9.15 Update (9:20 am): TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman reported last night that Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Tom Rothman was essentially whacked.

“Individuals close to the situation said that Rothman went after Ron Meyer‘s job as head of Universal Studios, and ended up losing the job he has had for more than a decade,” Waxman writes. ‘He went to [News Corp. COO] Chase Carey and overplayed his hand,’ said one insider close to the situation.

“Rothman is known as a volatile, often explosive tempered executive, while Carey is a straight-laced business executive with a very different style. Other reasons include the fact that Rothman was less relevant in a restructured News Corp.

“Of the mogul duo, Rothman was considered the creative force in moviemaking decisions, while Gianopulos is the business-minded executive and tough negotiator. In a restructured News Corp., Dana Walden and Gary Newman will report directly to Carey, eliminating the need for another executive layer.

Earlier: Eight minutes ago Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Tom Rothman is “in the process of finalizing his exit from the studio.” annd that his exit is said to be “imminent.” So what’s that about? All I know is that Rothman, 57, is a tough headstrong bird who reads this column, and that he has what is typically referred to as a hands-on (or hands-in) management style.

In 1994 Rothman founded Fox Searchlight Pictures, and served as its chief honcho. He served as Twentieth Century Fox Film Group prez from January to August 2000, and then as Twentieth Century Fox Production topper from 1995 to 2000. Mr. Rothman has been chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment of Fox Entertainment Group Inc. since July 2000 and serves as its Director. He has also served as Co-Chairman of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. (That’s a lot of serving., but we’ve all gotta do it.) He serves as Director of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. Mr. Rothman also serves as a Member of the Board of Directors of the Sundance Institute.

“Does Auda serve?”

[Cries of “no, no, no, no!”]

“Does Auda abu Tayi serve?”

[Further negative cries]

I didn’t see it, I mean. I wanted to, intended do…but somehow it didn’t happen. I said this a couple of days ago but it’s the festival’s fault. They show all the name-droppy, high-appeal films during the first four or five days, programming them against each other and forcing either-or choices, and then they refuse to re-screen them when things slow down over the last four or five days.

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.

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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.