Film Summary CDLXIX (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs)


The Coen Brothers have come around to releasing another entertaining film.
This one based on several different Western themes. All of them entertaining, some better than others and with an entire scenario that makes me scratch my head and wonder: ''Why is this a film and not a series of episodes?''

Still as the old saying goes, you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth and I shouldn't be complaining about a series of episodic Adventures being crammed into one film. After all if they hadn't of done that the chances of me seeing it would have been reduced.

Being a Cullen Brothers film you can be assured that the camera work and general atmosphere the movie will be top notch. The acting for the most part in almost all of the segments is pretty good. There's a few people who I thought couldn't really nail down that Wild West antique voice.  However I feel with those actors that try to push themselves more into that accents they would have just devolved into parody. And at the end of the day most of them had enough Charisma that you could forgive any shortcomings of voice.

I liked all the individual stories but the lack of connection between them made the entire experience feel a little empty. Just when you're about to get invested the tails would end.

Of all the stories I think the old man gold prospector was the best. I liked it simple premise and overall environment. It's a very calming and enjoyable story that has this twinge of fear behind it. As if you're suspecting something bad is going to happen at any moment. And at the end of the day I'm a sucker for any story about a kooky old man just running around in the world trying to get by on whatever he can.

The action was overall enjoyable, oddly comedic and at the right point brutal.
It was used to just sparingly enough that you never got bored waiting for the action but you never grew tired of it at the same time. And it's kind of hard to nail down which segment was the most amusing to watch. There's a scene of one man simultaneously taking on an entire war party of Apache Lake Native Americans and a scene of one man's ridiculous Gunplay that take the title of most amusing action scenes for me. In fact the entire movies name is based only on one story that happened at the beginning.
But really it's not the action that'll keep you invested in the film. It's the all the ball interactions between people and some pretty amusing dialogue that's been written in for them all to say. sadly I don't have that much else to say about this movie.
It's pretty good.
It's not fantastic.
I went in expecting more than I think I got. But overall it's worth a watch. I don't know if I'd ever want to stick through it again. Probably just watch the old man prospector part of the movie and leave the rest of it alone.

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