strong enough that they don't care about that stuff and that's just what Hitchcock used to call the plausibles and who cares if the narrative makes sense, I can't totally disagree with that. I think that that's fair if someone's enjoyment of the movie

kind of transcends those Monday morning quarterback questions, but I have them too. Yeah, absolutely. And I've been chewing over them with friends and it's still not really feeling totally satisfying. Yeah, he's such a careful filmmaker. I mean, that opening sequence where you see Chud, you see the right stuff, you see these, you know,

we see the hands across America ad, you're rooted in a certain 80s pop cultural experience. The understanding of homelessness and poverty is shot through that lens of acts of charity that are essentially like about making you feel better about the world rather than actually helping people, people. You know, I think that that, I personally, like, was very interested in that direction that the film was going, and I don't know necessarily that it was aided, or that the film was

helped by, like, leaving it all kind of murky and up for debate. Although, I really have enjoyed debating this movie, and I've really enjoyed talking about this movie with people. Let's talk about another film that came out this weekend that is also the product of a director who has been reticent to explicitly say what his film is about. And that is dragged across concrete. Adam, can you please just give me the bullet points for listeners who maybe haven't heard of this film, haven't heard of S. Craig Zaller.

What's going on here? Well, you know, I'm not fully sure, and I rarely say that, because while I'm sure, I'm wrong a lot of the time writing as a critic, you know, I'm usually fairly confident about what I think, right? So here you have this filmmaker who has made three very long, very violent, very, I would say, attenuated and self-consciously slow genre films. He made a Western called Bone Tomahawk, which is unbelievably violent. He made a sort of not a prison break, almost kind of just like a prison fight movie called Brawl and Cell Block 99 with Vince Vaughn, which is very long and violent.

And now he's made Dragged Across Concrete, which has become this huge talking point, both because of, what it's about, which is these two kind of suspended racist LAPD cops, played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn, who decide to shake down these bank robbers after a heist. And also, it's a talking point because people are just trying to figure out what to do with Zahler, who seems to have these kind of dog whistles in his dialogue and his subject matter and his casting towards a kind of right-wing audience. Won't quite deny it in interviews, won't quite, oh, up to it in interviews, and that sort of like fine line between giving an artist space to be ambiguous and just whether he's dissembling, I think is driving people kind of crazy. And also the movie is just

so artful and powerful and well made in places that people feel obliged to say something about it. Like, no critic is kind of ignoring the talent that went into making it. And I think you saw a lot of that talent yourself, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that a film like dragged across concrete, and I know that this is sort of like the hardest thing to do right now which is putting aside its politics if in fact you think it's politics or the politics espoused by some of its characters

are Zoller's politics personally and I think that probably I have something to say about that but when you watch the film itself which is a very very long movie that features lots of very static scenes of two characters talking that being said

when you watch dragged across concrete you realize how homogenous movies have gotten because this feels like such a shocking jolt to the system. It kind of remixes your receptors a little bit. You're like, oh my God. Like something completely, I'm watching something completely different right now. Even if it does obviously owe things to Tarantino and genre filmmakers or even Kurosawa and has like some of its compositions and framing and its staging is pretty classical. but I don't know that I've seen something in a long time

where you could tell that from the cinematography, the staging, the control of the performances of the actors, the writing, and the music were all obviously orchestrated by someone who had a clear vision of what they wanted every aspect of this movie to be presented as. Does that make sense? No, it does. and I think that what makes him attractive

as a candidate for like premature autur canonization or, you know, the discussion around his aesthetic is that it is so strong, it is so confident, and it's very unique, right? Like, a sheer amount of downtime in these movies versus

the incredible, like, wide awake savagery of the violence. Like, it's a really unique rhythm, which is what I tried to write about. And I think also just as genre cinema has kind of become a little bit gentrified and as you say homogenized even in terms of violence and gore and scariness that kind of a two four model of like you know elevated horror or whatever yeah zalmers be presenting something pretty low down and raw and unrepentive

but never feels stagey and it never feels like i mean there there's parts of it that you would think like oh does this kind of just play it it still feels like cinema it doesn't feel like tv or like three TV episodes stitched together. No, no, it very much feels like cinema. And I think it's that unapologetic quality and even the espetization of it, which is bordering on a kind of art film, torpor and stasis that he's using.

I think it's really got people's kind of got people's eyes open wide and got their signals up trying to figure out what to do with it. But in terms of separating the politics from the movie, I don't think the movie wants you to, And that's partially where I think it's potentially interesting to see a movie that's kind of unapologetically not liberal and politically correct. But I also suspect it's more trolling than conviction. At least that's where I came down on it in my review. Not everyone agrees.

