Ballad

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Taken as a whole, it's smart, snappy filmmaking from the duo who, plus years into their careers, are still revealing new tricks hidden up their sleeves. You'd think with viewers' short attention spans and love of binge-watching, it would be the perfect format for today. But "Buster Scruggs" is mostly unengaging. Ethan and Joel Coen have a reputation for making films that shatter expectations, and "Ballad" is no exception. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a divine tasting board for all things Coen brothers The first and second narratives are blisteringly fun and energetic, but onwards from there the pace slackens enormously.

The mosaic arrangement of the shorts, varying in greatness and mediocrity, causes The Ballad of Buster Scruggs to miss the mark as a cohesive whole. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs alternates between dark, lunatic humor and darker, depressing morbidity. In other words, it's The Full Coen. The Coens love how fate places a banana peel under the feet of those foolish enough to look up at stars. Desire makes fools of everyone and to the Coens, that is rich comic material.

Netflix might just be the best pasture yet for brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. The Oscar-winning filmmakers were reportedly creating a Western series for the online streaming giant but that has turned into an anthology film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The Coens' love of the beautiful, the bizarre, the bucolic and the brazen are on full display with their six-part anthology movie that serves as reminder of what wonderfully unique cinematic voices they are.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is uneven, as most anthology films tend to by design, but it reaches that vintage Coen sweet spot of absurdity and profundity. The best segment is also the one that kicks things off, the titular adventures of Buster Scruggs, a singing Gene Autry-style cowboy who manages to get into all sorts of scrapes. The tonal balancing act on this one is pure Coen, at once inviting an audience to nostalgically recall the Westerns of old while kicking you in the teeth with dark, hilariously violent turns that veer into inspired slapstick.

There is a delightful absurdity to the segment thanks to the cheerful sociopath nature of Buster Scruggs, the fastest gun in the West that's eager to show off at a moment's notice. He's a typical Coen creation, a wicked wordsmith finding himself into heaps of trouble, but through his quick wits and sudden bursts of violence, he's able to rouse an entire saloon full of witnesses to his murder into a swinging, carousing group following him in song.

I laughed long and hard throughout much of this segment. I was hooked and wanted to see where it would go next and how depraved it might get. He's like a combo Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny breaking the fourth wall to let the audience in on his merry bravado. The segment ends in a fitting fashion, another song that manages to be hilarious and strangely poignant at the same time. The Coens allow the scene to linger into a full-on duet of metaphysical proportions. I could have watched an entire series following Buster Scruggs but it may have been wise to cut things short and not to overstay its novelty.

The other best segments take very different tonal destinations. Waits is fantastic and truly deserving of Oscar consideration as the prospector. He's hardscrabble and resilient, and there's a late moment where he's narrating a near escape from death where he's tearfully thankful, possibly losing himself in the moment, and so grateful that it made me tear up myself.

The segment ebbs and flows on the strength of the visual storytelling and Waits. It's a lovely short with a few hidden punches, which is also another fine way to describe the other best segment, "The Gal Who Got Rattled. She's heading west for a new life, one she was not prepared for and only doing so at the urging of her pushy brother who dies shortly into the journey. Now she's on her own and struggling to find her own place in the larger world. There's a very sweet and hopeful romance between her and Billy Knapp Bill Heck , one of the wagon train leaders who is thinking of settling down.

It's also a segment that slows down, accounting for the longest running time of the six. It goes to great care to establish the rhythms of life on the road, where many people walked the thousands of miles across the plains. The budding courtship is at a realistic simmer, something with more promise than heat. It's such an involving story that its downturn of an ending almost feels criminal, albeit even if the tragic setups were well placed.

Both of these segments take a break from the signature irony of the Coens and sincerely round out their characters and personal journeys and the dangers that await them. The remaining three segments aren't bad by any stretch I'd rate each from fine to mostly good but they don't get close to the entertainment and artistic majesty of the others. How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. The awkward case of 'his or her'.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Identify the word pairs with a common ancestor. Test your vocabulary with our question quiz! Synonyms for ballad Synonyms ditty , jingle , lay , lyric , song , vocal Visit the Thesaurus for More. Examples of ballad in a Sentence a ballad about King Arthur a haunting ballad about lost love and loneliness. Magic rose and began a Norah Jones-style ballad , picking up phrases from Mr.

