Snow is coming this weekend. Like, a lot of it. So much so that weather reports are saying about half the country is getting some, which makes this weekend a perfect time for you to hunker down, stay in your pajama pants and watch movies. Sure, you can go for the trendy, obvious Netflix picks like the new Matt Damon and Ben Affleck cop movie, or another round of singing demon hunters, but if you dig a bit deeper, you canfind some true masterpieces on the platform, like these three listed below.
And, if you happen to be in the half of the country that isn’t getting snow this weekend, let’s just be honest with yourself and admit that you don’t have much going on in your life either and tune into these movies too.
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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
To date, the last movie brother filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen brothers made together was 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a two-hour anthology film made up of six different segments, all of which take place in the Old West. While it doesn’t represent the pinnacle of their impressive body of work, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is often funny, often poignant and especially rewarding for anyone familiar with the Coen brothers’ filmography. While intentional or not, each of the film’s segments seems to nostalgically reflect on some of the Coen brothers’ previous work, making Buster Scruggs a fitting note for their partnership to end on if, indeed, it remains their last collaboration.
The best known segment from Buster Scruggs is “Near Algodones” with James Franco, as it brought about the “First time?” meme featuring Franco with a noose around his neck. In it, Franco plays a bank robber who is about to be hanged for his crimes, only to be saved by an attacking tribe of Comanche warriors. While the settings are very different, the bleak circumstances and sense of absurd coincidence brings to mind the Coen brothers’ breakthrough film, Fargo.
“Meal Ticket,” about an aging impresario and an armless, legless monologist, has the same “That’s show business” fatalist spirit as Barton Fink. “All Gold Canyon” is a pretty straightforward western story about a grizzled, aging prospector similar to Jeff Bridges’ take on Deputy U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. The love story “The Gal Who Got Rattled” approaches the subject of uncertainty in the same philosophical manner as A Serious Man. “The Mortal Remains” — which I’d rather not spoil the plot for — features several characters that fit common Coen brothers archetypes, like a self-righteous woman who harkens back to the self-important businessman Jeffrey Lebowski and a rambling trapper that brings to mind talkative John Goodman characters like Walter Sobchak and Big Dan Teague.
The very best of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs though is the opening segment that gives the film its name. Buster Scruggs, also known as the “San Saba Songbird,” is a sharp-shooting, happy-go-lucky cowboy with a casual disregard for life and a song in his heart. Buster is played by Tim Blake Nelson with the same joy that inhabited Delmar O’Donnell in O Brother, Where Art Thou? And this segment features the same musicality and poetic, loquacious dialogue that makes that film so special.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
While it may sound strange, one of the best reviewed movies of 2023 starred the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Produced by Seth Rogen and directed by Jeff Rowe of the Netflix hit The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem marked the first theatrical outing for the franchise since the maligned Michael Bay-produced films and it invigorated the decades-old property with a slew of new elements, most notably its unique art style and its bold casting.
At first glance, the artwork in Mutant Mayhem brings to mind the beautifully rendered Spider-Verse films, but while Mutant Mayhem certainly takes advantage of some of the advances made by those movies, it also does something completely different by giving the film a rough, sketchy look that resembles concept art more so than a finished product. The idea behind it, according to the filmmakers, was to give the impression of “overworked” art done by teenagers, which is a clever take given the subject matter.
In keeping with the film’s youthful energy, for the first time ever, the entire team of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was played by actual teenagers (the only other time a teenager played a Ninja Turtle was a 19-year-old Corey Feldman voicing Donatello in 1990). By casting actual kids as these characters, the Turtles exploded with a sense of youthful energy that previous stories failed to tap into. For the first time ever these characters, who are, indeed, children, felt like children.
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Snatch
Over the past two decades, many a complaint has been made about the “Disneyfication” of once-visionary director Tim Burton. I’d like to lodge a similar grievance about Guy Ritchie. Besides the fact that he directed the unimaginative live-action Aladdin remake, he also did two ho-hum Sherlock Holmes movies and a slew of conventional action flicks that, compared to his early work, are entirely uninteresting.
Around the year 2000, the British-born director exploded into American pop culture thanks to Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, two British gangster films that were written and edited like nothing going on in America at the time. Both movies featured dark, funny, electric characters and a rapidfire editing style that moved a story along at a furious pace. Both movies were fresh, exciting, ambitious and hilarious and they never waited for slower audience members. The movies just hurried along, expecting people to keep up or get left behind, with the end result being a riveting narrative that glued you to the screen.
Speaking specifically about Snatch because, well, that’s the one on Netflix, the movie is about two intertwining stories in the British criminal underworld. The first of which is about a jewel heist and the other is about unlicensed boxing matches. To name just a few of the memorable characters in Snatch, the film features Brad Pitt as a mush-mouthed gypsy, Denis Farina as an angry Jewish-American crime boss, Benicio Del Toro as a gangster and named “Franky Four Fingers” and Jason Statham as a boxing promoter back in the days when Statham was still funny — does anyone even remember that now? Because funny Jason Statham seems buried even further in the past than Guy Ritchie’s originality.
