I’ve never had a fat cat in my life, but the size of Mouse, my borderline obese two and a half year-old Siamese male, has become a problem. 25 minutes ago, I mean. He just jumped onto the top of the wooden cabinet above the sink, filled with plates and glasses with two suitcases sitting on top, and the cabinet couldn’t take the weight and the whole thing just came CRASHING DOWN on the counter and the floor.

Mouse — Friday, 1.7, 1:05 pm.

It sounded like a series of grenades going off, like the building itself was collapsing. The noise must have startled people walking on the street. The cabinet shattered in sections, smashed plates, smashed glasses, smashed bottles, clutter & crap and liquor stink all over the place. The kitchen is a complete disaster zone, and all because Mouse is Orson Welles. Now I’m looking at $300 or $400 in reconstruction costs to put it back up, replace the plates and glasses…at least.

Snow all day today, tonight and into tomorrow. Nothing heavy, and yet New York City sanitation crews are still behind on the last snowfall. Ten-foot-tall mountains of garbage were sitting in various locales on the Lower East Side as I was roaming around last night. If I was Mayor Bloomberg I would have done more than demote sanitation chiefs who allegedly ordered a deliberate snowplow slowdown because they were angry about cutbacks. I would have gone all Luca Brasi on their asses.

I allowed in this morning’s Season of the Witch review that the Rotten Tomatoes rating “might go up a tad when the kneejerk fanboys start weighing in.” But they didn’t. With no support from anyone, Dominic Sena‘s medieval calamity currently has one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes ratings ever.

Ben Zuk‘s “Salute to Cinema” is just another flashy collage of scene slivers. Not a hint of content or feeling or theme interrupts the nonstop so-whattitude — combustion, verve, sound and fury…roller-coaster! And it doesn’t hold a candle to Matthew Seitz’s recent assemblage. Pay a little less attention to the 4th of July sparkler aspects and a little more to what the films were actually about.

I got started late today because of a nightmare that woke me at 3:15 am. It was an okay flying dream (i.e., didn’t feel like a nightmare at first) in which I was parachuting in a kind of sideways fashion, not dropping as much as coasting along three or four hundred feet above a half-suburban, half-wooded area. A run-of-the-mill metaphor for a high-wire act like writing a daily Hollywood column that’s half movies and half mood-pocket. That plus the idea of being more at peace in the air than on the ground. No biggie.

I suddenly felt like I didn’t want to coast along anymore so I steered the chute toward the flat roof of an unusually tall Victorian-era home. I grabbed hold of something or other and landed on the roof. The chute naturally deflated. I walked over and tried to open the trap door on the roof but it was bolted shut. Then I suddenly lost my footing (the chute tugged or suddenly half inflated due to a wind gust) and I fell off the roof. No chance that the chute would open as I plummeted head first. I was a second or two from landing and breaking my neck so I woke up with a “whuh!…no!” Yes, just like every actor who wakes up from a bad dream in every movie that’s tried to thrill or scare or spook, going back to Vertigo.

Sleeping was out so I got up and read and wrote “Boiled Down,” and then I began to feel overwhelming fatigue around 6:45 am and dropped off on the couch, and then woke up around 11:45 am, and all because of a simple flash of a thought about falling (or failing) that manifested in a standard boilerplate flying dream, which I’ve been having since I was eight and which are basically a dime a dozen.

And it’s called being interested in owning just one of these Bluray discs — the darker one directed by that Kershner guy — and ignoring the hell out of the other five. I could see Netflxing A New Hope, but Return of the Jedi has been erased from my memory. Don’t even mention the prequels.

The screening selections at Roger Durling‘s Santa Barbara Film Festival (1.27 — 2.6) are always well chosen, but the meat and the heat are always the tributes and panels. Because these events are always so smoothly produced and frankly kind of Deja Vu-like, some of us are hoping to again sample some of the delightful chaos that punctuated last year’s James Cameron tribute.

Here’s the final big-name roster: (a) Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) receiving The American Riviera Award, and interviewed by Durling on Friday, 1.28 at the Arlington Theatre; (b) James Franco (127 Hours) getting the Outstanding Performance of the Year Award, and interviewed by Leonard Maltin on Saturday, 1.29 at the Arlington; (c) Christopher Nolan (Inception) being given the Modern Master Award, and interviewed by Deadline.com’s Pete Hammond on Sunday, 1.30 at the Arlington; and Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech) receiving the Montecito Award, again with Hammond interviewing on Monday, 1.31 at the Arlington. And then five nights later, on Saturday, 2.5, Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole) will be handed the Cinema Vanguard Award at the Arlington with Durling moderating.

The 2011 Virtuosos Awards, presented at the Lobero theatre on Friday, 2.4, will go to Lesley Manville (Another Year), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom) and Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit) with Entertainment Weekly‘s Dave Karger on the mike.

The annual “It Starts With The Script” panel, which is always moderated at the Lobero theatre by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, will happen on Saturday, 1.29 at 11 am. Three hours later marketing whiz and “job whisperer” Madelyn Hammond will moderate the “Creative Forces: Women in the Biz” panel at the same venue. L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein will moderate the usual “Movers & Shakers” panel on Sunday, 1.30 at 11 am, also at the Lobero. Six days — Saturday, February 5 — the “Directors on Directing” pane will kick off at 11 am with EW‘s Dave Karger moderating.

Yesterday British critic-journalist Tom Shone, writing on his “Taking Barack To The Movies” site, reports that Matt Damon has told him that (a) Terrence Malick suggested the ending of Good Will Hunting to Damon and GWH co-screenwriter Ben Affleck during a dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts way back when, and that (b) they knew the notoriously reclusive director due to Malick being “best friends with Affleck’s godfather,” who isn’t named in the piece.

The godfather connection obviously suggests why Affleck ended up in Malick’s The Burial, the Oklahoma-shot drama with Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko and Rachel Weisz that’s currently in post and scheduled to open sometime in 2013. Kidding. But not that much.