The extended-cut Bluray of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (138 minutes vs. the 118-minute theatrical version) streets today. I’ve rented it on iTunes for viewing this evening. In the view of Forbes.com’s Mark Hughes, the theatrical version was over-abbreviated but the long version allows the characters to breathe easier and and stretch their legs and fill things out. If this view turns out to be widely shared, people will call it a repeat of the extended Bluray cut of Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven — a significantly better version than what was shown in theatres.
Variety‘s Scott Foundas has added his name to the short roster of those who greatly admire Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (i.e., N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis, film maven F.X. Feeney, Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, myself and four or five others). Foundas calls Scott and Cormac McCarthy‘s drug-dealing film “a ravishing object — a triumph of mood and style, form as an expression of content, and dialogue that finds a kind of apocalyptic comedy in this charnel-house existence. It is bold and thrilling in ways that mainstream American movies rarely are, and its rejection suggests what little appetite there is for real daring at the multiplex nowadays.”
Take no notice of The Counselor‘s 34% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It simply means that a lot of reviewers found the movie unlikable or unpleasant. Or they found it too scary to handle — they had to push it away in order to go on living their lives. But shame on those reviewers who are calling it a bad or poorly made film, or that “everyone’s speech is awash in gaudy psycho-blather and Yoda-like observations,” which is blind bullshit. Or that “you can’t believe a word of it.” Yes, you can. You can believe every word. You simply have to understand and accept that The Counselor is expressing a cold and clear-eyed view of the Mexican cartel drug business with a very blunt and eloquent voice. It is an undistilled visit to McCarthyland, which is to say the bleak moralistic realm of novelist and (in this instance) first-time screenwriter Cormac McCarthy. You can say “wow, that’s one cold and cruel place” and that’s fine, but you cannot call The Counselor a bad or negligible or sloppily made film. I hereby declare these viewpoints anathema and excommunicate.
I was so impressed by the profound assurance, philosophical authority and thematic clarity in Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25), which I saw last night, that I pleaded with Fox publicists to let me say a few things despite the Thursday afternoon review embargo. They gave me permission to do so. I was also very taken by the visually seductive stylings (the dp is Dariusz Wolski with editing by Pietro Scalia) and what I would call a bold but almost reckless indifference to conventional audience expectations for a film of this type.
I asked to speak to Counselor producers Nick Wechsler and Steve Schwartz, and they called about an hour later and we talked for…oh, 15 minutes or so.
I recognize that my admiration for The Counselor may be a minority view, but I know a class act when I see and hear one. I love that The Counselor sticks to its thematic guns (including a very tough philosophical view of greed and frailty) and that it doesn’t back off an inch from what McCarthy and Scott are surely aware will be regarded by mainstreamers as an unpopular approach to narrative development and character fate.
The basic thematic lesson is that there are so many serpents slithering around the Mexican drug business that investing yourself in this realm to any degree is tantamount to suicide. Not exactly fresh information, perhaps, but it’s the singer, not the song. If you’ve seen No Country For Old Men, you know where Cormac McCarthy (who wrote the screenplay for The Counselor without pausing to publish a narrative book version first) is coming from as a storyteller and social forecaster and ethicist.
The Counselor is an ice-cold morality tale about a very brutal realm, and particularly about a cunning, ruthless and emotion-less character whose identity I can’t reveal but who is played very impressively by…can’t reveal that either. But I’m not talking about Michael Fassbender. Although he handles himself and his role in an appealing, engaging fashion, or as engagingly as the narrative allows.
