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.

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I intend to visit the site of the 1968 My Lai massacre during next month’s Vietnam visit. I don’t care if the Vidotour guys want to drive me there or not. In fact I wish they wouldn’t. It’s located about 80 kilometers south of Hoi An so I’ll just rent a scooter and drive down myself. “Please help me with a scooter rental agency in Hoi An or Danang,” I’ve just said to the Vidotour guys. “If you don’t want to help me I’ll find one myself — no worries. But you should know I am committed to not spending my time in Vietnam like a typical American tourist. I am not going to allow myself to be insulated from the culture of Vietnam and I’m not going to led around by a tour guide and watched over like I’m seven years old. Thank you but I don’t want to be protected from life in Vietnam. I don’t want to look at it through a thick glass window. I want to step out in it and smell it, taste it, walk through it, be part of it.”

Yesterday morning TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman ran a piece that implied that the decision to delay George Clooney‘s Monuments Men was as much about getting it right as finishing the special effects in time. “It’s been a bit of a dance,” Clooney told Waxman earlier this month. “We’re trying to do the movie in the vein of war films, but you don’t want it to sound like The Great Escape. Those movies that were done in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they all had their own sort of life. You don’t want to do a replica, you have to do a new version.”

This is roughly the same thing Clooney told me on the Monuments Men set last May (“Monuments Memories“). “The Guns of Navarone doesn’t play so well any more,” Clooney quipped between takes. I wrote that he “was basically saying that if you’re going to make a good World War II film these days, you’ve got to improve upon the old models because they don’t fit the current sensibility.”

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Russell Brand is my absolute favorite comedian right now. If only he hadn’t appeared in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Arthur and Rock of Ages. What bond could have possibly existed between Brand and Katy Perry? I don’t respect Brand’s “don’t vote” attitude either, but the complacent attitude of Brand’s questioner, Jeremy Paxman, is far more problematic. As a Gawker commenter stated, “It’s not people like Brand who don’t vote that are part of the ‘problem’ — it’s assholes like Paxman who refuse to acknowledge the myriad of issues that our current political system has failed to solve” — or even address — “and who are completely unwilling to listen to alternatives who are part of the problem.”

Philomena Spoiler Warnings — proceed at your own risk: In yesterday’s “Feinberg vs. Bejo” piece, I noted that three of Scott Feinberg’s top ranked Best Actress contenders are on the soft side in terms of (a) having been given a really good role to work with and (b) really delivering the goods,” and that one of these is Philomena‘s Judi Dench. I characterized her performance as “spirited older lady behavior and dialogue — nothing that stupendous.”

A film critic colleague responded last night as follows: “I have to say I think you’re dead wrong [about Dench in Philomena]. For me, it’s maybe the greatest performance of her career, and I’d be shocked if she isn’t nominated. The Academy has nominated (heck, even awarded her) for much lesser work.”

Wells: “What Dench is doing in this film is boilerplate ‘older uneducated lady from the provinces’ schtick.”

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Over the years Oliver Stone and I have corresponded every so often between running into each other at press events and whatnot. The other day he wrote to remind me about the Bluray release of his Untold History of the United States, which came out on 10.15 at Amazon, Costco, Target etc. All 12 hours plus two unaired chapters. I wrote him back as follows:

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Who cares if Blue is the Warmest Color director Abdellatif Kechiche has been verbally scrapping with star Lea Seydoux, mostly recently in the form of an op-ed accusing Seydoux of having slandered him? “If my film had not been rewarded at Cannes,” Kechiche writes, “I would be a destroyed director today — a dead man, as they say.” And so what? All that matters are the performances that Kechiche got out of Seydoux and costar Adele Exarchopoulos, and the obvious fact that Blue is a touching, masterful work — an immersive film about falling in and out of love that anyone who’s ever been there can relate to in spades.

In an analysis piece called “Why Are Contenders Dropping Like Flies This Awards Season?,” The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg basically says that 2013’s Oscar competition is really tough. He!s saying that producers and filmmakers who are even a little bit uncertain about their chances are saying “eff it…let’s avoid the grief and the expense by opening next year.”

But in summarizing the Best Actress contenders with the greatest prospects, Feinberg ignores one of the absolute best female performances of the year — Berenice Bejo in Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past.

This is a bit odd given that three of Feinberg’s top ranked Best Actress contenders are on the soft side in terms of (a) having been given a really good role to work with and (b) really delivering the goods. I’m talking about Labor Day‘s Kate Winslet (forget it — not her year), Philomena‘s Judi Dench (spirited older lady behavior and dialogue — nothing that stupendous) and Saving Mr. Banks‘ Emma Thompson (a less-than-transporting portrait of a clenched, spinterish, fairly joyless British woman in a tweed suit). Osage County‘s Meryl Streep, Blue Jasmine‘s Cate Blanchett and Gravity‘s Sandra Bullock are okay, but anyone who says “there probably won’t even be room” for Blue Is The Warmest Color‘s Adele Exarchopoulos is committing a great sin in the eyes of the Movie Godz.

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.