The Coens head West (and to Netflix) in the grimly comic anthology The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs
Today's second movie is the newly released Netflix film from the Coen Brothers, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It's an anthology film set in the Old West. But we can't expect everything to work out in the end. This film proves what have long suspected; that the Coen Brothers create characters just so they can fuck with them. They are like some mean vengeful god, as writers and directors. Whether good or bad, morality seems to matter not a bit as to a character's fate. Are they likable? Kill them. There are a lot of tragic endings, but they let a few get away.
The last story is interesting in it's symbolic allegory but not really as fun to watch as the rest of the film. It's dialogue heavy, and nobody is really likable, leading me to be so annoyed with them that I sometimes failed to pay enough attention to the dialogue, expecting something more to happen. People talk in a way that is sometimes difficult to understand. I'll probably watch it again.
The first story about Buster Scruggs is the most fun and can be enjoyable with multiple viewings. My favorite was The Gal Who Got Rattled.
From the article:
The Old West is Coen country. Senselessly brutal and rich with rapscallions, it’s a backlot backdrop perfectly suited to the preoccupations of these sibling movie brats. Yet for all the ways the genre has crept into their catalog—a sagely cowboy narrator, an oater-within-the-film, sprawling frontiers of the Depression-era South and 1980s Texas—Joel and Ethan have only once officially dabbled in the premier blockbuster form of classic Hollywood, with their mostly irony-free remake of True Grit. Before now, that is. As if making up for lost time, their new Netflix anthology film The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs offers six Coen horse operas for the price of one. They run a gamut of conventions, proving just how much landscape—geographic and narrative—the Western really covers. What they all convey, some more comically than others, is how short and pitiless life could be in this heavily mythologized era.
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