There’s a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men, where sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his deputy arrive at the site of a particularly grisly murder. “It’s a mess, ain’t it sheriff?” asks the deputy. Surveying the corpses and the wreck of a burned out SUV, Bell replies, “If it ain’t, it’ll do till a mess gets here.”

There’s a maxim writers tend to trot out when trying to put some distance between themselves and a particularly whiffy adaptation of one of their novels: ‘my book, their film’. In the event Cormac McCarthy tries something similar to disassociate himself from the shitstorm currently enveloping The Counsellor, it seems unlikely it would hold much credibility. Unfortunately for McCarthy, there has been much pre-release hoo-hahing about the fact The Counsellor is his first original screenplay: what McCarthy should take away from the experience is that what works well enough on page doesn’t necessarily translate successfully to screen. But McCarthy isn’t entirely culpable: as the film’s director, Ridley Scott clearly has some understanding on what works and what doesn’t.

Is The Counsellor really ‘the worst movie ever made’, as one review claimed? No, of course not; and I say that confidently as someone who’s watched Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. The Counsellor is just extraordinarily odd. You could perhaps claim that The Counsellor is a bold and provocative artistic statement – although Ridley Scott is not exactly known for making challenging, unorthodox movies – or simply what happens when an acclaimed novelist makes an ill-conceived sidestep into movies in cahoots with a starry-eyed filmmaker who has fatally misjudged the author’s ability to deliver screen-worthy dialogue.

Let’s say, first of all, that I very much wanted to like The Counsellor: I like a number of Scott’s films, I thought Michael Fassbender (who plays the titular counselor) was the best thing in Scott’s last film, Prometheus – and more pertinently, I was broadly positive about the published screenplay. But the problem persists from page to screen, that the dialogue is elliptical and baroque. For much of the film’s two-hour running time, (mostly) men deliver long speeches to one another about greed, sex and death. Fine on the page, less so when delivered by other people.

The film concerns Fassbender’s Counsellor, who specializes in representing shady individuals along the Tex-Mex border. He succumbs to the lure of the once in a lifetime deal, involving 625 kilos of cocaine being transported from Mexico to Chicago in a septic tank. As you can imagine, everything goes tits up in a ditch. Along the way, we meet a tantalizing array of nightclub owners, femme fatales, drug cartel jefes, shady businessmen and killers. A typical McCarthy pre-occupation – the self-destructive choices a man makes – provides the film’s motor. This is ostensibly a world familiar from countless other movies – but unfortunately, it isn’t one that’s particularly suited to sustaining the dialogue McCarthy has written here, where long portentous speeches sit awkwardly in what is essentially a neo-noir thriller.

There is some fun to be had, particularly the scenes involving Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem. Pitt – whose audio book readings for McCarthy’s Border Trilogy are terrific, incidentally – plays Westray, a sharp-suited intermediary, while Bardem’s entrepreneur Rainer is a wearer of brightly coloured trousers and a spinner of tall tales. His hair is as hilarious as it was in No Country For Old Men. Fassbender, meanwhile, is curiously passive: the irony is that much of the film revolves around the counsel he receives from the other characters. I’m less convinced by Penelope Cruz as Laura – the Counsellor’s lover – and Cameron Diaz’ Malkina.

They show up McCarthy’s weaknesses as a writer: he doesn’t do love stories and he doesn’t write women well. Cruz has little to do about from look imperiled, while Cameron Diaz has a lot more to chew on with Malkina, but I’m not entirely convinced she’s successful in her endeavours. Malkina is an amplified femme fatale: we can tell that, because she keeps pet cheetahs, with whom she empathises far than her fellow human beings. In the film’s most extraordinary scene, she has sex with Rainer’s yellow Ferrari. What complexity McCarthy may have written into the character is airbrushed out in favour of some narrowing of the eyelids and pantomime pouts. Ooh, look: she’s got a tattoo up her back, she must be trouble.