I don't know what you think. But it's actually in some ways the calculated aspect of it makes me feel insincere and almost makes me like it, dislike it more than if I thought it was a really, truly right-wing film. I don't know where I come down. So basically what I think is that this reminds me a lot of some of the underground culture that I grew up around in the 90s that had a sort of ironic edge to it that would be, I guess, best sort of pointed at like something like Big Black, which is this band that Steve Albini, a Chicago engineer and record producer had, that would sort of use the imagery, like really out like pretty aggressive imagery in its album covers and a lot of its song titles and a lot of the lyrics would be this sort of expression of the deepest, darkest id you could have

and they had an album called songs about fucking, and it was basically there was like a whole genre of stuff like music and literature called pig fuck, you know, that was just kind of like this like, hey, we're art school kids but we're also dabbling in the

like language and iconography and visuals of I don't even know how describe it, but basically like Neanderthal-ish ways of thinking. And I don't think that anything in dragged across concrete can be ascribed to what Zaller is saying, which is like, this is just the authentic way our characters would, he says he leads with his characters and that his characters determine everything. But the affect of the acting in this movie is so flat, it is almost as if they are

puppets. You know what I mean? Like he is speaking through each of these characters. Everybody in these movies talks in a very particular way that is inimitable. And so you start to get into authorship versus meaning and you also start to get into, well, it's not that I reject the idea that this movie can exist. I think the objection comes from in 2019. People are saying like, is it okay to winkingly make something like this, if it is a wink in general in truth? Well, I mean,

and that's just that. I mean, it's funny. We're talking about the ambiguity of interpreting us. I think in some ways, drive across concrete doesn't beg so much for interpretation. It's a pretty, as the title suggests, kind of hard, concrete, unmistakable crime story. It's not hard to understand what happened in it narratively.

It's not hard to understand the parts that you're supposed to feel brutalized by or shocked by. But the The ambiguity is, yeah, I think in terms of authorship and meaning, when I read him in those interviews talk with how he's led by his characters, you know, he must be the first filmmaker in history to simply be channeling what his fictional characters want to say. You know, he writes them. And the question of who he gives the most oxygen to.

Like he's just a medium. Yeah, right. Like he's just a medium. You know, the question is who he gives the most oxygen to and how are the other characters drawn? He talked a lot very defensively, but the fact that there's a third lead in the the film who's an African-American, the first character we see in the film. Yeah.

By Henry John. But that character is defined, I think, in such a reductive, cliched way from the beginning, and not just because it's genre fiction where everybody is an archetype, but because he's the most boring kind of archetype, you know, like doing this to help his mom, and he's got a little brother in a wheelchair, and he's going out for one last job, and he doesn't say anything interesting. He doesn't get to speak in these kind of poetic, droned-out case. that the two cops get. He kind of just disappears from the movie for a long time.

Yeah. And, you know, he, so it's hard for me to take him at his word that he's interested in putting viewpoints in conflict when certain viewpoints dominate so much more than others. And he just does this shit that feels so much like trolling, like giving Vince Vaughan's character kind of racialized girlfriend who that doesn't, like, react at all to the fact that he's been suspended because of, like, racist behavior and brutality on his job. Where he has the Mel Gibson character talk about like, where Bill Gibson's wife talks about I wasn't racist until I moved to a

black neighborhood. And you're like, what, am I supposed to believe that? I'm supposed to believe that they have a crappy apartment when it looks so big and nice and brightly lit? It's very frustrating. But I can see why, especially because film criticism, tends to be people who are identifying themselves as progressive and liberal, and if not politically correct, very interested in that idea of like diversity and representation.

that's where film criticism's at now, as it probably should be. This movie is like catnip both to piss them off or to get them to try and make excuses on its behalf. And it's pretty fraught. Yeah. Ultimately, the thing that's dragged across concrete is the audience. You know, I'm sure that is not lost on people. I personally am always interested in being dominated by a movie,

either psychologically or viscerally. And I think that this movie does that. it is a real it's a friggin Rubik's cube though trying to solve what it is ultimately its value in the culture is

well but also it occupies in some ways so much space like we're talking about it on this podcast and a lot of major critics written about it but it's essentially a VOD release yeah that's actually the ingenious part

is that everybody's talking about this movie which normally would be kind of like forgotten among anything that shows up on the iTunes store on a Friday and can we say it I mean I don't think it's a small point too, and I don't know how much you'd want to say about it. Gibson,

whose casting is where I think a lot of the notoriety that he's coming from, whether that's deliberate or not. Zoller says he didn't write it with Gibson in mind. Gibson, who has about as much stuff that you can say about him that's bad as any actor I can think about, he's really fantastic in the movie. I have no... The acting was never the problem. Yeah. Yeah. No, for him was never the problem, but he's genuinely excellent in this film. I take no pleasure in saying it, I guess. Yeah. But he's really good. Well, I'd be interested to know if watch listeners feel like they have the stomach for it. I'd be curious to hear other people's responses to it.

Adam, thank you so much, man, for calling in, and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye.