The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - Coen Brothers Netflix series turned portmanteau movie

Stick around for the following episode, you will not regret it.

I enjoyed all of these, except for Meal Ticket, which took its sweet time getting to a very obvious point.

I guess I took it as less "obvious" than "inevitable," the natural result of the simple, ruthless everyday calculus. But I found it affecting nonetheless.

the bookends each have such a deliberate artificial tone that it's not necessarily a detriment

rewatched most of it on TV and the day-for-"night" section of the last story looks like dogshit

I've had the Surly Joe song stuck in my head for the last two days :(

I thought the first story was some brilliant genre satire, and the last one an unnerving meta-commentary on the whole thing, and the four stories in between varying degrees of good to very good. The digital photography bothered me until it didn't, and the Waits story was beautifully shot (the day-for-night stuff in the finale looked phoney, sure, but in a silent movie way that I kind of admired). I didn't even recognize Waits, but I'd get behind a Best Supporting Actor campaign if he's eligible (still not sure how the whole Netflix thing works re: awards). Also, James Franco's best performance either since Freaks and Geeks or ever, for whatever that's worth.

I didn't even recognize Franco or a full minute or two because he didn't look like an underfed stringbean. Dude should keep some meat on his bones.

I'm sure I've said this somewhere before, but as much as everyone hates to admit it, Franco is a pretty consistently strong actor

i didn't quite bust my scruggs to this but it was a diverting 2 hours and change.

I liked Franco's bit. "First time?" made me lol.

He's good at doing that bewildered "wtf is going on" thing.

I’m sure Franco’s been in loads of rubbish, but he’s capable to v good in the things I’ve seen him in

the next film I saw in the cinema after Scruggs was Addams Family Values (for the first time), lol at the range of unexpected Krumholtzery in the pair

this was so good

I also loved it. Giving owl looks to the haters.

This is excellent. My fave Cohens since "A Serious Man".

The Kazan one kind of dragged for me. And there was a missed opportunity not showing the Arthur character attempt to deliver the bad news without making it seem like HE did it to keep Billy as an employee... and yes that may or may not be the “obvious” consequence teased in the closing scene but I imagine most people assume it is just meant to imply “Arthur is dreading giving his buddy the sad news”.

Everything leading up to that moment felt a little slow watching them think through how she will negotiate her financial issue, and then the proposal conversation... Maybe I just wasn’t detecting enough chemistry? idk

I kind of liked the anti-romantic nature of their courtship

I don't think the possible consequence Evn mentions is supported by what we know about those characters.

For me that segment works for the ambiguity of Arthur's level of engagement with the situation (until the climax), the herky-jerky rhythms of Billy and Alice's courtship, and of course the Coens' facility for building a little nested comic tragedy of tiny errors and massive consequences out of not much of anything.

buster being a live action looney tunes character was unexpected and ridiculous

I've had the Surly Joe song stuck in my head for the last two days :(

― paolo, Tuesday, November 20, 2018 4:43 AM (five days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Likewise. The soundtrack is on Spotify, but I just found that "Surly Joe" doesn't play nearly as well out of context. Carter Burwell's score is (typically) beautiful, though.

I thought the total work looked good and moved swiftly (at least compared to The Sisters Brothers, another modern revisionist Western). Do contemporary audiences even recognize the genre conventions the "Buster Scruggs" installment so thoroughly subverts?

My guess would be no, although it depends what you mean by "modern audiences." I only barely know who Gene Autry and Roy Rogers because of my grandparents and my weird interests in old things as a kid, though I suspect that my parents (who are probably roughly the Coens' age) would at least retain a vague cultural memory of the figure.

I loved this! Obviously rather grim but there was a lot of good whistling-past-the-graveyard humor tge Coens excel at imo.

I will rep for the Zoe Kazan oregon trail story, I thought it was excellent & really well studied. (Sidebar I am a big Donner Party nerd & am a sucker for stories of all those insane pioneer journeys to the west)

I found it to be quite romantic, though to clarify: the courting was “romantic” for the time period & circumstances. Those wagon train folks had hard lives full of day to day if not hourly tragedies & loss, and owing to piety & social constraints were pragmatic to a fault, so it would be unlikely for them to achieve anything like our current standards of modern romance, yknow: heartfelt emotions & such.

