The Counselor (2013)

“The Counselor” is a stunning failure from a seemingly A-grade group behind and in front of the camera. The story comes from the pen of Greatest Living American Writer Cormac McCarthy (“Blood Meridian”). The director is Brit Ridley Scott (“Alien”). Its rising star is Michael Fassbinder, playing a criminal lawyer known to us only as “Counselor” who dives willingly into the drug trade to get cash. Why? He wants diamonds for his Sweetie Pie (Penelope Cruz). Javier Bardem and Brad Pitt are among the villains. How can all this suck? I sat mouth agape in disbelief at this train wreck, and struggle to find words. OK. Cum on a car. No, really. See, Cameron Diaz loudly plays drug lord Bardem’s evil wife, an OTT Cruella De Ville as cast by “Real Housewives of New Jersey.” In one scene, she fucks and cums on hub’s sports car windshield. Really. Now the real sticky part (sorry): The WTF navel-gazing drivel that pours from the mouths of these great actors is even worse than that vision. Everyone in this film talks nonstop gibberish about fate, chance and death, and unlike every McCarthy book I have devoured, I begged for it to end. D

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

Bryan Signer’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” –- his first return to the Marvel Mutant franchise in 11 years -– has one of those plots that would jump several Marvel titles and have me buying and reading lest I miss a twist. “Future Past” is literal as we focus on clawed-hero Wolverine (Hugh Jackman, Marvel’s hardest working man) leaping from 2023 to 1973 to stop an Orwellian existence started by a mad scientist (Peter Dinklage) bent on domination. Indeed we get the heroes and villains of the two “X-Men” time-line franchises, with seniors Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan and sophomores James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender respectively playing hero Professor X and (non)villain Magneto, all for one admission. Singer serves the giddiest fun scene of the entire “X” films -- a punk speed demon (Evan Peters) breaks Magneto out of a Pentagon cell -– but, damn it, all the time leaping and plot erasing reminds me of the futility of so many comic books. No one dies. Watch a well-known character perish? No worries, wait three minutes, it won’t matter. Emotional investment? Suspense? Wet fireworks. Pay up for the next chapter, please. In three-color print, it worked. On screen? It rings empty. B-

12 Years a Slave (2013)

I don’t want to know anyone who doesn’t walk out of “12 Years a Slave” a crushed soul rebuilt from the ground up by the final and finally at-last hopeful moments of this true horror tale that is deft enough to show beautiful –- stunningly so -- landscapes amid recreations of terrifying acts of inhumanity that were the start of this great (and terrible) nation. 

These shots are clear: As they degrade the lives of those they see as less than themselves, the allegedly greatest of our kind –- rich, educated, and privileged beyond measure -– bring ruin to their own lives with the heinous need to control and take all treasure. 

Brit-born filmmaker Steve McQueen (“Shame”) has done what few American directors have dare tried: Tell the brutal story of slavery in the United States with unblinking detail and absolute you-are-there authority. 

This is the anti-“Gone with the Wind,” with its Southern celebration and happy slaves, and certainly the anti-let-us-have-fun-revenge-flick “Django Unchained,” which I like less and less the more I recall my two, one too many, viewings of it. 

Solomon Northup was a born free African-American in 1840s New York, a musician and engineer, until he was kidnapped and sold into bondage below the Northern line into death, rape, and forced labor that should shock anyone with a hair of decency. 

Chiwetel Ejiofor (“Children of Men”) plays Solomon, a man who must deny his own greatness and abilities, essentially his outright normalcy as a human, lest he be murdered or worse -- and yes there are worse fates -- by his white masters who will not see anyone of color as their equal. 

Solomon does this for 12 grueling years, his longest stretch as “property” of a sadistic drunkard (Michael Fassbender, a regular in McQueen’s films) who is abusive to all around him, including his own wife (Sarah Paulson) who can equal her husband’s acidic temper. 

This is an age when a black slave could be killed for learning to read or write, an act I cannot even muster in my head as a reality. But McQueen shows us many disturbing realities – including a brutal whipping that Solomon is forced to take part in – as every day, and as much a part of the American spirit as apple pie, George Washington and fireworks. 

To deny this, to ignore it, to wish it away as a past that should be forgotten and “get over it,” -– and I heard that a lot in Alabama and here in Virginia from racist cunts who then turn around and celebrate the rah-rah-rah spirit of the Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy, or what their university did in 1881 -- is a great as sin as those who meted out this disaster of inhumanity. 

