If Paramount has any brains they’ll definitely include the originally shot ending of World War Z on the DVD/Bluray. Everyone has read about the discarded finale and is probably curious to some degree. It would be close to criminal not to share it, especially given the dark sexual-territorial aspects that may or may not have been filmed. On 6.22 Movies.com’s Peter Hall posted a synopsis of the original finale in the WWZ script. “We don’t have 100% confirmation that all of this [finale] ended up being filmed, though there’s evidence below [that] a lot of it was,” Hall writes, “but this is at least how it was supposed to end.”

Key portion: “Gerry (Brad Pitt) reaches Karin (Mireille Enos). He explains to her that the cold is the way they’ll win battles, which does her no good because it just so happens she and the kids are in a refugee camp in the sweltering heat of the Everglades. They’re in the type of camp where you have to have something to trade to survive, and it just so happens the one thing Karin had to trade was herself. She doesn’t explicitly tell Gerry this, but after she hastily hangs up the phone we see that she’s in some kind of reluctantly consensual relationship with the soldier who rescued them from the rooftop at the beginning of the movie.

I don’t mind living in a Lauterbrunnen-like urban canyon in the financial district, but I can’t say I’m in love with it either. I don’t have a big problem with looking out the living-room window and gazing down 14 stories to the street below, but I do feel a wee bit remote and cut off. But I love getting to know the financial district, where I’ve never really hung before. And I’m really loving all the friendly vibes I’m getting from everyone down here (apart from the dicks at The Vintry). I’m basically okay with the neighborhood. It just doesn’t conform to anyone’s idea of a quaint, homey, people-friendly realm.

I’ve made some calls and written some emails about trying to attend Thursday morning’s funeral service for James Gandolfini, which is happening at Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine (Amsterdam and 112th). Hundreds are going to attend. The passing of this legendary actor has hit New Yorkers where they live, and not just in a tragic, realistic sense. For millions Tony Soprano‘s death in that Bloomfield, New Jersey restaurant (actually an ice-cream parlor called Holsten’s) was an uncertain thing. Now he’s really gone, and many of those who felt they didn’t experience closure from that final episode are, I suspect, going to attend Thursday’s service to finally get that, flaky as that sounds. It’s going to be like the funeral of Vito Corleone and Marlon Brando thrown together.

I don’t know if the family or Gandolfini’s managers (Sanders Armstrong Caserta Management) are saving seats for press or not, but I can at least try for some kind of attendance or viewing or something. I want to do this. It feels important to me. I’ve been a Gandolfini guy since True Romance, or for the last 20 years.

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.