Nick Clement to HE: “I absolutely cannot wait to see Inside Llewyn Davis, which is probably my most anticipated movie for the rest of 2013. I don’t want to hear any spoilers but what’s the deal with the cat? Is the cat as big of a part of the movie as one might think due to how many shots of it that are featured in the trailer? Is the calico cat a “character” in the film? My wife and I are cat lovers so we’re both curious.”

HE to Clement: “The Llewyn Davis cat is cool but you should probably take it easy and not look for anything special or…you know, nirvana-like to happen. The cat has an identity, yes, and is a life force of a certain kind, but he’s basically a motif. He certainly has no ‘cat personality’ except that he’s willful and crafty enough to escape apartments and run off into the streets of Manhattan and travel dozens of city blocks on his own. He’s basically just an orange object to be held and lost and found and held and lost and found. In and of himself he’s more or less meaningless. At most I see him as a kind of wandering Manhattan Ulysses. But he’s really a kind of MacGuffin.”

Clement to HE: “Love it! I watch A Serious Man every few months, so your recent comparisons have gotten me very excited.”

I’ve a fairly busy screening week in front of me — White House Down, Stuck In Love, The Way Way Back, a possible second viewing of Fruitvale Station, a possible peek at Pacific Rim — but a voice is telling me I should see This Is The End, even though everything I can sense and smell tells me to wait for Netflix, if that. This Seth Rogen-Evan Goldberg film seems to have caught on to some degree ($57 million) with the under-30s and has perhaps even touched something in the general zeitgeist. Or am I giving it too much credit? This passage from the New Yorker review by Anthony Lane caught my eye.

I caught the first three or four weeks of Mad Men‘s Season Six, but I disengaged during the European stay. Now that I’m back and in NYC, I’ve bought a season pass and plan to binge over the next few days. Last night Don Draper, the chilliest and most uptight, most fucked-up hider, cigarette smoker and chronic boozer in cable TV history, got whacked. Fired from Sterling Cooper, I mean. Good! Best thing that could have happened to this asshole. The shattering of his smug facade has been a long time coming. Go to rehab, go to jail, drop the Draper identity or at least get more in touch with your real self and your actual past, slam your car into a telephone pole, stick your head in an oven, grow a beard, become a hippie.

East End Film Festival synopsis for Mike Figgis‘s Suspension of Disbelief: “A world-renowned screenwriter becomes implicated in the murder of a beautiful young Frenchwoman in Mike Figgis’ return to the world of psycho-sexual mind games. A murder-mystery in which its protagonist loses sight of reality and the fiction he has created. Figgis is one of the UK’s truly maverick cinematic spirits, returning here with something fresh, exciting and more than a little disturbing.” Plus a 6.22 Guardian piece by Figgis about what’s ailing the British film industry.

I understand that Milton Glaser‘s 1968 “Mickey Mouse in Vietnam” short was made in a very back-pocket, low-tech way, but would it have killed Glaser to add a soundtrack sometime over the last 40-plus years? Compared to this Steamboat Willie is like Avatar. Why does Mickey fall in slow-mo when he gets shot in the head? Was Glaser influenced by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway‘s deaths in Bonnie and Clyde?

James Wan‘s The Conjuring (Warner Bros./New Line, 7.19) “scared me more than any other movie in recent memory. I’ve been grossed out by gore, and jolted by cats jumping out of closets, yes, but this is something else entirely. For full-on fear and dread, the kind that makes you start squirming at the beginning of the scene, because you know someone’s about to open a door they shouldn’t, this movie starts creepy and maintains a hold on your spine for the next 112 minutes.” — from 6.22 Los Angeles Film Festival review by TheWrap‘s Alonso Duralde. So how about some NYC screenings?

This morning Meet the Press host David Gregory asked columnist Glenn Greenwald why he shouldn’t be legally prosecuted for having apparently assisted renegade National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Gregory: “To the extent that you’ve aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” Greenwald: “[I think it’s] pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies.”

I don’t know anything and neither does anyone else, but it’s at least somewhat likely if not more so that the following will end up as big-time award winners/nominees at the end of the year and early 2014. Please forward suggestions about any other potential contenders.

Best Picture: American Hustle, Wolf of Wall Street, Inside Llewyn Davis, All Is Lost, Saving Mr. Banks, Fruitvale Station, August: Osage County, Monuments Men, Foxcatcher, Before Midnight.

Best Director: David O. Russell, American Hustle; Martin Scorsese, Wolf of Wall Street; Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis; John Lee Hancock, Saving Mr. Banks; Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station; George Clooney, Monuments Men; Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher; Richard Linklater, Before Midnight.

I’ve contemplated the suggestions for HE’s Best of 2013 At The Six-Month Mark, and I just can’t blow off the top-notch films I saw at the Cannes Film Festival (Inside Llewyn Davis, All Is Lost, The Past, Blue Is The Warmest Color, et. al.). If I were to ignore them because they haven’t been released I’d give HE’s Halftime Award for Best Picture to Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight, but I can’t ignore Cannes — it happened, hundreds saw and wrote about these films, they’re part of the conversation, they’re too accomplished and important, etc.

