Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character, a singing gunslinger, in Coen brothers’ Western anthology
THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2018)
Museum of the Moving Image, Redstone Theater
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Thursday, November 29, $15, 7:00
Costume exhibition continues through May 26
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
The Coen brothers honor and subvert the Western as only they can in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a six-part anthology film they made for Netflix. It also was shown in two theaters for a week — making it eligible for Oscars — and is having a special screening on November 29 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Over the course of the last quarter-century, Joel and Ethan Coen wrote a handful of short movies that they thought would never get made, but they eventually decided to put them together into one omnibus film. Each segment tackles a different subgenre, involves at least one death, and begins with the turning of pages in an illustrated book, as if these are old classic Western fables, although that’s just a cinematic conceit: Only “The Gal Who Got Rattled” and “All Gold Canyon” were inspired by real works, by Stewart Edward White and Jack London, respectively.
James Franco stars as a doomed bank robber in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The anthology opens with the title tale, about singing cowboy Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson), who casually takes on all challengers with his remarkable shooting prowess, speaking directly into the camera as he creatively disposes of one gunslinger after another. In “Near Algodones,” a cowboy (James Franco) thinks it will be easy pickings to rob a bank in the middle of nowhere, but then he runs into a teller (Stephen Root) who is not about to surrender any cash. In “Meal Ticket,” a traveling impresario makes money by putting a limbless man (Harry Melling) on a stage on the back of his wagon, reciting Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and other famous writings and speeches. Tom Waits is nearly unrecognizable as an old prospector in “All Gold Canyon,” panning for valuable nuggets until a young man (Sam Dillon) sneaks up on him. In “The Girl Who Got Rattled,” quiet Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan) is on her way to meet a suitor chosen for her by her earnest brother, Gilbert (Jefferson Mays), accompanied by his noisy dog, President Pierce. They are part of a wagon train led by the handsome Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and the tough-as-nails Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines), but trouble awaits when Gilbert falls ill and an Indian appears in the distance. And finally, in “The Mortal Remains,” a grizzled old trapper (Chelcie Ross), erudite Frenchman (Saul Rubinek), and proper lady (Tyne Daly) are sharing a stage coach with a pair of bounty hunters, an Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill) and an Irishman (Brendan Gleeson), who are transporting their latest capture on the roof.
A nearly unrecognizable Tom Waits is a wily old prospector in “All Gold Canyon” segment of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Written, directed, edited, and produced by the Coens, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a fabulous journey through the Old West, as the brothers play with genre tropes and stereotypes while paying tribute to John Ford, John Wayne, William A. Wellman, Gene Autry, Howard Hawks, Walter Brennan, John Huston, and many other Western stalwarts. Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel lovingly shoots the vast landscapes and blue skies using a digital camera, a first for a Coen brothers film, while the inimitable Carter Burwell provides the period soundtrack and Mary Zophres the historically accurate, mostly handmade outfits. Despite the six different stories, the film flows together quite naturally, with the last entry a sly commentary on everything that came before it; essentially, the characters played by Rubinek, Daly, and Ross represent the audience, as the Englishman mesmerizingly describes the art of storytelling itself, something the Coen brothers have mastered yet again. (Now, if only they could fix the typo on the first page of “Meal Ticket.”)
The Museum of the Moving Image screening will be followed by a Q&A with longtime Coen brothers costume designer Zophres, moderated by MoMI senior curator Barbara Miller; it is being held in conjunction with the new exhibition “The Coen Brothers Go West: Costume Design for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” The display, which consists of sixteen costumes (including the fab one worn by Nelson and the protective one donned by Root), ten costume boards, and several hairpieces, will be open after the MoMI screening. For more Coen magic, IFC Center’s “Weekend Classics” series continues on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings at eleven with The Big Lebowski (November 23-25), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (November 30 – December 2), No Country for Old Men (December 7-9), True Grit (December 14-16), The Hudsucker Proxy (December 21-23), and Inside Llewyn Davis (December 28-30).
