Movie Nation

One wondered if plus-sized silly Rebel Wilson was ever going to graduate from scene stealer and sidekick to romantic lead/comic lead.

And so she has. This Valentine’s Day release has a frump wake up “in a romantic comedy,” with New York “filtered” in that rom-com way, impromptu dance numbers, bedding the hunk of her dreams.

One problem? “I’m in a mother-f—–g romantic comedy and it’s f—–g PG!”

Priyanka Chopra, Adam Devine, Jennifer Saunders and Liam Hemsworth are the co-stars. Three credited screenwriters and the director of “A Harold & Kumar Christmas” are involved, so we will see what we see when we see it Feb. 14.

It was always just sitting there, waiting for somebody to attempt it.

The chest thumping, ego-tripping, rhymed insult fights that began life as “The Dozens” and morphed into “rap battles” was ripe for a smart, mouthy, down and dirty comedy.

“Bodied” is a seriously funny — laugh out loud, PBR through the nose funny. And the framing device, a white academic — an English major, of course — studying hip hop for his master’s thesis, “The Varied Poetic Functions of the N-word” in Battle Rap,” provides an entre to the form for those last holdouts who don’t take the talent, quick-thinking wit and artistry of rap seriously.

That’s Adam’s function in this clever, canny, outstays-its-welcome goof on art form. Calum Worthy of TV’s “Austin & Ally” and “American Vandal” is sort of a ginger Tobey Maguire, a hint of “Gee whiz” about him as he acts as surrogate for the audience, watching rap battles, explaining them to his nerdy womynist vegan girlfriend (Rory Uphold, hilarious) even as she obsessed about the violent, sexist imagery of these profane throw-downs.

“It’s a gun metaphor,” translates at one point.” “I think we can assume everything’s a gun metaphor.”

Berkeley student Adam connects with one of the top dogs of this Oakland underground scene, the smart and amazingly accepting rapper who goes by “Behn Grymm.” The fact that he’s using a homophone for Ben Grimm, “The Thing” of The Fantastic Four,” should be a tip that Adam shouldn’t condescend to him when explaining his thesis. The guy throws “Sue Storm” (another Fantastic Four member) into his rhymed insults, “Sandra Bullock couldn’t save your black ass (a “Blind Side” shot)” at his obese foe.

So Adam asking about “the N word as an intensifier for both comedic and intimitadory effect…or as a rhythmic flourish” is child’s play to Grymm (Jackie Long, suggesting depth and wit and “Sure, I could put up with a white mascot” warmth in his performance).

As Adam’s questions point to his seriousness and genuine affection for and understanding and appreciation for the form, Grymm throws him into a post-event parking lot rap battle with another ditzy white rapper wannabe. Ignoring  girlfriend Maya’s shrieks of “cultural APPROPRIATION,” Adam engages, tests himself (he dabbled with a “slam poet” phase), Adam thinks of his feet, cooks up intricate rhyme scheme insults (slowly) with obscure, literate and culturally-sharp references.

And impresses. The guys, and women like Devine Wright (Shoniqua Shandai) start to accept him. Maya’s demands be damned, Adam is hooked.

What lifts what could be another “white boy takes rap by storm” story (scripted by Alex Larsen, directed by Jonathan Kahn) is the film’s satiric sting. There’s little reluctance in allowing Adam’s inclusion in this world. But everybody from Maya to Grymm to Behn’s wife (Candice Renee) brings up the race thing, the “cultural appropriation” thing, what Adam is and isn’t allowed to use in these seriously politically incorrect battles. Sexism, homophobia and race make it into battles. Adam isn’t given the same license.

“If you really wanna a ‘nigga’ pass, move back to New York.”

The self-satisfied and prudishly PC Maya lands the best shot — “Do you REALLY want to be another white guy appropriating black culture? We don’t NEED MAcklemore. We need MackleLESS.”

But as Adam takes down this white rapper (“You’re suffering from I Wanna be Down Syndrome.”) and holds his own against Korean rapper Prospeck (Jonathan Park), as he starts treating Maya with the male privilege (groupies) endemic to this scene (not a good idea), he wins attention and “respect” for his thesis.

