“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is a Coen Brothers film that has limited theater play – I’m guessing to earn Oscar consideration – and dropped on Netflix. This is the best Netflix original I’ve seen and maybe marks a turning point in the evolution of how we enjoy film. I think this film make a lot of Top 10 lists of 2018’s best films but it’s really targeted for the home streaming market. I can think of a lot of films where Netflix or Amazon put up a chunk of financing to get streaming rights, but wow Netflix plopped a memorable movie right into the streaming pond. This is a dark and violent western. If you didn’t laugh at Steve Buscemi getting stuffed into a woodchipper in “Fargo” then maybe this isn’t your movie. The movie is a series of vignettes. Apparently the Coen Brothers wanted to serialize it on Netflix, but put it into one movie. One IMDB review said the Coen brothers said they wrote these vignettes over about 25 years, but just about everyone seems perfectly cast that I can’t believe it wasn’t written specifically for them. Tim Blake Nelson, who had such a memorable role with the Coen Brothers in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, opens as Buster Scruggs, a cheerful singing cowboy dressed in white with a Coen Brothers twist. James Franco is in the second vignette, which seems like a Coen Brothers take on an O Henry short story with a Stephen Crane ending. I can’t believe the third vignette wasn’t written with Henry Melling in mind. I listened to the DVD commentary on “The Wire” and they pointed out how powerful facial expressions can be in film, using Lance Reddick’s performance as an example. There is a three-second segment with Melling and Liam Neesom that almost knocked the wind out of me, the facial expressions said so much. I guess I have to find something to nitpick. Tom Waits plays a grizzled prospector but he doesn’t know how to pan for gold. Really, they could have searched YouTube for a gold panning tutorial. I panned for gold as a kid and those gold flakes the prospector tosses away are bigger than 98 percent of the flakes I collected as a kid. Flakes that big come along maybe once every 20 or 25 hours. The next vignette is a meditation on hope and desperation with Zoe Kazan. The final is a blend of Elmore Leonard and Rod Serling. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year and I’m glad I got to see it only for the price of my Netflix subscription, which I have anyway. Sadly, it probably don’t mean as much financially to Netflix as an Adam Sandler movie. But this is a clear shot across the bow of movie studios. The market is changing and maybe faster than they expected.
-- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