And the Tom Waits story was so good - again, very of that time, and the single-focus mindset of the prospector was so well done. Felt like it could’ve gone down in the Sierra foothills not far from Sacramento. GOODNIGHT MISTER POCKET.

inconclusion, people are like ferrets

I liked that the echoing chorus in Buster's "Cool Water" were actual echoes in the canyons.

the use of place was excellent and somewhat inverted, in a way -- the Buster Scruggs story was definitely parodying material that would have been filmed on a backlot or soundstage and they used multiple real locations, and the closer was a more contemporary dramatic rumination and was mostly soundstage

location shoots were more varied in the middle but the wagon train sequence being shot in northwest Nebraska was a good pick. all of the scrubland you can handle

i loved that line about the prairie being like the ocean

already been noted but Franco delivering the "first time?" line made me crack up, too

To revisit yesterday's question about singing cowboys, I was talking about this film today with some of the MA students in my program (so, age 23 or thereabouts?), and I asked them if they got what the Buster Scruggs segment was spoofing, to which one answered "Roy Rogers, right?" That surprised me.

haven't watched this yet but saw it get some flack for an apparent almost complete disregard of the existence of native americans (something that is true for True Grit as well)

Well, they were there. Just not very friendly.

Yeah, I thought about that as well. In a way it's not ok? It's six stories, and they should hopefully add up to saying something about what it was like living in that part of the world in that time, and none of the stories are from the people who had lived there the longest? Forget just questions about inclusion and political correctness, if you wanted to say something about what living in the west was like, wouldn't it make the art stronger if you included that different viewpoint as a contrast? What does it say about the Coens, and by implication their audience including me, that this is not something they want to do?

I mean, it's a huge issue but I don't particularly care what the Coens have to say about it. The onus should be on Netflix, with its literal thirteen billion dollar production budget for original content *just for 2018*, to help address representational issues by forking over opportunities to a more diverse set of filmmakers, not on hoping that 60-something filmmakers who have written like two parts for POCs ever are about to behave any differently all of a sudden.

Well, they were there. Just not very friendly.

― An Uphill Battle For Legumes (Capitaine Jay Vee), Tuesday, November 27, 2018 8:03 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They were dehumanized and demonized perils, existing to drive the plot. I note that per IMDB one segment was based on a Jack London story, and another "inspired by" Stewart Edward White (1873–1946). (Presumably the other installations were original to the Coen Brothers, but based on the tropes and clichés endemic to fiction writers in the Western genre of this period?)

I don't know, isn't it also a bit of a copout to just say that the Coen brothers wouldn't be able to make a good segment featuring native americans? They could hire collaborators who knew stuff they didn't know. In a way it's just about making the best film as possible, and if you want to take a multifaceted look at an issue, ignoring this viewpoint is kinda glaring. That it's so utterly expectable and explainable sorta only makes it worse.

I dunno, they're part of a huge, *huge* number of established filmmakers for whom that's just not a dimension of life they tend to engage with. I'm sure there are a couple counter-examples, but generally speaking those old(er) dogs aren't about to pick up new tricks. The answer is to fork over dough to more Dee Rees-es and fewer Scorseses, not hoping the latter will suddenly privilege the experiences of [insert marginalized group here].

I'm really not interested in excusing/pardoning them but it feels like a useless expenditure of energy to be upset with them in particular I guess

if you want to take a multifaceted look at an issue

kinda took the "issue" here to be the death-drive of settler colonialism, fwiw. not sure a native american led segment contributes to that.

Dunno, neither Buster Scruggs nor the prospector nor James Franco seemed like settlers to me?

the movie's also not really set in "the west" anyway, it's set in our collective imagination of decades of movies/tv/dime novels etc. their depiction of native americans was certainly backwards but also true to the source material. i think it was a dumb choice to not change anything about that source material but they're working from a template here and not trying to say something about 19th century america so much as about our collective interpretation of it.

were you guys also bothered by how buster scruggs managed to be such an amazing shot, and how the chicken could do math

guys this is a genre exercise not an attempt at creating a realistic portrayal of that era in history

xp

well i was wondering if liam neeson knew there was a trick and bought the trick, or if he just bought the chicken and was destined for despair.