Ejiofor truly, sorry this sounds cliché, this film has robbed me of most words, astounds in the lead role. I have been a fan of his for years, and now just stand in awe. He plays a freeman forced into not just slavery and near unspeakable cruelty an acting chore, a sick live stage act that lasts some 4,400 days, an educated, bright, angry, hopeful man who must show near none of those traits. 

That’s what sticks with me. Burying oneself as dead although you are yet alive, and long to see your wife and children, and parents, etc. 

In one bravo scene, three quarters, McQueen dishes out a scene that pulls no punches: Ejiofor as Northup looks out into the sky of his “home” and then directly into the camera at the audience, daring us to not just continue in his harrowing story but to never forget his suffering and the untold numbers of his fellow slave captives in an American that only called itself free, but in a blatant knowing lie, a wink as the rich and powerful killed hundreds of thousands, or more, of people of color, all for greed, and wealth, and land. 

The final moments, and this is no spoiler that Solomon lives, where he apologies –- apologies –- to his family for missing out on their lives, just laid waste to me. Can you imagine? I simply cannot, and have no words. McQueen and company have left me near silent. 

(Note: As with “The Butler,” a host of big names pop by for cameos, Brad Pitt among them, but these roles are mostly commoners, owners, bigots, and others, and the cameos do not stick in the crawl as, say, John Cusack does as Richard damn Nixon. OK, stop, hold on, Pitt almost grinds and pops too much a saint-like liberal progressive.)

Lest we need proof this story must be told, loud and in every corner, lest it ever be forgotten, a darling of the right-wing conservative movement has written a review of “12” –- without seeing the film, and stating he has no intention to -– saying McQueen and the film are too “harsh” on slavery, which has economic merit and can actually be healthy…. That such thought still carries cultural weight today is truly paralyzing. 

And makes “12” all the more vital. (If you can, read the book source. STAT.) A

Prometheus (2012)

The must re-watch shocking, amazing, perplexing, fascinating film of the summer, maybe the year. “Prometheus” is not exactly an “Alien” prequel, but a smarter, darker great-grandparent to such a prequel, fueled with curiosity of beginnings and origins, but not just of the classic 1979 sci-fi horror film that set off a new genre and exploded my young mind, but where all life began. The questions and the answers here, as in life, vex more than soothe and settle, and I’d settle for nothing less. Weeks out, I still obsess about this entry.

“Alien” – for all its glorious cinematic blood and guts, big hidden ideas and woman as warrior hero/savior of a kitty, was sort of like “Jaws in Space,” a monster film. A  brilliant one, no less. With exploding-from-the-inside chests and a real Paranoid Android, thank you, Thom Yorke. I love that film, endlessly. This is far deeper, and comes from not just the mind of original director Ridley Scott, but co-screenwriter Damon Lindelof, the man behind the question-baiting, answer-withholding enigma-within-a-puzzle “Lost,” an absolute favorite TV show, and I don’t watch much TV shows.

All this in a summer flick, I love it. I digress. 

To the film: Despite the million bitch-and-moan reviews you see everywhere, those pointing out scenes don’t match up, we’re not even on the same planet -- LV-426 -- that Ripley et al landed on in our 1979, the movie’s 2122. Instead, here, much of the action takes place in the year 2093, on a moon dubbed LV-223, and believed to be the exact spot of the creation of humankind, all the universe, or so a series of ancient cave paintings tell two scientists, one a Christian named Shaw (Noomi Rapace of the European “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” trilogy) and the other an agnostic hard-ass named Charlie (Logan Marshall-Green of “Devil”). The two brains become the center of a $1 trillion, multi-year mission to find the planet, and meet our makers, God, or –- so dubbed here –- The Engineers. (Go engineers!)

Yes, things go bad soon after touchdown and a non-human, but definitely hand-built massive structure, is explored, and bodies are ripped apart, stomachs opened, and -– in one nasty scene -– a worm crawls out of a person’s eyeball. (I refuse to give any spoilers, so I’m being as vague as possible here, but think this: Worst science class field trip ever.) But this isn’t a B-horror movie, it’s Scott’s bid to give us a pre-telling of not just “Alien,” but possibly “2001: A Space Odyssey,” every great science fiction film ever made, including “Blade Runner,” and our own lives. Connections to the 1979 flick are ... on your own to figure out, off screen, before or after this action.

