![]() ![]() He claims the gold and buries the boy in his hole. ![]() Believing the prospector to be dead, he hops into the hole but the prospector leaps up and shoots the boy several times, revealing his wound to be minor. When he reaches the motherlode of gold, a young man who has been tracking the prospector suddenly arrives and shoots him in the back. The fourth segment showcases a grizzled old prospector (Tom Waits) as he digs for cold in the middle of a pristine green meadow beside a rushing river. It is a cynical short film that carries echoes of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men as we question the utility of the arts and of “unproductive” people. In the end, we are led to believe he kills the crippled man by dropping him into a lake in order to replace him with the chicken. As they press on further into more remote regions, the act pays less and less until one day the businessman buys a chicken who can apparently complete arithmetic. In it we follow a two-man (Liam Neeson and Harry Melling) traveling acting troupe as one man has essentially enslaved an orator with no arms and legs as he recites classic works from Shakespeare, the Bible, Shelley, and Lincoln as they travel from town to town. The third segment is the strangest in my view. Justice ultimately prevails against the bandits of the Old West. A band of lawmen chase them down and James Franco’s character is once again captured. However, he is rescued by a drover leading his cattle, but the drover soon turns out to be a mere rustler. Following a shootout, he is strung up to be hanged by a war party of Comanche attack the scene and leave him with the noose around his neck atop his horse. The second segment stars James Franco as an unknown cowboy who robs a remote bank in the New Mexico territory. It is an anti-misanthropic short story –one question I have is why the Coen’s chose this segment as the title to the whole film? Are there certain themes explored in this segment that are relevant to the whole film. But even in death Buster Scruggs rises as a singing angel into heaven. Buster Scruggs kills all his enemies in all manner of ridiculous gags until he is outmatched, shot through the head by a new singing cowboy. It is an absurdist, light-hearted comedy (hearkening back to the Coen’s earlier film Raising Arizona) that plays out like a classic television western show. The first segment “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” stars Tim Blake Nelson as Buster Scruggs –a Roy Rogers-esque singing, gun-slinging cowboy. The film has a storybook quality to it as we see the pages turn in an original fictional book edition from 1873. This episodic homage to the classic tropes of the Western genre, was granted a limited release in theaters and was widely released for streaming on Netflix. I really enjoyed much of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, far more so than expected. ![]()
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