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Wow. I guess people don't listen to the Sons of the Pioneers anymore? "Cool Water" has got to be one of the most well-known English-language songs of the 20th century.

whaleallright wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 5:56 pm Wow. I guess people don't listen to the Sons of the Pioneers anymore? "Cool Water" has got to be one of the most well-known English-language songs of the 20th century.

I don't think it's nearly as well known as you think it is.

It’s the only country classic I know specifically because it was covered by Brian Wilson and The Replacements, so I always figured it was a big deal to be on both their radars already.

Glowingwabbit wrote: Sun Feb 03, 2019 6:32 pm I don't think it's nearly as well known as you think it is.

For much of the late 20th century, most Americans could have hummed the chorus. (The Wiki entry chronicles a nonexhaustive litany of cover versions.) It was picked as the third greatest Western song of all time, above even "Home on the Range." I guess the fact that it's not a seasonal song and that the popularity of the Western has declined means it's no longer as ubiquitous as something like "White Christmas." But if you were at a summer-camp sing-a-long in the English-speaking world at any point between, say, 1950 and 1980, this song would probably come up within the first hour.

It's a really great song. Sadly I don't think an O Brother-style revival of the singing cowboy genre, complete with a concert special on PBS, is in the cards.

I think both Dylan and Neil Young have recorded "Cool Water".

Possible Young covered it somewhere, but I don’t know of a recorded version. Probably would have fit nicely on his (deeply underrated) “Americana” album though!

Brian C wrote: Fri Feb 01, 2019 4:02 pm The song was also in another recent movie, which I thought was an odd coincidence. Maybe it was The Mule?

Yes, it was The Mule. I started laughing in the theatre when it played during The Mule b/c I had just seen Buster Scruggs the previous day.

Does anyone else feel like this has been influenced by the Argentinian Wild Tales? I think the structure, pacing and at some extent humour too are very similar. Or maybe there are others too, but I’ve seen a lot of anthology movies and I can’t recall anything else quite like these two.

If anything the Coens influenced that film. This is Coens 101 really, for better or worst.

I believe "Cool Water" also recently appeared in Rango.

Both anthology movies suck the audience in at first with fast paced episodes and then start extending the complexity of stories and also start playing with audiences’ expectations by varying twists (how justice is served/how main character ends up). Maybe Damian Szifron borrowed some tricks Coens and then Coens returned the favour.

My guess is the Coens learned that from the many mid-century anthology films they have no doubt seen (it was once a pretty robust genre).

It's also a common structure for these sorts of stories even extending into the literary realm. I was just reading Tales from Silver Lands which does the exact same thing you described to a tee for example.

whaleallright wrote: Mon Feb 18, 2019 3:17 pm My guess is the Coens learned that from the many mid-century anthology films they have no doubt seen (it was once a pretty robust genre).

I’m sure Coens have a lot of love towards that direction too, but it does not exclude Wild Tales. I have seen Flesh and Fantasy, Dead of Night and Three Cases of Murder from that era, but I don’t remember quite this kind of pacing and build up. It’s been a while since I saw those three, so I could be wrong.

knives wrote: Mon Feb 18, 2019 3:19 pm It's also a common structure for these sorts of stories even extending into the literary realm. I was just reading Tales from Silver Lands which does the exact same thing you described to a tee for example.

Good lead. I have to admit, that inspiration for my original post is a bit obscure, but I got a Jorge Luis Borgos (who’s also Argentinian) feel from many of the stories in TBoBS, so getting more Latin American tales as reply is interesting. I’ll look into this book.

Really? I'd love hearing more about your Borges connection (not being cynical, I love Borges)

dda1996a wrote: Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:59 pm Really? I'd love hearing more about your Borges connection (not being cynical, I love Borges)

After some consideration, for me the theme of this anthology is how some cultured and/or eccentric virtuoso characters might have dealt with the cruel realities of the North American frontier. You know, folks like Ethan and Joel. We have a multitalented troubadour, a cunning and queerly gnomish banker, a limbless poetry aficionado, a savant gold prospector and a gifted libertine trapper to name the most obvious. I’ve read maybe a dozen of Borges stories, but they too seem to feature cultured virtuoso eccentrics with often cruel and macabre fates. Second and third episodes of the movie have both a touch of magical realism. The Borgesness of the main character in second episode is hard to explain, but I had very similar conciderations about his past as I had about the main character of short story Garden of Forking Paths. They both seem like a person who has gone through a path at the extreme ends of their possible alternative realities.

So yeah, pretty obscure reads as advertised.

The film that most came to mind while watching TBoBS was/is Wayne Coe's Grim Prairie Tales, a Western-Horror anthology from 1990. Like the Coen's film, the tales told vary in mood and tone, ranging from psychological character study to supernatural folk-tale. It is long overdue a Blu-Ray release (especially since it never even made it to DVD!).