Despair either way.

I think it's a waste of energy to criticize the Coens for not being woke. They've spent decades pursuing their very narrow and idiosyncratic interests (movies, genre tropes, white ppl, human stupidity, Jews) and that doesn't seem particularly like to change now.

I agree that Netflix should throw money at new voices who are, say, interested in flipping existing genres to highlight historically ignored perspectives. Find the next Coen bros etc.

Btw I still have two of these to go but I've been enjoying them as bleak little Coen-y fables.

Dunno, neither Buster Scruggs nor the prospector nor James Franco seemed like settlers to me?

― Frederik B, Tuesday, November 27, 2018 8:01 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

professor of american studies at the university of aarhus has spoken

jfc

Do u know what a settler is

apparently not

I thought this was great! I'm surprised so many of yall are down on it. Way, way better than Hail Caesar--low bar, I know

I liked Hail Caesar too :(

I was gonna say!

I liked Hail Caesar a lot but it's one of their four worst

I thought this was great! I'm surprised so many of yall are down on it.

updating this:

summary of opinions expressed so far:

inconsequential
terrible
kind of loved it
love it?
fucking loved it
garbage
fun

so, one can see a consensus starting to emerge here, if one stands across the room, is drunk, and squints very hard

• this is brilliant.
• liked this quite a lot.
• This thread has not yet dampened my anticipation
• I enjoyed all of these, except for Meal Ticket
• I've had the Surly Joe song stuck in my head for the last two days
• brilliant genre satire [...] unnerving meta-commentary [...] varying degrees of good to very good. [...] beautifully shot
• diverting
• this was so good
• I also loved it. Giving owl looks to the haters.
• This is excellent. My fave Cohens since "A Serious Man".
• [1/6th of the film] kind of dragged for me.
• looked good and moved swiftly
• I loved this! [...] a lot of good whistling-past-the-graveyard humor [...] excellent & really well studied. [...] so good
• the use of place was excellent
• (genre "Indians") were dehumanized and demonized perils, existing to drive the plot.
• I've been enjoying them as bleak little Coen-y fables.
• You thought this was great!

yeah, well

btw Nelson, Kazan and Bill Heck did a Q&A after the screening at MoMA last night. Nelson said he first saw a script or treatment for his segment in 2002, I think?

Kazan said she prepared by re-reading Willa Cather. Not the history ("I'd done a shit-ton of research for Meek's Cutoff" -- which i'd forgotten she was in).

The digitalness of the imagery was distracting at times, like in the opening scene, where I doubt TB Nelson was anywhere near Monument Valley.

The whole YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY oregon trail bit I did tap out on tbrh

cholera, i'm pretty sure

this was def the hottest i've seen Franco looking in years... but Bill Heck tops him (heh heh)

I not only found Franco attractive in the film (which is rare) but I actually enjoyed his performance (which is even rarer).

I feel like there was some kind of deliberate cross-reference between "PAN SHOT" and "PRAIRIE DOG" or whatever the wagon train guy yelled

the first episode is an extended Singing Cowboy joke... it's hard to believe how many singing cowboys on film there were in the '30s and '40s. Roy Rogers was the only one who endured.

I was trying to think of a name of another one besides Roy while watching it and sadly drew a blank

Gene Autry was the only other one I'm really familiar with

Yeah gene autry has endured. His Xmas songs get a lot of play

I watched a Ken Maynard one the other night for lols and it was weird as hell.

Yes, Autry def #2 (and possibly richer!) but have you ever seen any of his films? My God, there are 97 on Letterboxd; I wonder how many exceed 55 minutes, or weren't serials.

Check out the plot of this one:

https://letterboxd.com/film/the-phantom-empire-1935/

sounds right up my alley

Yeah I wasn't responding to circa or Shakey.

I'm on team leprechaun, you guys don't deserve JF.

rmde

Leprechaun lies in the eyes of the beholder imo

You can think any damn thing you like. Just don't pester me with your sad delusions.

^ not new board description