Idiot Kids at Outer Limits, Nick Speed at the Old Miami," 5 July These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'ballad. First Known Use of ballad 15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2.

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History and Etymology for ballad Middle English balade ballade, song, from Middle French, from Old Occitan balada dance, song sung while dancing, from balar to dance, from Late Latin ballare. Learn More about ballad. Resources for ballad Time Traveler! Explore the year a word first appeared. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. Key work on the traditional ballad was undertaken in the late 19th century in Denmark by Svend Grundtvig and for England and Scotland by the Harvard professor Francis James Child. Since Child died before writing a commentary on his work it is uncertain exactly how and why he differentiated the ballads printed that would be published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.

Unlike the traditional ballad, these obscene ballads aggressively mocked sentimental nostalgia and local lore.

Broadside ballads also known as 'broadsheet', 'stall', 'vulgar' or 'come all ye' ballads were a product of the development of cheap print in the 16th century. They were generally printed on one side of a medium to large sheet of poor quality paper. In the first half of the 17th century, they were printed in black-letter or gothic type and included multiple, eye-catching illustrations, a popular tune title, as well as an alluring poem.

These later sheets could include many individual songs, which would be cut apart and sold individually as "slip songs. Among the topics were love, marriage, religion, drinking-songs, legends, and early journalism, which included disasters, political events and signs, wonders and prodigies. Literary or lyrical ballads grew out of an increasing interest in the ballad form among social elites and intellectuals, particularly in the Romantic movement from the later 18th century.

Ballad Lyrics Generator

Respected literary figures Robert Burns and Walter Scott in Scotland collected and wrote their own ballads. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats were attracted to the simple and natural style of these folk ballads and tried to imitate it. In the 18th century ballad operas developed as a form of English stage entertainment , partly in opposition to the Italian domination of the London operatic scene.

Rather than the more aristocratic themes and music of the Italian opera, the ballad operas were set to the music of popular folk songs and dealt with lower-class characters. The first, most important and successful was The Beggar's Opera of , with a libretto by John Gay and music arranged by John Christopher Pepusch , both of whom probably influenced by Parisian vaudeville and the burlesques and musical plays of Thomas d'Urfey — , a number of whose collected ballads they used in their work.

Later it moved into a more pastoral form, like Isaac Bickerstaffe's Love in a Village and Shield's Rosina , using more original music that imitated, rather than reproduced, existing ballads. Although the form declined in popularity towards the end of the 18th century its influence can be seen in light operas like that of Gilbert and Sullivan's early works like The Sorcerer as well as in the modern musical.

Native American ballads are ballads that are native to North America not to be confused with ballads performed by Native Americans. The blues ballad has been seen as a fusion of Anglo-American and Afro-American styles of music from the 19th century. Blues ballads tend to deal with active protagonists, often anti-heroes, resisting adversity and authority, but frequently lacking a strong narrative and emphasising character instead. The ballad was taken to Australia by early settlers from Britain and Ireland and gained particular foothold in the rural outback.

The rhyming songs, poems and tales written in the form of ballads often relate to the itinerant and rebellious spirit of Australia in The Bush , and the authors and performers are often referred to as bush bards.

Narrative basis

Several collectors have catalogued the songs including John Meredith whose recording in the s became the basis of the collection in the National Library of Australia. Typical subjects include mining, raising and droving cattle, sheep shearing , wanderings, war stories, the Australian shearers' strike , class conflicts between the landless working class and the squatters landowners , and outlaws such as Ned Kelly , as well as love interests and more modern fare such as trucking.

Sentimental ballads, sometimes called "tear-jerkers" or "drawing-room ballads" owing to their popularity with the middle classes, had their origins in the early " Tin Pan Alley " music industry of the later 19th century.

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They were generally sentimental, narrative, strophic songs published separately or as part of an opera descendants perhaps of broadside ballads , but with printed music , and usually newly composed. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Ballad disambiguation.

For the album, see Balladeering album.

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