Thursday, December 20, 2018

Easter Eggs in Coen Bros. "Ballad of Buster Scruggs"

Netflix has released a new full length Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I'm not a Coen Brothers groupie - I can remember when Blood Simple came out in the mid-80s, and I loved Fargo (and Raising Arizona and Barton Fink), but other films like Miller's Crossing I could take or leave.

Buster Scruggs has grown on me. I wasn't impressed by the idea when I first head it. Or by the trailer. I kind of dully downloaded it for an airplane trip, and even on first viewing I thought it was a lot of clever-and-craft but maybe not that enjoyable.

Best Ten Lists

Along the way, I've now seen most of the film several times and I find it fascinating now. National Board of Review named it one of the Ten Best Films of 2018.

Six Chapters, Six Genres

The movie contains six chapters, all set in the Old West and with styles varying from comedy to fantasy to realism to ghost story. The six Western genres are:

The singing cowboy.
The bank robbery.
The traveling entertainment show.
The lone prospector.
The pioneers on a wagon train west.
Stagecoach, bringing together unexpected travelers.

Easter Eggs and Tidbits

Below I've pulled together some callbacks and Easter Eggs, including from Entertainment Weekly and Reddit, here and here. Note - not much plot is here, but I haven't avoided spoilers.

The opening theme music is Streets of Laredo; in the last segment, a character sings a funereal song to the same melody.

Streets of Laredo is also the closing-credits music.

Both the first chapter and sixth chapter contain characters breaking into song.
The well known historical lyrics of the song Cool Clear Water include a horse named Dan.

Buster Scruggs opens the movie by singing Cool Clear Water, and his horse is named Dan.
In Chapter 2, we have the opposite character, a bank robber dressed in black head to toe; his horse is named...Timmy.

The French card player in the first chapter - whom the camera focuses on several times for no clear reason - is a younger man who will be seen again at 70 years old in the final chapter, the stagecoach. But you might not realize this on first viewing.
When Buster shoots the gambler in the second saloon, after the three shots, we hear a coin spinning down to a stop. After a couple seconds, the gambler tumbles to the floor, and we once again hear...a coin spinning down to a stop.
The third segment contains a counting chicken; in the fourth segment, a character asks, "How high can a bird count?"
Having a legless man recount the Ozymandias poem (about a legless statue; in the third segment, the entertainer), is one of the most bizarre images in recent film.
There are fine details hidden in the set design.

The six filmed stories are presented like the coming-to-life of chapters in a book. Intercut we momentarily see the first and last page of each chapter; only readable on freeze-frame, the text pages can add interesting color.
In the first chapter, Buster is dealt "The Dead Man's Hand," supposedly the same set of cards that were the last dealt to Wild Bill Hickok.
In the Stagecoach segment, or ghost story, the travelers arrive at a hotel which has an angel left of the door and a devil right of the door. But they're glimpsed only for a moment.
When the stagecoach arrives at the Hotel, the twilight buildings opposite are "clearly just shells" although you have to watch several times to be convinced.

Actors from where? Brendan Gleeson, a bounty hunter in the sixth chapter, was a lead in "In Bruges." The jibbering banker, played for laughs in Chapter 2, is Stephen Root, revered as goofy Milton in "Office Space." (Root also plays Michael Hader's low-rent crime boss in HBO's Barry and a Harvard Law prof in On the Basis of Sex.) The grizzled Trapper in Chapter 6, Chelcie Ross, has a long resume' including Basic Instinct, Major League, and Hoosiers. Zoe Kazan (as Brave Pioneer Woman) is granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan.
By far the biggest star in the cast, with the grandest stage voice, is Liam Neeson, who is given a fifteen minute nearly non-speaking role.
Four different characters are shot in the middle of the forehead.

Two gunslingers and the Singing Cowboy in Chapter 1; the heroine in Chapter 5.

Both a saloon hooligan in Chapter 1 and the prospector in Chapter 4 are shot through, but "the bullet doesn't hit nothin' vital" in either case.
In the ghost story, the woman several times reverses her speech in describing her husband as "is" or "was." Also in the ghost story, a metaphysical debate on human nature circles three or four times to rest on the same debate point: "People are like ferrets." "People are not like ferrets."
As the film closes, the stagecoach driver rides off with the characters' luggage, at high speed in the direction he'd come from, but the characters have other things to worry about by that time. The Frenchman, the last to enter the ghostly hotel, does so finally with shoulders up, confidence, and a sharp tap on his hat.

____

Part Two - Tidbits That Didn't Make The List Above

Buster Numerology

There are four references to France:

French card player in Chapter 1
Frenchman's Gulch western town in Chapter 1
Story about prior bank robber "from France" in Chapter 2
Recurrent French card player (now older) in Chapter 6

There are two references to Greek mathematics:

Buster's methods "might be downright Archimedean" in Chapter 1
Chicken is "Peckin' Pythagorean" in Chapter 3

Chapter Timing...

