The Counselor = Cormac McCarthy + Ridley Scott + (Fassbender + Pitt + Cruz + Bardem et al)

At least with Cruz it could be seen as "You may recognize her as that really hot woman, but she's also a serious actress" which is sad too but at least she actually won one

I wonder how many famous "serious" actors and directors have never even been nominated for an oscar

good question. depends on what you mean by famous. indie people like todd haynes, jim jarmusch, richard linklater have never been nominated. neither have genre-based folks like john carpenter and walter hill and sam raimi--but they may not be "serious" enough. christopher nolan has never been nominated. nor has cameron crowe. going back a ways, blake edwards was never nominated (how the f*** did that happen?). ditto john frankenheimer. ditto jerry schatzberg. raoul walsh was never nominated, nor nicholas ray, nor (needless to say) douglas sirk. but these guys weren't known to the general public ATT.

hitchcock famously never won one, but he was nominated a bunch of times.

stanley donen was never nominated. neither was ophuls. or de sica (even though a few of his films were huge art-house hits). paul schrader hasn't been nominated.....

Well, you hire Ridley Scott, you get Ridley Scott...

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=the%20counselor%20trailer&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDQQtwIwAg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dn4rTztvVx8E&ei=k9wCUtr3FubkyQHbiYGQBA&usg=AFQjCNHcVnWGU_HUSJkL5DAaNaHOT8W7Ew&bvm=bv.50310824,d.aWc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4rTztvVx8E

I'm in

since Blood Meridian is stuck in some kind of development hell (Scott had it for a while then James Franco had it and now idk), this will have to suffice

looks like his tribute to Tony

looks sweet

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303442004579121733648876754.html#articleTabs=article

really want to see this

"He doesn't give any answers about his work," Mr. Franco said in an interview. When Mr. Franco called Mr. McCarthy and asked why he had written a book about such a repellent character, he was glib. "He said, verbatim, 'I don't know, James, probably some dumb-ass reason,'" Mr. Franco recalled

looks like his tribute to Tony

His brother died in mid-production.

"He said, verbatim, 'I don't know, James, probably some dumb-ass reason,'" Mr. Franco recalled

<3

this looks bad tbh

Blood Meridien is an amazing book but I have largely soured on McCarthy's dourly nihilistic moralizing

STOKED

but I have largely soured on McCarthy's dourly nihilistic moralizing

u faced the abyss and u blinked, quitter

D'oh!

Local film critics on my FB wall were horrified.

movie set in el paso = sold.

Wasn't terrible, nor particularly good. It depends how you react to the way Cameron Diaz takes over the movie...

Cormac McCarthy sure writes some unfortunate sex talk tho. And I looked at a few pages of the published screenplay, it's longer and more embarrassing there.

Pitt doing cocksure lowlifes p well these days. Also Bardem looks like John Cassavetes in a fright wig.

I thought No Country For Old Men was weak and obvious, lacking fire

you can put this guy in the fire

i don't think he quite "gets" mccarthy (though maybe this film is terrible). and the novel NCFOM is a tight, excellent thriller w/some interesting themes made into a greater movie.

McC gets "gotten" a little too clearly in this film; Cruz:Diaz is very madonna:whore.

(although a madonna who enjoys cunnilingus)

Analogy in my head is how De Palma did great with a Mamet screenplay (The Untouchables) vs. Mamet directing his own material. In this case, it's McCarthy putting his material front and center vs. handing it off to the Coens.

No Country for Old Domino, All The Pretty U-Turn?

There are some crisp lines, and Rosie Perez has a real good scene, but this material isn't anywhere near NCfOM level.

Bilge has it just about right (dammit, i shoulda come up with Brian Grazer, if Hollywood freaks were ever much in my head):

http://www.vulture.com/2013/10/movie-review-the-counselor.html

so yeah, ppl expecting a Tony Scottish movie will be kicked to the curb by this one. GOOD.

i don't think he quite "gets" mccarthy (though maybe this film is terrible). and the novel NCFOM is a tight, excellent thriller w/some interesting themes made into a greater movie.

Pah. I haven't seen The Counselor, but I'll take any opportunity to try to puncture NCFOM's balloon. The novel is neither tight nor excellent, it's hamhanded and uncommitted to its genre. (The Road is much better as a genre piece, because it does commit.) The Coens' movie has most of the same problems as the book, imo. But it takes less time to watch than read, so an improvement on that count at least.

I love McCarthy when he's good, recoil from him when he's overblown, and the problem is that he's usually both within the space a few pages or paragraphs. That said, Blood Meridian is an amazing piece of sustained writing. Barely a false note in it.

(Also, No Country is the one where McCarthy's assorted prejudices are most naked and unredeemable.)

The novel is neither tight nor excellent, it's hamhanded and uncommitted to its genre.

seemed like average Stuart Woods airport potboiler

film was a def improvement

this one's pretty nakedly 'reactionary' too, but as BE says evrything's so symbolic it's not as directly offensive.

