Last week’s reviews were accurate: Patriot’s Day works, delivers, does the job. And it’s not a “Boston fuck yeah!” film until the last five or six minutes in a tacked-on epilogue that pays tribute to all the real-life participants, heroes and victims of the April 2013 Boston Marathon massacre. Make no mistake — if you edit out the tribute section and a heartfelt but unnecessary movie-ish monologue delivered by Mark Wahlberg, Patriot’s Day (CBS Films, 12.21) is director Peter Berg‘s best film ever. Really. It’s sharp, fast, crackling and on-target for the most part. Not entirely but close. The 90% that works really works.

The Patriot’s Day highlight is an adrenalized Act Two sequence that follows the Tasrnaev brothers (Alex Wolff‘s Dzhokhar, Themo Melikidze‘s Tamerlan) as they hijack a car and get into a wild-ass gunfight with local cops in Watertown. J. K. Simmons‘ character, Watertown Police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese, plays a highly significant part in this shoot-out, and J.K. is almost good enough to warrant an acting nomination. Confident as shit. Alas, it’s not enough of a part.

To his credit, Berg tried to emulate the Paul Greengrass aesthetic, and he more or less accomplishes that. (The handheld lensing is by Tobias Schliessler, and the bouncy, brilliant editing is by Colby Parker Jr. and Gabriel Fleming.) Blame the CBS Films/Lionsgate marketing guys for suggesting in their trailers that Patriot’s Day would be some kind of “Boston, fuck yeah” thing. I responded to that suggestion, but now I’m happy to report that it isn’t that until the very end. This is a very well-handled thing — not an AA but a solid A-minus. And that’s good enough.

Ellen DeGeneres began to quake with emotion as she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House earlier today. She smiles, she beams, she starts to tear up, she shakes her head very slightly as if saying to herself “I can’t believe this is happening,” she looks down, the emotion wells a bit more, President Obama looks over to see if she’s okay and gives her a supportive hug, she looks up and glows, and then her eyes water over even more as he attaches the medal ribbon. I felt it. I was right there with her. The full ceremony is after the jump.

In the immediate wake of the announcement of the Film Independent Spirit Awards nominations, the first headscratcher (which a colleague pointed out before I noticed it myself) was “why no Best Director nomination for Manchester By The Sea‘s Kenneth Lonergan?” Manchester is the Big Kahuna of nominees across the board (Best Feature, Screenplay, Editing, Actor, Supporting Actor) with Moonlight the runner-up, so Lonergan’s direction not being singled out seems strange.

The second surprise is the absence of Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali among Best Supporting Actor contenders. Ali has been the overwhelming Best Supporting Actor pick among the Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby-ites for many weeks now, and keep in mind that the Spirits are totally in the tank for Moonlight this year. (Altman Award actor recipients can’t be nominated, but directors or writers can?) This doesn’t mean Ali won’t snag an Oscar nomination, but an element of doubt has obviously been introduced. Incidentally: A few weeks ago a colleague told me he thinks Hell or High Water‘s Jeff Bridges might have the best shot at a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Except the Spirits have now selected Bridges’ costar, Ben Foster, as their nominee in this category.

Here are my spitball projections of likely winners:

BEST FEATURE: American Honey, Chronic, Jackie, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight. Likely winner: Manchester By The Sea, especially with Moonlight‘s director-writer Barry Jenkins and the Moonlight cast already tagged as recipients of the Robert Altman award.

BEST FIRST FEATURE: The Childhood of a Leader, The Fits, Other People, Swiss Army Man, The Witch. Likely winner: The Witch because its’ easily the best of the five, although I could see Swiss Army Man sneaking out a win.

JOHN CASSAVETES AWARD: Free In Deed, Hunter Gatherer, Lovesong, Nakom, Spa Night. Likely Winner: Hunter Gatherer.

BEST DIRECTOR: Andrea Arnold (American Honey), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Pablo Larraín (Jackie), Jeff Nichols (Loving), Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women). Likely Winner: Andrea Arnold or Barry Jenkins, but probably Jenkins at the end of the day. HE preference: Arnold.

I’ll finally be seeing Bridget Jones’ Baby. Missed the all-media last August but screener just arrived. Most of what I heard was “not bad, fairly decent, no harm,” etc. Which is roughly what you hear from a film with a 77% Rotten Tomatoes score. But honestly? My first thought when I opened up the package was the Owen Gleiberman hoo-hah from last July. “My view is that Owen was merely saying that the work wasn’t subtle enough,” I wrote on 7.3. “I think that’s a reasonable thing to observe. You can have all the work done that you want, but you can’t allow it to become a topic of conversation.” The Bridget Jones Baby Bluray/DVD comes out on 12.13. It earned a relatively pallid $24 million stateside, but the worldwide tally was $185 million and change.

Yesterday a video (posted by an Atlantic reporter) showed a nutter alt-right crowd cheering and offering Nazi salutes to Hitler-like statements from National Policy Institute‘s Richard Spencer. A Trump spokesperson offered the following limp-wristed response: “President-elect Trump has continued to denounce racism of any kind and he was elected because he will be a leader for every American. To think otherwise is a complete misrepresentation of the movement that united Americans from all backgrounds.” Translation: “We don’t want to alienate our alt-right supporters by condemning racism or ethnic cleansing. The alt-right understands what we mean. We’re with them but we have to phrase our comments carefully.” The bottom line is that Spencer and his kind would be hiding in the woodwork if Clinton had won, but now they feel free to be “out.”