Where I think the film works best is in the look Scott gives it: a sleek, designer quality that acts as a corrective to the trailer parks, motel rooms or grimy bars familiar from this kind of border yarn. Everyone wears crisp shirts, the furnishings look expensive, giant Macs twinkle discretely in the corner of airy apartment dwellings, the surface of swimming pools remain unrippled. Ultimately, though, it’s just a very confused film, tonally flat and slightly dull yet capable of moments of jaw-dropping strangeness. I keep thinking – maybe this is all deliberate, maybe this is Scott completely upending our received notions of what a mainstream movie should be. Maybe it’s head-spinning genius.

But yet. Would a conscientious script editor, a director less in thrall to the writer or simply significant cast changes have made it better? It’s foolhardy to speculate, of course, and I wish I could be more positive about it. You could argue that the reason why so few of McCarthy’s books have made it onto the screen – Scott himself spent years trying to film Blood Meridian – is that his writing is far too disconnected from conventional filmmaking orthodoxies to work. Which isn’t entirely the case – both No Country For Old Men and The Road worked very well, but the Coens did good, if subtle work to streamline the former while the latter was light on dialogue in the first place. There’s an adaptation of an early McCarthy novel to come – Child Of God – and advance reports at least seem favourable. Which perhaps makes the failures of The Counsellor all the more galling.

THE COUNSELLOR OPENS IN THE UK ON NOVEMBER 15

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Celebrating anniversaries has, I guess, become second nature in the music industry now. A quick pass through the reviews pages in the last couple of issues of Uncut reveal anniversary reissues and special editions for Nirvana, Billy Bragg, Tears For Fears, R.E.M, Four Tet and Bob Marley.

There’s another significant anniversary coming later this month – the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination, the events of which are marked in a new film, Parkland. Of course, the Kennedy assassination has proved irresistible to writers and filmmakers; on Saturday, The Guardian published a lengthy piece rounding up 50 years of Kennedy fiction, and as if to demonstrate that there is still some water slopping around at the bottom of the well, The New Yorker recently reviewed two new books about Kennedy. Considering the weight of existing material on the subject, I’d have expected the anniversary to be marked more substantially than a couple of biographies and what is, admittedly, a fairly low-key film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgPjt_BRLvY

Parkland is named after the Dallas hospital where Kennedy was treated after he was shot and then, two days later, Lee Harvey Oswald. For the film’s first half hour, director Peter Landesman follows the Parkland staff – played by Zac Efron and Marcia Gay Harden among others – as they go about the grim, urgent business of trying to save Kennedy’s life. The film then spreads out, to follow various key figures in the unfolding drama including Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), Secret Service agent Forrest Sorrels (Billy Bob Thorton) and Robert Oswald (James Badge Dale). Parkland comes with an intriguing provenance: the script is adapted from a book called Reclaiming History written by Vincent Bugliosi, a former District Attorney probably best known for prosecuting Charles Manson in 1969 for the Tate-LaBianca murders. I’d imagine conspiracy theorists could have a lot of fun with that.

Parkland’s intentions are no doubt honourable, although I found it lacking. It feel curiously disconnected, not to say hurried. There’s a lot of jumping around, and 93 minutes doesn’t feel enough running time to dig into the stories of these disparate characters. At least, Landesman successfully teases some interesting details out of these well-documented events. For instance, the Secret Service detail insist that Kennedy’s coffin be flown back in the cabin rather than stowed in the hold, which necessitates furiously sawing a chunk out of the side of Air Force One to get it through the door. Lee Harvey Oswald’s funeral, during which Robert – along with his mother and sister-in-law, the only mourners – has to ask the gathered press photographers to help him lower his brother’s coffin into the grave. To its credit, the film doesn’t engage directly with conspiracies surrounding the assassination – though one scene near the end where an FBI agent destroys a file on Oswald to protect the agency’s Dallas office takes on significance to those hunting for the ‘truth’ behind Kennedy’s murder in subsequent years.