Not from his star academic dad (Anthony Michael Hall in a biting, aloof and clueless-but -doesn’t-know-it turn).

Kahn stages the battles like prize fights, a swirling camera circling bouts titled accordingly — “Devine Wright vs. Groom” — with in-your-face rhyme-spitting, many a finger jab given a visual/aural gunshot effect.

Yeah, “battles” can be bloody.

I loved the way much is left unexplained, slang (“You gots bars, son!”) and just why this culture which treats the kid with contempt one minute and embraces his embrace of that culture the next.

The script lets characters play stereotypes — Maya’s gender identity politics, Prius driving feminist/communist veganism, contribute to her emasculating harpy image, the “Asian” guy has an Asian guy’s job — and points out those cultural cliches. The movie generally circles back around and upends those stereotypes.

Maya and her PC friends insist that Adam demonstrate, on the fly, how he’d insult them in a rap battle, but he keeps the ugliest stuff he thinks up (which we hear and see) in his head. The friends have that patronizing take on African American culture of the liberally clueless.

“Your exaggerated Ebonics are offensive.”

“I can’t be a racist. I’m Asian.”

The milieu is colorful, with too many funny, feisty rappers to name here. They are legion, from the master of ceremonies who introduces Adam as “The Nerd who Needs No Revenge,” peers who drop a little “He so white, he make Michael Jackson look like…Michael Jackson” and nail “Home Alone” and other movie references.

“Oh the irony, You look like Ron Weasley, you sound like Hermione.”

Adam’s not-quite-benign racist assumptions have him constantly surprised at the houses, the “real life” work and personas of the people he battles. Smart battlers aren’t ghetto, aren’t broke and aren’t to be underestimated.

And the rapping and dialogue just sparkles. The film even breaks the fourth wall as Jas (Renee) “black-splains” how the movie fails “The Bechdel Test.”

The third act, built around a far more “serious” battle, drags and drags and is the main reason this otherwise light-on-its-feet romp clocks in at a tedious two hours.

But for its first 90 minutes, “Bodied” dazzles, ducks and dishes through a corner of hip hop most of us only experience through documentaries or Youtube clips. Here’s a movie that takes the form seriously, and gives us a taste of how hilarious it can be — for those not on the receiving end of these epic couplets of insult.

MPAA Rating: R for strong language and sexual content throughout, some drug use and brief nudity

Cast: Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Rory Uphold, Shoniqua Shandai, Debra Wilson, Dizaster and Charlamagne Tha God

Credits:Directed by Joseph Kahn, script by Alex Larsen. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:00

Production-designed to within an inch of its life, backed by the gorgeous music of Tchaikovsky and including a ballet, though not the famous one their “story” was inspired by, Disney’s “The Nutcracker and the Four Realms” offers up a heaping helping of eye candy and treacle for the holidays,

If only they’d had a coherent story and a good actress in the lead. If only those were the only two serious shortcomings in this brainless, cotton candy bauble.

Filmed by Lasse Hallstrom (“What’s Eating Gilbert Grape'”), re-filmed by Joe Johnston (“Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”), and re-written to boot, it’s the sort of movie you don’t need to be told was a hash job followed by a hack job. A child could see it’s a beautiful, eye-popping empty-headed mess.

In Steam Age London young Clara (Mackenzie Foy, pretty to the point of colorless) is coping, along with her siblings and her gloomy dad (Matthew Macfadyen), with her first Christmas without their mother. Even a posh silver egg present from her tinkerer/godfather Drosselmeyer (Morgan Freeman) and the lush Christmas ball he throws every year cannot melt the family’s chill.

The egg requires a key to unlock, and gadget-designing Godfather Drosselmeyer sends Clara searching for that key as the final bit of her present. But a mouse snatches it, she finds herself chasing it through the vast mansion and into The Christmas Tree Forest. That’s where she meets a nutcracker soldier (Jayden Fowora-Knight).

He helps Clara discover that her late mother was a queen in this fanciful universe where such realms as The Land of Enchantment and the Land of Snowflakes and Land of Flowers are in conflict with The Land of Amusement, led by Mother Ginger.

