Every December I tap out a list of the year’s best (excellent, very good and good) and I usually end up with a tally of maybe 20 films or 25 films, and 30 if I want to be liberal about it. But if you were to boil these down to the really good ones that will probably stand the test of time, you’d probably be closer to 10 or 15. Which is why 1962 seems like such an amazing year. Jules and Jim, The Manchurian Candidate, To Kill a Mockingbird, Knife in the Water, Lawrence of Arabia, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, L’Eclisse, Lolita, The Exterminating Angel, Ride the High Country, The Miracle Worker, The Longest Day, Days of Wine and Roses, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner — that’s 15 films and we’re less than halfway through the list. The Trial, Sundays and Cybele, Winter Light, Dr. No, My Name Is Ivan, A Kind of Loving, Mutiny on the Bounty, Billy Budd, The L-Shaped Room, Cape Fear, Freud, Carnival of Souls, Lonely Are the Brave, Advise & Consent, Birdman of Alcatraz, Eva, David and Lisa, Sweet Bird of Youth, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Counterfeit Traitor, War Hunt, Phaedra, Lisa, Day of the Triffids and Antoine and Colette. 40 films that pretty much everyone who’s taken a film course or owns a film anthology book has seen and admired or or least respects, and at least 20 or 25 stone classics.

I’m going to be brave and admit something that undermines my fanatical film guy authority (if you want to call it that). I’ve twice seen Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski‘s Nosferatu the Vampyre (’79) and I’ve seen Shadow of the Vampire (’00), E. Elias Merhige‘s fictionalized story of the making of F.W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu, but I’ve never really sat down and watched F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. Now, finally, tonight…the restored Kino Bluray version (which streets on 11.12).

You can’t go by the trailers, which suggest a flat-out satirical comedy. Trailer cutters always go for the socko stuff, the lowest-common-denominator defaults. But if it’s more or less a huge sprawling black comedy (and I say “if”), that may amount to a brilliant approach. Scorsese, screenwriter Terrence Winter and star Leonardo DiCaprio came to the Wall Street table way too late to play it as some kind of dark, solemn, high-stakes melodrama. The last 25% of Goodfellas (arguably the best part) was pure cocaine in the veins. Well, cocaine and then the comedown.

I was reading Andrew Stewart‘s 10.29 Variety story about Paramount having officially slated Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street for a 12.25.13 release when I was jerked alert by a phrase at the end of the story. Yes, okay, I stole that expression from Tom Wolfe‘s “The Painted Word,” but I nonetheless sat up and said “whoa.”

Stewart writes that “a list of other Oscar contenders have vacated the race in recent weeks, including Sony Classics’ Foxcatcher,” the Weinstein Co.’s Grace of Monaco and Sony’s The Monuments Men, which sources say the studio pushed back based on the assumption that Paramount would end up making the year-end release for Wall Street.”

In response to yesterday’s riff about the stone psycho who lives upstairs asking me twice “is that your cat?” and my reply being colored by a measured hostility and facetiousness, Glenn Kenny wrote the following: “It’s hilarious how Wells will pompously go on about how HIS ‘sobriety’ beats that of anyone who’s, say, been working a program for 20 years, and then spin out a shit fit of completely disproportionate rage if the wrong guy looks at him cross-eyed. ‘Sobriety” — I do not think that word means what you think it means.”

LexG/Ray Quick wrote something good about Javier Bardem‘s performance in response to yesterday’s “Foundas Joins Counselor Club” riff. “Minus Penelope Cruz‘s character, Bardem’s is probably the least venal in the movie: Honest, terrified, in thrall to Cameron Diaz against his better judgment, open with Fassbender. He’s the soul of the movie and his brutal, amimalistic downfall is one of the few poignant moments in it. Whereas Pitt’s comeuppance is played [with] all manner of notes, Bardem was pretty much a soulful straight-shooter through and through, and he goes out as undignified as anyone, into the ground, it’s over, fuck you, there go the cheetahs, steal his shit while we’re at it. It’s a merciless end for a character, [and yet] these critics [are] acting like it was Chigur Redux or Skyfall Ahoy. What movie did they even see?”

