netflix The Coens offer six tales of Old West absurdity and brutality in The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs

[Veritable Quandry]

This looks like it might be fun, in an absurdist way.

Specific genre aside, the format recalls nothing so much as Tales From The Crypt, down to transitional cutaways to a leather-bound book, featuring illustrations that tease events from the pocket-sized dramas to come. But Crypt’s stories unfold in an essentially moral universe, punishing sinners via an almost Old Testament karmic retribution. What goes around doesn’t necessarily come around in Coens country, and if there’s an overarching idea holding The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs together, it’s that very few of us will make our way to a meaningful ending. That’s not misanthropy. Sadly, it may just be realism.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

See this movie. One of the best absurdist Westerns ever made. And beautifully filmed with some great performances, Well worth watching, just don"t get attached to any of the characters.

 

[Free]

I watched it. Loved half of the anthology stories, liked the other half.

I was expecting them all to be as absurd as the Buster Scruggs one, but no... Nonetheless, worth watching.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

Something that just occurred to me. While the stories are "not connected"

Spoiler: Not particularly important to the plot, but watch it first anyway.

In the last tale, there is a Frenchmen in the couch wearing a striped jacket played by Saul Rubinek who tells a story about refusing to play a friend's hand at poker. In the first story, when Buster sits down after a player leaves the poker table, there is a younger Frenchmen played by David Krumholtz wearing a striped jacket when Buster refuses to play the cards dealt to another man (in this case, Eights and Aces, a Deadman's Hand in Poker). It occurs to me that this is possibly the older version having spun a tale based on the incident that places himself in the center of the story. This fits with the Englishman's observation that "We all like stories about us, so long as the people in those stories are us, but not us."

eta: Both characters are credited as "Frenchmen."