“Alien” is just one child of this movie, this story, this Father. So many more films are wide open to explore, even those closer to home than anything in the films we all know and love, save Parts 3 and 4, and anything with “Predator” in the title. To wit: Dig the opening scene in which a massive, ivory-colored being drinks a strange, harsh potion atop a massive waterfall, and immediately starts to literally crumble. From the inside out. A disc, flat then tall, hovers above. He falls, splashes dead into the water, and his decaying cells are reborn in the water into new live, and we can flash guess from the next jump to Scotland, we just saw the birth of humans on Earth. All us.

In a summer flick. (Have I mentioned that before? Call me smitten.)

It’s not a perfect film, too many of the scientists, engineers, doctors and brainiacs aboard the ship must act foolish in order to meet their end, and a late-in-the-game self-surgery procedure (the film’s biggest talk-about-it scene that will live on infamy and YouTube clips for decades) would lay a person flat for a week, but the wildly resilient character bounces back far too quickly. (Note: The person ingests and injects enough drugs to kill every member of Guns N’ Roses, so the script leaves wiggle room on that point. Almost.) 

But damn the nitpicks, I loved it all, from the sound design, the vast sets of the human space craft (the ironic title of the film is its name) to the caverns of the alien temples and spacecraft, and Michael Fassbender’s David, an android with no outward feelings or emotion, but all too aware that as his creators -– mankind -- are all capable of being flawed, hopeless, hopeful, beautiful, addictive, messy, psychotic, murderous, and kind, why cannot man’s Creator also be that. Scott even plays off of Fassbender’s godly good-looks and stranger-among-strangers post as David obsessively watches and mimics Peter O’Toole’s performance in “Lawrence of Arabia.” Even the 3D version rocks, including the surgery scene, and the eyeball, quite effective. Also, will someone please nominate Fassbender for an Oscar already, the man from “Shame" near owns this epic tale.

This “prequel’ is no “Thing 2011” rehash -– that’s the worst this film could be –- Scott is shooting for the heavens, the stars, and beyond, and that’s something to celebrate during a summer of caped hero movies and Adam Sandler comedies. Let the uncut, full, master version of Scott’s vision come quick. God may be in the details. Imperfections and all, this is my kind of summer flick. Bravo to all. A  

Haywire (2012)

Steven Soderbergh’s “Haywire” exists for one reason: To show mixed-martial arts fighter Gina Carano kick the snot out of such Hollywood heartthrobs as Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender, and Ewan McGregor. She does this exceedingly well. The fight scenes are fast, feel brazenly real, and contain none of the CGI’d wirework gunk that turns most female vigilante flicks into fetishized trash. I’m looking at you, “Underworld.” When Tatum pummels Carano in the opening scene, the sight is shocking. Carrano gives back, brutally. Alas, the action is all that’s worth noting as the story (by Lem Dobbs, who wrote Soderbergh’s “Limey”) is a merry-go-round of betrayals so outlandishly unbelievable and confusing, I gave up tracking details and dialogue. Speaking of, and I pray I never meet Carano, but her delivery is tepid, with at least half her words red-flagged as post- production re-recording. She has a tough screen presence, but so much of this film is awkward talk that it feels long at 93 minutes. In a sequel, Carano must fight Liam Neeson. Fact. B-

A Dangerous Method (2011)

When David Cronenberg -- master of exploding head psychological atom bombs, and violence mixed with sex – said he was making “A Dangerous Method,” the ménage a trois between pioneer head-shrinks Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, I was stoked. I wanted envelopes torched, singed paper ashes blown in the faces of prudes. So count me wanting, put out, so to speak. Except for a few wha? spanking scenes, “Dangerous” is all talk, and I should not be surprised, as this was once called “Talking Cure.” Our focus is on Spielrein, German Jew, wealthy, and hysterically mad, put in the care of Jung (Michael Fassbender), the protégé of master head doc Freud (Viggo Mortensen). Sabina bends Jung’s tight-starched collar, and Freud feuds, and Word War I dawns, and Jung’s last scene has him going like Michael Corleone’s last scene in “Godfather, Part II,” lawn chair and all. No burning desire, no passion. Talk. Knightly’s accent grinds, and Mortensen’s Freud has all the zing of Ask Jeeves, so it’s Fassbender’s show, and he’s damn good, but a notch below “Shame,” the 2011 sex-obsessed flick that’s all dangerous method. B-

