05.14.08

Team ÜberCiné CANNES 2008 Official Journal - - - Day One: C’est Magnifique!

Posted in Glögg Is Life. at 11:42 pm by Gregory

I’m in France!

Les mots ne peuvent pas exprimer comment heureux je suis!

They named this guy after the airport.

I’m not even gay, and yet I’m thrilled to be in France!

Team ÜberCiné landed yesterday at Charles de Gaulle, slightly weary from Priceline’s seventeen-hour layover in Newark, but otherwise chuffed to be back in the City of Light! We were all so excited, we barely suffered from the culture-shock of observing most Parisians (including children and dogs) smoking and/or urinating in public (see: Le Cinéma Français des ’90s) whilst all of the other French people filmed them. Weird, but…Oh la la!

Obviously, because we have no sugar-daddies and the studios don’t care about us, we couldn’t afford to land at l’Aéroport Cannes-Mandelieu like all the tabloid bitches and media freak-a-zoids do, so we decided to transform our inconvenience (Cannes is quite a long way from Paris, especially in flip-flops) into a Holiday — like Mr. Bean’s Holiday!

How we got here.

Yep, since Mr. Bean’s Holiday was absolutely one of the finest (and most beautifully-lensed) Motion Pictures of last year — wherein Rowan Atkinson essentially steals the concept of “Monsieur Hulot” and bumbles his way (natch-urellement) to Cannes — we decided to retrace his steps (and errors, and pratfalls, and general idiocy) all the way to The Greatest Movie Event In The World (Except For, Let’s Face It, Toronto).

Nous arrivons à Cannes!

Arriving even more slightly weary at the outskirts of Cannes where the gypsies dance until dawn, we got lost ninety-four times but finally found our way to the only Motel 6 in all of Europe — where we were smart enough to book ahead.

Mind, in France the concept of the “non-smoking room” causes people to laugh — much like the concept of the “quiet American” or the “actress who isn’t merely a slut who got lucky” — so we quickly grew accustomed to the notion of our breathing passages sealing themselves closed through the night, as well as all of our clothes and belongings quickly smelling like holy hell. This is Cannes! We’re going to have a good time if it kills us (and, if we’re all really lucky, if it kills Shia LaBeouf, too).

Since ÜberCiné is world-renowned for having the absolute best coverage of news, stock reports and pop culture on Planet Earth, we were greeted this morning with fifteen (!) oversized gift-baskets from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Rupert Murdoch and Pauly Shore (ever notice how the ladies never spend centime #1 on gifts for other people?) — and these we immediately had Fed-Exed to our P.O. box in Winnipeg, because some of the Blu-Ray Special Editions enclosed might be totally worth something someday (possibly even Son In Law — suddenly thinking: “Why didn’t they cast Pauly Shore as “Mutt Williams”? — but I digress…)

Pauly on the Shore (right, with half-boner)

Arriving at the Festival proper, we immediately flip-flopped straight to the middle of Cannes and walked up to the Media Accreditation Table and begged like pathetic little girls for our laminates — which are pretty cool, really, and feature a picture of Pepé Le Pew to signify ” Online Journalist - Restricted Access - DO NOT ADMIT!!!” (This, of course, is a joke — but nonetheless I’m not going to publish a photo of our badges, so that some unscrupulous types don’t bogart it and try to crash the best parties.) The P.R. Women in France are extra-nice, actually, and gave each of us a beret and bottle of champagne by way of welcome.

A Typical French P.R. Woman

And then it was off to our first screening of the day — a brilliant new drama from director Peter Weir called You Only Lick My Daughters! — which was preceded by an introduction by Mr. Weir himself, wherein he confirmed his latest epic as “a sort of spiritual sequel to Witness, only nowhere near as good.” Indeed! In this film, Bobcat Goldthwait stars as a multihyphenate Terrorist-Sexual-Predator-Republican-Senator who accidentally gets caught in D.C. terrorizing and predatoring and Republican Senatoring, and thus steals an inconspicuous purple HumVee and speeds out to the wastelands of Northern Indiana to attempt to tuck himself away amongst the simple, rural folk. Concealing himself in what, at first, appears to be a giant, decrepit barn caked in owlshit, he discovers himself inside a particularly unfortunate caricature of an Amish house, and embraced by a family of twenty-three children (half boys, half girls, and one undecided, played by Shit — oops! — Shia LaBeouf), all of whom he takes prisoner even though they’re, like, totally nice to him. (In a surprise bit of stunt-casting, Larry “Lana” Wachowski plays one of the daughters.)

Larry “Lana” Wachowski (left), with brother Andy

Meanwhile, their father — a short, bald, angry widower who is bald and short (Ben Kingsley) — attempts to kill him with antiquated farm implements.

Sir Ben Kingsley

I won’t give away the twelve surprise endings of You Only Lick My Daughters! (which is altered slightly from the forthcoming Jane Smiley novel, Yet More Cows, upon which it is based) — but basically its title hinges on an agreement wherein the bald, short, Amish widower — whose politics are far from progressive — eventually agrees to allow the Goldthwait character to molest his daughters, but not his sons, because, “the Lord sayeth that’s icky and wrong.” I don’t think it’s a spoiler to add that, by the end, everyone has learned a little something, and grown as a human being. The ghost of short, bald Kingsley’s dead wife is played, of course, by Cate Blanchett.

