It's a film about small people, black humor, violence and absurdity, and ill-fated, and it has earned a good reputation of 8 points on the film critics website.
Don't worry, it's not The Unknown, it's the Coen brothers and The Ballad of Buster Scruggers.
This is a work of "Cannes directors shooting the net big".
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a collaboration between Netflix and the Coen brothers. It was supposed to be a six-part miniseries about cowboy gunners, bank robbers, traveling actors, gold diggers, horse herders, and nameless travelers.
However, the results that are currently unfolding before us have become a movie. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a short collection of six short stories of 132 minutes.
It won best screenplay in Venice, was nominated for the Golden Lion, and was loved by critics and audiences alike, with Metascore giving it a score of 78. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film received a 93% freshness rating from critics and a high score of 75% from viewers.
Six short stories that follow the Coen brothers' usual black humor, each of which is entirely laid out by the possibility of a long film:
The robber who robbed the bank was sent to the gallows because he was rescued by the cattle thieves; the little girl who met her love because her brother died, did not die of the Indians, but died of the old cowboy's admonition that "if I fall to the ground you will kill yourself".
"The Ballad of Buster Scruggers" is still the same taste of Cohen: fate is unpredictable, life is not worth it, death may be late, but it will not be absent.
According to the Coen brothers, the film's first story began early, somewhere between Barton Fink and Shadow Tycoon, while the last story was programmed into the film before filming began.
Of course, this is by no means the best work of the Coen brothers, but more like a date between streaming and independent directors. For Netflix, it's like six unique TV commercials, while for the Coen brothers, it looks more like a small work for practicing hands and letting go of themselves.
Why the Cohen Brothers are willing to have a "date" with Netflix, presumably it is not just that Netflix is rich and powerful.
As a character in the 90s independent films, the Coen brothers like to "play like movies", which is already a well-known thing for movie fans.
Independent filmmakers in the age of absurd banter
Throughout the history of american independent film development, the Coen brothers are in the 80s and 90s.
Independent films of the 80s and independent films of the 90s, although similar in time, gave birth to two distinct independent films.
In the 1980s, independent filmmakers saw film as a weapon or experimental object, giving film the task of changing society or concretizing theory, and successful independent films were about things and people that Hollywood did not pay attention to, class, race, and gender, which was the favored object of directors in the eighties.
David Lynch, with a "Blue Velvet" full of foul language, sexual abuse, violence, and voyeurism, has lifted the entanglement of sex, violence, and power in a calm town. In My Own Idaho, Gus Van Sant transforms Shakespeare's Henry IV and focuses on the love tragedy of a male prostitute and a rich man.' And the story of two gay women robbing two million dollars in "Crazy Flowers" has given this film a fascinating charm.
If the story of a few people is still the label of independent films in the 80s, by the 90s, this label has been completely torn off, and the jokes in black humor are ridiculous.
In the first two films, the Coen brothers have already established a distinct personal style.
Their debut film, Labyrinth of Blood, about a boss hiring a killer to kill his wife, has been hailed as "Hitchcock's resurrection."
However, the Cohen brothers were not Hitchcock's successors. Compared to hitchcock's concern for suspense, in "Blood Labyrinth", the audience is the all-knowing.
The audience knows who the culprit is, the audience knows who fired the gun, the audience knows who actually killed the boss, but the audience is not omnipotent, because the audience will never know what the protagonist will do in the next second in the Coen Brothers' film.
The Coen brothers created an omniscient and not omnipotent perspective in order to give the audience a better feel for what it was like to be played by fate. Everything is absurd, everything is unknown, in the situation of no dependence, people have lost trust in reason, but also lost trust in experience, only the present process and existence, is what they need your attention to.
Their Raise Arizona is much easier, and it might as well be called the Coen Brothers' first game.
The film later became the prototype for Project Baby, in which two prisoners steal a child out of greed, but send the child back out of guilt.
This film, "people with five children don't necessarily know more love than people without children", washes away the bloody and tragic impression of previous independent films. And humor, which was once considered to be an unethical film language, has found a more advanced mode of expression from the Coen brothers' films.
The Coen brothers gradually entered the commercialization
The world is different, but Cohen, like today's independent directors, faces the biggest problem: lack of money.
The existence of independent films has filled the gap in Hollywood. But this also dooms independent films to be impossible to "get rich".
No money means that there can be no luxurious means in the film, exaggerated stunts, and outstanding acting skills are not ingredients that independent films can control. Directors of independent films can only strengthen the personal role of directors by repeatedly deliberating the script to create special characters.
With the outbreak of the financial crisis at that time, independent films "came in winter", and it was difficult for directors to raise funds to produce films.
Meanwhile, in 1994, when Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction won $200 million at the box office for $8 million, it immediately caught Hollywood's attention.
Hollywood realized that independent films were also a lucrative business. Since then, the production cost of independent films has begun to increase. With more and more investment, independent directors, who originally emphasized the individual, began to consider costs and had to restrain their personalities.
In 1994, the American Independent Feature Film Program promised that independent films funded by major Hollywood studios would be eligible to apply for its Independent Spirit Award. In this social situation, the Coen brothers also began to consider the commercialization of their own films.
There are also outliers in this era, such as Jarmusch is a director who never compromises, his "Earth Night", "Ghost Dog Killer", "Limits of Control", all of which are self-written and self-directed, and are not willing to make a one-and-a-half compromise to the audience, the whole film is not interesting in the starting and closing, and it challenges the endurance of the audience, and thus is isolated from commercialization.
The Coen brothers are closer to Hollywood, and they use Hollywood's habitual suspense, violence, and western methods to create anti-Hollywood movies, without heroes, without a big happy ending, but still able to grab the attention of the audience. After experiencing the failures of "True Love and False Love" and "Old Woman Killer", the Coen brothers won the public's affirmation for "Old And Nothing", winning four awards for best picture, best director, best supporting actor and best adapted screenplay.
The Coen brothers grinned and bowed to the public, but the nature of the joke remained unchanged.
Independent films, hard, not so hard
After winning the Oscar, the Coen brothers said: "Although 'Old Nobody' has been affirmed by the Oscars, it is indeed becoming more and more difficult to get money to make new films. The film industry as a whole has become more conservative and cautious over the past year. ”
"In our opinion, the biggest difference between the past and the present is that in the past, if you made a 35mm film, you could let everyone see it. Now, part of the reason is that it's easier to make a film, and it's harder to get someone to see it at a glance. Because there are so many things to see. ”
Is this the pressure of independent film directors: to stick to the author's true colors, or to compromise with the public? Sticking to low costs, or occasionally overtures to business?
But as events unfold, the fate of independent films is also quietly changing. Today's cinemas often have a situation of small cost differentiation: a small cost film, under the pressure of popcorn special effects blockbusters, with young directors, high reputation, box office counterattack. The emergence of this dark horse situation is the recognition of the producer, the choice of the director, and the recognition of the audience.
From a global perspective, a small-budget film and a young director, for the producer, the risk is now low, with the possibility of small success rising.
New directors are easier to work with than traditional big-name directors. In the period when special effects blockbusters occupied the market, eclectic small-budget films were a supplement to commercial large-scale productions, and there was no shortage of unexpected precedents at the box office.
For emerging directors, the language of Hollywood cinema is effective for audiences. When emerging directors try to borrow these languages and model methods, they will develop a trend of "mainstreaming independent films", and the intervention of capital and the support for small and medium-cost films have just boosted this trend from the macro orientation.
This is a summary of the past of independent films, but also a vision for the future, and the history of independent films in the United States in the past four decades may also inspire young directors who are struggling with business and self.
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