The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018 film) = Finished

Weird West - a genre that puts the legends and problematic framing of the Wild West through a twisted prism, and sets all equal. We are one before a dry sea of grass and scrub, cosmic horror and haunted shanty towns, Devils with neat playing cards and crooked games to match. It is one of my absolute favorite molds, and almost no one uses it.

Imagine my surprise to see the Coen brothers bear my incredibly niche cross.

There's a lot of Westerns out there. What sets this movie apart - what stuns me by its departure from the norm - is that it focuses on the legends of the West. No, not our traditional conception of hard gunslingers in a dying period of unparalleled freedom, provided you were white, stubbled, and carried enough ammunition to mow down a small army. I'm talking urban legends. Folktales. Fireside stories told with dramatic flair in the dark, each varying wildly from the last.

Buster Scruggs doesn't use a gunslinger unless he sings showtunes and dies an awful, meaningless death, rising into heaven on angel wings as he sings a duet with his killer. A prospector played by Tom Waits hits it big, only to get a bullet in the gut beneath verdant hills that will quickly forget their presence. You'll get invested in a tableau for a good 20 minutes before it ends with a dire suggestion...and that's it. No closure. Just the dramatic stop driving a pit into your stomach before the next storyteller takes the stage and sends you somewhere else entirely.

The anthology structure tells you exactly what Buster Scruggs is trying to be. More painful irony, strange caricatures ("Pan shot!"), and sudden endings, than rote sermons about a vision of the West that has become increasingly familiar.

I've enjoyed Coen brothers stuff in the past, but I genuinely love this movie. Partially because it's the exact kind of thing I'd like to make, but also because of the essential reaction it puts into the world against the type of Western I've spent half of this post side-eyeing. The grand, self-important, world-weary messages embodied by media like Red Dead Redemption 2. 

I don't need more manifestos.
I need stories.
Strange little tales to carry me into tomorrow.

I think we all need that.