The audience at Cannes loved You Only Lick My Daughters! — affording it the customary fifty-minute standing ovation — and since it’s the first and only movie we at Team ÜberCiné have viewed at Cannes this year, we unanimously confirm that it’s the very best movie we’ve seen here thus far.

Of course, we’ll be attending the Kung Fu Panda panel on Friday and the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull panel on Saturday, but, as serious cinéastes (some might say ÜberCinéastes), we’re actually hoping to find even more significant and important cultural and socio-political events to explore.

Case-in-point: Mud, the new film from actress-turned-documentarian Hillary Swank.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank,

wearing Polish tablecloth, post Sno-Cone.

Like most fuckin’ actresses who screw and screw-over a bunch of people and become rich and famous and then pretend like they give a shit about suffering people in other countries, Ms. Swank (a former Karate Kid; rhymes with “wank”) was sitting around watching TV one night and suddenly…well, here’s a treat: We at Team ÜberCiné actually ran into Ms. Swank over by the Sno-Cone cart in Cannes, and conducted an impromptu interview re: Mud:

ÜberCiné: Hi. You’re Hillary Swank, right? Make that two “red” ones, merci. So what’s Mud about?

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Well, back before I screwed and then screwed-over Chad Lowe, we were doing it in front of the TV, and there was this totally depressing show on, about, like, Southeast Asia and how, like, there’s, like, a big storm there every few days, and then everybody drowns, except then the people who don’t drown are all covered in mud, and I was all: ‘Aha!’

ÜberCiné: But the people who drown are also covered in mud, right? Gardez le changement.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: What?

ÜberCiné: What?

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: No — what did you just say?

ÜberCiné: Oh, it was French.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Why the fuck are you speaking French here?

ÜberCiné: Forget it. How’s your Sno-Cone?

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Cold and conical — much like me.

ÜberCiné: I don’t even know how to respond to that.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Check out that family over there! They’re urinating!

ÜberCiné: And smoking.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: When I saw Elisabeth Shue urinating in Leaving Las Vegas — and then she won an Oscar for it — I was all, “My destiny is sealed.”

ÜberCiné: What about Mena Suvari in Spun? She actually takes an on-screen dump.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: No Oscar, though, right?

ÜberCiné: Nope.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Well, that says it all. Obviously, dumping isn’t where it’s at.

ÜberCiné: Anyway, let’s get back to your amazing new documentary, Mud — which is narrated by Cate Blanchett and Samantha Morton. So tell me–

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Wait — who do you represent again?

ÜberCiné: ÜberCiné.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: What the fuck is that?

ÜberCiné: It’s an extremely popular and powerful website with millions of visitors each day. It’s also a way of life. I could teach you.

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Okay. My room’s, like, right there.

ÜberCiné: Wanna do it?

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Sure.

ÜberCiné: Look, I sat through The Affair of the Necklace; I feel like you owe me something in return. Wait… “Sure”? That’s it?

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: I’m an actress. Bang me. Whatever. But can I finish my Sno-Cone first?

ÜberCiné: You’re an actress. You can walk and eat at the same time…can’t you?

Actress-Turned-Documentarian Hillary Swank: Rad!

Obviously, we at Team ÜberCiné were even more slightly weary after doing it with a two-time Oscar-winner who isn’t as pretty as her ex-husband but boxes better — but in fact that’s a total lie, because we’re way above doing it with actresses, and in fact all we did was walk Ms. Swank back to her hotel, stand her next to some failed Eurotrash rock star with guaranteed magnetism for her limited sensory capacities, and then run away with our tape-recorder, giggling insanely. At this point — perhaps due to the mixed effects of three-days’ sleeplessness, slight weariness and drinking champagne from the bottle, we ran into acclaimed funnyman and pedophile Woody Allen, who toppled into a fountain and abruptly drowned.

French Mourners

Allen’s daughter, however — who is also his wife — was heard to say, “Oh, it’s okay — we were all getting sick of him making a mediocre new movie every year anyway,” and, feigning mourning whilst examining the contents of dead Allen’s wallet, offered us their free passes to the evening’s V.I.P. Opening Gala Event: A special advance screening of the remake of The Fat Boys’ immortal Disorderlies — starring Ryan Phillipe and Shit — whoops! — Shia LaBeouf in digital blackface as two of the Boys (the inferior actors perhaps taking their cue from Robert Downey, Jr. in this summer’s August dumper, Tropic Thunder), as well as Cate Blanchett and Samantha Morton alternating as “The Human Beatbox” — with Eddie Murphy playing all of the remaining characters. Truth be told, we didn’t even consider attending the screening — but we did go to the special Cannes Opening Gala V.I.P. Disorderlies buffet for something like five hours, and we brought large, insulated plastic cartons for transport of entire serving bowls of pasta and lots of mysterious deep-fried things back to our Motel 6. There was also something in there which appeared to be snails (!) — but these we gave to the gypsies in trade for a dance each with their women, and now — although it wasn’t as much fun as watching The Apple at midnight at the Nuart — I must say of today — Day One for Team ÜberCiné at Cannes! — simply “C’est magnifique!” — and, head full of ridiculous balderdash and tummy full of French grease, I hastily eye the ten-Euros-per-minute counter on the Motel 6 computer and bid you adieu! this lovely evening.

~Gregory

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