The second segment of the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is titled ‘Near Algodones’ and stars James Franco as an outlaw cowboy who can’t win for losing.
This segment is a lot less cartoonish than the opener but it’s the second most comical of the six. The Coens ease viewers into the darkness, which hits with a wallop in the next chapter.
We’re getting close to year’s end, and I have a host of movies left to see that have a shot at cracking my top ten.
Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma leads the pack, followed by (in no particular order) Vice, Mary Poppins Returns, If Beale Street Could Talk, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The Favourite and Widows. Plus a host of movies from earlier in the year I need to catch up with at home: Hearts Beat Loud, The Rider, The Oath and Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, to name a few.
My desert island countdown continues (see Monday’s post for the full explanation).
Desert Island Musical Artists – #1 – Bob Dylan
Dylan was the man when I first became a true music fan, listening to his old LPs on a turntable on the island of my 10th grade bedroom. He’s still the man three decades later.
Every couple of years (and more often than that lately), the Coen Brothers release another film that cements their place among America’s finest and most consistent filmmakers. Recently, on the heels of 2007’s Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men, they released the hilarious screwball comedy Burn After Reading and last year’s brilliantly dark Book of Job-inspired A Serious Man.
In 2010, they return with True Grit, not so much a remake of the 1969 John Wayne classic, they say, but a more faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel. Having neither seen the original film nor read Portis’ novel, I’m in a position to judge the Coens’ film simply on its own merits.
The verdict: it’s sublime.
So goes the song at the center of A Serious Man, the extraordinary new film by The Coen Brothers, and those lyrics sum up the plight of main character Larry Gopnik quite nicely. Gopnik is a physics professor, a few weeks short of tenure, whose life begins falling apart around him through no fault of his own. A Serious Man traces his attempt to find a way out of the darkness. Anybody familiar with The Coen Brothers’ filmography can guess how that goes.
Meet Me In Montauk 