A uniquely stylized Western, "The Ballad of Buster" is a collection of six vignettes of song-and-dance Westerns. Said to be the creative brainchild of the Coen brothers, who spent 25 years working on it, the noir style remains the same, complete with people of all colors. While reacting to the harsh realities of western life, the encounters of varying human nature vary. Strange stories can be, straight to the human nature, special black humor, make people laugh bitterly movie.
The Ballad of Buster is the Coen Brothers' new film of 2018, a movie composed of a compilation of six relatively independent short stories. Through the eyes of cowboy sharpshooters, bank robbers, disabled sellers, western pioneers, gold seekers, and more, first-generation Americans of various identities, the West is shown to be both sketchy and perilous. And the last story will be the previous five stories for thought-provoking sublimation, in this world of the weak and the strong, each of us are insignificant, no one will have what the protagonist halo, perhaps as long as hard work, everything to others to leave a certain amount of space but also a little luck and wisdom can be returned to the whole body.
The film presents these harsh realities poetically and with black humor, illustrating the vagaries of fate; the narrative technique of each short story is good, and the reversal or black ending is saddening. The cinematography is superb, with many shots chosen from unique perspectives, creating stylized compositions; the lighting levels are spot on in portraying the psychological changes in the characters.
The film is presented as a collection of short stories, each of which is subtle and well-made, and maintains a unique Coen-esque black humor, but also gives a lot of insight into the West, which is really interesting. The stories, as tragic as they are, still have a bit of banter and dark humor, but at their core, they are still the usual Coen brothers' noirish dystopia. Read down the story by story, gradually getting better and better, and the playfulness makes people y feel the desolation of life, at this time the laugh is a bitter laugh.
The Coen Brothers' stories never fall into the cliché, never guessed the twist and the end, is always a distinctive character from the same kind of featured characters, as well as the tone of black humor and bloody violence. From the first story's bang-bang fast-paced action gunfight western song and dance movie, to the last one's deep soulful philosophical film similar to Bergman's movie, under the genre shell of the western, it goes deeper and deeper into the dangling tale of man and destiny. The Coen brothers' dark humor and mastery of the screen make for awesome cinematic textures, and it's the anti-climax that makes it all the more interesting, not being able to control where life goes, aren't we all?
In the West, a song always relaxes me. The cowboys in the first story, singing at all times, the sharpshooters, even if they accidentally die, are still happy, also singing and flying to heaven. The Coen Brothers' absurd and romantic 6 ballads, while still bright and warm, are life and death, and even more so, play those arias about humanity in the Wild West. The Wild West is such a magical place where everyone is a floater and everything can happen, and everyone is madly in love with him and chasing after him, but they just don't hate him, because death will come sooner than hate.
Several of the stories are great as they go from absurd song-and-dance comedy to black humor to sudden changes of tone into laments and arias, and the movie can turn into a drama (clear and complete) or back into a short film (abstract and fragmented). It has the unfinished feeling of a short story. Like watching Hitchcock theater. Complex and difficult to understand, standard in human society. Any cross-section, you can see strange textures, girls and gold mines, songs with inexplicable sadness, latent tragedy. Songs can really purify the human soul, running around in everyone needs to choose a place to rest.
The classic scenes of Westerns, such as bar fights, street duels, bank robberies, torture chambers, gold digging, confrontation with Indians, and wagon train conversations, are all present in the film, but the Coen Brothers' trademark philosophy of existentialism and black humor make it an anti-genre film that toys with the expectations of the viewer, and is overflowing with absurdity, serendipity, loneliness, pathos, and death. The movie's Buster Scruth has many of the characteristics of the classic Western. There's a lot of classic Western hero in Scruth, and the Coen brothers inject some cartoonish color into the character, allowing him to break the fourth wall and talk to the audience from time to time, making the whole story lighthearted and satirical.
The whole story is full of irony and humor, I don't know whether to laugh or sigh, bringing me a thick sadness, I am quite impressed or the 3rd story, human nature, really portrayed a very real and very sarcastic, restored the most primitive, the most naked human nature during the period of pioneering the West. Pioneering period of the West is full of killing iteration, the cycle of heaven, the use of betrayal, gold fever dream, fear of death, strange alienation and conflict of values. The sixth looks bad, but it's really the finishing touch, and the fifth builds the entire movie's reflection in the context of the present, so each is a condensed capsule of humanity, hitting it right in the face, and all of them are enjoyable for me.