But as the film moves along, Joel and Ethan Coen introduce weightier characters and more emotionally nuanced narratives - ones in which the person who is set up to be the protagonist doesn’t always end up in that position. Those are just Ballad’s first two chapters, which are easily the silliest and most insubstantial of the group. In another, a bandit (James Franco) encounters a bank with a teller (Stephen Root) who is more sly than he looks. In the first instalment, we meet Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), a singing cowboy who also happens to be an ace gunslinger and wanted criminal. Presented as six dusty tales from the Old West, Ballad introduces us to a slew of characters, none of whom appear in further episodes. But the brothers’ fans will no doubt come stampeding, and good reviews may help raise further awareness. This Netflix release doesn’t boast quite as much star power as other recent Coen productions such as True Grit - another Western, as well as their highest-grossing film. Genre goofs, mature ruminations, slapstick storytelling and wistful character studies all take their turn in the saddle, but what unites these six separate stories (beyond their stellar craft and distinctive worldview) is the filmmakers’ palpable excitement about working within truncated narratives, the writer-directors exploring their different guises with a sense of playful discovery.īallad doesn’t reinvent the Coens’ sardonic, measured aesthetic, but the anthology’s looser structure allows them a friskiness that is welcomeĪs with all anthologies, some of Ballad’s chapters are stronger than others, but the film’s unpredictability and sense of possibility are rousing. The delightfully protean Western anthology The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs presents audiences with just about every variation of the Coen brothers they might prefer. Nobody’s doing that kind of thing anymore, anthology movies, and we thought it would be kind of fun to bring it back.Dirs/scr: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen. As pointed out by CBS, the one called "All Gold Canyon" is based on a story by Jack London.īuster Scruggs premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, and at the time Joel explained (via Variety), "Even though they were completely different in mood and subject matter and sort of even generically within the sort of loose idea of Westerns, they were all kind of vaguely about the same thing and it would be interesting to put them all together. The segment called "The Gal Who Got Rattled" shares a title, a character name, and some of the plot with a story by Stewart Edward White. The stories also all contain classic aspects of the old west - standoffs, outlaws, gold digging - and some are more directly based on actual existing stories than others. While the stories vary from one about a singer/sharpshooter to one about the Oregon Trail, they all involve death in some way, whether it's someone being killed (which happens often) or a dead person being transported on a covered wagon. "We probably didn't expect to make them until maybe eight or 10 years ago, when we started thinking, 'Well, maybe we can do these.'" "They were put in a drawer, because they were short movies, and what were we going to do with them?" Joel said.
#Ballad of buster scruggs movie#
In this case, though - and as is clearer with some of the more outlandish sections of the movie - the stories primarily come from Joel and Ethan Coen themselves, with a couple of them being more directly inspired by existing work.Īccording to CBS News, the Coens explained during a press conference in October that they wrote the stories about 25 years ago.
After all, there are a lot of stories about the American west out there. This makes it seem that there might be some sort of source material outside of the Coen brothers' minds that the film is based on. The movie is an anthology with six different stories, all about the wild west, and between each story the pages of a storybook are shown flipping on to the next tale.
In the Coen brothers' latest film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the actual ballad of Buster Scruggs is only one-sixth of the experience.
0 kommentar(er)