Shame (2011)

“Shame.” Call me crazy, but it’s all about the liquids inside us. Poison. The bodily fluid liquid Shame in all of us. A weight, a black hole, a soul crusher. The bodily fluids must be purged, at all costs. They. Must. As demons are exorcised, memories are downed in drugs and booze. Liquids purged. This crazy-daring-disturbing-beautiful art flick, from Brit director Steve McQueen (not the dead Hollywood star of the 1960s, but a young black Brit artist) follows Brandon, an Irish-born, American-raised 30-ish man in New York City. Some dub him a sex addict. Maybe. He certainly relentlessly, ceaselessly, and carelessly picks up sex partners where ever he can find them, or pays for the pleasure for quick encounters. And if no woman is available, porn via Web or magazine will do, and he can masturbate out the semen from his body. His rage, his demon. Men will do, too, to help get that liquid anchor out. What past he leads?

Rising star of 2011 Michael Fassbender, quickly becoming a favorite actor, should have landed an Oscar nomination for his Brandon, a tortured, lonely, angry soul, long past dead inside, who – in the long, wordless climax (I mean that many ways) – cannot fathom intimacy or love or a relationship, and during a three-way, looks as tortured as a man undergoing water-boarding. His one shot at intimacy, an actual relationship, is a full disaster, he calls the woman boring and denounces love, and fails in bed, sexually. It’s all about release, nothing more. There is no love in this world. Not here.

Brandon’s cold, hard, life, all the sex and porn, leftover take-out, and relentlessly repeated classical music played as white noise is thrown a devastating loop when his equally mentally unstable sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up in his shower, unexpected. Uninvited. Unwanted. Unbounded. She longs for a connection to Brandon. His openness at her nudity and she at his, hints at a dark, horrible childhood. Never explained. We don’t need to know, and maybe would be too horrified to know the truth. Their first run-in onscreen, I thought she was his ex-wife. I said dark and disturbing, and I meant it. Few films ever go this dark.

If Brandon ejaculated out his pain through sex, masturbation, or any stimulant, Sissy is a cutter. Blood. A long series of scars mark her wrists and arms, and she wants to lose more blood. And she will in the end. Pints. The whole movie is liquids -- blood, semen, music, fast-moving subway cars, and rain, never stopping, spinning in an endless circle, down a bottomless drain. Even the music is liquid. Always moving, flowing.

The final scenes mimic the first scenes. McQueen’s film is epic, and cold and small, and amazing, full of sex and nudity. That climatic three-way starts out explicit and erotic as hell, as porn, and then turns painful as Brandon shows nothing but misery, a cold, hard punch to audience-mandated expectations for such a NC-17 sex film. This is eroticism turned ugly, anti-erotic. If the screenplay, by McQueen and Abi Morgan (who wrote the lesser “Iron Lady”) is slight on details, McQueen’s camera – the cinematography is beautiful, and in ultra-wide screen – tells us so much more. Watch how, when Brandon and Sissy talk, the camera is behind them, their faces, eyes, expressions cut off. Cold. Only when they fight, scream, yell, and he attacks her, him fully naked, do we see their faces. As dark as this film goes, I want a re-watch. STAT.

Fassbender bares it all, literally. The rage inside him is barely contained, and when he stares down a woman, his flirtation by eye, masks something far darker. That’s acting. Art. Beauty, Danger. Sex. And ... bottomless doom. The character of Brandon barely speaks. Mulligan, she of “An Education” and “Drive,” will not not speak, and lays out a tortured version of “New York, New York,” so dark, so long, so painful and hopeless, I’m not certain what we saw on screen was reality within the film, but her singing/talking directly to her hardened, hard-on brother, how the cold, dark, big city -- life itself -- will kill them in the end. Brandon cries at the moment, by his sister’s beauty and pain, and is horrified to see that kind of liquid, a tear, come from inside him. Pulsating rage follows.