Fearing that the people of the world, who all spoke the same language, were capable of anything after building a tower that reached to the heavens, the Old Testament God confused their languages and scattered them all over the earth. The inability of people to communicate with one another is at the center of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s fascinating, compelling Babel. The plot follows three stories that slowly intertwine. On vacation in Morocco, Susan (Cate Blanchett) is the victim of a random gunshot fired by a small boy (Boubker Ait El Caid), sending her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), into a frenzy to try to save her life. Meanwhile, their housekeeper, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), who is looking after their children, has to decide what to do with them on the day of her son’s wedding in Mexico, turning to her crazy nephew Santiago (Gael García Bernal) for help. And in Tokyo, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi) is a deaf-mute teenager who desperately wants to fall in love, but all the boys she meets — and her father (the great Kôji Yakusho, from The Eel, Cure, and Shall We Dance?) — don’t take the time to listen to and understand her. Despite a couple of minor wrong turns, Iñárritu recovers to make Babel a whirlwind of a movie, laying bear the tragic consequences that can occur when people refuse to simply communicate, even in the most basic of ways.
IFC Center’s Trump-inspired “Autocratic for the People: An Unpresidented Series of Star-Spangled Satires” concludes March 31 – April 2 with Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s inimitable South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Since 1997, Stone and Parker have been using colorful low-tech cutouts to dine on sacred cows, lambasting celebrities, politicians, religion, sexuality, the military, education, television, movies, corporations, pop culture, and just about everything else they can think of in the animated series South Park, which follows the travails of a group of eight-year-old boys in a small town in Colorado. In 1999, Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, and Kenny McCormick got to star in their own feature-length animated film, in which they lead the resistance to save Terrance & Phillip while Kyle’s mom starts a war with Canada. They’re joined by such SP regulars as Chef, Mr. Mackey, Mr. Garrison, and Wendy Testeberger and such special guests as Satan, Saddam Hussein, and the mysterious Gregory, along with guest voicers George Clooney, Eric Idle, Minnie Driver, Dave Foley, and Brent Spiner. The musical numbers, written by Parker with Henry Mancini Award winner Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can), are a riot, including the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” “Uncle Fucka,” “Kyle’s Mom’s a Bitch,” and “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” Another fave is “I’m Super,” delivered by the irrepressible Big Gay Al, who sings, “Bombs are flying / People are dying / Children are crying / Politicians are lying too // Cancer is killing / Texaco’s spilling / The whole world’s gone to hell // But how are you? / I’m super / Thanks for asking!” A 35mm print will be screened at the way-too-early hour of 11:00 am from March 31 to April 2 as part of IFC’s Weekend Classics programming. Coincidentally, the film is also being shown — at the somewhat more reasonable time of 12:20 am — on March 31 and April 1 in the Nitehawk Cinema series “Musical Midnites.” Meanwhile, Stone and Parker, who also made the fab 
How can you possibly not love a movie in which wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper, brandishing a shotgun and standing next to an American flag, declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass . . . and I’m all out of bubblegum.” IFC Center’s Trump-inspired “Autocratic for the People: An Unpresidented Series of Star-Spangled Satires” continues March 17-19 with John Carpenter’s tongue-in-cheek Reagan-era cult favorite, They Live. In the goofy 1988 political sci-fi thriller, Piper, who passed away in 2015 at the age of sixty-one, stars as John Nada, a drifter who arrives in L.A. and gets a job working construction, where he is befriended by Frank Armitage (Keith David), who is otherwise trying to keep to himself and away from trouble as he makes money to send back to his family. Frank invites John to stay at a tent city for homeless people, across the street from a church where John soon finds some disturbing things happening involving a blind preacher (Raymond St. Jacques), a well-groomed man named Gilbert (Peter Jason), and a bearded weirdo (John Lawrence) taking over television broadcasts and making dire predictions about the future. John then discovers that by using a pair of special sunglasses, he can see, in black-and-white, what is really going on beneath the surface: Alien life-forms disguised as humans have infiltrated Los Angeles, gaining positions of power and placing subliminal messages in signs and billboards, spreading such words and phrases as Obey, Consume, Submit, Conform, Buy, Stay Asleep, and No Independent Thought. John seeks help from Frank and cable channel employee Holly Thompson (Meg Foster), determined to reveal the hidden conspiracy and save the planet.
