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.

I sat down with Wolf of Wall Street costar Jonah Hill at the Soho Mondrian between 4:10 and 5:25 pm. We covered almost everything. I recorded it all. I’ll type up most of it and tap something out tomorrow. Hill’s portrayal of Donnie Azoff, partner in stock-fraud crime and quaalude comrade of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), will live forever in the annals of motion-picture bacchanalia. Which is one way of saying it’s a superb performance. Oh, and by the way: today is Jonah’s 30th birthday. Go to the 32-minute mark for Hill’s interview on the 12.19 Charlie Rose Show.

Wolf of Wall Street costar Jonah Hill — Soho Mondrian, Friday, 5:30 pm.

I haven’t seen the majority of the nine films on the Academy’s just-announced Best Foreign Language Feature shortlist, but I know for a dead cold fact that Asghar Farhadi‘s masterful The Past, which didn’t make the cut, is a much, much better film than Thomas Vinterberg‘s The Hunt, which did make it…much.

Wong Kar Wai‘s The Grandmaster, which no one who knows anything has done cartwheels or backflips over, made the list but Haifaa Al-Mansour‘s widely praised Wadjda, the Saudi Arabian entry, didn’t? Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn must have punched the refrigerator door at least once.

Obviously a dark day for Sony Pictures Classics, the U.S. distributor of Wadjda and The Past. Life isn’t unfair — it’s infuriating.

I landed at Kennedy around 10 pm last night. 45 minutes (!) for the bags to finally appear on the carousel. Gypsy cab into Manhattan for $60 bills, and the guy avoided the LIE (or one of the highways heading into town) to avoid paying the toll. Awoke at 9 am or 6 am L.A. time. A Jonah Hill chat is set to happen downtown around 4 pm. Nothing wrong with a little relaxation from time to time. I have to get in touch with Glenn Kenny to…actually, maybe I should hold back on paying him that $50 I bet on American Hustle winning the Best Picture Oscar. It might just make it. The Movie Godz are foursquare against Gravity winning, I can tell you that. A Best Picture winner has to have some kind of social, political or psychological undercurrent — it has to say or reflect something about who we are (or who we used to be or want to be). Gravity says absolutely nothing except that we all want to survive — big deal.

A two-minute, nine-second fragment of last night’s Charlie Rose interview with The Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese and star-producer Leonardo DiCaprio.

Results of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s George Cukor poll were posted today. While there was no runaway favorite, Holiday, Sylvia Scarlet and A Star Is Born were named most often. Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn agreed with me that Rich and Famous seems to pop through with a bit more pizazz and audacity. My fallback choice will always be Holiday.

An idea hit me this morning. The idea (and you can’t be too literal or specific-minded when you ponder this) is that the basic dynamic in this conversation is a metaphor for the back-and-forth between myself and some HE comment-threaders. I believe that I am both Lou Costello and the miserable wanderer, and HE readers are the miserable wanderer. Or something like that.

A&E executives have no choice but to hold fast regarding their decision to indefinitely suspend Duck Dynasty‘s Phil Robertson for his dumbshit anti-gay comments in a just-published GQ interview. Hinterland yahoos rallied strongly yesterday in defense of Phil and against A&E’s decision, but if the A&E guys buckle they will be regarded by history as lily-livered wimps. The bottom line, as noted by N.Y. Times reporter Bill Carter, is that “it will be a long time before any viewer even notices the suspension. The next edition of nine Duck Dynasty episodes has already been completed and the episodes will begin next month. Robertson will be prominently seen in all of them. The suspension will affect only future episodes, which have not yet been shot and will not be seen for months.”