What’s this Argo obsession that Sasha Stone, Kris Tapley, Roger Ebert are putting out? Drop to your knees in worship? What film can steal its Best Picture thunder? Will you guys please take it easy? Argo is a very fine thing — a well-crafted, highly satisfying caper film with a certain patriotic resonance that basically says “job well done, guys…you should be proud.” But the hosannahs are a bit much.

Argo is proof that director-star Ben Affleck has clearly, seriously upped his game. He really is the new Sydney Pollack, and I say that as someone who knew, enjoyed, occasionally chatted with and deeply respected the director of Three Days of the Condor, Tootsie, The Yakuza, Out of Africa, The Firm, The Way We Were, etc.

But Argo is basically a movie designed to enthrall, charm, amuse, thrill, move and excite. It’s a comfort-blanket movie that basically says “this was the problem, and this is how it was solved…and the guys who made it happen deserve our applause and respect…no?” Yes, they do. But above all Argo aims to please. It skillfully creates suspense elements that probably weren’t that evident when the story actually went down. And it throws in two or three divorced-father-hangs-with-young-son scenes, and some CIA razmatazz and a few ’80s Hollywood cheeseball jokes and basically lathers it all on.

We all liked it in Telluride, but audiences in Scranton, Detroit, Ft. Lauderdale, Bakersfield, Terre Haute and Hartford will really love it.

I keep thinking about that jacked-up suspense finale that “works” but doesn’t feel genuine. You know it doesn’t. That last nail-biting bit with the police cars hot-dogging the departing jet on the Tehran airport runway? Standard Hollywood bullshit.

If I was a high-school teacher and Argo was a term paper, I would give it an 87 or 88. Okay, an 89. It’s obviously good, but it’s not constructed of the kind of material that ages well. It is not a film that exudes paralyzing greatness. Like many highly regarded Hollywood films, it adheres to familiar classic centrist entertainment values…and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s very pleasing thing, but it’s a fucking caper film. Boil it down and it’s Ocean’s 11 set in Washington, D.C., L.A. and Tehran of 1978 and ’89 without the money or the flip glamorous vibe or the Clooney-Pitt-Damon-Cheadle combustion.

Just get a grip, is all I’m saying. Tone it down.

In the relentlessly praised Silver Linings Playbook, Jennifer Lawrence “steals the show with her harshly barbed words and unapologetic attitude,” thefilmstage’s Jared Mobarak wrote two days ago. “So much in fact that half the theatre clapped after one of her most heated dressing-downs.

“This wouldn’t mean much [under] normal circumstances, but I saw the film at a Toronto Film Festival press & industry screening. Half these people usually leave prematurely to hit another possible distribution deal and they never show emotion, let alone willfully applaud a movie screen when no one involved in the film is present to suck up to. This shows how likeably impulsive and unpredictable her role and performance are.”

“Or look at Phoenix, lifting his head high and proud, as Brando used to do, with an added, cranky stiffness that comes from having, or being, a serious pain in the neck. The eyes narrow and the mouth is awry, one corner twisting into an Elvis curl, though it looks too sour for seduction, let alone song.” — from Anthony Lane‘s 9.17 New Yorker review.

Thanks to Grantland‘s Cinemetrics’ columnist Zach Baron for the compliment, and congrats for actually taking a rhetorical stab at what The Master is about, to wit: “The Master manages to tell much of the sad postwar story in this country: the demise of its communal ideals; the rise of a kind of spiritual cynicism that substituted obedience for faith; the unrelenting individual isolation that ensued.”

But in a Master article posted yesterday (Thursday, 9.13) the Guardian‘s Tom Shone quotes the same tweet plus another (I blurted out several as I left the theatre on 9.8) but it doesn’t rightly attribute. Rather, it credits two separate fans (“one fan” + “another”).

I still don’t like the sound of Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln voice. I almost hate it, in a way. It’s flat, undistinctive, unimpressive, Matthew Modine-ish. (And that’s not a putdown of Modine.) It’s hard to describe what I was looking to hear, but this isn’t it. And I dearly love the voices that Lewis has given us over the years. The fault, of course, is Spielberg’s — he didn’t push Lewis hard enough, he let well enough alone.