Always amusing to me when serious novelists finally dip their toes into films and realize, jeebus, there's a lot more money for a lot less work! See: Richard Russo, Michael Chabon ...

xpost Agree on Blood Meridian. Fuck a film adaptation, that book is a marathon of literary violence.

Pah. I haven't seen The Counselor, but I'll take any opportunity to try to puncture NCFOM's balloon.

http://i.imgur.com/gowD7A0.gif

Agree on Blood Meridian. Fuck a film adaptation, that book is a marathon of literary violence.

yeah he'll never top it

good god such a great book

ncfom is such a good book. God damn what a classic.

lol: http://www.miami.com/039the-counselor039-r-article

Every movie's like, cheetahs on a gold leash.

DICKDICKDICKTORINO

HEY WRONG THREAD

critical roundup of alleged thread topic

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-ridley-scotts-the-counselor

i was kinda trepidatious going in but i really dug this! if someone had told me in advance that there was a scene-stealing john leguizamo cameo, i wouldn't have been worried. it's very mccarthy, so much so that im not sure ridley knew what to do with it at times. but it's good.

i guess the "insanely verbose" dialogue doesn't annoy as much if you accept that all the characters (cept those drips Fassy and Cruz) all sound like CM, the way Woody Allen characters sound like him.

also ppl couldn't follow the plot, wtf?

ncfom is flawless and p much without a view on morality imo

$8 million weekend, even worse than expected

Even with Brad Pitt, does the multiplex crowd really want to see a movie that gives the impression of being another No Country For Old Men?

Oh man this movie

Definitely "worth seeing"

I liked it,kinda

pretty much my feelings.

i look forward to seeing it again actually. something tells me it'll play well on cable.

it really reminded me of Cosmopolis--particularly in that it seemed to revolve around a series of rather abstract conversations. intriguing.

Ha that was almost a haiku

Self xpost

But yeah, ryan otm

Also, it doesn't become clear for a while that half the movie at least must be conversations between The Counselor and a character who only appears in a single scene.

really want that ruben blades coffee service

on motorized decapitations

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2013/11/cormac-mccarthy-truman-capote-herschell-gordon-lewis.html

lol there's three names I never expected to see together

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/10447186/The-Counsellor-when-good-scripts-go-very-bad.html

what sux about the movie is mostly in the script

Wasn't that bad, did have some interesting bits, but seemed to overstretch the amount of subplots and be self-consciously amoral which is probably totally oxymoronic.

Saw it in a cinema with one other person in the audience which is a bit weird. Guess word of mouth is out about the film. I enjoyed some of it quite a bit.

imo the best things about it are the peculiar digressions and the particular flavor of mccarthy's dialogue and ideas

And that one sunflower Versace shirt Bardem wears.

I've been saying "I've seen it all; it's all shit" pretty regularly since I saw it. I love pithy nihilism tho.

I haven't finished watching it but ws penelope cruz + fassbender in that opening scene daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn

extended disc cut in Feb, 21 mins longer

no thx really

I think the early conversation with the Amsterdam jeweler about love and death and fate and god is much longer.

longest Bruno Ganz monologue since Hitler rant

unironically cant wait

psyched

http://www.uproxx.com/filmdrunk/2014/01/cormac-mccarthys-ex-arrested-brandishing-gun-pulled-vagina-dispute-aliens/

Yeah I'll be checking out the longer cut. Hopefully there's not more of *that* scene.

this was terrible imo. everyone in it is miscast, save maybe penelope cruz. the dialogue is the major problem, a brisk no thank you sir to the extended cut

More like michael miscastbender and javier boredom and brad shit in this one, thanks for nothing boremac mcsharty

so who has watched the expanded version, and...?

Eszterhas scripts are better.

Four-hour commentary track.

HBO Max has the extended version (20 minutes longer), though you have to search under extras to the page to find it. Much better than the original cut.

Reminds me structurally of Gomorrah as far as a collage of how many people have jobs to make a smuggling operation happen.

Yes, that was the most canny thing about the movie: the way that the scenes of abstract philosophical speech were interspersed with scenes of people going about the operation with minimal or functional dialogue, a really striking contrast.
One of my least favourite things in this is the trope of the powerful evil guy who says, "I know you don't want me to do this evil thing, but fate makes it inevitable". There's a lot of interesting stuff in this movie, but I'm not convinced its moral compass is any more evolved than Mötley Crüe's "Dr. Feelgood".

I love this movie. I own the director's cut Blu-Ray. I don't need an evolved moral compass from a movie whose entire message is "fuck around and find out."

I should rewatch this.

I watched the 138 minute cut. Somehow I had completely blanked on both the movie and McCarthy's connection -- total "wait, what?!" when his name appeared.

Cormack McCarthy filmed as a big, expensive capital-G Giallo sure sounds like a great idea, but every director eventually misses threading that needle of misunderstood masterpiece or camp classic. It's manic and feeds off of its own energy now and then, but I think I like the writing about this more than I do the actual film.

"Bardem looks like John Cassavetes in a fright wig." -- I miss Morbs.