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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Started by Emma Raducanu, November 09, 2018, 10:27:26 PM

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Keebleman

Quote from: Dex Sawash on January 24, 2019, 05:11:01 AM
I'm hopeless on subtext stuff and had no clue what the last part was about. Had no clue half of Cagney and Lacey was still alive either.

I worked with the other one of Cagney and Lacey in the summer.  I was an extra on Casualty and there was a white-haired American actress on set.  I didn't twig who it was until I walked past a trailer with 'Sharon Gless' on it and thought, hang on...

rasta-spouse

Quote from: Twed on January 22, 2019, 09:00:03 PM
Interesting article about how some of the stories aren't originals, but adaptions of old short stories. The originals are now online to read: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/01/coen-brothers-buster-scruggs-oscar-nom-adapted-screenplay-not-original-1202037160/


Ah, good info! So were any of these adapted authors credited?

I've long suspected that everything they do is cut-and-paste pastiche. Like how Miller's Crossing is basically The Glass Key - that doesn't stop it from being great though, the Coens totally nail it their way.

St_Eddie

You're all a bunch of Buster Scruggs as far as I'm concerned.

Bazooka

Watched it last night, by the end of the fourth short(the gold digger) I thought its been on for hours should have ended it there, it hadn't even been on an hour, but glad I stayed awake as I enjoyed the skits that followed. The cinematography was captivating, especially in the gold digger scenario.

Also great to see Chris Finch.

Ferris

Quote from: Bazooka on February 02, 2019, 11:15:58 PM
Watched it last night, by the end of the fourth short(the gold digger) I thought its been on for hours should have ended it there, it hadn't even been on an hour, but glad I stayed awake as I enjoyed the skits that followed. The cinematography was captivating, especially in the gold digger scenario.

Also great to see Chris Finch.

I laughed out loud in the theatre when I saw Finchy.

"What the fuck is Finchy playing haha legend"

Bazooka

Ha, lovely stuff. I am pretty damn good at spotting faces, this film covered everyone in dust and grime as it would have been back in them good o'l days, but Chris 'Ralph' Finch enabled instant recognition.

Wet Blanket

Thought the Gal Who Got Rattled and the Tom Waits one were the best. The former could (maybe should) have been a film all of its own.

The opener is also great but sets a goofy tone completely at odds with the morose follow ups. Found my mind wandering during the Liam Neeson one; the James Franco one just seemed like a couple of good scenes they had but didn't know what to do with, and count me among those befuddled by the final segment.

Nevertheless I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. I'd like to find out at what stage in the development they abandoned the plan for a six-part series. Are there entire scripts out there that beef up most of the segments?

St_Eddie

Quote from: Wet Blanket on February 04, 2019, 10:35:35 AM
I'd like to find out at what stage in the development they abandoned the plan for a six-part series. Are there entire scripts out there that beef up most of the segments?

That was always a bullshit.  It was never going to be a six-part TV series...

Quote from: The Hollywood ReporterWhen the Coen brothers' Western anthology film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was initially announced, it was believed to be a TV series, with Annapurna's president of television, Sue Naegle, producing the project that was later acquired by Netflix.

But Joel and Ethan Coen, and their cast, insist that the project was always intended to be a film.

When asked about the possibility that Buster Scruggs was going to be a TV series, Joel Coen told a press conference at the New York Film Festival, "That's an artifact of just what a strange animal it was. They didn't know, none of us really knew what to call it, or how to classify it. But aside from the confusion about the classification, the actual what we were going to shoot — the length of each of the stories, all of which vary — there was never anything that we were considering doing any differently. There were never any more stories and they were always intended to be seen as a group."

Stephen Root, who appears in the film's James Franco-starring second installment, "Near Algodones," told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Buster Scruggs' New York film festival premiere, "I think it was always conceived as [a movie that consists of different stories]. People say that it's going to be chopped up by Netflix and shown as separate parts. That was never going to happen. It's always been a film of different vignettes loosely set in the 1870s."

Grainger Hines explained that even though he only appears in one section, titled "The Gal Who Got Rattled," he, like other castmembers, was able to read the full script, containing all of the various stories featured in the film.

