#BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS MOVIE#

In “All Gold Canyon,” inspired by a Jack London story, Tom Waits-who fits so well into Coen World that it’s kind of a shock to realize this is his first picture with the filmmakers-plays a prospector for whom process seems more fulfilling than the accumulation of wealth. Its protagonists are a taciturn, hard-drinking traveling showman, Liam Neeson, and his charge, an armless and legless young man with a great store of poetry and scripture at his command, billed as a great “Orator.” Beginning his “set” every night with Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” he speaks to ever-dwindling frontier audiences, compelling Neeson to make an arguably ruthless business decision.

#BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS MOVIE#

In the third story, “Meal Ticket,” the movie takes a grim, mean turn. The next story, starring James Franco as an ill-fated bank robber, leads up to a punchline that’s one of the funniest in the Coen canon.

This episode is a gasp-inducing wonder, a perfect storm of Frank Tashlin and Sam Peckinpah stylings, suggesting this is going to be one of the more raucous and absurdist Coen outings. Is he, as a wanted poster paints him, a “misanthrope?” No, he insists, he just doesn’t like to be, um, contradicted.

Into a rather goofy singing-cowboy vignette, the title story, starring Tim Blake Nelson as a man in a white hat who addresses the viewer most cheerfully before he begins blowing holes in any number of dirtier men who won’t cooperate with him.

Ballad of buster scruggs