Clara, as the princess, must join the other regents — Hawthorne, Shiver and Sugar Plum (Eugenio Derbez, Richard E. Grant and Keira Knightley) — and stop Mother Ginger  (Helen Mirren), who presides over a realm that is an abandoned, enchanted amusement park.

Every set is more dazzling than the one before. Everything is dependent on elaborate, clockwork gadgets. And an awful lot of it is digital, computer-generated-imagery (CGI).

Most impressive — the mice who swarm into a giant mouse monster, the tumblers who break apart like Russian nesting dolls.

There’s a royal ballet in the middle of all this, telling the “story” of the realms, and it too impresses, as prima ballerina Misty Copeland dances, accompanied by an orchestra conducted, in a nod to “Fantasia,” by Gustavo Dudamel in silhouette.

But none of it makes a lick of sense. The quest is a non-starter and the action — toy soldiers brought to life for the Big Battle — is blasé.

Knightley is the only member of the cast to register, all high-voiced and bubbly and fretful.

“Oh…POOH!”

That’s the only quotable line from Ashleigh Powell’s disastrous script. Names such as Tom McCarthy and Simon Beaufoy have been reported as among those trying to “fix” it, but there’s no getting over the nonsensicalness of it, no line that is any better than the trite and true — “I wish mother was here.” “We ALL do.”

Grant looks miserable, first scene to last, Macfadyen, Knightley’s “Pride and Prejudice” co-star has nothing to play and Mirren is wasted in a role in which her stuntwoman did all the real work.

Still, it’s quite the spectacle and harmless enough, what with the color blind casting, the high culture (ballet and Tchaikovsky) sampled, the princess resourceful enough to rescue herself.

The most inventive thing about this twist on the Nutcracker “brand” is a modern dance piece re-imagining “The Nutcracker” in modern dance form under the closing credits — far too little, entirely too late to save “The Four Realms.”

MPAA Rating: PG (for some mild peril)

Cast:Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley, Jayden Fowora-Knight, Helen Mirren, Misty Copeland, Matthew Macfadyen, Eugenio Derbez, Richard E. Grant and Morgan Freeman

Credits:Directed by Lasse Hallstrom and Joe Johnston, script by Ashleigh Powell. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 1:39

It sounds like a movie pitch.

Guy starts talking in his sleep, somniloquy, the phenomenon is called. He’s hoarsely whispering in a strange tongue. His significant other records him, and what he’s muttering sounds like something he heard on a little seen, unmarked and mysteriously unknown horror movie, preserved on VHS video in a white box.

And these “white tapes” seem to come from a long-closed videotape emporium, “The Video Palace.” Our somniloquent hero, Mark, a video editor by trade, sets out to talk to experts in “white tape” horror; interviews with horror bloggers, producers, collectors and aficionados, trying to unravel what he’s saying, what he’s watched and what a movie “that you watch, that watches you back” might mean.

Mark will make this journey and record it as his podcast. So it’s not a movie…yet.

Still, this podcast about a podcaster is up to its eyeballs in horror fandom, with hints of “The Ring” and “The Blair Witch Project” and any tale that sends the curious looking for that which should not be found abound, with bloggers, oddball collectors, fearful myth-believers and skeptics littering the supporting cast.

“Video Palace” is a part of AMC NEtworks “Shudder” channel. The series has Ben Rock (“Alien Raiders,” “Shadow of the Blair Witch”) as director, Bob DeRosa (“Killers” “White Collar”) as writer and was created by Nick Braccia and Michael  Monello (he produced and dreamed up the ingenious marketing for “The Blair Witch Project”).

It’s available on iTunes here. 

It’s a 10 episode series, and the cast includes Chase Williamson (John Dies at the End) and Devin Sidell (31) along with Bonita Freidericy (Preacher), Larry Cedar (Twilight Zone: The Movie), Leon Russom (A Quiet Place) and Justin Welborn (Beyond the Gates).

The explosion of podcasting — talk shows, performance programs, dramas, comedies etc. in forms that mimic radio suggests that we’ve entered a new Golden Age of Radio Drama — pre-recorded, listen-at-your-leisure and typically on-your-phone programs in all the genres radio used to pursue before “format” and TSL (time spent listening) became broadcasting’s king and queen.

