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IT DIDNT HIT NOTHIN IMPORTANT
Coen Brother's new NETFLIX movie - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
IT DIDNT HIT NOTHIN IMPORTANT
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Well, maybe I'll give it another try and pay more attention to the Frenchman.
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If you ever rewatch it sometime, I’ll be curious to know if you share the more positive 2nd look.
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Yea I changed my tune on it too. Awesome movie
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I had no idea what to expect when I clicked on it and really liked the story of the wagon train and the adventures of the woman headed West. I thought that was the most engaging segment of the movie. I had read the Jack London short story about the miner several times and the film followed it exactly and did it justice. I was very pleased at the direct interpretation as London is one of my favorites.
It was a very entertaining film. I did not know if was the Coen Bros until I saw this thread.
It was a very entertaining film. I did not know if was the Coen Bros until I saw this thread.
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Smart old fucker. Stupid young buck. Gotta have nthat double tap
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Im seriously not understanding what the big fucking deal abiut this guy is.... i googled him and havent seen any of his movies.
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Another masterwork of unbridled brilliance. This is the Coen brothers in peak form.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Waits
Maybe one of the best examples of his contemporaries was Kris Kristofferson (who you'll know from the Blade films if you don't know his music). James Taylor and Jackson Browne were the bestselling, bright-eyed, spiritual optimists of this generation in the singer/songwriter mold. John Denver was kind of like what William Blake or Jack London were to writers of their generation; just off doing his own thing completely, and not giving a fuck what the keepers of culture were uttering off in their record towers.
Van Morrison is perhaps the one who bridges the gap between these cheerier guys, and those like Waits. More soulful, wistful, perhaps a bit less uplifting.But still not raw. Not punching you in the face.
Here is one of my favorite songs by Waits (not sure how it is regarded by his hardcore fans, or if it is one of his better known songs). From 1985:
He's one of the most famous singer/songwriters of the 20th century, back during the age of rock, prior to hip-hop. Before my time. He represents the seedier, more intellectual, philosophical, and perhaps more cynical-- yet still blue collar-- facet of this scene. He was infusing jazz into his music. Worldly sounds, too, like the classical cabaret sounds of the French. His focus was not at all on voicecraft from a traditional point of view. You might call it anti-crooner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Waits
Maybe one of the best examples of his contemporaries was Kris Kristofferson (who you'll know from the Blade films if you don't know his music). James Taylor and Jackson Browne were the bestselling, bright-eyed, spiritual optimists of this generation in the singer/songwriter mold. John Denver was kind of like what William Blake or Jack London were to writers of their generation; just off doing his own thing completely, and not giving a fuck what the keepers of culture were uttering off in their record towers.
Van Morrison is perhaps the one who bridges the gap between these cheerier guys, and those like Waits. More soulful, wistful, perhaps a bit less uplifting.But still not raw. Not punching you in the face.
Here is one of my favorite songs by Waits (not sure how it is regarded by his hardcore fans, or if it is one of his better known songs). From 1985:
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The short answer is his music sucks, but it's technically well made.
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I loved. Here is my take. The movie deals with human nature (death) and plays with the public's expectations, history, and even the industry.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
Near Algodones
Meal Ticket
All Gold Canyon
The Gal who got rattled
The Mortal Remains
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
It is basically a Looney Tunes Cartoon. If the Wild West was portrayed as in the movies, the plain good guy would also be a psycho. It plays with the expectations of who dies.
Near Algodones
It plays with the image of justice and retribution. James Franco survives an execution for robbery only to be executed for a crime he didn't commit.
Meal Ticket
It's all about the industry. How it will treat you well, and do anything for you until the moment you are not useful anymore and the public prefers watching a chicken count than to hear the most important works of western civilization.
All Gold Canyon
It is about retribution again. Sometimes some stories end well and justly. Sometimes.
The Gal who got rattled
By putting the story on the woman's perspective and portraying her as an active agent, intelligent and nice, she represents the public. And the fact is, no matter how great you were, you probably wouldn't have survived either. The fact that virtually everyone watching the movie wanted the dog to survive shows that.
(For the dog was the reason why the girl got out of the caravan's way and got the Comanches after them. The dog should have died.)
