The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Netflix (if you haven't heard of it) is a very popular streaming service that offers a wide variety of movies and TV shows. Their TV shows are mostly pretty good. Their movies are, for the most part, pretty bad. "Straight to Netflix" is the new "straight to video" when it comes to their movies, which makes sense since Netflix has to constantly produce new content to stay alive. Luckily though, Netflix has a big enough audience that established filmmakers will occasionally work with them, which is how we end up with fun, oddball movies like Bong Joon-Ho's Okja, Noah Baumbach's The Meyerwitz Stories (New and Selected), Mike Flanagan's Gerald's Game, Macon Blair's I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind (which I still need to see), and now, The Coen Brothers' The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

I've seen all of the Coen Brothers' movies, since they're two of my very favorite filmmakers, and for the most part they're consistently great. Their classics have earned the title a million times over, their underrated movies deserve to be put up with their classics, and even the ones that aren't so good are still unlike any other movie that's being made today. Their unique brand of surreal-yet-understated comedy, typically in the midst of horrifically brutal happenings, has earned them their place in the pantheon of great modern auteurs, and it's played up to the highest degree in this movie.

This is a western anthology film, with the framing device being a literal book that features six short stories. The first three of these stories are completely wild and bizarre, while the last three are much more grounded but still have that strange tilt that you can expect from a Coen Brothers story. They're all visually gorgeous, thanks to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (who also did the tragically underrated Inside Llewyn Davis), taking full advantage of every angle of the western genre.

Returning Coen players Tim Blake Nelson and Stephen Root are wonderful as always (those two specifically are more unhinged than I've ever seen them before and it's a treat to watch), and Coen newcomers are brilliant as well. Some actors in the film, like Tom Waits and Liam Neeson, are playing completely different types of characters than I've ever seen them play before, to the point of being nearly unrecognizable, which is one of my favorite Coen Brothers staples.

All of the stories have something great, or at the very least memorable, to offer. My favorite story is one with Liam Neeson and DUDLEY DURSLEY (Harry Melling), which is beautifully written and acted, and gives a brutal perspective on show business and its relationship with the public. I won't say more than that.

I'll leave the rest a surprise (and they're all surprising), because this is definitely a movie I recommend. As a whole it's tonally uneven, but that's what you get with an anthology movie. Even if you're not a fan of westerns or even the Coen Brothers, please click on this movie so that Netflix can find out how much more people like it when they present unique and interesting films like this instead of the onslaught of undercooked crap that they've been releasing recently.