Somehow or some way, the voice of a legendary figure has to sound “legendary.” It has to have a certain sit-up-and-pay-attention quality. If the gravelly voiced George C. Scott had decided to imitate the actual voice of George S. Patton, it’s quite possible his performance in Franklin Schaffner’s 1970 biopic Patton might not have led to a Best Actor Oscar. Listen to the Real McCoy — who would wanted to hang out with a guy who sounded like this for 170 minutes?

And that John Williams uplift music…momentous responsibility has been put in our hands, gentlemen, blah, blah….it is time for us to defeat slavery, blah, blah…God!

Congratulations to Kent Jones and Robert Koehler for being hired as dual replacements for outgoing Film Society of Lincoln Center senior programming hotshot Richard Pena. Jones will be the new director of programming of the NY Film Festival and Koehler will serve as year-round programmer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

It’s been recently claimed by Nick Wrigley on Home Theatre Forum that James Stewart‘s brown suit in Vertigo is not really brown but aubergine, which is a kind of blending of brown with a little red or violet thrown in. To my knowledge nobody has ever made such a claim since Vertigo‘s release 54 years ago, but nothing is too weird when you get into the world of Bluray film dweebs and their anal-tech obsessions.

“Looking at the UK Blu-ray of Vertigo, Jimmy’s supposedly ‘brown’ suit is mostly a dark aubergine. Sometimes it looks brownish, but mostly it looks aubergine. My friend commented ‘you just can’t get suits that colour these days…look at it, it’s gorgeous.’ Is there a chance it was a beautiful aubergine suit on the VistaVision negative, but optically reduced 35mm dye transfer prints made it ‘brown’? Or am I barking up the wrong aubergine?”

I wrote yesterday that in a curiously colored Vertigo DCP I was shown in late August Stewart’s brown suit has morphed into a kind of violet-brown or purplish brown.

I only know that Stewart’s Scottie Ferguson has been wearing the same diarrhea-brown suit in countless viewings of Vertigo and now suddenly there’s a new aubergine meme working its way into the conversation? If it’s been aubergine all along why didn’t someone make that claim years or decades ago?

Even if Stewart’s suit was very subliminally aubergine on some level on the Vertigo set, the suit color in the Vertigo DCP that I saw on 8.28 is significantly more violet-shaded than in any Vertigo image I’ve ever seen. Talk about a whiter shade of pale — this is a purple shade of brown.

I know what Stewart’s suit looked like in Robert Harris and Jim Katz‘s 1996 70mm restored version of Vertigo, and in all those stills I’ve seen over the years and it was always plain earth brown…period. No redness, no purple or violet tones, none of that.

I’m asking now for all members of the Secret Vertigo Aubergine Society (i.e., those who’ve always secretly believed that Stewart’s suit was aubergine but didn’t want to say anything for whatever perverse reason) to come out now and declare themselves. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m rather infuriated about this. I intend to stop this aubergine thing in its tracks right now if I can. I will not give up and say, “Oh, gee, I guess I’m color-blind now and have been color-blind all along…just call me an aubergine convert now that Nick Wrigley has opened my eyes!”

How many people use the word aubergine in common conversation, much less know what it means?

It’s always been brown, brown, brown all the way, believe me. Don’t listen to these guys. The aubergine thing is absurd.

In a 9.13 post, Charles Pierce‘s Politics Blog has revealed that Esquire and Yahoo! News asked national pollster Gary Langer to survey more than a thousand Americans following the two political conventions. The complete survey will be available in early October in Esquire’s November issue, but here are some basic numbers. 58% of those surveyed believe that Obama would take Romney in a fist fight.

I’m about to slip into the 12 noon press-and-industry screening of Brian DePalma‘s Passion, which got killed in Venice and hasn’t done any better here (“a campy, uninintentonally hilarious romp“). Then comes Nick Cassevetes‘ Yellow at 3 pm. And finally a revisiting of Rodney Ascher‘s Room 237, a doc about several imaginative and /or obsessive interpretations of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, which I first saw eight months ago at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

There have been several films about drunks (The Lost Weekend, Leaving Las Vegas, Under The Volcano, etc.) but only two, really, about a couple coping with alcoholism with one choosing sobriety and the other resisting or unable to follow — Blake Edwards‘ Days of Wine and Roses and now James Ponsoldt‘s Smashed (Sony Classics, 10.12), which I missed at Sundance but finally saw last night.

