But times are hard, audiences are scarce, and if the artist can longer carry his own weight, what’s the impresario to do? Cheer up! Because “All Gold Canyon” is next, and it stars Tom Waits as a prospector alone in the wilderness, working his tail off to find a pocket of gold that could change his fortune forever. It’s about to get depressing, because the next segment, “Meal Ticket,” is about the sad life of a young actor with no arms or legs (Harry Melling, from the Harry Potter franchise), who depends entirely on his manager (Liam Neeson) for his care. It’s a trifle of a short but it makes the point of the movie quite clear: death is around every corner, and it’s got a sick sense of humor. It’s as though destiny wants to kill him but always gets distracted at the very last minute. A series of violent and hilarious shenanigans later, he’s on the verge of death, but fate isn’t done with him. The next segment, “Near Algodones,” stars James Franco as a bank robber who gets more than he bargained for when he tries to pull a heist in the middle of nowhere. The wild west wasn’t fun it was brutal and hard, and when you juxtapose the fun films in the genre with anything resembling actual history you get something disturbing and wrong. It’s self-aware about the western genre, evoking no recognizable reality and instead commenting on the lie of the genre. “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” the short, is set apart from all the other segments in the movie.
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