Ballad of buster scruggs locations12/10/2023 It is a tightly woven ‘Western Anthology’ film, in that it consists of six vignettes – all set on the American ‘frontier.’ The film is framed within the narrative device of an old story book that is illustrated with colour plates, and moves through its six chapters at a steady, assured pace. But, it is fitting that The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs is the project with which The Coen Brothers should take this step, because it is, in many ways, a direct note to audiences. While the streaming platform has been making great strides in the commissioning of original movies, landing a Coen Brothers project is a huge leap for an organisation that has consistently stoked heated debate about the future of cinema. It is the first time The Coen Brothers have shot a film digitally, and it is the first time they have made a film with Netflix. The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs is an interesting event in film. This is important to note, because The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs is one of the best Coen Brothers films ever made, while also seeming to be something of an answer to that very argument. Even those films that include notable women characters – such as Fargo, Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, or Burn After Reading – feature those characters as essentially Token Women, within a story that revolves around male dominance. Their stories are entirely male-centric, and are filled with overwhelmingly white casts. © 2023 NYP Holdings, Inc.The Coen Brothers might be legendary filmmakers, but they are not known for their intersectional feminism. This isn’t one of the brothers’ top-drawer films because there are too many dull stories and characters we don’t latch onto - just a series of Buster shrugs. But setting the mood has never been the Coens’ problem. The folksy music by Carter Burwell is twangy and tuneful, too. It’s also nice to take in the lush Old West scenery that looks epic even when the story is tumbleweed-dry. The final part, “The Mortal Remains,” ends the movie with a fizzle, but it’s always a pleasure to see Tyne Daly, who plays a religious wife with secrets. What sells it is how simultaneously spooky and sweet big-eyed Kazan is. Zoe Kazan plays a young woman on a wagon train who’s promised to be married to a man she’s never met. But the next portion, “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” has real drive and direction. And, in another boring scene, Harry Melling (Dudley from “Harry Potter”) plays a limbless traveling actor.Īt this point, you might be tempted to head back East. Tom Waits actually is doing Will Ferrell’s “I’m the prospector!” bit as he searches for a nugget of gold in them thar hills. James Franco plays a bank robber in a section that could be a scrapped “SNL” sketch. This tale comes closest to the blood-and-yuks style that Coen fans eat up.įrom there, the storytelling becomes a little shoddy, pardner. The first - and best - chapter is an almost-musical about the title character, a singin’ gunslinger (Tim Blake Nelson) whose sense of humor is as sharp as his shootin’. But “Buster Scruggs” is mostly unengaging. You’d think with viewers’ short attention spans and love of binge-watching, it would be the perfect format for today. “Buster Scruggs” is episodic - appropriate for its Netflix home - so we follow a few Wild West characters for 20 minutes or so, and then we’re handed a whole stack of new ones. With “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” directors Ethan and Joel Coen venture to the frontier once more, after “True Grit” and “No Country for Old Men.” But this time, there’s only a little grit in this very slow country.
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