Last night there were competing Los Angeles press screenings — one for Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville‘s obviously lowbrow Bad Grandpa (Paramount, 10.25) and Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy‘s cold but masterful morality melodrama The Counselor (ditto). I for one wouldn’t see Bad Grandpa with a gun at my back. But I’ll bet there were a lot of critics, columnists and media reporters who figured it was more important to catch Bad Grandpa than The Counselor because the Tremaine-Knoxville, a movie made by and for those treading water in the lower end of the gene pool, is going to make a lot of money and entertain the apes. I don’t know what will happen to Scott’s film, but my guess is that despite (or because of) its clear-eyed brilliance and general absence of conventional emotion it’s going to leave Joe and Jane Popcorn with a queasy feeling and/or scratching their heads. Trust me — that’s Joe and Jane’s problem and not the film’s. No matter what happens box-office-wise Ridley and Cormac are just fine, and so is their impressively cold-blooded thriller, which you do not want to bring your girlfriend to unless she’s very, very special.
The Counselor is ice-cold and hard and gleaming, and (I’m just whacking golf balls off the top of my head) philosophically clear and commanding and unyielding and even (I know how this sounds) oddly personable and compassionate in a perverse sort of way. It really, really doesn’t deliver the thing that audiences tend to go to movies for. I couldn’t figure out some of the plot particulars, but I was in awe of the mood and the tone and the resolve of it. (As well as the sheen.) I knew right away I was watching a smart, well-engineered, well-oiled, first-class thriller-cum-philosophy lecture piece that came from the pit of Hell. Having read portions of the script a few hours earlier I knew what was coming (at least during the first act), but I was delighted with Javier Bardem‘s amiable and jazzy performance as Reiner, a fair-minded entrepeneur and drug dealer; ditto Cameron Diaz‘s performance as Bardem’s predatory, cheetah-loving girlfriend. But my main impression is that The Counselor is about as strong and classy and as uncompromising as a film of this type can theoretically get.
Posted on 12.2.11: Steve McQueen‘s Shame demands a spinach-eating looksee from all non-Eloi viewers, but hoowee, it’s a bucket of bleak.
Here’s my 9.5. Telluride Film Festival review: “Steve McQueen‘s Shame is a prolonged analysis piece that’s entirely about a malignancy — sex addiction — affecting the main character, and nothing about any chance at transcendence or way into the light.
“Michael Fassbender plays a successful Manhattan guy with a sex-addiction issue. He’s into slamming ham like a vampire is into blood-drinking, minus any emotional intimacy whatsoever. And at the end of the day, all the film does is show you how damaged and deranged he is. The guy is lost, tangled, probably doomed.
“Act One: Fassbender is one smooth, obsessive, fucked-up dude. Act Two: Fassbender really is a twisted piece of work, you bet. Act Three: Boy, is this guy a mess!
“This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do. But Shame has a point, delivered with a methodical intensity, that sinks into your bones. And part of the point is that suppressed memories of incest…I can’t do this.
“But Shame has integrity, and is one of those films, like A Dangerous Method, that you might not like as you watch it but you think about a lot in the hours and days and weeks afterwards.
“The sex scenes are grim and draining and even punishing in a presumably intentional way. Fassbender walks around with his dick hanging out and flopping against his upper thigh, and I suppose it ought to be acknowledged that he’s fairly well hung.
Carey Mulligan, who plays his effed-up sister, has (a) a longish nude scene in a shower and (b) a song-singing moment that goes on for three or four minutes.”
Chilly and clinical as it is, it’s all but impossible to not think about Shame, a lot, after it’s over. Failing to see it means hanging your head in shame the next time an intelligent film discussion occurs in your circle.
On 9.30 N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis called Shame “another example of British miserablism, if one that’s been transposed to New York and registers as a reconsideration of the late 1970s American cinema of sexual desperation (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Hardcore, Cruising, etc.).”
From 11.10: “What if Michael Fassbender’s sex-addict character was called ‘Shame’? And if everyone called him that — all the girls he picks up, his sister (Carey Mulligan), his charmless boss at the office and so on? And what he if struck up a relationship with a 10 year-old kid who lives in his building, and what if the kid found out he was a sex addict and said, ‘I’m ashamed of you, Shame!'”