I’ve known these guys for years — hardcore horror buffs, most of them. They’ve got a clever concept that’s well-executed, not offering frights straight away, but building a mystery, a “universe,” with names (interview subjects) familiar to horror fans.

It’s immersive and pretty darned good. Bear in mind that I started my career in public radio during a period when NPR was doing binaural sound radio dramas and Stephen King works were making it on the air. Want to “see” the best version of “The Mist?” It was on the radio in 3D (binaural, headphones-only sound).

So the bar is high for such projects, inside my head anyway.

I love the way this connects to our fading memories of the video store experience, of “clam shells” (soft-sided VHS boxes), head cleaner and screen streaks that let you know a tape was on its last legs.

Or that the hairy horror from “The Ring” was coming out of that well to GETCHA.

So check out “Video Palace,” and explain to the kids coming up that “Be Kind, Rewind” was around long before Jack Black made a movie of that title.

“People’s Republic of Desire” is a cinema verite documentary about online streaming stars in China, people who “perform” on demand and are rewarded directly by patrons — viewers with money.

It’s narrow-cast capitalism at its most ruthless.

“People’s Republic”“People’s Republic” opens in New York and other cities in early Dec.

The problems started pretty much the moment the Pell Grant, named for a U.S. Senator who wanted to move college aid from colleges which dispensed it to students, to the students themselves, was invented.

The idea, as recounted in the documentary “Fail State,” was to give students “choice,” to spend aid money at state schools and community colleges, or private — typically non-profit ones.

But that act opened the Pandora’s box of “for profit” education, “schools” built on “the market model,” which found they made more money by not actually providing an education, by spending their Federal student loan guarantees obtained from students on obtaining more students — advertising, recruiting and rounding up warm bodies that qualified for loans — and paying for lobbyists and making campaign donations to ensure Congress would never ever derail their fraudulent gravy train.

Jennifer Wilson, an alumnus of Everest University pictured above, holds up her degree, which no prospective employer would recognize, and states a cold, hard personal truth — “This $50,000 piece of paper is completely worthless.”

The film’s title — a play on college names like “Boise State/Albany State/Ohio State” — isn’t the cleverest. And the film is something of an overreach, offloading far too much information to easily process. That’s because the movie has a lot of ground to cover, with a lot of policy turning points, too many villains to track and too much money spread around to trace.

Still, Alexander Shebanow’s film shines a damning spotlight on these “degree mills,” which many represent as simple “frauds.”

We see how The University of Phoenix sponsors concerts at military bases because they need veterans to sign up for their courses. Not shown, Full Sail University buys billboards all around their city block-sized Orlando, Florida campus (re-purposed shopping malls along with a few purpose built structures) touting how many “Oscar nominated films” or “Grammy winning albums” their alumni worked on. What they did on those projects, or even if the figures themselves are accurate, isn’t disclosed.

And your TV is filled with ads for schools that sound prestigious, but are often just money-transfer operations making their investors and founders rich.

“Fail State” focuses on academics, journalists and legislators fighting to expose, regulate or close such schools. And it zeroes in on their victims — low income people of every race, recruited, pressured, hustled and conned into signing up for “educations” that are in most cases, lacking, and for loans that millions of such students will never be able to repay.

Shebanow sums up decades of reporting on this, another solvable problem made unsolvable by politics. The first story we see identifying this then-new ripoff was introduced by Walter Cronkite on “The CBS Evening News” back when he anchored it. The latest, by John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight.”

Members (Maxine Waters) and former members of Congress (Senator Tom Harkin) detail how attempts made, over the decades, to regulate, police and if necessary close such businesses, which are responsible for billions in un-repaid student loans every year.

Former President Bill Clinton is given millions to sit on the board for Walden University. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner rode to the speakership on the millions donated by parent companies of such schools, the sainted John McCain defended them and George W. Bush started the gutting of rules his father’s administration pushed through years earlier.

And Trump University? Never let it be said that a grifter doesn’t know a good grift when he sees one.

Schools such as Kaplan’s ICM School of Business,  Westwood College, Rasmussen, Columbia School of Broadcasting, DeVry, Everest, ITT Tech, Strayer, University of Phoenix and hundreds of others focus their pitch on the disadvantaged, offering a fast-track (months instead of years) program that won’t cost you anything up front.

