Tag Archives: Western

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)

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DIRECTED BY: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

FEATURING: , James Franco, Liam Neeson, , Tom Waits, , Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek

PLOT: Six tales of the Old West, including a singing cowboy, an unlucky bank robber, an impresario and his hobbled talent, a tenacious gold prospector, a prospective bride, and a stagecoach full of tired travelers.

Still from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

COMMENTS: The Coen Brothers have made a remarkable cinematic career out of a body of work that careens from grim realism to wild stylization, often making unexpected stops along that spectrum. Sometimes, their push in one direction has alienated fans of the other; if you like the harsh satire of Fargo, you probably won’t enjoy the heightened mannerisms of The Hudsucker Proxy, and the metaphysical mysteries of A Serious Man might feel impenetrable to lovers of the stoner wisdom of The Big Lebowski. When they turned their attention to Westerns, it seemed like the demands of the genre pushed them toward a more sober, realistic approach, as typified by the neo-noir charnel house of No Country for Old Men and the gritty pastoral (not to mention corrective) remake of True Grit. For the final film (to date) of their storied collaboration, Joel and Ethan returned to the Old West, but found a way to hit nearly every possible take on the genre along the way.

At first glance, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs appears to have all the elements to please fans of traditional Westerns: a showdown in an empty street, a wagon train weaving across the plains, a lone man doing battle with an entire tribe of Indian savages, panning for gold, stagecoaches, poker games, and a hangman’s noose. Far from playing to the crowd, however, these six vignettes are haunted by death and regret. There’s at least one fatality in each story, and the survivors come to a reckoning with the actions that have kept them alive. To the extent that any of these needed to be Westerns in the first place, it’s to highlight the harshness and swift cruelty of this place and time. There is a moral code, it’s unforgiving, and it is strictly enforced.

The opening chapter, which gives the film its name, is by far the most stylized of the set. Nelson does not merely play a cowboy but an archetype, wearing a suit of brilliant white, strumming a guitar and speaking directly to us of his philosophy. It’s cloyingly familiar, until he wields his pistol and reveals himself to be a whirlwind of brutality. What ensues is essentially one joke, but it’s a good one told very well: the fella in the white hat is extremely violent, morally repugnant, and dies quickly and without a trace of heroism. It’s a nose thumbed at Gene Autry and Tom Mix and every Hollywood fantasy of the West. In that regard, it perfectly sets the table for what is to come.

The next two stories demonstrate a dark humor that suggests sometimes you can’t win for losing. James Franco’s thief immediately finds himself in over his head in what should be a simple bank Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HEADS OR TAILS? (2025)

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Testa o croce?

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Heads or Tails? is available to purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis

FEATURING: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Alessandro Borghi,

PLOT: An Italian cowboy and the wife of a brutal army captain flee into the wilderness after an incident during a bronco-riding contest between Italians and Buffalo Bill’s traveling wild west show, and the captain’s father hires Buffalo Bill himself to track down the refugees.

Still from Heads or Tails? (2025)

COMMENTS: If you’re excited to see a Western with beloved character actor John C. Reilly portraying Buffalo Bill Cody—which is how Heads or Tails? pitches itself—prepare for some mild disappointment. Cody does feature in the story, which takes its impetus from a real-life incident where local Italian cowboys (butteri) trounced Bill’s wild west show in an impromptu rodeo. But soon after the results are in, Bill nearly disappears from the story, which instead follows blue-eyed buttero Santino and the intensely-freckled French Rosa as they flee into the wilderness, accused of a terrible crime. Eventually tracked by Bill and others, the pair have mildly diverting adventures that include meeting up with a band of anarchists who want to make Santino into a revolutionary hero.

More Buffalo Bill would have been great, because the two leads, while attractive (both have piercing blue eyes), lack the chemistry and passion needed to get us invested in their outlaw escapades. The plot moves slowly, with too many scenes involving nothing more than the pair hiking through a swamp or camping out, and contains few true surprises. Their lovemaking looks like they know the camera is watching. Even a jailbreak offers little thrill. About all that we know about Rosa is that wants to move to America to rebuild her life, and stoic Santino has little character at all. Bill, played by Reilly with a showman’s panache, is far too interesting a character to sit on the sidelines for most of the movie while we watch these dull lovebirds instead.