[Updated]. I don’t have time or the energy to write something deeply felt about each and every Scott film, but there’s absolutely no question in my mind the The Counselor deserves its #4 slot, that the first half of Matchstick Men is dead brilliant, and that A Good Year (ranked at #8) is a much better film that many people realize.
In this order…
1. Alien
2. The Duellists
3. Thelma and Louise
4. The Counselor
5. Blade Runner
6. American Gangster
7. Matchstick Men
8. Gladiator
9. Kingdom of Heaven (extended version)
10. A Good Year
11. Black Hawk Down
12. Black Rain
13. The Martian
I don’t feel that strongly care about the rest. Okay, I hate Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Ditto Legend. Someone to Watch Over Me is piffle. I found House of Gucci half-tolerable, but I’m not sure I’d want to watch it again.
The Last Duel was better than half-decent. I don’t even remember 1492: Conquest of Paradise or Body Of Lies. Scott’s Robin Hood was half-watchable, G.I. Jane is negligible; ditto Exodus: Gods and Kings, White Squall, Hannibal.
I was actually okay with All The Money In The World.
...for popularizing the term "friendo" in No Country for Old Man. (Cormac McCarthy or the Coen brothers wrote it, of course, but Javier brought it home.) Favorite Bardem performances, in this order: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, No Country, Before Night Falls, The Counselor, The Dancer Upstairs, Biutiful, The Sea Inside, Skyfall, Being The Ricardos. One of the very few name-brand actors to stand by Woody Allen when spears and missiles were raining down, and to throw shade upon the fanatics. One night on the Cote d'Azur beach in '07 or '08 I bummed a Marlboro light from Javier, and as we parted company a few minutes later he gave me another -- one to grow on, so to speak.
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In a recent “What I’m Hearing” column about the Motion Picture Academy’s plan to somehow arrest and even turn around the ratings plunge that has been increasing over the last five or six years, Matthew Belloni wrote that the “increasingly niche tastes of Academy members” are a principal reason why most people haven’t seen the films up for awards.
The whole rundown was posted earlier today by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.
What Belloni means by “increasingly niche tastes” is that since ’16 or thereabouts, the film industry has increasingly fallen under the grip of aggressive progressives, otherwise known as wokesters (POCs, #MeToo-ers, LGBTQs, obliging guilty liberals, kowtowing corporations). And they’ve been calling the shots more and more, and it was this increasingly dominant influence that made last spring’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar telecast seem like such a suffocating experience.
We all understand that the Soderbergh Oscars absolutely killed whatever was left of the old mystique. They made it clear that the Oscars had been transformed into a West Coast Tony awards thing — awards that reflected the mentality of an elite membership that had its own progressive game going on, and to hell with skillfully finessed movies for the politically neutral meatheads — i.e., films that reach out to people and reflect their lives as actually lived.
(Sidenote: it’s heartening to note that one such film is Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard, due from Warner Bros./HBO Max on 11.19.)
Five or six years ago the “increasingly niche tastes” crowd, understandably goaded by the election of Donald Trump, decided that the older-white-male dominance had to be strongly diminished and that the world needed to change. And so the industry, Marvel and D.C bullshit franchises aside, needed to increasingly forego the usual escapist or emotional engagement elements and/or baseline reflections of real life that movies have historically provided over the decades, which meant mostly ignoring the experience of average Americans who live outside the NY/LA bubble.
Streaming changed everything and the pandemic really up-ended the salad bar, but what’s been implemented more and more over the last five or six years is a variation of the social realism movement that took hold in the modern art world of the 1930s.
I explained it all on 3.22.21 in a piece called “Wolfe Reminds, History Repeats.” Here it is again in a nutshell:
“Since wokeness began to manifest in ’17 and certainly since the pandemic struck, the movie pipeline has been losing steam and under-providing, to put it mildly. Nothing even approaching the level of Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, La-La Land, the long cut of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor, Zero Dark Thirty or Portrait of a Woman on Fire has come our way from domestic filmmakers.
Above and beyond an array of pandemic suffocations, a significant reason for the strange absence of robust cinema, for this general faint-pulse feeling, is (wait for it) wokeness and political terror.
