The Christmas downshift begins today and won’t end until January 2nd, or 13 days from now. I can feel it in the Manhattan air. The conversation is dying down a tad. I don’t mind and in fact always enjoy the time just before Christmas, particularly in the stores and during walks around the city in the late afternoon and especially at night. But the post-Christmas blahs, a seven-day period that will begin on Thursday, 12.26, and end on Thursday, 1.2.14, are hell. Okay, they’re not “hell” but I know it always feels wonderful when they’re over. Thank God I have the amusements and distractions of New York to fiddle with. Can you imagine sinking into the post-Christmas quicksand in, say, Wilkes-Barre or Birmingham or upper New Hampshire? Do you want to feel really zoned and blah-ed out and generally trapped in your life? See Nebraska. It’s like a cherry on top of an eternally depressing ice-cream sundae. Except during those passages when Mark Orton’s score takes over. Then everything is okay.

“The editing style is really, again, about simplicity and not gimmicks, you know? So it’s a little hard for us right now with the modern style of blender editing, where everything is two frames long. [Marty] keeps saying, ‘Where is the shot?’ Whatever happened to the great shot like Kubrick used to do? And you could watch it for six minutes and never get bored because it was so beautifully framed. It had such beautiful music. And what was going on inside was so great. Now it’s just, the image doesn’t mean anything. And they seem to be getting so short now that I wonder if they’re going to come to the end of the road. I don’t think they can make each cut any shorter! I wonder if there will be a big backlash and everything will go back to being slow again.” — Wolf of Wall Street editor Thelma Schoonmaker speaking to Hitfix‘s Kris Tapley in a 12.20 interview piece.

I always have a hard time deciding which films are exceptionally well cut. If I like a film I like the editing — it doesn’t go much deeper than that. First-rate editing — smart, fleeting, sleight of handish — is invisible, for the most part. If you don’t notice it it’s probably good. What I notice is economy and timing and, at times, the musicality. Good editing and good music share certain qualities. I sometimes notice how long a shot is held, the precise millisecond when a shot cuts to another. I also notice editing with uneven rhythms and jarring tempos, and I definitely notice cutting that seems overly frenzied and chaotic. I know that the editing in Inside Llewyn Davis seems extra-attuned. I love Thelma’s cutting of The Wolf of Wall Street, needless to say. 12 Years A Slave, for sure. Her is perfectly cut.

Are there any films that have stood out as especially well-edited for the HE community?

During our chat yesterday at the Soho Mondrian, Wolf of Wall Street costar Jonah Hill mentioned the FOMO syndrome, or fear of missing out. The term is most commonly applied to Shallow Hals who compulsively check their social media streams to see what might be happening elsewhere, etc. But I define it in as a fear of missing out on any rich, nourishing experience. Random HE FOMOs: doing the Camino trail across Spain, missing any great play on the London or New York stage, missing out on a beautiful sunrise in the Caribbean due to oversleeping, missing some hilarious joke being shared by someone two tables away from mine…I could go on all day. I guess it’s not FOMO as much as wanting to be in 100 different places at any given time. Or 100 different eras. I wish I could have spent a few days in Washington, D.C., during the Lincoln administration. Or somehow had a chance to meet Charles Dickens in London in the early 1850s, when things were going really well for him creatively. Or a chance to wander around Rome when Julius Ceasar ruled the world. Or Jerusalem during the time of Yeshua of Nazareth.

Four nights ago August: Osage County‘s Meryl Streep, Margo Martindale and Abigail Breslin dropped by for a post-screening q & a at Pete Hammond‘s KCET film series in North Hollywood. It was the final screening of the ’13 series. There’s a sameness to on-stage, post-screening interviews. You can’t step too far outside of the routine. But there’s always something refreshing and even calming about Streep’s manner of sharing. She always seems to be reaching deep inside for something semi-spontaneous. And she’s never given a rote performance, of course. August: Osage County opens in NY & LA on 12.27.