that:
1)McCarthy’s worldview, on paper, all by itself, isn’t terribly interesting, or
2)NCFOM, written by somebody else and/or filmed by somebody else, could have easily been a stupid pile of crap, in keeping with point 1).

BUT:

1)There was a small element of campiness in NCFOM; there was Javier Bardem’s hair, encounters with Texas characters like the fat lady who runs the trailer park or the guy Bardem confronts in the gas station, and things like that kid saying “look at that fuckin bone” after Bardem gets hit by a truck. If anything, that element is going to be more pronounced in a movie made by the Coen Brothers than a movie made by Ridley Scott.
2)You’d think Ridley Scott would be better at directing action scenes than the Coen Brothers, but in the case of McCarthy adaptations, he isn’t. The scenes where Bardem hunts Josh Brolin blow anything in the Ridley movie away.
3)The Cameron Diaz scene isn’t laughable because it’s weird or a failed attempt at being “sexy,” it’s laughable because in spite of whatever point McCarthy and Ridley were trying to make, it just comes across as something goofy that doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the movie, which is what separates it from the examples I gave in point 1). All it made me think about was first, if Cormac McCarthy has some sort of leering old man-fetish for gymnasts that he’s trying to confess to, and second, whether or not the Cameron Diaz character doesn’t realize she’d get bird shit in her pussy doing that.
4)For further evidence that Ridley/McCarthy can’t do camp, there’s a truly dumb, trivial, lame deleted scene from the movie that you can view on the DVD where Fassbender goes to buy underwear for Penelope Cruz and ends up flirting with a sales girl played by Margaery Tyrell from Game of Thrones. He tries to buy stockings and then this dialogue takes place:
FASSBENDER: You should wear stockings!
HOT SALESGIRL: I am wearing stockings.
FASSBENDER: Those look like pantyhose.
HOT SALESGIRL: Well they’re NOT. lifts skirt
It’s such a dumb scene I can’t tell if it’d make the movie better or not.

So while I get that NCFOM and Counselor are in many ways similar,

Is “mumblecore” still a thing? Was it ever? I saw a couple films that people said were that, and came here and tried to discuss it and I can’t remember what was said but Alpha Hammer laughed me off the face of the fuckin’ planet.

So The Holdovers is bad? I’ve enjoyed a few Alexander Payne movies recently and Paul Giamatti is pretty reliable, but the trailer to that movie looked dumb. What was bad about it?
I hadn’t heard of Zone Of Interest. The Under The Skin director adapts Martin Amis?!? Uhm…