Stylistically, the film is an appropriate recreation of a 60s-70s Italian western, complete with melodramatic acting (Bill, in particular, seems like he’s always performing even when he’s not on stage) and some humorously obvious dubbing. The Tuscan locations—which include a cool seaside grotto—don’t recreate the American west, but do look appropriately primal on their own. The “surreal” twist hinted at in some reviews is misleading; it’s more of a brief magical-realist bit, attributable to the heroine’s traumatized psyche (although it does suggest an even more feverish take on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—more of this, and we might really have had something here). Heads or Tails? also includes a few jabs at colonialism (the expressions on the Indians’ faces as the genocidal Bill brags about their noble culture are priceless) and nods to feminism (Rosa is the central figure and the toughest hombre in the film). But it’s not self-consciously revisionist so much as dedicated to the setting’s historical accuracy. Heads or Tails? comes up as a spaghetti western retread with modest art-house ambitions. But it never really decides which way it wants to go: full-throttle homage or sly postmodern parody. It probably should have settled on either heads or tails, and left out the question mark.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…sometimes failure is more interesting than success, and Heads or Tails? is a beautiful, beautifully acted, weird, sharply funny revisionist western taking on two cinematic traditions with the kind of knives-out bravura that contemporary cinema needs more of.”–Sarah Marrs, Lainey Gossip (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUNG FU CONTRA AS BONECAS [KUNG FU AGAINST THE DOLLS] (1975)

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AKA Bruce Lee versus Gay Power

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DIRECTED BY: Adriano Stuart

FEATURING: Adriano Stuart, Maurício do Valle, Helena Ramos, Edgard Franco, Nadir Fernandes

PLOT: When Chang, a wandering warrior of mixed origin who is well-versed in the skills and philosophies of kung fu, returns home to find that his family has been murdered by a gang of outrageous bandits, he vows to seek vengeance.

Kung Fu Contra As Bonecas [AKA Bruce Lee vs. Gay Power] ()

COMMENTS: No one associated with the making of this film ever called it Bruce Lee vs. Gay Power. This is important, because that extraordinary title seems to be at the heart of its lingering reputation. If some enterprising videocassette huckster hadn’t decided to employ some savvy attention-getting branding, combining an extreme example of Bruceploitation with a thematically unexpected opponent, then Kung Fu contra As Bonecas might never have made it out of Brazil. As it is, I’ve had to take a crash course in Brazilian history and film trends just to wrap my head around exactly what’s going on here, to say nothing of stoking a passing familiarity with poorly aged 1970s American television. Even with that, I have my doubts as to whether I’ve gotten it all. It is often said of art that if you have to explain what your piece means, then it has failed. Kung Fu contra As Bonecas has this problem to the nth power. 

Let’s start with the part that was closest to my wheelhouse. The movie is, in large part, an outright spoof of the David Carradine vehicle “Kung Fu,” the popular American TV series in which a distinctly non-Asian itinerant warrior made his way across the Old West confronting various forms of oppression and bigotry. (Depending upon who is telling the story, the real Bruce Lee either devised the premise for “Kung Fu” and had it stolen by unscrupulous producers, or was first in line for the lead role but was bypassed by studio execs who couldn’t fathom making an Asian actor the star of a prime-time TV series.)

Playing the lead role himself in a ludicrous oversized jet-black wig, Adriano Stuart deliberately mocks “Kung Fu”’s conventions, with flashbacks that directly parody the hero’s education in some dark monastery, turning the show’s innocent boy into a privileged young man in a graduation cap and gown and bearing the sobriquet “mosquito” (in place of the series’ “grasshopper”). He is instructed in the ways of Zen calm, which he consistently fails to maintain. In case that’s not obvious enough, this Chang sports a pink tank top featuring a glittery illustration of Carradine’s character hovering above the words “KUNG FU,” a garment that one suspects he picked up in a Hot Topic. It’s either unrestrained commitment to the bit or desperate flailing to make sure everyone gets the joke. 

Chang’s enemies are the cangaceiros, outlaws who brutalize the region, engaging in robbery, rape, and murder. Scenes in which the gang terrorizes innocents almost seem to be aping Sergio Leone, depicting their violence graphically and unblinkingly and setting a serious contrast to the ridiculous hero. However, the feminine habits Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUNG FU CONTRA AS BONECAS [KUNG FU AGAINST THE DOLLS] (1975) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: QUANTUM COWBOYS (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Geoff Marslett

FEATURING: Kiowa Gordon, John Way, Lily Gladstone, Patrick Page, , , Alex Cox

PLOT: After three years in prison, Frank reunites with his pal Bruno to affirm that a murdered musician is alive; meanwhile, Colfax and Depew pursue increasingly desperate measures to remove themselves from a simultaneously occurring time-loop.

Still from Quantum Cowboys (2022)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Good times, looping and otherwise, await the viewer in this multivariously-animated adventure, with its scattered reality monitored by an all-observant supernatural entity, his recording crew—and his cat.

COMMENTS: Quantum Cowboys plays like the fun-time menace of The Endless fused with the philosophizing of  Waking Life, with a story unfolding in the late 19th-century Arizona Territory. If that comparison doesn’t do it for you, I got others. While director Geoff Marslett hasn’t made a wholly new phenomenon, in the manner of igneous rock spewed from cinema’s core, he has through precedent and pressure forged a metamorphic rock, squeezing genres, tropes, and ideas into a film different from what has come before. And all its inner weirdness is coated with such easygoing charm that only upon reflection does the viewer realize a whole lot of odd stuff just happened.

