Many HE readers presumably saw Lincoln last night, and are champing at the very bit. But before posting you have to imagine yourself watching the History Channel on a Sunday evening, and at 9 pm a very Lincoln-like drama about the passing of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution comes on. The aspect ratio is boxier, but it’s almost exactly the same thing as Spielberg’s film except it’s an hour shorter and Matthew Modine plays Lincoln instead of Daniel Day Lewis. It wouldn’t be that different of an experience, would it?

New Yorker illustration by Ricardo Martinez.

In the view of New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, Lincoln “is a curious beast. The title suggests a monolith, as if going to this movie were tantamount to visiting Mt. Rushmore, and the running time, of two and a half hours, prepares you for an epic. Yet the film is a cramped and ornery affair, with Spielberg going into lockdown mode even more thoroughly than he did in The Terminal. No one is happier in this fug than Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s cinematographer, who veils events in such a rarefied and sifted haze that they seem already poised halfway to myth.

“There is physical conflict [in Lincoln], but it seems perfunctory: first, a murderous opening scrap between black and Confederate regiments, invested by Kaminski with the staccato desperation that he brought to Saving Private Ryan, and then, much later, a corpse-littered battlescape. The true tussle of the movie, however, is between the Spielberg who, like a cinematic Carl Sandburg, is drawn aloft toward legend — hardly an uncommon impulse when dealing with Lincoln — and the Spielberg who is tugged down by Tony Kushner‘s intricate screenplay toward documentary grit. You can never tell which of the two tendencies, the visionary or the revisionist, will come out on top.”

10:50 am Update: A producer friend wrote a few minutes ago and said “you could not be more correct about Lincoln. This is the Emperor’s Clothes film of the year. The thing is glacially-paced…and not 2012 climate-change glaciers, but, say, 1962 glaciers.

“Daniel Day-Lewis is very good, and I suppose he deserves credit for having gotten the ‘real’ Lincoln down rather well (he even gets the Lincoln walk correct). But, really, in the end the performance is a bit of a bore due to the script. Day Lewis plods from room to room, person to person, giving big speeches, small speeches, anecdotes and educating us on Euclid.

“I would have walked out, but it was too packed at the Arclight and there was an African-American next to me weeping throughout and so it seemed unseemly to me to do that.

“I think that there eventually will be a backlash against the film and, in the end, Denzel wins the Oscar.”

Weeping African-American Guy: “Ohh-hoh-hoh…heeeeshh-hee-hee…hee-hee-heesh….weep…weep.” Producer: “Excuse me there, fella. Gotta get by.” Weeping African-American Guy: “I, uh….wait, you’re leaving? I don’t even know you but you’re leaving? What are you made of? You’re walking out on a movie about Abraham Lincoln? Did you vote for Romney? Producer: “It’s a free country, pal…okay? You can weep and moan and make all the noise you want, but this is a slow turgid thing and it’s not doing it for me. And I voted for Obama, if you want to know.”

As expected, Skyfall is stomping at the box-office with a likely $85 to $88 million by Sunday night. I’ve seen it twice because of Roger Deakins‘ exhilarating cinematography, for the teasing perversity in Javier Bardem‘s Silva, for the way director Sam Mendes delivers in a carefully honed and upmarket fashion, like it’s all being shot for Vanity Fair, and because Skyfall avoids and in fact seems to despise many of the stylistic flourishes and indulgences that have come to represent the Bond franchise over the last 50 years.

And yet it delivers with high finesse. While being a dark and solemn thing at heart. The opening credit sequence, a dreamscape of death if I ever saw one, is but one taste.

As David Denby puts it in his New Yorker review, Skyfall has been fashioned “in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, [and] is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place.” Exactly! Yes! Thank you!