So here’s the breakdown so far on 2013’s Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress…right? Little thought is given to likely Oscar/Academy recognition given my lack of respect for mainstream Academy attitudes, although any/most of these faves will probably be Oscar-nominated. This is just me talking right now. The Academy bullshit can wait.

Best Halftime Picture Award of 2013: Tie between Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Inside Llewyn Davis and J.C. Chandor‘s All Is Lost. I’m sorry but Davis is one of those less-is-profoundly-more films that not only works and coheres perfectly when you first see it, but also gets better and better the more you think about it weeks down the road. And All Is Lost is just fucking brilliant — easily the most novel and gripping survivalist suspense drama ever made, and particularly striking for the zero-dialogue element. Leagues and light years beyond Life Is Pi.

Other Best Halftime Picture Nominees: 3. The Past, d: Asghar Farhadi (Cannes 2013); 4. Blue Is The Warmest Color, d: Abdellatif Kechiche (Cannes 2013); 5. Before Midnight, d: Richard Linklater; 6. Ryan Coogler‘s Fruitvale Station (Sundance, Cannes); 7. 20 Feet From Stardom, d: Morgan Neville; 8. Frances Ha, d: Noah Baumbach; 9. Behind The Candelabra, d: Steven Soderbergh; 10. Mud, d: Jeff Nichols, 11. Upstream Color, d: Shane Carruth; 12. Shadow Dancer, d: James Marsh; 13. The Attack, d: Ziad Doueiri.

Best Halftime Director Award of 2013: Joel and Ethan Coen, Inside Llewyn Davis. Other Best Halftime Director Nominees: J.C. Chandor, All Is Lost, Asghar Farhadi, The Past, Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station; Richard Linklater, Before Midnight.

Best Halftime Actor Award of 2013: Robert Redford, All Is Lost. No other performance so far has come close to conveying as much gravitas, alone-ness, sadness, decency, humanity. And no other performance so far has elicited such flat-out admiration and exhilaration on my part. There’s nothing to do but celebrate Redford’s luck in scoring perhaps the best role of his career and delivering bis best performance since he played…you tell me. Jeremiah Johnson in Jeremiah Johnson, Bob Woodward in All The President’s Men, David Chappelet in Downhill Racer, the goodbye scene in front of the Plaza in The Way We Were, etc.

Best Halftime Actor Nominees besides Redford: Oscar Isaac, Inside Llewyn Davis (there’s often a new guy/outlier nominee among Academy’s Best Actor contenders), Michael Douglas, Behind The Candelabra (I don’t care if Candelabara debuted on HBO — it opened theatrically in Europe); Michael B. Jordan, Fruitvale Station; Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight. Wells Exception: If Michael Shannon hadn’t played General Zod in Man of Steel his Iceman performance might have some Best Actor traction at this stage, but he has to pay the penalty for being in Steel, which was and is an act of mercenary paycheck-ism.

Best Halftime Actress Award of 2013: Tie between Berenice Bejo in The Past and Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue Is The Warmest Color (although the latter’s unpronounceable, unspellable last name probably puts her behind Bejo at this point). Best 2013 Halftime Actress Nominees besides Bejo & Exarchopoulos: Julie Delpy, Before Midnight; Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha; Andrea Riseborough, Shadow Dancer; Rooney Mara, Ain’t them Bodies Saints.

Best 2013 Halftime Best Supporting Actor Award of 2013: Bruce Dern, Nebraska. (Wells to Paramount: Dern having won the Best Actor award at Cannes is great advertising, but there’s no way his Nebraska performance will get any traction as a Best Actor contender with the Academy — it’s a supporting performance through and through. Runner-up: Ali Mosaffa, The Past.

Best 2013 Halftime Best Supporting Actress Award of 2013: Pauline Burlet, The Past. Runner-Up: June Squibb, Nebraska. HE Exception: Kristin Scott Thomas is striking and, yes, memorable in Only God Forgives, but the movie is so Godless and Godawful that nobody having anything to do with it can be nominated. There may even be a penalty carrying over into 2014 and 2015. I haven’t finally decided — let me think it over.

I can’t think of anything more to write today. Flatlines happen; roll with it. So how about some mid-year nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress? I’ll chime in later today or tonight.

A critic friend caught White House Down a couple of days ago, and so I called this morning to see what he thought. “Roland Emmerich is as soulless and bombastic a director as Michael Bay,” he replied, “and this” — Emmerich’s latest — “is no better than Olympus Has Fallen.” Whoa, whoa…what? All the while I’ve been presuming that White House Down would be the slicker, pricier, more upmarket version of a White House-attacked-by-terrorists film, certainly compared to Antoine Fuqua‘s Olympus Has Fallen, a C-grade, Walmart-level piece of shit that opened last March and did about $160 million worldwide.

“But it looks so much better than Olympus Has Fallen,” I argued, not having a shred of first-hand observation to fortify my view. “It has to be at least half-decent or tolerable…right? Olympus was a drag. WHD at least looks and sounds like a tonier product. A slicker Sony Studios-type deal rather than…you know, a film that looks like it was shot in Shreveport.”