It’s actually a busy week for me, film-wise: I’m off to see Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor tonight and (potentially more profitably) Alexander Payne’s Nebraska tomorrow and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave on Thursday. I’ll report back on those as and when I can – I’ll try and get some thoughts up about The Counsellor this week, at least, as it seems to be generating a lot of quite strong feedback. In the meantime – in case you’ve not already seen it – I should flag up the small matter of our current issue, which is on sale now. Our cover star Joni Mitchell discusses her remarkable career, and inside this month’s issue there’s the 50 greatest singer songwriter albums, Robert Fripp, Bon Scott, George Harrison, Nils Lofgren, Lloyd Cole, reviews including The Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, Kinks, White Denim, Captain Beefheart, Midlake, the Pixies and more.

Enjoy the rest of your week.

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A lot of things can happen when you watch The Necks, the magnificent Australian improvising trio, play live. Sometimes, you can become fixated on prosaic details: how does Tony Buck’s left hand keep vibrating that shaker onto his drumkit at such an ecstatic velocity for so long, for instance? Do they have hidden clocks that allow them to move so elegantly to a conclusion without appearing to even acknowledge each other’s presence, let alone look at one another? Will unzipping my coat be an unacceptably noisy intervention?

Other times, these practical questions can shade into quasi-mystical ones, about how three musicians can work so deeply together that their rapport and collective understanding begins to seem uncanny. At the start of the first of three nights at possibly my favourite venue in London, Café Oto in Dalston, Buck, Lloyd Swanton (double bass) and Chris Abrahams (piano) begin by doing nothing for what feels like a minute or so. Abrahams takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes. Buck arranges his bells to be within easy reach of his kit. There is a long pause, then Swanton plays a brief eight-note phrase on his bass, pauses, exhales, extends the pause a little longer, and does it again. This goes on for maybe five minutes: a gentle, spare, meditative induction into the Necks’ extraordinary soundworld.

In some of my past writing about The Necks, like this old review of “Silverwater” , I’ve found myself falling into a kind of diaristic, blow-by-blow account of their progressions. It’s a method that predictably has shortcomings, sketched out very lucidly in a great piece by Grayson Currin on their new album, “Open” ; an album, by the by, that received a rather underwhelmed review in the current Uncut, but which, for me, is one of their best, and in fact one of my favourite releases by anyone this year.

Like most Necks albums, “Open” consists of one piece, stretching a few minutes over an hour, in which a lot goes on in such a graceful way that you can be fooled into thinking it’s a kind of minimalist operation, even though this particular operation involves a little guitar, organ and synths alongside the basic tools of the jazz trio. Watching them live, though, it becomes apparent that their method is rooted in patience and measure rather than minimalism, as such, even though Abrahams’ flurries can recall Steve Reich from time to time.

I wasn’t taking notes at the show, so a precise reconstruction of what The Necks actually do last night is beyond me, at this point. The first piece lasts about 50 minutes, and gradually builds from that solo bass opening, though not in any conventionally linear or predictable way, into some truly dense and ferocious passages. I remember Abrahams playing great wild clusters of notes that make me think of Messaien, and the ringing intensity of Buck’s playing as a bell bounces across the surface of a drum. That sound, midway between a measure of intervals in meditation practise and a fire alarm, is what lingers most about the elevated frenzy of it all; that, and Buck’s closing gestures, when he skids the bell across the drum skin to create an almost dub-like effect.

After a 30-minute break, the second set begins with Abrahams in more romantic mode; a little Harold Budd, maybe, or Satie, or Keith Jarrett – this music evolves so subtly, so constantly, that reference points and echoes come and go very quickly even as, once again, you’re lulled into a belief that not much is actually happening. This time, there’s more linear momentum to the piece; I say ‘piece’ because, even though it’s by all accounts totally improvised, Necks music seems to function with an innate logic and structure which makes a word like ‘jam’ seem completely inappropriate.