Aaron Paul, Mary Elizabeth Winstead in James Ponsoldt’s Smashed.

I liked it, wasn’t bored, stayed with it, admired it and came out saying to myself and anyone who asked, “Yeah, definitely…a straight story foritifed by solid writing, strong directing and really fine performances,” especially from Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Breaking Bad‘s Aaron Paul. It’s all about character, choices and consequence within realistic restrictions, and these two bring honesty and clarity to the table.

The only problem I had with their on-screen marriage is that Winstead is tallish (about 5’8″) and Paul seems at least a bit shorter. This may be an illusion, but with the giselle-like, open-hearted Winstead around it’s hard to invest in a runty T-shirted guy with a tennis-ball haircut and patchy facial growth playing a party animal…no offense. (I have a thing about tennis-ball haircuts, which I feel are good for one environment and one movie only — the Devil’s Island prison colony in Franklin J. Schaffner‘s Papillon.) I’m not faulting Paul’s performance in the least. He just bothers me.

Special cheers and commendations to director and cowriter James Ponsoldt for keeping things pruned and focused and making every scene seem necessary. The screenplay was co-written by Susan Burke, a recovering alcoholic who faced her issues in her late teens and early 20s, and so the film seems to know whereof it speaks. Speaking as a currently sober guy and the son of an alcoholic it passes the smell test and then some. Smashed deserves all the respect, admiration, ticket sales, downloads and Spirit Awards that the world can offer or part with.

With the exception of one “oh, come on!” moment, Smashed walks right in, sits right down and tells the truth about alcoholism in a way that feels like tight drama and a serious roll-on or roll-in. I would only add that as cleansing and righteous as telling the raw truth can feel, never confess your alcoholic sins to an employer…ever. Employers don’t want to know about your personal stuff so don’t even think about going there. Employers are not your friends. They are people to be served and satisfied and respected as far as it goes, but they always need to be played.

Do 20- and 30-somethings have alcohol issues that compare to the ones that 40-and-overs have? Probably, but I sure as hell never paid attention to whatever issues I might have had in my 20s and 30s. I just sipped and chugged and “ho-hoh”-ed along and didn’t give it a second thought. Then I was stopped by some very bad omens in the ’90s and that was the end of my vodka-and-lemonade-ing. And then it hit me that wine and beer had become a bit of a drag and they got the heave-ho last March.

I was indifferent to Winstead in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (a movie that I did everything in my power to wound if not kill) and I barely remember her from Death Proof, but she settles in, plants her feet and delivers the plain goods here. Her performance is more in the realm of seriously rooted and convincing than drop-dead, Oscar-assured wowser, but she’s obviously upped her game. If Winstead is smart she’ll never go back to being a geek pixie-fantasy girl. Well, she can, but it’ll be a comedown now that she’s achieved a kind of career peak.

Cheers also to costars Nick Offerman, Octavia Spencer, Mary Kay Place and Megan Mullally (whose reaction to Winstead’s honesty in an end-of-act-two scene is the basis of my “oh, come on!” reaction).

I also quite liked that Smashed runs only 80 minutes., and yet it doesn’t feel in the least bit truncated or abbreviated. It actually has a sense of story-telling discipline….imagine!

Incidentally: It was mentioned last night that Glenn Gordon Caron‘s Clean and Sober (’88) is also a coping-with-addiction drama involving a romantically-lined couple, but that was about cocaine and largely about rehab.

Archaeologists announced Wednesday that the remains of Richard III may have been unearthed in the shadow of the University of Leicester. The hump-backed monarch is believed to have been buried in Leicester after his defeat in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. The bones unearthed during the dig have been sent for DNA testing and experts believe the skeleton is “a very strong candidate” to be genuine. This at least allows for a posting of Laurence Olivier‘s “now is the winter of our discontent” speech.

I’m supposed to see James Ponsoldt‘s Smashed at 6 pm at the Ryerson, and then attend a dinner for talent. Pic is about an elementary-school teacher who realizes she needs to get control and sober up. Word around town is that Mary Elizabeth Winstead gives a stand-out, possibly award-worthy performance. Speaking as an ex-wine and vodka drinker who’s currently sober, there’s something in me that doesn’t want to see this. Is it because alcoholics are incredibly dull people to hang with?