But even as a narrator notes the shifting nature of work in America, where “college is the only route to the middle class,” “it’s increasingly out of reach.”

The many academics interviewed point out how “poor students have just a one in ten chance of graduating,” how “higher education is functioning as a caste system.”

F. King Alexander, president of LSU, details the history of collapsing state support for colleges that began under Reagan and continues today

One film chapter explains “The Pain Funnel” approach to recruiting — a step-by-step plan recruiters use to break down recruits, embarrass, frighten and goad them into signing up.One Miami “campus” even hired strippers as on-street recruiters.

With $100 billion in student loans going out today, there’s a lot of incentive to get that money, moving it from taxpayers to corporate chiefs, sticking the poor and when they default, the government with the debt.’

It’s no wonder one congressperson calls two of the instigators of this mid-2000s deregulation looting spree, Congressmen John Boehner and Howard McKeon, “bag men for the mob.”

The warnings about “creating a permanent underclass” are underscored with who is losing out on the money the for profit operators are grabbing — America’s community colleges, “the Dark Matter” holding the country together, providing cheap, practical and legitimately accredited educational training for millions hoping to better their financial situation.

We meet Marquette Bascom as she struggles to raise two sons and attend LaGuardia Community College. Her student loans are sizable, but not onerous.

And unlike the other students hoping for the same results she does, she will have a legitimate degree and a loan she will be able to pay off.

It’s a lot to take in, and “Fail State” doesn’t leave the viewer with a lot of hope. When the Obama Administration figured out how to grade such operations and shut down the ones plainly set up to fail their students, Corinthian, Everest, ITT Tech and DeVry went away.

And then Donald Trump got elected.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Credits:Directed by  Alexander Shebanow, script by Alexander Shebanow, Regina Sobel, Nicolas Adams, narrated by Gibson Frazier. A Gravitas/Starz release.

Running time: 1:33

Yeah, this one’s set in Norway, where they allegedly listen to scientists.

Magnet has picked this one up for US distribution. No firm date for release  for “The Quake” that I can see,

The reason it’s notable is its connection to the very fine Norske tsunami thriller, “The Wave,” same stars, same general idea of a natural disaster that has avoidable consquences.

There’s an embargo on this film, a review that won’t see the light of day until All Hallow’s Eve.

Disney landed Keira Knightley, and Keira 2.0, aka young Mackenzie Foy, along with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.

It opens Thursday night, and one wonders if Disney’s fondness for making the most of “brands” isn’t about to blow up on them.

I mean, “The Nutcracker” ballet is something a tiny percentage of kids find enchanting, and the rest of us were dragged to it, endured the evening of blatantly symbolic dance (You still have to tell tiny tots the story”) or saw a version on TV and didn’t warm to it.

No, it’s not the ballet, but the branding in this case could be a “Oh NO Mommy” turn off for a lot of viewers.

It could do well, but one has a nagging feeling the weekend belongs to Freddie Mercury and families may not be up to a true “holiday” kids’ fantasy quite just yet.

Long before the Coen Brothers saddled up with “True Grit,” they showed a penchant for florid, archaic English, the speech of the characters of Western writer Charles Portis.

Think of “Raising Arizona” — “Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”

“O Brother, Where Are Thou?” — “It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.

Not everybody prattles on through “The Ballad of Buster Suggs,” the Coens’ new film for Annapurna and Netflix. One chatterbox trapper (Chelcie Ross) gets labeled “tedious” for running on and on at the mouth because he so seldom has the pleasure of a human audience.

Then there’s the title character, played in the opening scenes by Tim Blake Nelson, showing off his crooning pipes in a way that “O Brother” only rarely allowed.

“I too have been known to violate the statutes,” his Buster offers a crusty barkeep who allows that whiskey is illegal in this corner of the desert Southwest. The shootout that follows, an under-estimated Chatty Cathy of a dandy, in cowboy clothes straight out of a Roy Rogers faux Western, dispatching several tough hombres and never losing his grin, can only be punctuated thusly.

“Puts me in mind of a sawwwwwng.”