Anyhow, Abrahams keeps working out discreet new strategies of attack while Buck and Swanton are functioning, after a fashion, as a more orthodox rhythm section for, I don’t know, 15 or 20 minutes. Swanton’s bassline is kind of funky, in its way, and Buck is using a shaker in lieu of one stick to create this thick, rich beat that moves somewhere between New Orleans ritual and cosmic jazz without really being anything like either.

This morning I tried to find an analogue in the Necks’ catalogue – “Rum Jungle” from “Mindset”, maybe? – but nothing I played – the rest of “Mindset”, “Silverwater”, “Fatal” from “Chemist” – was quite like it. The show was closer to the propulsive spirit of those three albums (though not their sometimes post-rockish phases) than the more spectral domain of “Open”, but The Necks aren’t just an unclassifiable band, each individual piece they play is too slippery, too evanescent to be classified even within their own catalogue. Continuing the hunt, I ended up listening to “Black Unity”, and that wasn’t exactly right, either.

Eventually, back at the show, Buck drops the shaker and starts swinging round his kit, focusing intensely on the cymbal, and for a little while The Necks sound like what I’d cautiously describe as a normal, frighteningly accomplished jazz trio. But then they’re away again, Abraham excavating dark resonances from the furthest reaches of his keyboard; the sense of perpetual movement, fluid investigation, genuine originality stronger than ever. The Necks are one of the great spectacles in live music that I’ve come across in the past decade or so; if you have tickets for tonight or tomorrow, I can’t begin to explain how much I envy you.

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Picture: Holimage

Avatar has much to answer for. Blue-skinned aliens aside, James Cameron’s film was famously heralded (at least by the PR team) as the future of cinema – a digital epic to change the shape of the modern blockbuster.

It’s a claim that’s increasingly hard to substantiate, with little evidence to suggest it’s done much more than artificially – and perhaps only temporarily – boost box office income for studios in an era of financial uncertainty. As a format, it seemed like more than a gratuitous bell-and-whistle extra to sell expensive tickets: any old rubbish got kitted out in 3D, with the 18th century Hanoverian court of King George II in Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides arguably being as tenuous a justification for 3D conversion as it got. It’s hardly the technological quantum leap that Cameron – despite Avatar’s multiple shortcomings – envisaged.

There is, however, a serious case to be made for Gravity, as the best and most responsible use of 3D yet. It looks like an educational IMAX documentary, but with the addition of a grippingly told story – the attempts of two stricken astronauts to survive some miles above the Earth’s surface. Where most blockbusters rely on a mix of crash-bang-wallop effects, big monsters and pseudo science, among Gravity’s many merits is its lean, pared-back narrative. Alfonso Cuarón continues to make intelligent, mainstream movies – the best of the Potter films was his, while Children Of Men is the best sci-fi movie in years. Gravity also benefits from terrific, realistic performances from leads Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.

The continuing career of Sandra Bullock says much about her straightforward appeal to her audience. At 49, at age when woman have supposedly passed their expiration date in Hollywood, she has become one of its biggest successes in a series of palatable romantic comedies or Oprah Book Club thrillers. Her constituency – middle Americans, largely – respond to her straightforward charms and the broadly morally decent films she makes. Recently, she has enjoyed three films whose opening weekend tallies each exceeded $30million, while Gravity opened with $55 million, a story in itself.

Bullock plays skittish newcomer Ryan Stone who is concerned principally with keeping her lunch down in zero gravity. She is partnered with

wily Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney), an old hand at this space lark. When their shuttle is irreparably damaged by drifting space debris, they find themselves cut off from mission control, with no choice but to navigate the 100 kilometre distance across space to the international space station and, they hope, safety. Air supply is an issue. Critically Gravity is not a science fiction film, but an intimate disaster movie that plays to Bullock’s recognisable dramatic strengths – plucky everywoman in peril – but relocates them to outer space.

Alfonso Cuarón‘s depiction of the heavens, meanwhile, is breathtaking enough – the sun’s corona as it appears from round the side of Earth, space debris appearing through the darkness, the cameras pitching and rolling round Ryan and Kowalsky, the digital detail of mountain ranges or weather formations back on Earth.

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.