Violent, occasionally gruesome stuff happens in the novels of Cormac McCarthy, who wrote the screenplay for Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25). He seems to have a particular passion for slicings, stranglings and the spurting of arterial blood. There’s a famous campfire scene in Blood Meridien in which a guy takes a big knife and slices off another guy’s head, just like that. Dark purple blood comes spurting out of the guy’s neck and goes hissing onto the fire. There’s that arterial splatter strangulation at the beginning of No Country For Old Men. And there’s all manner of grisly murder in The Counselor. There’a scene in the recently-published script in which Javier Bardem‘s Reiner, a drug dealer with Brian Grazer hair, talks about strangling guys with a mechanical “bolito” device [after the jump].

A crudely framed video of an early trailer for Darren Aronofsky‘s Noah appeared earlier today and then was taken down. Side issue: How does Russell Crowe‘s Noah, a simple man living in ancient times, give himself a nice clean buzzcut? There were knives in Noah’s time but no scissors or razors or electric shears. So how did he manage a skinhead cut?

For the most part Hans Zimmer‘s 12 years A Slave score (which hasn’t been commercially released yet) is gentle, lulling, unassuming. Zimmer has called it “translucent.” But there are also a couple of tracks that have a bassy, badass, electronic-tuba-from-hell sound. Obviously conveying something evil and malevolent — the sound of slavers. There’s one (track #4 on a Slave soundtrack that I received this morning) that could be used for a scene in which Godzilla goes stomping through Tokyo. If you ask me Zimmer deserves an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score for this alone

The contemporary sound of this “horror” track was explained by Zimmer in a recent Collider interview, to wit: “Brad Pitt said [this] in Toronto…it wasn’t my quote…that it took an Englishman to make a story about a story about one of the great tragedies of America,” Zimmer told Steve “Frosty” Weintraub. “”12 Years a Slave, which is truly a period piece…..I constantly kept thinking it’s addressing our current…it’s set in the present because it’s the conversations we’ve never had, it’s the conversation we still need to have. And if it does anything it should start a conversation, and I think that’s what McQueen does brilliantly.”

“It’s no Margin Call, but still worth your investment,” said a Toronto Globe and Mail review of Costa Gavras‘s Capital (Cohen Media, 10.25). “Clearly, Costa-Gavras has lost none of his kinetic pacing or his cerebral way with thrills. Unfortunately, the script later gets corrupted itself by a sexual melodrama that lacks both sense and sultriness. However, the picture regain[s] its balance to deliver a mainly entertaining lecture on the root of all evil.” What scares me is the trailer’s on-the-nose English narration.

I’m tapping this out from seat 36D on my American Airlines flight from Heathrow to LAX. That’s right — it’s a Boeing 777-300ER with international effing wifi. $19 bucks for the whole flight. Not the fastest but a blessing all the same. Plus an electrical outlet for each seat. Limited availability now — JFK to Heathrow, Miami to Heathrow, Dallas/Fort Worth to Hong Kong, Miami to Sau Paulo. I’m flying American from here on whenever I go to Europe. Today’s flight left London at 2pm GMT. It’s now 10:45 GMT or 2:45 Pacific. The LAX landing should happen around 4:45 pm.

HE’s Best Films of 2013 (features and docs, merit alone, in this order, forget award season for now): 1. Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave; 2. Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis; 3. J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost; 4. Abdellatif Kechiche‘s Blue Is The Warmest Color, 5. Spike Jonze‘s Her; 6. Alfonso Cuaron‘s Gravity; 7. Jean Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyer’s Club; 8. Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past; 9. Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight; 10. Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha; 11. Morgan Neville‘s 20 Feet From Stardom; 12. Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station; 13. Steven Soderbergh‘s Behind The Candelabra; 14. Paul Greengrass‘s Captain Phillips; 15. Jeff Nichols‘ Mud; 16. Alexander Payne‘s Nebraska; 17. Nicole Holfocener‘s Enough Said; 18. Ziad Doueiri‘s The Attack; 19. Destin Daniel Cretton‘s Short Term 12; 20. Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color; 21. Gabriela Cowperthwaite‘s Blackfish; 22. John Lee Hancock‘s Saving Mr. Banks; 23. Ron Howard‘s Rush; 24. Henry Alex Rubin‘s Disconnect; 25. Greg ‘Freddy’ Camalier‘s Muscle Shoals; 26. Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers; 27. Penny Lane‘s Our Nixon.

Contrary to tweeted assumptions, I didn’t post my Saving Mr. Banks review “late.” It went up almost exactly concurrent with last night’s 11 pm embargo. Precisely 10:59 pm London time. I don’t care what the time code says. Finis.

The British-based Eureka Entertainment already has my order for their upcoming Red River Bluray (streeting on 10.28, arriving in early November) so I can’t do anything about it, but I’m faintly pissed by the screen captures in Dr. Svet Atanasov‘s 10.18 Blu-ray.com review. Every shot appears to be swarming with grainstorm mosquitoes. Which means that the Bluray doesn’t deliver a decent Blu-ray “bump”, or the effect described in my 10.12 review of Sony’s From Here To Eternity Bluray. Atanasov’s words strongly suggest there’s nothing transformative or intoxicating in this new Red River. He’s actually pleased that “there are no traces of problematic degraining corrections” and that “sharpening adjustments have not been performed.” Let’s try this again. I want something better than the last DVD, and if that means a Bluray with “problematic degraining” then please fucking give me that.

My LAX flight leaves Heathrow at 2 pm, or six hours from now. I’ll want to be at the terminal by noon, which means leaving for Heathrow on the Underground by 10:30 am or two and half hours from now. I’m heading out for breakfast now and then I’ll shower and pack. The flight will last 11 hours and 15 minutes…good God. And no wifi. I guess I can do some writing on the pad and then post material when I arrive. Arriving at LAX around five-something. I’ve been up since 4:30 am. Body clock doesn’t know which end is up.

Yesterday’s viewing of Saving Mr. Banks reminded me once again that the lead performances that win the most applause are (a) almost always from name-brand actors and (b) those that they haven’t stretched or reached for but have relaxed into like an old shoe. We all respect and admire the effort and artistry that goes into an exotic transformational performance, but most of the time we prefer the company of “friends” whom we’ve come to know and feel comfortable with. This is what movie stars do, and why we pay to see them in films and will often praise their “performances”, when in fact they’re mainly just sharing with us in a way that we like. They’re using a little bit of vocal or body English to pass along a feeling of “performing” and that’s fine, but we’re mostly paying for an agreeable hang-out.

In short, movie stars basically play themselves, and that’s all we want them to do. The movie-star performances that win Oscars tend to be those in which the consensus is that “this is the best fit yet — the most natural and filled-out act of self-portraiture this or that actor has ever given us.”