Denby, in short, is lamenting the passing of that bottled and bonded 20th Century attitude, or perhaps the passing of the 20th Century, and once again seems to be pushing an ongoing argument against the inevitable, even though what he’s observed in recent reviews — a certain cultural diminishment, innumerable crude tendencies, a downwash — is arguably happening. Denby has essentially been saying in his reviews what Tony Soprano told Jennifer Melfi in the very first episode of the first Sopranos season, way back in ’99: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

And yet I enjoyed this Denby riff about the first and possibly best Bond of all: “Connery was shrewd and piratical — he let us in on the fun of being wicked. An ironist, he knew that the role was absurd but that the desire for fantasy wasn’t. He was the gentleman-rogue hero — aristocratic in disdain, yet classless — of every man’s dream of himself, and women could enjoy him as the adroit cad who arrives at night, delivers the goods, and leaves in the morning. Connery took his time. His drawling pauses as he calculated his advantage were a prime comic device, the manner of a brute swathed in sophistication, so sure of success that he never needed to rush.

“Roger Moore, of course, was more Brut than brute. He gave off the aura of a luxury product in an airline magazine — an expensive leather case, perhaps, rubbed rather too often with oil. He was neither shaken nor stirred; he was smooth, unmarked by experience in any way. George Lazenby and the gracious Timothy Dalton never really took control of the role, but Pierce Brosnan, with his big, handsome head atop a slender body, could be flinty. He had an interesting mean streak and the habits of cold indifference. He was lithe and quick, yet not really a menace, like the big-bodied Connery or the steel-springed Craig.

“The earlier Bonds were superlative lovers of food, spirits, and women. As box-office has become truly internationalized, however, the producers may have feared that a too knowing Bond might not please everyone. Such a connoisseur could turn off moviegoers who object to the notion of being outclassed. The Bond franchise will continue, though I doubt we shall ever again hear Bond say, as Connery did in Goldfinger, that a certain brandy was a ‘thirty-year-old fins indifferently blended, sir, with an overdose of bons bois.’ I don’t know what bons bois is, but I enjoyed the astringent flavor of Connery’s judgment.”

A seasoned and sardonic Industry Guy who agrees with my 11.15 review of Lincoln has written the following: “You get so much guff for being tough on Steven Spielberg that I thought you should know this time, with your Lincoln review, you’ve mysteriously pulled your punches.

“And there’s a lot to punch. AO Scott and Kenny Turan seem to be so dazzled by the names on this project that they’re looking past the film’s giant weaknesses, especially Tony Kushner‘s script. For every human expression there are (at least) a hundred lines of history lesson dialogue. The ratio of stock characters to compelling ones is worse.

“Daniel Day Lewis is brilliant, so I’m dazzled too on that count. But he’s in another dimension. It’s like Marlon Brando in a Disney afterschool special. People need to watch Advise and Consent to see how the making of laws can be handled dramatically. Preminger did it, because he had a POV about people. SS and Kushner appear to have none. So you get a movie about laws, and not people. Deadly mistake.

“Oscar for DDL? Sure why not. He delivered.”

Although the anti-Silver Linings Playbook cabal is fairly microscopic, it has a way of seeming more influential than it probably is as far as the guilds, Academy members and general audiences are concerned. In addition to the frowners mentioned in today’s “Hang On To Your Argo” post (principally In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg), the others are Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Badass Digest‘s Devin Faraci (although he also has positive things to say about it, oddly), UGO’s Jordan Hoffman and First Showing‘s Alex Billington.

Last night Magic Mike costar (and, if you ask me, serious Best Supporting Actor contender) Matthew McConaughey sat for a q & a at North Hollywood’s TV Academy theatre with Pete Hammond. The chat followed a screening of Magic Mike, and before an audience that was largely female. McConaughey, who struck me as earnest, articulate, no dummy, charming and down to earth, made quite the impression.

Magic Mike costar and Dallas Buyer’s Club star Matthew McConaughey — Thursday, 11.8, 9:10 pm.

McConaughey is a genuine award-season contender, I feel, for two reasons. One, he “hits a solid triple as Dallas, the owner-manager of the strip club Xquisite, nailing every line and delivering the requisite hoots and cock-of-the-walk sleaze,” as I said in my 6.26 review. And two, because he turned his career around a couple of years ago by dropping the shallow romcom vein he’d been mining for years, and he deserves applause for that.

