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Right after last night’s screening of The Counselor I drove over to the Landmark Cinema plex at the Westside Pavillion for what was basically an illogical reason. (I’ll explain in a second.) I was hanging out in the lobby when I noticed Jane Fonda emerging from one of the theatres with her little white dog Tulea, a Coton de Tulear, in her arms. I figured she had just seen All Is Lost as she and Robert Redford made Barefooot in the Park and Electric Horseman together. But my first thought wasn’t “cool…Jane Fonda and her dog seeing a Redford film!” My first thought was “cool…Landmark lets people bring their dogs to movies!” Even though they probably don’t. They probably made an exception for Fonda because she’s Fonda.

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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.

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Last night L.A. Times guys John Horn and Steven Zeitchik reported that Martin Scorsese‘s Wolf of Wall Street will open on 12.25. In the process Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, an apparently negligible programmer, will probably be bumped into early 2014.

L.A. Times guy John Horn is reporting that George Clooney‘s The Monuments Men will not open on 12.18 “because the film’s visual effects could not be completed in time,” according to director-star Clooney. The World War II saga of a group of art commandos trying to save paintings and sculptures from being trashed or hidden by Nazis will be released Sony Pictures “early next year,” the story says.

“We just didn’t have enough time,” Clooney told Horn from London. “If any of the effects looked cheesy, the whole movie would look cheesy. We simply don’t have enough people to work enough hours to finish it.” Clooney tells Horn that “Oscar attention was never his goal for the film.”

The appearance of a trailer for James Toback and Alec Baldwin‘s Seduced and Abandoned (HBO, 10.28) gives me an excuse to re-run my hotel-room discussion with Toback at the Carlton hotel during last May’s Cannes Film Festival. Here’s the mp3. I called it “Greatest Gabber of the 21st Century.” The chat lasted 40-something minutes — candid, hilarious, insightful as usual.

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Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave was made for “a price,” and yet it includes a brief process shot of Washington, D.C. in 1841 — the year that Solomon Northrup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) was kidnapped and sold into slavery. It isn’t much but at least it’s an attempt to convey what the cityscape looked like back then. A generic establishing shot. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s any kind of similar shot of the nation’s capital in Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln. That always bothered me. I really wanted to see a nice, expensive CG panorama shot of Abraham Lincoln‘s Washington — muddy Pennyslvania Avenue, the Treasury building, the White House without the east or west wings, horses and carriages, men in top hats and women in hoop skirts, plumes of smoke from a thousand chimneys…the whole shebang. But Spielberg refused. I don’t even recall seeing a basic establishing shot of the White House and the grounds. Closeups of the north portico but no glimpses of the entire structure.

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].

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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?

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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.”

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“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.