"It was a movie script when I read it. It was always a movie script, and my piece is most of the second half of the film," he said. "I mean everybody talks about it being a series. I never even thought of that when I looked at it. It was never edited down or any of that stuff either. It was always a movie."

"They follow, with kind of a couple exceptions, in chronological order in terms of when they were written, roughly," Joel Coen said of the stories. "And they just got put in a drawer. They were short movies and we didn't know what we would do with them. 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 all together.'"

Ethan Coen added, "We didn't really think of an order. They kind of fell into an order by virtue of the way we wrote them. We looked at 'em and we thought, 'OK, that's a good order.'"

Tim Blake Nelson, who plays the eponymous Buster Scruggs in the film's first story, first got involved with the project in 2002.

"[Joel and Ethan Coen] said, 'We're going to be writing some other ones over the ensuing years, and when we have enough we're going to make a film out of it,' and I said, 'Alright, I'm in whenever you do it.' You know it would nag on my mind now and again. I'd wonder what was going on with that, and then Joel called me about a year and half ago and said, 'Alright, we're going to do it.' We need to meet you for dinner to talk about everything you're going to need to start preparing: playing the guitar, pistol twirling, dancing — plus all of the words. Then I started preparing."

While the Coen brothers said they never considered merging the different stories together to make a more cohesive larger narrative, they did notice connections between the various tales, which Joel Coen compared to songs on an album.  "We had all of these stories and they were all Westerns and then they all started to relate to each other but kind of retrospectively, not consciously when we started doing it," Joel Coen said.

Bill Heck, who stars in "The Gal Who Got Rattled," said the film is "an ode to storytelling and different ways to tell story, and each one bleeds into the next and opens up the gates for the next one and feels very of a piece to me. I don't think they'd do nearly as well on their own as they do as a whole."

His co-star in that section, Hines, added, "The theme is that nobody gets out of here alive: We're all stuck. That kind of permeates throughout it, and that's what the film is about."

Nelson, meanwhile, called Buster Scruggs a "classic anthology movie."

"I think what separates this one is that a) all of them are really great, in my opinion, so there's not a weak vignette in there," Nelson said. "And b) the final story ... ties all the stories together and gives you a real reason for watching them ... so I think it holds together gorgeously as a cohesive film."

Menu

What else links these vignettes other than death? Are there other themes? I really enjoyed this. As with a lot of Coen Brothers films, I spent much of the duration laughing and, I guess, enjoying the different levels of irony but at the end I can't help feeling that I've just seen something quite profound. What did you all think?

Hand Solo

Quote from: Menu on October 21, 2020, 03:34:50 AM
What else links these vignettes other than death?

Basically Death and The Old West? I thought it was pretty much their attempt at Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man:


Mister Six

Watched this ages back but somehow missed or forgot about this thread. Surprised at all the people saying they can't see what the stories are actually about, when most of them are the usual Coen Brothers moralising about not putting money/ego over compassion for your fellow man.

Buster Scruggs is about a guy who basically massacres his way through the West, thinking that it makes him special, only to discover (and then immediately reject) the fact that he's known more as an irritating singer than a gunslinger. And then he dies and someone else takes his place, and it was all for nothing. Who's singing the Ballad of Buster Scruggs? He is, on his way to the afterlife, his body already growing cold and his place taken by another doomed soul.

Near Algodones is a yarn about another do-badder getting his comeuppance via cosmic joke. That little glimpse at the end is him realising that his glib wisecracks and outlaw ways have added up to nothing, and that perhaps if he'd lived a different life he might have been able to settle down with a pretty young lady. Then -- snap!

Meal Ticket is just a grim little piece about what happens when people are treated like commodities and cash treated as more valuable than life. No comeuppance for the baddie, but no indication that he's going on to a happier or better life either.

All Gold Canyon is just another simple morality yarn - the guy who works hard and long gets the gold and the guy who tries to steal it gets in grave.

The Gal Who Got Rattled doesn't have any particular theme, I think, other than a fairly grim and nihilistic view of the Old West. I think it's a great little tragedy though.