And that opening — snippets of grandiloquent goofiness, graphic violence and the occasional song, is your test. No, it’s not a musical. But will you want to sit through two hours and twelve minutes of unconnected episodes, chapters from a (fake) titled “The Ballad of Buster Suggs,” or are you of a mind to spend your time more industriously, the importance of being earnest taken into account?

Because while every single chapter — “The Mortal Remains,” “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” etc. — has delights and reasons to enjoy it, they don’t tie together. It peaks early, and slogs a bit afterwards as we get the usual Coen grotesques, darker-than-dark humor, verbal dexterity that ventures into verbosity and their special brand of cruelty.

Every so often with this film, premiering Nov. 16, makes one wonder “OK, when do they end this? And how?” It doesn’t so much run its course as stroll it, petering out along the way.

We meet a solitary prospector (Tom Waits) looking for gold in pristine (until he shows up) wilderness, an armless/legless traveling orator, “The Wingless Thrush” (Harry Melling) performing at the behest of a hustler/manager/barker played by Liam Neeson.

A bank robber (James Franco) has a knack for dodging nooses, once when an Indian war party crashes his necktie party.

An unworldly young woman (Zoe Kazan) is tested by a wagon train West, not least by her affection for her brother’s dangerously/irksomely noisy Jack Russell terrier.

And a couple of swells from the British Isles (Brendan Gleeson and Jonjo O’Neill) regale and are regaled by their fellow stagecoach passengers (Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek and that tedious trapper) as they transport a body overland to Fort Morgan.

It’s not a musical, in spite of that adorably bubbly and then bullet-strewn opening, but no less than Neeson and Gleason add tunes to the proceedings. Waits? Of course.

The songs are variations of the saloon tunes of a hundred Westerns, most amusingly Nelson’s Buster re-wording the classic “Little Joe” from “Destry Rides Again” to suit the situation.

Nelson is the stand-out performer here, with players like Neeson and Gleason and Franco feeling a tad wasted in parts this small. Waits sparkles, and the Coens make great use of Rubinek, who slings a French accent as he pontificates on the nature of love and what’s deep within the human heart and such.

“Buster Scruggs” is as rich in detail as any of the better Westerns we’ve seen in recent years, from “Unforgiven” and “Deadwood” to “Open Range” and “The Homesman.”

The wagon that transports trapped Professor Harrison, “the Wingless Thrush,” is a classic theater on wheels, and his repertoire, ranging from Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to Lincoln’s “Gettsyburg Address,” Shakespeare to the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, is exactly what traveling “orators” who weren’t Mark Twain would recite to the miners and cattle town provincials such performers regaled.

Indian warpaint is vivid and Remington painting real, prospecting is laid out in all its labor intensive tedium and peremptory hangings weren’t foolproof when all they had to work with was a horse, a tree, a rope and a prisoner.

The Coens manage a few Cinemascope-worthy Western vistas; Buster singing through buttes and canyons, an Indian attack that begins on the cusp of the horizon and a genuine wagon train — all images with beauty and scale that “True Grit” lacked.

Whatever working for Netflix did for their budgeting, not having to edit “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” into anything tighter or more thematically coherent allowed them these little grace notes.

But I found “Buster” to be a film that danced out of the starting gate and trotted or gamboled along, pleasantly and/or grimly ever after — perfectly watchable, probably more watchable in segments in the “Let’s put this on pause” comfort of your own home.

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence

Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek

Credits:Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. A Netflix/Annapurna release.

Running time: 2:12

The casual fan probably doesn’t notice that roughly the output of the Joel and Ethan Coen Filmworks ltd. is either a misfire or utterly unwatchable.

Great films, Oscar winners, mixed in with “A Serious Man” and “Hudsucker Proxy” and “Burn After Reading” and a pleasantly inferior remake of “True Grit.”

They spent Netflix cash on going back to the Old West, filming a movie that will go a long way toward deciding if James Franco earns a “Get out of #MeToo” card, or faces years in the movie wilderness and movies with the likes of Mel Gibson and Louis CK.

Netflix is starting to screen their movies for critics in theaters, which is a good thing, although trying to get a publicist there to get you access to a specific release (Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind,” finally) is a lost cause. There’s little rhyme or reason to what they promote. “Awards contenders?” Maybe.

“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” premieres on Netflix Nov. 16.