In Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’71), the fourth and final attempt to steal a huge diamond involves the surreptitious hypnotizing of a safe-deposit box security officer for a Park Avenue bank. The hypnotist, a woman called Miasmo, tells the officer to obey any person who says the words “Afghanistan Bananistan.” Co-conspirator Robert Redford, having rented his own safe-deposit box in the same bank, enters the vault and says the words. His expression as he waits to see if the hypnosis scheme has worked is, in my humble view, priceless. He does it just right.

Earlier this month Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy chose The Tribe, a brutal, vocally silent Ukranian film about violent robbers and pimps at a boarding school for the deaf, as his #1 2015 film. He called it “the toughest film to talk any normal person into seeing this year, but debuting director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky (remember the name, even if you can’t pronounce it) uses all his self-imposed restrictions (no dialogue, very long takes) to great advantage in this stunning study of societal degradation.” It’s really a 2014 film but we’ll let that go. I missed it when it played on the Cote d’Azur 20 months ago, and couldn’t fit it in when it played Sundance ’15. Drafthouse Films booked it into a few venues last June. (The most recent playdate was at the Indiana University Cinema in Bloomington.) To my knowledge I never received a year-end screener, and the domestic DVD/Bluray doesn’t pop until March 2016. I just wrote a Drafthouse rep for a screener or a link. It has a 78% Metacritic rating. Total Film’s Matt Glasby said “it treads the dark path between misery porn and masterpiece.”

My Hollywood Elsewhere duties include/allow for travel to distant places and occasionally some pleasant downtime between posts. But there are no days off and there never will be, and that’s fine. But sometimes I just…don’t…care. Today was one of those occasions. I was starting to feel slightly better during last night’s JFK-to-LAX flight, but travel is never easy for the half-well person and the illness sorta kinda returned today. Or at least the damn cough did. Tomorrow is another day.

“Leonardo DiCaprio spends most of the saga alone in the wilderness, and the score keeps him company as mirages, memories and landscape merge in his drifting mind. Cellos slip and slosh through a G-minor phrase that keeps pivoting back on itself in slow legato notes, against a reverberant, windy drone. Sakamoto slowly progresses through glacial chords that build toward a fortissimo horizon.” — from an assessment of Ryuichi Sakamoto‘s Revenant score by Vulture‘s Justin Davidson, posted on 12.27.

I would never push a case against Mark Rylance‘s Bridge of Spies performance as 1950s Russian spy Rudolph Abel. Nor would I dispute the general conviction that he’s an all-but-certain Best Supporting Actor nominee. Like everyone else, I knew right away he’d be nominated when I first saw Steven Spielberg‘s reasonably decent espionage film last month. What bothers me is the slamdunk blogaroonie belief that Rylance has it all but won. I like him too as far as it goes.  I just don’t get how he became the absolute #1 love child.

Actually, I do know how this happened. Rylance is a respected, Tony-winning theatre actor, which supplies the usual distinctive air. Being older and especially British also counts for a lot among SAG members and their vague inferiority complexes. And somewhere early on Rylance just became this bowling ball that started knocking pins over left and right. Some of this, trust me, was group-think, follow-the-leader, monkey-imitation reflex stuff. Too many critics and blogaroonies seemed to just feel the rhythm and started saying the same thing over and over — “Rylance for sure, Rylance for sure,” etc.

As of we now stand six big-city critics groups have given him a Best Supporting Actor trophy (including New York, Los Angeles and Toronto).

I have no real argument against this, but on the other hand I’ve been thinking “okay but was he really that good? If he wins, he wins…fine, but does it have to be a Rylance rout?”

And then during an aborted Oscar Poker recording earlier today (I was in Brooklyn and feeling too hoarse and woozy and cranky to go on) Awards Watch‘s Erik Anderson said a noteworthy thing. He said he’d only recently seen Bridge of Spies and that he didn’t get what all the Rylance fuss was about. He thought that Rylance didn’t “do” all that much and some of his performance was actually underwhelming.

A concisely written, well-phrased, cut-to-the-chase assessment piece by The Atlantic‘s Peter Beinart explains how and why the American body politic has been moving left since Obama, and that this shift is no flight of whimsy. “In the late ’60s and ’70s, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era ended,” Beinart notes. “Today, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era is only just beginning.

“An era of liberal dominance doesn’t mean that the ideological differences between Democrats and Republicans disappear. It means that on the ideological playing field, the 50-yard line shifts further left. It means the next Republican president won’t be able to return the nation to the pre-Obama era.

“That’s what happened when Dwight Eisenhower followed Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ike moderated the growth in government expansion that had begun in the 1930s, but he didn’t return American politics to the 1920s, when the GOP opposed any federal welfare state at all. He in essence ratified the New Deal.

“It’s also what happened when Bill Clinton followed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. By passing punitive anticrime laws, repealing restrictions on banks, signing NAFTA, cutting government spending to balance the budget, reforming welfare, and declaring that the ‘era of big government is over,’ Clinton acknowledged that even a Democratic president could not revive the full-throated liberalism of the 1960s and ’70s. He ratified Reaganism.

I wanted to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens a second time following the 12.14 premiere; I wanted to see if my initial positive reaction would hold. I saw it again the following night, and it pretty much did. But it’s not really a grower — i.e., one of those films that take root and yield deeper and richer satisfactions days, weeks or months later. Due respect but enjoyable as it is, SW: TFA is pretty much a one or two-timer. (The Revenant is a grower — I’ve watched it four times now.)

Which is why I was surprised by a 12.27 THR piece by Pamela McClintock that said “repeat viewers…are playing an increased role playing an increased role in the movie’s record-shattering run as the audience broadens out.” Disney distribution president Dave Hollis tells her that “you can’t do these kind of numbers without extraordinary repeat business…we know anecdotally people are seeing it three and four times.”

Love & Mercy‘s Paul Dano has been handed Best Actor trophies (Gotham Awards, Boston Society of Film Critics, Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association, Florida Film Critics Circle, New York Film Critics Online, San Francisco Film Critics Circle) and lauded as a top-notch Best Supporting Actor contender by several orgs (Critics Choice, Golden Globes, Spirit Awards, London Film critics Circle, Washington D.C. Area Film Critics Association, et. al.) and still the tired-blood Gurus of Gold have him ranked in sixth place in the Best Supporting Actor arena. They have him behind Bridge of Spies‘ Mark Rylance (if you say so), Creed‘s Sylvester Stallone (really?), Beasts of No Nation‘s Idris Elba (okay) and Spotlight‘s Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. Dano channeled Brian Wilson to give a phenomenal, career-defining performance and the Gurus still rank him below two guys who gave expert performances in what everyone acknowledges is an ensemble film? Dano has a critical mass factor like nobody’s business but you know what?

The flinty, straight-talking Haskell Wexler, one of the greatest and most influential cinematographers of the 20th Century, has left the earth at age 93. Hats off, head bowed. Wexler’s career lasted about 55 years, beginning with the 1960 documentary The Savage Eye to John Sayles‘ Silver City in’04. He enjoyed a peak period of about 15 years (’63 to ’78) when he shot Eliza Kazan‘s America, America (’63), Franklin Schaffner‘s The Best Man, Mike Nichols‘ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Norman Jewison‘s In the Heat of the Night and The Thomas Crown Affair. After directing the respected Medium Cool (’69) Wexler served as “visual consultant” on George Lucas‘s American Graffiti and then pushed on with Milos Forman‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which he was fired off after shooting about 87% over some muddled FBI-related concern), Hal Ashby‘s Bound for Glory and Coming Home. Wexler also completed the work of dp Nestor Alemendros on Terrence Malick‘s Days of Heaven. I interviewed Wexler during Sundance ’06 about his documentary Who Needs Sleep?, and it was during that discussion that he woke me to the fact that it’s pointless to work more than 14 hours a day, that your focus after that point isn’t worth anything. Haskell was a tough old bird, a real Type-A personality.

If I could lethalize the Yahoo Search virus by clapping my hands three times, I would clap my hands three times. It attached itself to my Chrome browser months ago, and no matter what I do (and I’ve tried and tried) I can’t get rid of the godawful thing, and it’s easily the stupidest search engine I’ve ever had the misfortune to use. I hate what it delivers, I hate that stupid purple scheme, just glancing at the logo makes me sick. Yahoo Search attaching itself to Google is like that infant alien wrapping itself around John Hurt‘s face.

The total number of January 2016 releases that I might be able to sit through without too much difficulty is…uhm, three. Okay, make it four. But really only two. I’m talking about (a) a pair of actioners about tough guys doing the rugged heroism thing, (b) what appears to be just another stupid, vulgar boner comedy, and (c) a troubled western that probably isn’t much good but you never know. Be optimistic.

The only 2016 commercial release that I damn well know will be good if not excellent in a droll, understated way and which I’m expecting to see next month (even though it won’t open until February 5th) is Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Hail Caesar!

The safest January bets are Michael Bay‘s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Bengahzi (Paramount, 1.15) and Craig Gillespie‘s The Finest Hours (Disney, 1.29). Neither will offer much in the way of thematic undercurrents, but at least they’re dealing with real-life events and will therefore need to deliver the goods in an “execution dependant” way.

I expect competency, at least, from Bay’s film, which is about that 9.11.12 mob attack upon an American compound in Benhgazi that resulted in the deaths of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith. Will Bay include a line or even a scene that points the finger at then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for not having done all she could to prevent this disaster? Seems doubtful. Bay is primarily a technician. He’s never come within 100 yards of political content in his previous films. He just wants to ride the smooth seas.

And then there’s Dan Mazer‘s Dirty Grandpa (Lionsgate, 1.22), which costars Zac Efron and Robert DeNiro and may, I suspect, turn out to be oddly likable. No predictions, just a hunch. Because DeNiro has lately been on a kind of roll.