I am glad they didn't ignore how violent Comanches were and that, with all the deconstruction of the genre, there were some real-life badasses out there like Arthur.
(For the dog was the reason why the girl got out of the caravan's way and got the Comanches after them. The dog should have died.)
I am glad they didn't ignore how violent Comanches were and that, with all the deconstruction of the genre, there were some real-life badasses out there like Arthur.
The Mortal Remains
The Hedonist Gambler, the God-fearing woman and the low-class furbearer hunter are actually dead. Everyone dies. What awaits them is a universal question: What will happen next?
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Hopefully gonna get to this tomorrow.
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I listened to it (a little) and it sounds like the epitome of hipster bullshit. Out of 10 songs only one was remotely palatable and it was the oldest of the bunch. Just him riffing over a jazz band.
Post a "great" tom waits song and lets see what others think.
He's a 2/10 singer and a 4/10 musician. All he has is being weird.
D
Deleted member 220895
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From listening to an excerpt from 1 song. You'll never be proven right or wrong if you're not open to actually listen to it. He has an amazing fanbase. The dude is a poetic genius and you didnt even consider what he said. Just how he sounds...
The only way you would get him is if you actually tried. No one else can prove it to you because you want to prove them wrong with your highly educated decision after a half of verse of a song.
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2/10 poster
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Just watched it earlier. Loved it. Probably my favorite Coens film since No Country and that says a lot as a really loved Inside Llewyn Davis, True Grit, Hail Ceaser, and A Serious Man. They are my favorite active filmmakers and a few years of Steven Spielberg and George Clooney missing the notes of their screenplays had me thinking they were over the hill. Until this film which pretty mixed all the styles and themes present in their catalog in one film. Hilarious(Buster Scruggs, Near Algodones) sad(The Girl That got Rattled), uncomfortable and infuriating (Meal Ticket), and uplifting(All Gold Canyon)
It never ceases to amaze me how they always hit these subtle notes that either provoke gut busting laughter, epiphany, discomfort, or anger. You know all their material would turn into crap in other hands since so much goes into a carefully crafted style and direction. Like when
Those little things always get me and it’s something you really only get from the Coens. They would fall flat or go unnoticed in other hands.
It never ceases to amaze me how they always hit these subtle notes that either provoke gut busting laughter, epiphany, discomfort, or anger. You know all their material would turn into crap in other hands since so much goes into a carefully crafted style and direction. Like when
James Franco’s character was being given his last words and he used it to complain about the bank teller not playing fair and the response from the executioner was simple but made me laugh out loud or Zoe Kazans reaction when she heard more bullets fired than it should take to put a little dog out.
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Well it's the only place they can go all-in without fear of censorship. Theater is so PC they would likely give Buster a 18+ rating...
D
Deleted member 220895
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Ah, a troll.
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0/10 perception
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Great insights, but you're missing the thread that ties them together.
I don't disagree with any of this, but you're missing the overarching theme connecting these parables, and it has impaired your interpretation chiefly of the fourth vignette.
This is an anti-western western. In many ways it is an anti-American western. It's quite postmodernist in how it challenges the accepted histories of the winner, as it were, and even mocks their core values through the prism of the genre itself; a western that deliberately defies and undermines the expectations of the genre, and its traditions, like so many other Coen masterpieces of the past.
You're onto the right idea that the Ballad of Buster Scruggs is reminding us how absurd the notion of the noble gunslinger is, or perhaps puts more appropriately, the notion that such a way would select for the success of nobility & honor. "Life by the sword, die by the sword." That is the lesson reinforced by the truism, "There is always a faster gun..." There is always the next best who is hungrier, faster, more vicious-- someone simply better at violence. Any fight fan can appreciate the disappointing truth that a talent for violence isn't correlated to excellence of character.
This is why the kid who kills him wears the archetypal black hat, versus Buster's white hat, and why he kills him for no other reason than reputation: the glorification of fear. The vignette ends with a rhetorical question Buster asks that is either bitterly cynical about the possibility of an afterlife, or bitterly cynical about the need for one (even as a social construct). Considering the Coen brothers body of work, I'll go with the latter. Mostly it's cynical about the nature of justice which is a theme you recognized with the second vignette. You're right the protagonist, if in a literal history, would be a psycho. I think it plays less with the expectation of who dies than it does with its characters's own misguided perceptions of good and evil-- which one they are.
