If you began your Independence Day activities on the evening of Wednesday, 7.3 (as most people did), you enjoyed a 2 1/2 day or 60-hour holiday. Because it more or less ended around noon today. The profoundly relaxing portion of your getaway, I mean. Sunday is always about coping with the shadow of Monday and grimming up for that — a wash. And once Saturday morning is over and the afternoon (or the evening, God forbid) begins it’s awfully hard to avoid thinking about Sunday. The only entirely clear days are Thursday and Friday. I know — I never take any time off so what am I talking about? I’m talking about how I used to feel when I punched a clock and took vacations. During the first 48 hours I used to feel free, blissful, tingly– like a 16 year-old after two 16 oz. cans of beer.

Last Friday (6.28) I posted some counter-points from a senior Pacific Rim player about how the reports about underwhelming tracking up to that point were misleading. Now Variety‘s Marc Graser is listening to a similar rap, reviewing the awareness-and-interest situation and going “hmmm, yeah, okay….maybe.”

Yesterday I sent New Orleans-based movie maven David Dubos a PDF of Kelly Marcel‘s Savings Mr. Banks screenplay. A few hours later he replied: “Read it today, quite good. Surefire Oscar nom for Best Original screenplay, and likely acting noms for Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson.

“On a side note (and this might be just a coincidence), but in the trailer for Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor (20th Century Fox, 10.25), the wire stretched across the highway to behead some poor sap…I remember reading that eons ago as a means of disposal in Truman Capote‘s Handcarved Coffins, in which the serial killer did the same thing. I wonder if Cormac McCarthy read that? Probably, I’m guessing.” — from an email friend, received yesterday.