The odd thing was that McConaughey looked so thin that he seemed unhealthy, and he had dark hair and a dark moustache that made him look like John Wilkes Booth. But the unhealthy look is intentional, it turns out, for a film called The Dallas Buyer’s Club.

McConaughey has lost 38 pounds, he said, in order to play the late Ron Woodruff. Club is “loosely based” on the life of Woodruff, “a drug taking, women loving, homophobic man who, in 1986 was diagnosed with full blown HIV/AIDS and given thirty days to live,” a synopsis says. “Other AIDS patients sought out his medications, and with the help of his doctor and a fellow patient, Ron unintentionally created the Dallas Buyers Club, the first of dozens which would form around the country, providing its paying members with alternative treatments.”

On 7.18.12 I wrote that I’d been noticing the fruits of McConaughey’s career-change strategy for a year or so. “Sometime in 2009 or ’10 he must have told his agent, ‘I know I went along with these shitty romcoms before but it has to stop…you’re fucking killing me, man…will you get me out of this?…enough of the quarter-inch-deep, pretty-boy Kate Hudson flicks…that way lies death.’

“My first acknowledgement that McConaughey had changed course was in a 5.3.11 review of The Lincoln Lawyer, to wit: ‘For nearly 20 years McConaughey has under-achieved. The few good films he’s been in have been mostly ensembles (Dazed and Confused, U-571, We Are Marshall, Tropic Thunder) while many of his top-billed or costarring vehicles have been romantic dogshit, especially over the last decade. Now comes The Lincoln Lawyer, the first completely decent, above-average film McConaughey has carried all on his own. By his standards that’s close to a triumph.”

“I should now state that I no longer regard McConaughey as a Beelzebub-like figure, which is how I described him in a 4.21.09 piece called ‘The Devil Probably.’ And that I no longer think of him as ‘King of the Empties,’ which is how I put it on 7.16.06. He’s wised up, done the work, redeemed himself…no more condemnation.”

McConaughey has been exceptionally good in Bernie, Killer Joe and Mud. His upcoming projects include True Detectives, Thunder Run and The Wolf of Wall Street.

My Vietnam excursion (11.19 through 11.30) means I’ll be missing out of the first wave of Les Miserables press & industry screenings, which will begin with a bang on Saturday, 11.24, or during the Thanksgiving time-off cycle. Universal has set 12.11 as the review embargo date although tweeting responses are cool from the get-go. Les Miz director Tom Hooper will be doing q & a’s before or after the six screenings slated for 11.24.

Year after year, conventional default thinking among Oscar handicappers is that the leading Best Picture contenders (a) say something recognizably true about who we are individually or as a culture right now, (b) are powerfully performed and stylistically edgy or striking in some way, (c) are emotionally affecting, (d) are commercially popular (The Hurt Locker being an exception) and (e) are not comedies.

That last rule is a big one, and many journalist know-it-alls who present themselves as highly perceptive free-thinkers follow it absolutely. Any film that is even half-comedic must be relegated to the second-tier. (Exception: American Beauty.) Which is why a skillfully made but not especially deep or socially resonant film like Argo — at heart a political caper flick that is obviously more earnest and less glitzy than Ocean’s Eleven, but isn’t all that different from it — is STILL outpointing Silver Linings Playbook on the Gurus of Gold Best Picture list. And despite SLP being more emotionally affecting, and in various ways reflective of our manic culture, and containing far stronger performances.

The biggest Guru friends of Silver Linings Playbook are still Fandango‘s Dave Karger, MCN’s David Poland, TheWrap‘s Steve Pond and L.A. Times entertainment reporter Glenn Whipp. The chief SLP Guru naysayer is In Contention‘s Kris Tapley. Apparent modified frowners are EW‘s Anthony Breznican, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg and L.A. Times reporter Mark Olsen.

On Morning Joe this morning Newsweek columnist David Frum called Republican leaders “cowards” and said that rural rightwing brainiacs have been been lied to by a “conservative entertainment complex” — i.e., Fox News. A conservative and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, Frum said that the GOP had been “overrun by fear-mongers.” (The key passage starts at 5:38.)