A nice fat payday for Bryan Singer, who hasn’t directed an X-Men film in ten years, plus big bountiful checks for all the cast members (Jackman, Fassbender, Lawrence, McKellen, Stewart, McAvoy, Berry, etc.) , but really, come on…when does this treadmill stop? It isn’t going to, is it? It’s like that mythical Dick Cheney line about U.S. forces in the Middle East: “We don’t leave.” The only thing that will put a cap on it will be a money-losing disaster, and that’s not likely. Even the most cynical franchise mentality should have some kind of answer to the age-old question of “is there any reason to make this film other than to just make money?” X-Men: Days of Future Past is going to cost around $250 million to make. Remember that the old Moody Blues album was called “Days of Future Passed,” not “Past.”

Almost exactly 20 years ago River Phoenix collapsed and died of drug-induced heart failure in front of L.A.’s Viper Room on the Sunset Strip, at age 23. Tomorrow I finally get to see George Sluizer‘s Dark Blood, the film Phoenix was working on but hadn’t quite finished at the time of his death. 80% of the film had been lensed; only interiors remained. Phoenix’s costars included Judy Davis, Jonathan Pryce and Karen Black. Sluizer has somehow pulled it together with narration and other techniques. All kinds of rights issues and territorial blockages had obstructed his progress. Blood first peeked out last year in the Netherlands. Here’s a review from Variety‘s Boyd van Hoeij.

Before we had our big texting meltdown the ex-girlfriend and I went last night to a massage-and-swim health club on Wilshire and Mariposa. She had called and reserved a massage for me as well as herself. She went into the women’s salon and I naturally went over to the guy’s entrance, which is on Mariposa. I paid $60 for a massage with my card and walked downstairs to the dressing area and froze in my effing tracks. For there were five or six older undressed Asian guys sitting and standing around, all wearing disgusting rubber flip-flops with two or three in towels and two or three without towels with their flabby white hairless bellies and ugly members hanging out. “Good fucking God!,” I said to myself. A red light began flashing in my brain. I turned right around, bounded up the stairs and got an immediate refund. “Is anything wrong?,” the lady said. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just cancel the payment, please.” Never again. Crunch, my Manhattan health club, has private shower stalls with little shower curtains. I never again want to look at a beefy old guy with his schlong hanging out…ever.

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.”

Biopics of revered political underdogs can only tell the tale. Modest beginnings, protagonist shows mettle, rise to power, complications from adversaries, big climax, end coda. Diego Luna‘s Chavez (due next April) is the first feature drama about migrant labor leader Cesar Chavez. Produced by Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal and Mr. Mudd’s John Malkovich, Lianne Halfon and Russell Smith with a script by Keir Pearson (Hotel Rwanda). Participant will distribute. Chavez costars Michael Pena, America Ferrera, Rosario Dawson, Malkovich, Yancey Arias, etc. Why did Chavez die at age 56? Biography.com says that Chavez’s hunger strikes (one having lasted 36 days) may have “contributed” to his death on 4.23.93, in San Luis, Arizona.

There’s a dedication at the end of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor to his late brother, director Tony Scott, who ended his life on 8.19.12. In a 10.24 review HitFix‘s Drew McWeeny suggested that the film’s dour, fatalistic tone might stem from Ridley’s feelings about his brother’s suicide. “It is cold and it is angry, and it may be the most pessimistic, unhappy film Ridley Scott’s ever made,” Drew declares. I for one feel there’s something cold and curious about nobody in this town having the slightest interest in knowing why Tony Scott jumped…still. The last time I spoke with him was during the Man on Fire junket, and he seemed in fine spiritual shape. Obviously he ended up deciding that leaving was a more attractive option than staying. Scott was apparently susceptible to depression (Mirtazapine was in his system) but nobody seems to want to know what the hell happened. It doesn’t figure that someone as talented and connected as he would just push the button. Some day an explanation or educated guess of some kind will surface.