The Mortal Remains - I'll admit that the whole "they're dead" thing passed me by originally, but I was pretty sleepy at this point. I guess the message is just that no matter how we conduct ourselves or what kind of people we are, we all end up dead at the end.

Anyway, I thought it was a cracking little flick. Not a major work in the Coen canon, but I didn't feel like it was time wasted. I agree that it's tonally all over the shop, but I can see the order making sense - ease 'em in with a broad comedy, move on to a slightly darker story that's still funny and absurd ("pan shot!"), get REALLY dark with some disabled-man killing, then have the gold prospector survive as a "Hey, we're not all that grim!" twist. End with the longer, tragic piece, followed by a broader, campier, more theatrical one. Could have maybe done with a lighter yarn between Gold Canyon and Gal, but I suppose the runtime would have been ridiculous.

Menu

Quote from: Hand Solo on October 21, 2020, 03:24:40 PM
Basically Death and The Old West? I thought it was pretty much their attempt at Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man:



Interesting. Need to see that one again.

Hand Solo

Quote from: Menu on October 22, 2020, 01:47:06 AM
Interesting. Need to see that one again.

Make sure you bring your tobacco.

Menu

Quote from: Mister Six on October 21, 2020, 03:51:20 PM
Watched this ages back but somehow missed or forgot about this thread. Surprised at all the people saying they can't see what the stories are actually about, when most of them are the usual Coen Brothers moralising about not putting money/ego over compassion for your fellow man.

Buster Scruggs is about a guy who basically massacres his way through the West, thinking that it makes him special, only to discover (and then immediately reject) the fact that he's known more as an irritating singer than a gunslinger. And then he dies and someone else takes his place, and it was all for nothing. Who's singing the Ballad of Buster Scruggs? He is, on his way to the afterlife, his body already growing cold and his place taken by another doomed soul.

Near Algodones is a yarn about another do-badder getting his comeuppance via cosmic joke. That little glimpse at the end is him realising that his glib wisecracks and outlaw ways have added up to nothing, and that perhaps if he'd lived a different life he might have been able to settle down with a pretty young lady. Then -- snap!

Meal Ticket is just a grim little piece about what happens when people are treated like commodities and cash treated as more valuable than life. No comeuppance for the baddie, but no indication that he's going on to a happier or better life either.

All Gold Canyon is just another simple morality yarn - the guy who works hard and long gets the gold and the guy who tries to steal it gets in grave.

The Gal Who Got Rattled doesn't have any particular theme, I think, other than a fairly grim and nihilistic view of the Old West. I think it's a great little tragedy though.

The Mortal Remains - I'll admit that the whole "they're dead" thing passed me by originally, but I was pretty sleepy at this point. I guess the message is just that no matter how we conduct ourselves or what kind of people we are, we all end up dead at the end.

Anyway, I thought it was a cracking little flick. Not a major work in the Coen canon, but I didn't feel like it was time wasted. I agree that it's tonally all over the shop, but I can see the order making sense - ease 'em in with a broad comedy, move on to a slightly darker story that's still funny and absurd ("pan shot!"), get REALLY dark with some disabled-man killing, then have the gold prospector survive as a "Hey, we're not all that grim!" twist. End with the longer, tragic piece, followed by a broader, campier, more theatrical one. Could have maybe done with a lighter yarn between Gold Canyon and Gal, but I suppose the runtime would have been ridiculous.

Enjoyed that, thanks. I saw one reviewer say the link is also the significance of the mortality of fictional characters. What it means for one of them to die. Which fits comfortably in the Coen's usual meta-encroaching work. They make you assess how it makes a viewer feel when a fictional character dies or just isn't there any more. Think of all the deaths in that way. Eg the sort of conventional death of the Gal(she shoots herself and we see her dead body) and James Franco(he gets hung but we have no confirmation that he didn't escape this hanging too) with the non-death of Tom Waits. He gets shot in the back and essentially gets up and goes on with his life(as nature returns to the scene it had left at the beginning of the story). And remember Buster Scruggs himself dies in front of us and yet reappears immediately as an angel and gives us another song and is still flying around as the story ends. I think the on-the-nose quality of the last episode's allegory is the Coen's trying to make us consider what it means for a fictional character to be already dead when we first see them as opposed to them dying after a couple of hours. What difference does it make? They're not real, after all. I'm not articulate enough for this but I think there's something to that theory

Mister Six

Ah, that makes sense of the stagey fakeness of the sets in that last story, too, given that they clearly had enough cash to make it look realistic if they wanted it to.