“The problem with Republican leaders is that they’re cowards,” Frum said, adding that the party’s base of donors “went apocalyptic” in the last four years. “Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex,” he said. Morning Joe‘s Joe Scarborough asked Frumn to “name names,” to whcih Frum replied that there are “too many.”

Frum said he’d spoken with Tea Party morons and found that a majority was convinced that taxes had increased under Obama and that the federal government had spent more than $1 trillion on welfare each year. Both claims are bullshit. “The followers, the donors and the activists are so mistaken about the nature of the problems the country faces,” Frum said.

Key quote: “The people who put the cement shoes on Romney’s feet are now blaming him for sinking.”

Doug Liman and Tom Cruise‘s All You Need Is Kill, based on a Japanese scifi “light” novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, uses a Groundhog Day approach to violent action thrillers. Question: When is Cruise going to suck in the fact that he’s a half-century old and that it’s time to become the guy Harrison Ford was in the ’90s? An action star, I mean, but not the Energizer Bunny.

Tom Cruise as Lt. Col. Bill Cage in Doug Liman’s All You Need Is Kill.

Cruise’s Lt. Col. Bill Cage “is dropped — untrained and ill-equipped — into what amounts to little more than a suicide mission, [and] is killed within minutes. But Cage awakens back at the beginning of the same hellish day, and is forced to fight and die again…and again. Direct physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop, dooming him to live out the same brutal combat over and over.”

Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton costar.

Gen. David Petraeus has resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency because of a little action on the side? Unless he was sleeping with a double-agent Mata Hari who was working for Al Qeada, the question is obviously “why?” What is this Nathaniel Hawthorne Sunday-school obsession that Americans have about puritanically condemning the painful but not uncommon way of things when a marriage has lasted two or three decades?

Gen. David Patreaus and wife Holly sometime within the last two or three years.

David and Holly Patreaus when he graduated from West Point in the mid ’70s.

What does a perfectly normal and, I would add, perfectly understandable infidelity (powerful men of a certain age often succumb to temptation, particularly when their wives haven’t aged in a flattering way)…what does this have to do with being able to do your job in an effective manner?

Slate‘s Fred Kapalan is reporting that the woman Patreaus was having it off with is the attractive author of a Petreaus biography (“All In: The Education of General David Patreaus“) named Paula Broadwell.

I’m not trying to be cruel, but please…compare the above photographs and come down off your moralistic horse and be honest. Cut the crap. The Patreaus’s have been married for 37 years. It’s perfectly normal for powerful husbands in their 40s, 50s or 60s to think about the unthinkable when sufficiently motivated.

You know what I mean. The French don’t look at affairs this way. Nor the Italians. I’m not saying something like this isn’t difficult or that it isn’t humiliating for poor Holly Patreaus — obviously it’s a rough episode all around. But again…who out there is genuinely surprised? Be honest.

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell announced the Pateaus resignation an hour ago, reading Petraeus’ farewell letter on air. Petraeus wrote that he had gone to the White House on Thursday and asked the president “for personal reasons” to resign. “After being married for more than 37 years I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair,” he wrote. “Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as a leader of an organization such as ours.”

Men all across the world are sympathizing as we speak.

Paula Broadwell’s reported involvement with Petreaus triggered his resignation.

“It had long been rumored that something was going on between Petraeus and Broadwell,” Kaplan writes. “Her book, co-written with Vernon Loeb, is widely regarded as a valentine to the general. When she was embedded with him in Afghanistan, they went on frequent 5-mile runs together. But Petraeus went on 5-mile runs with many reporters, and few people who knew him took the rumors seriously.

“In his personal life, he’s always been seen as a straight shooter, a square. Few could have imagined that his end would come as the result of a morals scandal.”

Powerful people have affairs, and they’ve been happening since Ceasar and Cleopatra. Leave them alone. Sexual connections between consenting adults, within or without the sanctity of marriage, are nobody’s damn business except those immediately involved.

I’m presuming this will be a very fine, occasionally rousing, expertly made film, but I can already feel the fatigue and the downerism.