You kids living in today’s post-Anton Chigurh world won’t believe this, but there was a time not that long ago when the bowl haircut was strictly for goofballs: Moe from the Three Stooges, for example, or Lloyd Christmas from Dumb & Dumber. But that was before the Coen Brothers — adapting a Cormac McCarthy novel for an extra dose of almost unbearable nihilism — pulled Javier Bardem from a Sears Portrait Studio display and set him loose in the godforsaken West Texas desert with a captive bolt gun. In his quest to recover the money from a botched drug deal, Chigurh becomes an inscrutable angel of death, stalking luckless Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), confounding aging Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and slaughtering anyone who gets in his way like cattle, literally. In their Oscar-winning quest to match the tone set by the unforgiving wasteland along the Mexican border, the Coens crafted a hot-running companion piece to Fargo and broke enough of the cardinal rules of filmmaking to almost make that hairstyle choice look normal by comparison. Almost. Free ($5 suggested donation), 6:30pm Tue, Briscoe Western Art Museum, Jack Guenther Pavilion, 210 W. Market St., (210) 299-4499, briscoemuseum.org.
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