To Learn More...

Wikipedia here.

IMDB here.
Reviews are easy to find via Google; an especially interesting one by John Podhoretz at Weekly Standard, here.

Buster - Tim Blake Nelson - on Marc Moran WTF, December 3, 2018, here.

Tim enjoys Hebrew and Latin and majored Phi Beta Kappa in Classics at Brown (1986).

Joel and Ethan Coen on Terri Gross Fresh Air, November 19, 2018, here.
Two articles on the photography and CGI - Variety here, Art of VFX here.
Youtube review, from Discarded Imaging - MUBI, see it here.

Closing Tidbits

German Dub of Old West Language. I'm a lifelong German hobbyist; the soundtrack is dubbed in a number of languages including German. In Chapter 6 you can learn the German word for bounty hunter is "Kopfgeldjaeger" - head-money-hunter. Also tricky when you think about it, they have to try to convey the elevated, odd, quasi-Shakespearean speech across all the dubbed translations.

Radio Play. If you've seen the video once, one chapter, the sixth or Stagecoach chapter, is interesting to listen to as audio-only, like a radio play.

Midnight Caller. Chapter 6 we hear the beginning of a ghost story, The Midnight Caller. In the earlier Coen Brothers movie, True Grit, a character offers to tell the Midnight Caller story, but never gets started. I've seen Buster commenters cite to a Midnight Caller described at Luke 11:5-13, but it seems irrelevant to me. (in Luke: Man asks his friend for bread at midnight; asked to go away; asks again; gets the bread, hence, "Ask and you shall receive.")

Callbacks Across Films: Shot in the Middle of the Forehead. Miller's Crossing ends with John Turturro shot in the middle of the forehead; this happens four times in Buster Scruggs, as noted earlier. Character names are shared between True Grit and Chapter 5, The Girl Who Got Rattled.

Little Callbacks: Dead or Alive. In Chapter 1, Buster holds up a poster that he's wanted, "Dead or Alive." The bounty hunter repeats this phrase in the Stagecoach, Chapter 6.

Art of Minor Characters. For a short Youtube video on the Coens' art of creating the finest minor characters, including those in Buster Scruggs, here.

Professor Betjeman. In the final chapter, the woman is married to a Dr. Betjeman, a noted Chataqua speaker on morals. The 1970s Poet Laureate of the U.K. was John Betjeman. See a statue of him at Paddington Station.

This blog as:
www.tinyurl.com/busterscruggseastereggs
or www.tinyurl.com/busterEE

Monday, December 10, 2018

Snapshot of Lois Weber, 1915 Hollywood Producer: New DVD Set

On December 7, 2018, Los Angeles Times reviews a new award-winning DVD set of films by Hollywood's great early female directors and producers, like Lois Weber. Most are from the 1914-1920 era.

LAT Article here.
6-DVD set, website here.

See Lois Weber at Wikipedia, here.

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 6518 Hollywood Blvd, dating from 1960. Here.
It's on the south side and 1.5 blocks west of Cahuenga.

In 2017, one of my high school age daughters and I saw a one-woman play, "Tea with Lois," in North Hollywood, bringing Lois Weber to life on stage.

We saw it in an audience of about six...but I still remember much about Weber from that evening.

Friday, December 7, 2018

Anita Hill Interview, NYT Dec 7 2018

‘Clearly the Tide Has Not Turned’: A Q&A With Anita Hill

“I’m not sure if I’m optimistic, pessimistic, or pragmatic.”CreditElizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

Image

“I’m not sure if I’m optimistic, pessimistic, or pragmatic.”CreditCreditElizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times

By Susan Chira

Dec. 6, 2018

There may be more women heading to Congress this year, but Anita Hill isn’t cheering yet. The woman who faced down the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 does not see transformative change on sexual harassment emerging from any branch of government in Washington for the time being.

During a lengthy conversation at Brandeis University, where she is a professor, Ms. Hill reflected on the aftermath of her own testimony, and of Christine Blasey Ford’s before the committee this year, and the unglamorous slog of what it would really take to confront and redress sexual harassment.

She was alternately tart and deliberative, contained but occasionally allowing a flash of anger to break through her carefully composed sentences.

For now, she said, she is placing more hope in the private sector to police sexual harassment and to avoid the blows many industries have already absorbed to their reputations and morale. As head of the Hollywood Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality, convened a year ago by some of the most powerful players in Hollywood, she is working on best practices that extend beyond preventing and punishing sexual harassment to foster broader cultural change. This interview has been condensed and edited.

Q. We’re at a bookend moment — two women who endured public exposure and attacks, two Senate hearings that ended with the accused nominees’ confirmation. Has the tide turned and the momentum of the #MeToo movement slowed?