Even apart from the woke bullshit, the basic economic model of Hollywood — you spend this much on a movie, it’s got to make the money back — has broken down because of the economics of the streamers. Which, some would argue, not only takes the thrill out of things, to put it mildly, but ensures something else.
In other words: Netflix can spend $220 million on one bad action film, it can lose all of that, and it does not matter, because their business model is “it’s all about the subscriptions, it’s all about the subscriptions, it’s all about the subscriptions, it’s all about the subscriptions, it’s all about the subscriptions….”
It’s that formula that makes the triumph of woke aesthetics possible, that makes “get woke, go broke” irrelevant. Because, of course, “get woke, go broke” remains true. Nobody — nobody! — gives a fuck about woke issues except for the one or two percent of the population who are the scum liberals who control the media and Hollywood.
Without the impossible-to-lose reality of streamer economics, none of this would work.
Michel Franco‘s incredibly cold, undeniably brilliant New Order (Neon), which I went apeshit for last September, finally began playing in theatres on 5.21.
The fact that “prior to its October 2020 release in Mexican cinemas, the trailer was received with an overwhelmingly negative response from the public, including a fierce internet backlash. One stand-out complaint said that the trailer indicated ‘a classist, racist and painfully stereotypical portrait of upper and lower classes in Mexico’…this alone requires that you see it.
“The racism accusations worsened when Franco claimed the film had been the victim of ‘profound reverse racism’ and felt himself as victim of ‘hate crimes’ as a White Mexican. Franco later apologized on social media, claiming he was not aware of the impact of his response,” etc.
From my 9.14.20 review: Set in Mexico City, it’s about a violent revolution against the wealthy elites by an army of ruthless, homicidal, working-class lefties.
Director-writer Franco (After Luca, Chronic) is clearly tapping into all the insurrectionist anger out there (last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, last year’s French Yellow Vest demonstrations) and imagining the ante being raised a couple of notches.
Remember those rightwing thugs (“Los Halcones”) murdering leftists during that Mexico City demonstration in Roma? New Order is a roughly similar situation but with the lefties pulling the trigger, and with a lot more ferocity. Rage against the swells.
It struck me as a nightmare vision of what could conceivably happen if the ranks of our own wokester shitheads were to dramatically increase and anger levels were to surge even more.
Atlanta creator, star and sometime director Donald Glover believes call-out culture is diminishing or dulling down creativity in movies and TV series. “We’re getting boring stuff and not even experimental mistakes because people are afraid of getting cancelled,” Glover tweeted. “So they feel like they can only experiment with aesthetic.”
Glover was responding to Twitter users who’d complained about feeling deflated and bored due to too many cookie-cutter films and TV series. Yeah, he said — that’s because terrified screenwriters and show runners are afraid to step out of the box and risk offending Twitter jackals.
Some of the usual rationales were posted in response. Scriptwriter Lisa Hofacker reminded that “(1) There are only 7 basic plots so only so much can be done & redone with that in mind, and (2) script reviewers basically only review the 1st 5-10 pages of a script…if it doesn’t have the inciting incident or exciting enough it gets thrown out.”
The proverbial “inciting incident” has to happen within five to ten pages? When I took Robert McKee‘s class in ’88 the inciting incident had to happen no later than 25 pages in, and preferably within 20 pages.
Not to discount Hofacker or even McKee, but Glover’s tweets sounded a lot like something I tapped out a couple of months ago. At the risk of irritating regular readers, here’s the gist of it:
From “Wolfe Reminds, History Repeats,” posted on 3.22.21: “For since wokeness began to take hold in ’18 and certainly since the pandemic struck 13 months ago, the movie pipeline has been losing steam and under-providing, to put it mildly. Nothing even approaching the level of Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, La-La Land, the long cut of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor, Zero Dark Thirty or Portrait of a Woman on Fire has come our way from domestic filmmakers. **
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