This is the central theme of the film. A well-meaning bad guy perceives himself as the good guy. Buster Scruggs is us. Buster Scruggs is America.
The secondary major theme that runs throughout the film ponders the American obsessions with guns. In this vignette, the establishment which prohibits guns from being carried inside isn't able (or willing) to effectively police its rule. That could be interpreted two ways in relation to our hallowed 2nd Amendment, but I would wager a negative intent. Disproportion of violence/aggression, specifically through the use of guns, is also revisited again and again throughout the film.
I think you have it mostly covered with Near Algodones, but you're overlooking a chief irony that is integral to the social commentary. Franco is about to be hung for bank robbery-- for theft. His judge and executioners are a posse of white men; ironically interrupted in a raid by Native Americans. Deepening this irony, one of these executioners calls him a "selfish bastard" because he spites that any of them should have his horse (and obviously he has no means to enforce this spite). Greed transcends reason. Don't miss the deeply cynical imagery that preceded this pertaining to materialism. The bank he robs-- is it in a town? Is it bustling with people? Nope. It's out in the middle of fucking nowhere. It's a barren grassland, and yet even here, in the American grain, there stands a bank; tended by an armed man willing to risk his life madly in defense of it. Meanwhile, the cattle rustler who saves him? He feels the need to play target practice with a rope. More commentary on guns. Love that touch.
I also love your insight about the meta-commentary on show business in Meal Ticket, but that isn't the central point. The central point is again one of cynical irony about the western tradition, and how our self-perception is a warped one. The relationship between the men is a mystery until the end. We are made to think his handler cares for him; that he is only enduring this hard life out of that love, and that the show is a creative adaptation to it. At the end we are given the truth. This quadapilegic was livestock to him. He felt nothing for him at all. It's another parable on greed. The great irony is contained in the fact that his show is the recitation of our noblest works about the better angels of our nature-- the Gettysburg address, for example. Yet he is dropped like a rock into an icy river. The ideation of our culture gives way to the savage reality of our history.
All Gold Canyon is NOT intended to be an uplifting parable. That's a deception. It's another cynical commentary on the American capacity for greed. The lone "winner" in our whole film is a gold prospector who destroys the environment in a obsessive pursuit of the get-rich-quick American dream. Gold has no value. All of this effort for a stupid, mostly useless metal found in rocks (perhaps echoing the rock that was just dropped into the icy river as a test for our traveling freak in the previous parable). His obsession is so great that he wills himself to defeat his equally greedy-- although slightly more lazy-- bushwhacker. Ironically, the guy with the gun doesn't win. Only the gold-mining pick-axe trumps the bullet in the Coen's West.
In the Gal Who Got Rattled the fact that she ends up killing herself with the gun when she otherwise would have survived is more fuel for that theme. It invokes the reality that gun-owners are more likely to kill family members than intruders, and that suicides outnumber murders. The financial over-ambition of her brother, who we are led to believe is something of a con artist, and a poor one at that, is the foundation of the journey (the $400 price for her hand). Furthermore, even for our trail-crossed lovers, the true history of the grant dispensing plots of lands to settlers (reminding me of Far & Away) which was intended to seal American ownership of Oregon, and displace the Brits/Canadians already there. Meanwhile, don't overlook that incompetence with a gun is why the dog successfully runs off in the first place, or that the most intimate thing shared between our would-be lovers is the intimation of their "Christian names".
I'm still unpacking the final vignette. I don't have any strong insights to offer yet. I have to watch it again.
This is an anti-western western. In many ways it is an anti-American western. It's quite postmodernist in how it challenges the accepted histories of the winner, as it were, and even mocks their core values through the prism of the genre itself; a western that deliberately defies and undermines the expectations of the genre, and its traditions, like so many other Coen masterpieces of the past.
You're onto the right idea that the Ballad of Buster Scruggs is reminding us how absurd the notion of the noble gunslinger is, or perhaps puts more appropriately, the notion that such a way would select for the success of nobility & honor. "Life by the sword, die by the sword." That is the lesson reinforced by the truism, "There is always a faster gun..." There is always the next best who is hungrier, faster, more vicious-- someone simply better at violence. Any fight fan can appreciate the disappointing truth that a talent for violence isn't correlated to excellence of character.