Four layers of narrative interact and interlay as Quantum Cowboys unfolds. A pair of nobodies—sly Frank and honest Bruno (Kiowa Gordon and John Way)—shovel horse droppings as a band plays to a small crowd at the opening of a railway station. Mischief leads to tragedy when a US Marshall pursuing Frank for petty robbery shoots the band leader. Meanwhile, the traveling salesmen Colfax and Depew (David Arquette and Frank Mosley, the latter looking like a dead-ringer for a younger version of the former) attempt to make bank by importing ideas from the future to sell to the past. Looming in the background is the charmingly earthy Linde, whose ambitions include land acquisition by way of matrimony with a white man. Looming over everything is Memory, who attempts to fuse these various observed paths into a coherent, single reality.

Frank is our reluctant hero, pulled into the time travel nonsense triggered by Colfax and Depew, our reluctant villains. Frank didn’t experience personal growth during a three-year prison stint for robbery, but his release, and the unlikely events immediately following, set him on a path toward maturity—but one that can only conclude happily if he can engineer an outcome that doesn’t leave everybody dead. Scattered amidst his journey are plenty of alt-country music luminaries (such as Neko Case), as well as Alex Cox as a preacher only somewhat anchored to any given timeline. Bruno, with his simple outlook and honorable ways, gives Frank—and the film—a focal point; Frank needs his friend for direction, and his friend needs someone to direct.

I could easily tell that everyone involved had a good time, from the the sanguine trio serving as Memory’s recording crew to the multi-roled John Doe, who has no time for the other John Doe’s tuneless musicianship and coolly shoots up John Doe’s tavern to silence an unpleasant cacophony. Geoff Marslett and co-writer Howe Gelb (an Arizona-born singer-songwriter) let their animation team do their thing, making for a visual style that’s a coherent variation on being everywhere at once. The music rocks with a twang, the performers ooze charm, and the action gyrates to a delightful finale of friendship triumphing over obsession. As Linde observes the day after her nuptials, “Nothing’s meant to be. Especially this.” Quantum Cowboys probably shouldn’t exist, but, thankfully, here it is for our enjoyment.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“May I be the first to crown Quantum Cowboys the new king of the psychedelic western? Visually it beats El Topo to the draw. It makes your brain slide further across the theater floor than Greaser’s Palace.” — Michael Talbot-Haynes, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

Quantum Cowboys [Blu-ray]

Quantum Cowboys [Blu-ray]
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SLAMDANCE 2024: SLIDE (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton

FEATURING: Voices of , Jim Lujan, Tom Racine, Ana Sophia Colón, Daniel Kaufman

PLOT: Emerging from a desert whirlpool, a mysterious slide guitarist defends the locals—and the local monster—from the corrupt machinations of the mayor of Sourdough Creek.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Plympton’s absorbingly grotesque animation style, paired perfectly with his oddball storytelling, make his films a shoo-in ’round these parts.

COMMENTS: A bearded hick, launched from his horse-driven observation perch above an incomplete dam, hurdles through the air as dozens of flying logs arc in his direction. He screams, and the camera appears to crash through his mouth, past his teeth, down his esophagus, through his guts, and out again through the… other end. This dramatic journey is animated in Bill Plympton’s signature, jaunty style, and is just one of the countless examples of him playing with lines in motion.

The man in question is Jeb Carver, the mayor of hickturesque Sourdough Creek, the rustic locale where Tinselwood Studios is hoping to film their latest blockbuster. Never one to abstain from milking a chance for all its worth, Carver takes this opportunity to convert his logging town into “Monte Carlo del Norte,” pushing his citizens to deadly lengths to whip up a dam, casino, and resort over the course of a week. The immigrant fishing village gets leveled, the “service girls” work extra shifts, and the band is banned from playing slow music. Enter a mysterious stranger, and his slide guitar.

The silly plot is pushed forward with silly machinations, silly dialogue, and a sinister (but still fairly silly) monster which is disturbed by the deforestation. This silliness serves mostly to allow Plympton to play around with his weird cartooning. Characters chase other characters up interminable stairs; dozens of unnaturally proportioned firearms pop up and fire from trees, fish, and hats; teardrops slide and slosh in extreme closeups; bosoms bounce up and down (and, for the kinky types, side to side) courtesy of the in-film technological marvel, The Sugar Shaker; and Yellow Submarine-esque fantasies play out like nauseous reimaginings of psychedelic whimsy.

Slide is not groundbreaking, it’s not “big” in any sense of the term, and as a pastiche, isn’t “new” per se. But, it is unfailingly interesting to watch (a necessity for a cartoon—something that other animation studios would do well to remember) and oh-so-reassuringly bizarre. Bill Plympton is a talented artist, particularly for having chosen the (difficult) route of animation in his unique style of comical grotesquerie writ (er, drawn) large. Kick back, keep your eyes peeled, and allow Plympton’s latest eccentricity to Slide deep down your pie-hole.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Named after its completely mute lead character and his ‘slide guitar,’ this surreal movie overflows with ideas and mesmerizing imagery…. If Slide sounds bonkers, it absolutely is.” — Josh Batchelder, Josh at the Movies (festival screening)