(And in retrospect, "We all end up dead no matter how we were in life" isn't really a very Coensy moral, so I was probably off-base with that one.)

Menu

Quote from: Mister Six on October 22, 2020, 04:45:00 AM
Ah, that makes sense of the stagey fakeness of the sets in that last story, too, given that they clearly had enough cash to make it look realistic if they wanted it to.


I wonder if that 'stagey fakeness' was the thinking behind some of the dodgy CGI. I'm especially thinking of the bridge that Neeson throws his son off. It was shuddering like the letters would in the opening LOST in 'Lost'. There was another piece of dodgy CGI but I can't remember it now - possibly in the last story. Would make sense for your theory.

Mister Six

No, I think it would only work for that last story, I think. I didn't notice any bad CGI, myself.

Menu

Quote from: Mister Six on October 23, 2020, 01:53:58 AM
No, I think it would only work for that last story, I think. I didn't notice any bad CGI, myself.

I never usually do at all. It was just as they arrived at the bridge, you could only see the very beginning part of it, and it was flickering like mad. I watched it on Netflix and the stream was struggling with a lot of the shadows as well. A good advert for blu ray.

QDRPHNC

The fakeness of the last story (my favourite) is part of it. When they pull up to the hotel, the buildings across the street appear to be facades only.

Menu

Quote from: QDRPHNC on October 23, 2020, 09:15:22 PM
The fakeness of the last story (my favourite) is part of it. When they pull up to the hotel, the buildings across the street appear to be facades only.

The quick shot of the Frenchman putting his head outside the carriage to ask the driver to slow down reminded me of Nosferatu. Also the fact that the first time we see Scruggs he is in in Monument Valley, and the harmonica-playing bad guy are very on-the-nose references to Ford and Leone. Which I think backs the point about how the Coens are emphasising the fictional element of these characters and stories.

Ant Farm Keyboard

The first segment, the one about Buster Scruggs, is also about the glorification of violence, mythology and propaganda. Scruggs, who is a real piece of shit and kills everybody, has self-written songs glorifying him and carries some code of honour that supposedly makes him the hero (at least in his own eyes), mirroring what's happened to most real life figures from western stories or with any war or espionage movie where the Americans are the good guys who can't do any harm on purpose. Of course, it's shown as grotesque and ridiculous, but from George Custer to Chris Kyle, there are tons of Buster Scruggs in American fiction.

Menu

Quote from: Ant Farm Keyboard on October 24, 2020, 09:23:32 AM
The first segment, the one about Buster Scruggs, is also about the glorification of violence, mythology and propaganda. Scruggs, who is a real piece of shit and kills everybody, has self-written songs glorifying him and carries some code of honour that supposedly makes him the hero (at least in his own eyes), mirroring what's happened to most real life figures from western stories or with any war or espionage movie where the Americans are the good guys who can't do any harm on purpose. Of course, it's shown as grotesque and ridiculous, but from George Custer to Chris Kyle, there are tons of Buster Scruggs in American fiction.


Yeah good point! There's a lot in this film isn't there.

Hand Solo

When they put out the casting call for Buster Scruggs they must have written 'Some Jim Varney aka Ernest looking motherfucker'.

Mister Six

They probably just called up Tim Blake Nelson directly, since he was also in the Coens' O Brother Where Art Thou?

Menu

Quote from: Mister Six on October 25, 2020, 01:54:30 AM
They probably just called up Tim Blake Nelson directly, since he was also in the Coens' O Brother Where Art Thou?

Apparently they did, but years before shooting. He had to learn the guitar and sing in a baritone. Or something.