Finished this last night.
At first I didn't much care for the titular, opening episode (just seemed like a cartoon and not really a progression for the Coens) but in retrospect it does a good job setting up the tone, themes, and aesthetic of the anthology and it's definitely the most entertaining of the lot.
However, I didn't fully like an episode until the Tom Waits prospector one. Aside from the fact that its ending wasn't as predictably dour as the rest of them, it had the best visual storytelling of the bunch. and I want to name a band "Measly Skunk."
"The Gal Who Got Rattled" to me is the clear high-point--still has all the excellent craft but also has nuance and characters that feel like actual people. it's deservedly the longest episode but at the same time it feels rather odd to have an episode that long in comparison to the others. The ending is brutal but at least it is interesting and brutal, and goes well with the episode's compelling conversations about fear and faith and the interplay there. The actors were all outstanding, but especially Bill Heck. Zoe Kazan was also really good, though, and I wasn't prepared for Mr. Arthur's emergence at the end there, Grainger Hines killed it. In retrospect the title plate has an "oh, crap" impact--maybe the one title plate that really brought something to the experience.
But then there's the harsh comedown of finishing with "The Mortal Remains," which I frankly hated because now it was like we went from Coen Bros doing a primo Western tale to them doing an overwrought, overwritten play as their closing chapter, and one that's Edgar Allan Poe stylings didn't really feel in keeping with the rest of the anthology. I didn't enjoy it at all (couldn't wait for it to end, really, and it wasn't even half an hour long) and when it faded to the closing of the book, it was hard not to shrug.
While there are thematic (the basic theme being that life sucks, with nearly every episode building to that "punchline"), tonal, and aesthetic connections between the stories in the anthology, it doesn't really feel like they are adding up to something, or even enhancing each other that much. They kind of just exist together in the same movie and some of them are good and some of them aren't. I do think there is some cognitive dissonance because I keep thinking of it as a TV show that was edited into a movie and even if that wasn't the case, I think the mind would take more to the stories being separate episodes. I would say that maybe some of the shorter ones could have been fleshed out more but I think the only one I'd really want more of is the Franco one, and there maybe just a few more minutes (definitely feels like some stuff was cut out after the hang-tree scene and so the ending, which is good but abrupt, barely has a chance to register as anything other than a cruel joke preceded by a grace note that has no context with Franco's character--and maybe that sort of brief, blunt nature is what that episode's about, but I do think it could have been a little bit more than it was).
Now I'mma rank them and rate them because I can!
1. "The Gal Who Got Rattled" - 4/5
2. "All Gold Canyon" - 3/5
3. "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" - 3/5
4. "Near Algodones" - 3/5
5. "Meal Ticket" - 1/5
6. "Mortal Remains" - 1/5
