Ridley Scott is 81-years-old but he isn't going to be throwing in the towel anytime soon. The maverick filmmaker just keep working and there are no signs of him stopping either. Just look at his stats, he's released 10 films in the last 12 years. The most polarizing of which has to be the 2013 movie "The Counselor." Written by none other than renowned author Cormac McCarthy, ‘The Counselor’ revolved around a lawyer and drug deal gone bad. However, if it can claim any kind of fame, it has become infamous for its scene of a scantily clad Cameron Diaz having sex with Javier Bardem’s very expensive car.
Speaking to Variety, Guillermo del Toro expressed his unadorned love for “The Counselor,” calling it “brilliant” and a film he loves on a “molecular level.” The filmmaker states how “underappreciated” the film is, acknowledging that Hollywood is a business, but “we can’t lose track of the art inherent in filmmaking.”
Even Ridley Scott himself has been on-record as saying that he believes 20th Century Fox didn't market ”The Counselor” properly and that it deserved better than being tossed over by the studio. “I really loved ‘The Counselor,’ which should have been f—ing HUGE!” he told the Toronto Sun a few years ago. Adding, “with that cast, we should have had a $50-million weekend. After the marketing and advertising on that, I was ready to kill somebody. You don’t preview films like that. You keep them in a box … you’ve got Brad [Pitt], you’ve got Cameron Diaz, you’ve got Javier Bardem, you’ve got Penelope Cruz you’ve got Michael Fassbender…are you f—ing kidding me? You don’t show it, you advertise and you put it out and you’ll have a $50-million opening weekend.”
I'm not ready to agree with Scott and del Toro just yet on "The Counselor," however, I have been meaning to give it another shot regardless. It was a film, that fed me something I did not expect — a plotless romp with graphic violence, weird sex and an abundance of McCarthy's legendary “philosophical speak”.
Despite its 35% Rotten Tomatoes score, some well-respected critics have defended the film (go read Glenn Kenny's review or Manhola Dargis').
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.