Having recently discovered Film Comment's podcast I've been going back and listening to back episodes and I stumbled onto one about this film and I was kind of surprised by one of the comments I heard about the film, so I want to run it by you guys and see what you think.

One of the people on the podcast was talking about the third episode and said that it "says so much about dwindling American values and says so much about the way people are treated as commodities and the way the entertainment business is functioning in its current state"

So, there are three claims there and, frankly, i find all three out of them to be out of nowhere.

1. dwindling American values

This seems like such a leap to me. Why would you take this episode, which involves two very specific people in a very specific business at a very specific time, to be commenting on American values broadly?

2. the way people are treated as commodities

Again, it feels like a kind of a leap to me to assume that that was the intention behind this story and that that was in the Coens' mind when they wrote this.

3. the way the entertainment business is functioning

This is the most plausible one to me, but I still don't buy the idea that the Coens wrote this to comment on the entertainment business. I saw this episode as not commenting on anything, but being merely a story showing a fascinatingly grim decision made by a person pressed by circumstances to make it.

Are those three readings of the film the way you saw it? Do you find them plausible or do you, like me, feel like those are taking a bit too much of a leap.

Well, i don't think the second point is a stretch: the guy was nothing but a commodity to Neeson, and when he wasn't able to generate revenue for him he literally replaces him with something cheaper. I don't think it's a stretch to say that that entered their mind.

Yeah if you had to call one and only one of the stories didactic, that’s the one. Not too subtle about it.

Were the Coens thinking about any of those things as they shot (on digital for the first time) a vignette about about market conditions leading an entertainer to lower his standards in a way that coldly discards an employee, for a netflix-exclusive movie that was reworked from an aborted tv series? No idea but seems plausible!

I mean, even without knowing the meta context, all that stuff is in the story and it seems like they would need heroic levels of creative tunnel vision for it to be only about those two characters and their unique circumstances, to the exclusion of all the ways it reflects the art/commerce relationship now and through history.

I thought they had written these stories sparingly over the years long before signing onto Netflix?

I think whoever took that analysis on the podcast chose a fair way to read the story, which doesn’t need to indicate direct specific intent. I don’t know about focusing on “dwindling” which would imply a deterioration from better times, but it wouldn’t be outside of the Coens’ wheelhouse to apply their worldview on moral ambiguity to a micro story in commenting on macro concepts.

I’ve been meaning to watch this episode again and pay more attention to the passages that were recited, but I remember thinking, that some were very personal for the culture aficionado. I’m pretty sure the piece about Cain and Abel was about him and the impresario. With it aficionado paints himself as the golden boy who knows he’s going to be betrayed by the envious evil partner. It’s he who’s sacrifice is true and who puts food on the table and who’s rich, cultured inner world resonates with the world while impresario lurks in shadows. Shakespeare’s sonnet 29, another of the aficionado’s favourites, implies he would not trade places with the impresario for any number of limbs gained. So there’s a two-way powerplay between them that repeats itself every night with both sides rubbing in his advantage to the other’s face and the complex dynamic goes way beyond the surface level of ”the impresario exploiting the artist”.

As Coens have gotten more than their fair share of criticism for commercial works beneath them, this is a great subject to poke fun at even though the humour is dark even at their standards. If the episode is being didactic about anything, I think it points out the reality, that the impresarios don’t really need the talented people that much. Masses can be amused by means not involving the big egoes full with overblown intergity once the novelty wears off.

bad future wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:07 pm Were the Coens thinking about any of those things as they shot (on digital for the first time) a vignette about about market conditions leading an entertainer to lower his standards in a way that coldly discards an employee, for a netflix-exclusive movie that was reworked from an aborted tv series? No idea but seems plausible!

What's the story behind this? What's shooting on digital got to do with it? You're not saying the market conditions are the disappearance of film, are you?

bad future wrote: Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:07 pmI mean, even without knowing the meta context, all that stuff is in the story and it seems like they would need heroic levels of creative tunnel vision for it to be only about those two characters and their unique circumstances, to the exclusion of all the ways it reflects the art/commerce relationship now and through history.

To me it seems much more likely that they just wrote a story that has a grim dramatic punch to it, even without knowing that they've openly said they never imbue their stories with symbolic or metaphorical meaning.

People often ascribe stuff that's been part of human society for time immemorial, to the most proximate bogeyman (capitalism, America, millennials, etc.). People have exploited other people, often in gruesome ways, as far back as we know. Would the sketch in question never not be "timely" in that broad sense?

Reminds me a bit of how for many decades, every film that came out of Eastern Europe (or later, China) was interpreted in the U.S. to be a parable about Communist oppression. some certainly were, others were just about classic things (exploitation, misery, absurdity, hatred) that just so happened to still be present in socialist Europe.

Anyway, if the Coens did intend a "commentary" (ugh) on current events, one thing we can be certain of is that they'd never own up to it.