A. If you define the tide by the Senate Judiciary Committee, you’re missing a whole lot. Clearly the tide has not turned either with the outcome of the hearings or the process. That is really inexcusable. It’s as though they stuck their heads into the sand and assumed either it didn’t matter or they didn’t need to pay attention to it. I think that was the problem 27 years ago. The political question is whether or not they are in touch or not with the reality of our lives to be representing us.

Q. When you look at the myriad institutions that have been wrestling with this, what would it take to really implement changes?

Ms. Hill testified during Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991.CreditJose R. Lopez/The New York Times

A. 1991 was one of those experiences that was really horrifying for a lot of women. I don’t use that word lightly. I see women today who are still in pain and reeling from 1991 and then revisited it and brought up more memories in the Kavanaugh hearing.

The 1991 hearing had a peculiar impact. People predicted that women would never come forward, and just the opposite happened. They came forward in record numbers. Rules and practices were put into place, people started having conversations, lawsuits were filed, more cases went to the Supreme Court in the next three years. There had only been one Supreme Court case before 1991. On the political front, women ran for office because they felt they weren’t being represented.

Something did happen, but there was also backlash. You saw the rise in these forced arbitration agreements. Nondisclosure agreements took hold and started to rise in the ’90s. Increasingly, class action lawsuits were more and more difficult.

Increasingly as well, organizations started to look at the response to sexual harassment as an effort to make sure there was a compliance with the law and not an effort to solve the problems that existed. This experiment of how we’re going to address harassment — it failed.

Q. So what should be done?

A. It’s not the glamorous, headline-making work, it’s the day-to-day examination, combing through and interrogating things that people have just assumed were the only way things could be done.

Ms. Hill then ticked off a list of what needed to change:

• A process of reporting harassment where it is clear to every employee where to turn and how they will hear about the outcome. Those will have to be public, even though companies cite employee privacy, to build trust and prevent violators from being passed off to other workplaces.

• Investigations that are independent, often by third parties, particularly if the accused are senior executives or rainmakers.

• Training that includes implicit bias coupled with bystander training, creating a workplace culture where everyone feels responsible for calling out harassment.

• Preventing the retaliation that now hounds the majority of those who complain.

• Leaders who publicly commit to fighting harassment and creating a diverse workplace.

Christine Blasey Ford testifying before the committee in September.CreditErin Schaff for The New York Times

Q. Do you see a backlash against #MeToo from women as well as men?

A. We are just wedded to a culture of accepting this behavior, not being willing to make the tough calls and stick with them. There are very few problems where we make rules based on the possibility of false accusations. If we paid more attention to that in this society we wouldn’t have the death penalty.

The bigger problem is not false accusations. The bigger problem is the harassment. I agree that everyone in a fair process has a right to be heard, whether accuser or accused. What I cannot accept is the notion that many people have that women cannot be trusted to tell the truth about these violations.

Q. Will Dr. Ford’s experience deter other women from coming forward?

A. I have only one experience to base this on, but it was a pretty egregious and horrific process. And yet women said, ‘I didn’t even know I had this right. I’m not going to suffer in silence.’ I do think there will be more people coming forward. So I think it could have the same kind of countereffect that it did.

Q. Are you in touch with Dr. Ford?

A: I am. I’ll just leave it at that.

Q. Is it comforting for her?

A. I hope so. I know how important it was for me.

Q. When you look at the government, there are now two justices who were accused of sexual harassment (both of whom deny the accusations) and a president who boasted on tape of being entitled to grab women. How do you assess this?

A. They sort of feed each other. The Senate supports the compromising of the Supreme Court. The president compromises the presidency. The legislative bodies that support him or don’t call him out are enabling him to make comments that suggest he believes that he is entitled to be abusive to whomever he wants. And we should have known that eventually it would get to the courts, too. How it compromises the legal system — as a lawyer, that is so deeply troubling to me.

I will say this, too. The notion that Susan Collins [the senator from Maine] spread about the burden of proof, innocent until proven guilty and applying it to a Judiciary Committee proceeding, a political proceeding, compromised our legal standards. The legal standard is a high principle of our legal system, a start to protecting us against wrongful convictions. It should not be denigrated or used to cover political choices.

But I’m ever hopeful. Political bodies change, leadership changes, people can make better choices.

Q. You’re hopeful?

A. I’m not sure if I’m optimistic, pessimistic, or pragmatic. It has to do with my whole background. My parents were born in 1911 and 1912. My mother lived into her 90s, my father until his 80s. I measure change by what happened in their lifetimes. My grandfather was a slave, certainly his mother was a slave. I’m only two generations at most from slavery. I think I have the right to be hopeful. Because I see how far we’ve come. I’m very clearheaded about how far we have to go

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