Do not trust anyone says this film is dead and cold; it is about death and coldness, and sex, in all its glory, and pain and misery and Shame. And always about liquids, bodily fluids, escaping from the body, and the pain of an unexplained past. Pure fucking genius. Bravo, Mr. McQueen, and Mr. Fassbender.A

Super 8 and X-Men: First Class (2011)

“Super 8” and “X-Men: First Class” are not two films I would toss together on any given day, but they are sealed in my mind as a weird double feature separated by a week or so. They are sold as Summer 2011 Box Office Hits, but instead happily riff and thrive off film genres that no longer get the respect they deserve, even if they fall short of beloved and timeless classics.

“Super 8” is a throwback to the five-star films of my youth, “The Goonies” and “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” fathered by two masters-of-cinema dads, one older and one younger, producer Steven Spielberg and writer/director J.J. Abrams. With a pedigree such as that, it should be the Film of the Year. Yet, it’s not. Maybe I’m too far removed from my 11-year-old self, the year I saw and desperately wanted nothing more than to be a “Goonie.” (Hang out and kiss older girls? Fight villains and plunder pirate treasure!?! Yes and yes, please.)

The plot follows a group of young teens (led by Joel Courtney as a boy grieving over his dead mother) as they get sucked up in a spectacular alien conspiracy in their small Ohio steel town after they witness a spectacular train crash. The title comes from the movie they are making -- a zombie flick -- on old 8 mm film, this being the late 1970s. I remember doing that. In full Spielberg vein, the children are the heroes, and the adults must grow up.

“Super 8” also mixes in heavy doses of government madness as in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and it's a wild joy for a while. The teens play to each other, not the audience. The in-jokes of 1979 are so damn accurate and funny. But, damn it all, when the big bad alien is fully revealed, the film goes soft and flaky, and breaks its back reaching for sentimental pathos. All tension and fun evaporates. Also, the creature looks so …eye-rolling obvious CGI. Hey, guys, why not go for old-school puppetry and in-camera tricks? Speaking of cameras, Abrahams’ OCD love for lens flare kills the finale as faces are near blurred by blue light pops. It’s never a good sign when, during an emotional finale, one sits there thinking, “What the hell lens did they use?” But that’s nitpicking. I'll shut up.

Yes, “X-Men: First Class” is a prequel to the 10-year-old film franchise and yet another superhero movie in this, The Summer of Super Hero Movies. But that’s surface. Directed by Matthew Vaughn, “X:FC” is actually an old-school 1960s spy flick born of John Le Carre novels, James Bond films and “Fail Safe” paranoid drama, spiced with an old revenge thriller plot. We get CIA agents, war room grand-standing, fantastic hideouts for the villains (a submarine!), secret bases in plain sight for the good guys, strip clubs and old Nazis in hiding.

Much of the film takes place in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world almost nuked itself into radioactive dust. As with “Inglourious Basterds” or a James Ellroy novel, “X:FC ” takes this history and bends it. The gist: What if the whole United States/Soviet Union stand-off was the wicked master plan of a martini-sipping megalomaniac ex-Nazi Mutant (Kevin Bacon) grooving on the wish that nuclear fallout will bring him to power. Naturally, it is Charles Xavier, a peaceful Mutant (he is a telekinetic) who must keep the party from going nuclear. James McAvoy plays the young Xavier, before the wheelchair and baldness.

There’s also the rogue man out for bloody redemption who drives the whole plot forward. This is Erik Lensherr (sic), aka Magneto, an ex-Jew out to slay the Nazis who killed his family. Bacon’s character being target No. 1. Lensherr is far more interesting than Xavier, basically taking the place of Wolverine – violence-prone outsider – in the 2000 film “X-Men.” I’m assuming you know what I’m talking about, all this name dropping and Mutant talk. Apologies if you don’t. Magneto is played by Michael Fassbender who by law must become the next James Bond. (Ian McKellan played elder Magneto in the previous films.)

It’s a daring canvas, asking movie-goers to know real history. Despite how dark and dirty Vaughn stretches – he provides a gruesome death that will forever change the way you look at pocket change – I felt he wanted to go further. Darker than “The Dark Knight,” with more meaning. Too many kills cut away, sloppily, before they end. I actually could have done without the First Class in “First Class,” as the variety of young Mutants (with Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique) on display don’t hold water against McAvoy and Fassbender. There’s more nitpicking, from an “X-Men” comic book nerd’s perspective, but hey … how many summer flicks feature JFK and men in turtlenecks?

Both films: B