This is why the kid who kills him wears the archetypal black hat, versus Buster's white hat, and why he kills him for no other reason than reputation: the glorification of fear. The vignette ends with a rhetorical question Buster asks that is either bitterly cynical about the possibility of an afterlife, or bitterly cynical about the need for one (even as a social construct). Considering the Coen brothers body of work, I'll go with the latter. Mostly it's cynical about the nature of justice which is a theme you recognized with the second vignette. You're right the protagonist, if in a literal history, would be a psycho. I think it plays less with the expectation of who dies than it does with its characters's own misguided perceptions of good and evil-- which one they are.
This is the central theme of the film. A well-meaning bad guy perceives himself as the good guy. Buster Scruggs is us. Buster Scruggs is America.
The secondary major theme that runs throughout the film ponders the American obsessions with guns. In this vignette, the establishment which prohibits guns from being carried inside isn't able (or willing) to effectively police its rule. That could be interpreted two ways in relation to our hallowed 2nd Amendment, but I would wager a negative intent. Disproportion of violence/aggression, specifically through the use of guns, is also revisited again and again throughout the film.
I think you have it mostly covered with Near Algodones, but you're overlooking a chief irony that is integral to the social commentary. Franco is about to be hung for bank robbery-- for theft. His judge and executioners are a posse of white men; ironically interrupted in a raid by Native Americans. Deepening this irony, one of these executioners calls him a "selfish bastard" because he spites that any of them should have his horse (and obviously he has no means to enforce this spite). Greed transcends reason. Don't miss the deeply cynical imagery that preceded this pertaining to materialism. The bank he robs-- is it in a town? Is it bustling with people? Nope. It's out in the middle of fucking nowhere. It's a barren grassland, and yet even here, in the American grain, there stands a bank; tended by an armed man willing to risk his life madly in defense of it. Meanwhile, the cattle rustler who saves him? He feels the need to play target practice with a rope. More commentary on guns. Love that touch.
I also love your insight about the meta-commentary on show business in Meal Ticket, but that isn't the central point. The central point is again one of cynical irony about the western tradition, and how our self-perception is a warped one. The relationship between the men is a mystery until the end. We are made to think his handler cares for him; that he is only enduring this hard life out of that love, and that the show is a creative adaptation to it. At the end we are given the truth. This quadapilegic was livestock to him. He felt nothing for him at all. It's another parable on greed. The great irony is contained in the fact that his show is the recitation of our noblest works about the better angels of our nature-- the Gettysburg address, for example. Yet he is dropped like a rock into an icy river. The ideation of our culture gives way to the savage reality of our history.
All Gold Canyon is NOT intended to be an uplifting parable. That's a deception. It's another cynical commentary on the American capacity for greed. The lone "winner" in our whole film is a gold prospector who destroys the environment in a obsessive pursuit of the get-rich-quick American dream. Gold has no value. All of this effort for a stupid, mostly useless metal found in rocks (perhaps echoing the rock that was just dropped into the icy river as a test for our traveling freak in the previous parable). His obsession is so great that he wills himself to defeat his equally greedy-- although slightly more lazy-- bushwhacker. Ironically, the guy with the gun doesn't win. Only the gold-mining pick-axe trumps the bullet in the Coen's West.
In the Gal Who Got Rattled the fact that she ends up killing herself with the gun when she otherwise would have survived is more fuel for that theme. It invokes the reality that gun-owners are more likely to kill family members than intruders, and that suicides outnumber murders. The financial over-ambition of her brother, who we are led to believe is something of a con artist, and a poor one at that, is the foundation of the journey (the $400 price for her hand). Furthermore, even for our trail-crossed lovers, the true history of the grant dispensing plots of lands to settlers (reminding me of Far & Away) which was intended to seal American ownership of Oregon, and displace the Brits/Canadians already there. Meanwhile, don't overlook that incompetence with a gun is why the dog successfully runs off in the first place, or that the most intimate thing shared between our would-be lovers is the intimation of their "Christian names".
I'm still unpacking the final vignette. I don't have any strong insights to offer yet. I have to watch it again.