Why is an all-but-unrecognizable Liam Neeson the central object in this new-one-sheet for Martin Scorsese‘s Silence? All along the expectation has been that Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are the co-leads. The apparent answer is that much of Silence is about a search for Leeson’s guiding-mentor character, Father Cristovao Ferreira, by Garfield’s Father Sebastiao Rodrigues and Driver’s Father Francisco Garrpe. The inky shadows and gloom tones obviously indicate somber moods and unpleasant fates. Your typical popcorn-muncher is going to take one look at this and say “horror…got it.” Neeson looks like the boogey man. (Yes, his arms folded behind his back obviously indicate a passive, non-aggressive attitude, but don’t tell me he’s a man of peace and clear light, not with those shadows covering him like a shroud.) And what’s with the waves? All along the Silence stills have indicated the locales will be wooded areas, grassy hills, rural villages, etc.

I finally sat down and really watched Criterion’s One-Eyed Jacks Bluray (which was created by Universal Home Video and The Film Foundation under the watchful eyes of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg). While wearing my recently bought blue-tint bifocals, I mean. Which make Blurays on my 65″ Sony 4K look much sharper than I had previously suspected was possible. 

So let me tell you and speaking as one who saw this restored version of Marlon Brando‘s 1961 film projected in the Salle Bazin at the Cannes Film Festival, the Criterion Bluray is so ripe and robust it’s almost surreal — crisp and clean and needle-sharp beyond belief. It’s a VistaVision color bath you can just sink into. It caresses your eyeballs. I’m guessing it looks way, way better than it did on opening day at Loews’ Capitol on 3.30.61.

Side issue: Movies starring actors on the short side never announce this. In just about every film that’s ever starred a not-tall guy, and particularly in the case of action films or westerns, the lead actor’s short stature is always camoflauged to some extent. And yet when it came to casting two guys that his character would beat up, director-star Marlon Brando chose actors who were significantly taller and bulkier than he — Slim Pickens and Timothy Carey. And when those beating scenes happen, it looks a little strange for this much shorter guy to be whipping these big-ass guys. It doesn’t stop the film, but it seems odd.

During the last third of Manchester By The Sea, Patrick Chandler (Lucas Hedges) visits the home of his estranged, recovering-alcoholic mom (Gretchen Mol) and her Christian boyfriend Rodney (Matthew Broderick). Soon after Patrick receives an email from Rodney, the content of which I won’t go into but which basically says “your mother is a fragile soul who needs more time to get used to things,” etc.

As Patrick reads the email director-writer Kenneth Lonergan shows us a couple of shots of the text, and in the third or fourth paragraph (which nobody in the world will ever look at but which I spotted the last time I saw the film) Broderick uses the word “privilege” in some context or another.

Except Broderick — Lonergan, I should say — spells it with an “a” — privalege. Unless it was an honest spelling error on Lonergan’s part (which I strongly doubt), this is Lonergan suggesting that Broderick’s character is less wise and disciplined than he seems, and that he probably hasn’t been graced with an elegant, first-rate education. A man who knows his Bible and believes in the healing power of Jesus, but who lives in his little bubble (as, God knows, all too many liberals do, which SNL satirized last weekend). A decent man but limited in certain ways, and perhaps intentionally so.

All of this, I swear, is contained in that one misspelled word.

The suggestion is that a fellow who doesn’t know how to spell privilege (or who isn’t careful enough to use spell-check after writing a letter) is not only under-educated but is perhaps a little reluctant to know the world more than he already does. Rodney likes the realm that he lives in , and if that means he’ll occasionally mis-spell a word, so be it.

For some reason the Key West Film Festival booked my return flight from Key West to Los Angeles by way of Charlotte, North Carolina. I was at Charlotte-Douglas Int’ Airport for about 90 minutes last evening, and as I made my way to the departing gate I noticed a row of white rocking chairs along a longish corridor. And I said to myself, “Wow…that’s a nice touch. I wish I had time to sit in one of those chairs for five or ten and just be at peace for a bit.” But I didn’t. Because that’s how I live my life for the most part. I’m not really a rocking-chair type of guy, but I love the concept. I’m actually thinking of buying a rocking chair for my living room now.

An Eric Kohn Indiewire piece reports that Steve Bannon, the Lucifer-like alt-rightist who became the honcho of Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign last August and who will become Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor as of 1.20.17, worked in indie film distribution in 2004 and ’05.

Bannon’s company, American Vantage Media Corp., bought Wellspring Media in ’04, which led to his overseeing distribution of (a) Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (a critically admired, low-budget gay-identity film that was made for next to nothing with loads and loads of found footage), (b) Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (notorious for that Chloe Sevigny blowjob scene, and directed by a fellow Republican!), Todd Solondz’s Palindromes (which I never saw as I kind of hate Solondz, no offense) and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark.

Which of these four films would arouse President-elect Trump’s interest the most, presuming he hasn’t seen any of them? Three guesses and the first two don’t count.

Kohn also reports the somewhat embarassing information that Bannon worked in ’04 and ’05 with Cinetic Marketing’s Ryan Werner as well as The Orchard’s Dan Goldberg, whom I was just hanging with last weekend with at the Key West Film Festival. The seeming horror of the association! But no one should look askance at these poor guys for being strange bedfellows with Bannon 11 and 12 years ago. One has to maintain a sense of humor about such things. Back then Bannon, who split his time between New York and Santa Monica, was politically obliged to go along with the indie mindset. Now he’s about to become a modern-day “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” as Bannon described himself in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview.