Today Sasha Stone and I recorded a special Telluride-centric Oscar Poker with four guests — Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg, Jett Wells, renowed cinematographer Svetlana Cvetko (Inside Job) and editor-screenwriter David Scott Smith. We discussed Ken Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns‘ Central Park Five (major criticism), Noah Baumbach‘s Francis Ha, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers, Pablo Larrain‘s No, Ben Affleck‘s Largo, etc. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

Scott Tobias tweet: “Fair warning Toronto press folks: If you boo the Malick, I will punch you in the back of the head. Rhetorically.”

Wellshwood reply: “Don’t let Tobias intimidate you, Toronto press corps! If To The Wonder is a meandering, airy-fairy wank then boo at will. Slap it down.”

As with all film festivals, Telluride chatter is constantly about what everyone’s seen and felt and heard. After two days of this I’ve heard too many people say that a given film is “really good” or that he/she has “heard really good things” about it. Your brain turns to chewing gum after hearing this 30, 40 times. Last night I began asking chatters to try and express their reactions with a bit more specificity. I don’t think that’s asking too much. I try to gently draw them out.

Best buzz so far: Ben Affleck‘s Argo, Pablo Larrain‘s No, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers, Wayne Blair‘s The Sapphires, Ken Burns‘ The Central Park Five. Good buzz: Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Christian Petzold‘s Barbara. Flat or downish buzz: Roger Michell‘s Hyde Park on Hudson, Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa, Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price.

It’s 8:50 am, and I have to so much to write about yesterday’s screenings and 90 minutes to do it in before leaving for Pablo Larrain‘s No, which is screening at the Chuck Jones at 11:30 am…I’m stalled, choking, frozen in my tracks. So to get the engine started, two worthless asides. If you write about something, anything….

Since my mid teens I’ve always carried at least two combs and occasionally three. I never want to walk around with just one comb because if I lose that I’m fresh out, hence the two-comb rule. But I don’t even want to be faced with a two comb situation because if I lose one then I’m down to one so it’s better, really, to have three. Then if I lose one I at least have two left.

If you wear glasses for reading (like me) it’s usually impossible inside a low-lighted shower to differentiate between the shampoo, the conditioner and the body wash containers because the labels are always subtly worded. So I have to keep the glasses near the shower and then open the shower door and half step out into the light and put the glasses on to read the labels, but the steam is so intense at that point that the glasses fog up and I can’t see anything. So you also have to keep a small wash rag near the glasses in order to wipe them off. But if the steam is really opperessive you’ll have maybe four or five seconds to read the label before the fogging occurs.

Obvious solution: Read the labels before turning the water on, but that takes a certain organizational discipline and clarity of mind that’s hard to summon when you’re half awake at 6:30 am.

Saturday, 9.1 was the slowest festival filing day of my Hollywood Elsewhere life. No column riffs (and precious few tweets) about Christian Petzold‘s Barbara, Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha, Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers and Ramin Bahrani‘s At Any Price — all seen today plus attendance at a swanky Sony Pictures Classics dinner party at La Marmotte and then a late-night gathering at 227 South Oak.

Rust and Bone star (and apparent Best Actress contender) Marion Cotillard, Hollywood Reporter columnist Scott Feinberg at Saturday evening’s Sony Picture Classics dinner party at Telluride’s La Marmotte.

Yesterday morning was about roaming around, picking up the passes and attending the brunch, and then the highly engaging Argo happened at the Chuck Jones at 2 pm. And then it was back to town to try to get into Sony Classics’ Israeli Shin Bet documentary The Gatekeepers…nope. Sold out, locked down. I recounted this yesterday, I know. It’s 7:45 am and the day’s first film — Christian Petzold‘s Barbara — starts in two hours.

We saw three films yesterday and got shut out of a fourth. Two of the films, Argo and The Attack, were quite good, the former more conventionally entertaining and the latter more thoughtful and lamenting.

A pit stop at a cafe happened around 5:30 pm, and then we walked over to the Palm for Sally Potter‘s Ginger and Rosa, which runs only 89 minutes but felt like two hours. Set in 1962 London, it’s not so much about Rosa (Alice Englert) as her best pally Ginger (Elle Fanning, visually luscious with her fair skin and dyed red hair) and states of emotional frustration and entrapment. The action is mainly about Ginger’s soured relationship with her mom (Christina Hendricks) and her comng to know her boho-writer dad (Allesandro Nivola) and an obsession that Ginger and much of the London left has with nuclear proliferation — a big deal at the time but not so much from a 2012 perspective.

I’ve always respected Potter and am fully acknowledging that Ginger and Rosa is a well-made, carefully focused character piece, but I felt trapped — I didn’t want to be there.

One tiny quibble: Nivola wears a five-day unshaven look throughout, and guys simply didn’t do that in 1962. Hip-grubby GQ fashion whiskers didn’t start to happen until the mid ’90s. The only guys who wore beard stubble in 1962 were street winos and those growing a beard.

Next came a 9:45 pm showing of Ziad Doueiri‘s The Attack, which is unmistakably strong and penetrating — perhaps the most eloquent and moving pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli drama I’ve seen since…I can’t remember what but I was thinking back to portions of Costa-Gavras‘ Hanna K at times. There can be no peace between Israelis and Palestinians — the latter have been nudged, barricaded, pushed and shoved out of territory that was once theirs for the last 60-odd years, and the Israelis, once you get past their aggressive dominance, feel they have no choice but to protect themselves from the acts of rage that have resulted from this.

The Attack, based on Yasmin Khadra‘s novel, is about a Tel Aviv-based Israeli-Arab surgeon (Ali Sulaman) whose wife, he gradually comes to learn, had secretly bonded with Palestinian terrorists and finally decided to commit a final act of martyrdom. It’s one of those “I can sense right away what happened but I need to go through denial and then investigate it on a step by step basis” movies about a shell-shocked protagonist, etc. But it’s rendered carefully and completely, and the final 20 minutes or so are quite devastating.

My only beef is that Sulaman reveals himself at the very beginning as a man who despised Israeli authority in his youth, and so it seems curious that his wife wouldn’t have made any attempt to share her growing feelings of loyalty and support for the Palestinian cause.

Walter Salles‘ On The Road “is masterful and rich and lusty, meditative and sensual and adventurous and lamenting all at once. It has Bernardo Bertolucci‘s ‘nostalgia for the present’ except the present is 1949 to 1951 — it feels completely alive in that time. No hazy gauze, no bop nostalgia. Beautifully shot and cut, excitingly performed and deeply felt.

“It’s much, much better than I thought it would be given the long shoot and…I forget how long it’s been in post but it feels like ages. It’s so full of life and serene and mirthful in so many different ways. I was stirred and delighted and never less than fully engrossed as I watched it, and it’s great to finally run into a film that really hits it, and then hits it again and again.” — from a 5.23.12 Cannes Film Festival posting.

We gondola-ed down from the Argo screening at the top of the mountain, but it took a while and by the time we got to the Masons theatre, the 4:30 pm screening of Dror Moreh‘s The Gatekeepers — one of the big buzz films so far — was sold out and locked down. So we sauntered over to a coffee cafe so I could write a little something about Argo.

Ben Affleck‘s period drama, set during the 1979 and ’80 Iran hostage crisis and based on fact, is a partly light-hearted, partly riveting drama about a kind of Mission Impossible scam about smuggling six American foreign-service workers who had taken shelter in Tehran’s Canadian embassy after the storming of the U.S. embassy and the taking of hostages.

An enterprising CIA guy named Tony Mendez (Affleck) devises a plan to hoodwink Iranian officials into believing that these six are filmmakers looking to use Iranian locations for a cheesy-sounding sci-fi film called Argo that is, of course, fake.

Argo starts out as a somber docu-drama, and then shifts into a kind of flip jocular vein (especially with the appearance of John Goodman and Alan Arkin as a couple of exploitation producers who assist Afleck in creating the backstory for the phony film), and then somber again and then sad and then revved again and then really, really tense.

In short, it’s smart and absorbing for first two-thirds to three-quarters, but it’s the suspenseful final act that brings it home.

Argo delivers superb period detail all the way through — technology, cars, clothes, haircuts, everything.

Affleck’s direction is clean and concise and doesn’t waste time or footage. The screenplay by Chris Terrio is aces. And the cast hits nothing but true notes — Affleck as Mendez, Bryan Cranston as his CIA boss, Arkin and Goodman as the producers, Victor Garber as Iran’s Canadian ambassador who protected the six when they were hiding in his residence, and Kyle Chandler as the late Hamilton Jordan, Jimmy Carter‘s chief of staff.

Somebody tweeted “instant Best Picture contender!” after it was over. Really? Brilliantly suspenseful as the last act is, Argo, boiled down, is just a clever, well-jiggered caper film. Hats off but why does it have to be a Best Picture contender? A story well told and highly suspenseful, for sure, but there’s no thematic undertow, no metaphor tug — nothing more than “this is what really happened, and wasn’t it cool that the CIA pulled this off?” Yes, it was cool…but Best Picture contenders are about common chords and universality and shared emotional discovery, and that is not what Argo is up to.

Well, somewhat at the end because it’s nice to see a tough situation resolved through ingenuity and guts, but it’s not really a Best Picture contender for the ages. It’s a good, smart, satisfying adult thriller — why isn’t that enough?

My brief chat with Argo director-costar Ben Affleck at today’s Telluride Film Festival patron’s brunch was mostly about Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder, in which Affleck “stars,” so to speak. A friend who’s seen Malick’s film tells me Affleck has been all but cut out of it, just as Adrien Brody was edited out of Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Sean Penn‘s role was reduced to almost nothing in The Tree of Life.

In any event I asked Affleck if he’s seen To The Wonder and he said, “Yes, I’ve seen it”….(beat) (beat) (beat)…”and it makes The Tree of Life look like Transformers.” I didn’t take notes so the remainder of his comments are only approximately recalled, but he basically said it’s not a commercial film, that it’s the kind of thing that’s mainly for critics, and that when he’s directing a film “I’m always thinking about how to make this aspect completely clear and make this aspect understandable, and Malick doesn’t give a damn about any of that” and that his basic thing is to follow the butterfly, so to speak.

Jett and I are about to head up to the Chuck Jones theatre to see Argo, which Affleck will introduce, at 2 pm. He’ll be doing a q & a following tomorrow’s 1 pm screening.

At a dinner party last night I listened to the views of a hardcore Obama hater, an older woman who was otherwise perfectly agreeable. I say “hardcore” because she not only embraces the nonsensical view that we’re currently worse off than we were four years ago (when the country was teetering on the brink of financial catastrophe, caused entirely by a Republican-enabled Wall Street gangsta free-for-all), but she’s also a bit of a birther. Sorry, but I rarely come into first-hand contact with these people. They’re out there by the millions, I realize. I had to suppress the urge.