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Talking Pondo: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Violent Night
Description
In this episode, Marty gives Clif the film The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to watch and Clif gives Marty Violent Night to watch.
First up is The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen Brothers’ western anthology that takes the romantic image of the Old West and shoots it full of holes. Across six very different stories, Clif and Marty discuss everything from the gleefully absurd opening segment to the bleak, unsettling “Meal Ticket,” the gorgeous cinematography of “All Gold Canyon” and the strange, ghost-story atmosphere of “The Mortal Remains.” Marty appreciates the anthology’s variety and visual craftsmanship, while Clif finds the relentless darkness a little exhausting. They also debate the uneven pacing, the stories that linger a little too long and whether this is a movie they’ll be rushing to revisit.
Then it’s time for Violent Night, in which David Harbour’s Santa Claus discovers that Christmas Eve is a perfectly reasonable time to dispense with the niceties and start kicking some serious ass. Built from a familiar Die Hard setup, with a little Home Alone thrown into the mix, this action-comedy combines Christmas sentiment, outrageous kills, crude humor and a Santa who may have a few more warrior instincts than the average gift-giver. Clif enjoys the movie’s refreshingly violent holiday spirit and sees it becoming part of his annual Christmas rotation. Marty has fun with it, too, but questions the runtime, the pacing and just how many times a movie needs to say the F-word.
Along the way: the Coen Brothers’ place in modern filmmaking, Stephen Root’s wonderfully strange banker, the increasingly crowded shelf of violent Christmas movies, the joys of a proper holiday-movie rotation and Clif’s potentially brilliant idea for a Netflix print-on-demand Blu-ray business.
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Theme Song "The Rain" by Russ Pace
Photos by Geoffrey Notkin