Rushes

Pussyfootin' Around

Dušan Sekulović is at the Cannes Film Festival to accompany his short film, Pussyfoot, to the screening room. An abbreviated version his feature with the same title, Pussyfoot is a comedy about a bristly faced resident alien living out his version of the American dream in New York. I had the pleasure of sitting next to Sekulović on a 7.5 hour flight over to France, during he shared many fascinating bits of information, including how he raised most of the money to finance his film. Sekulović set up a website allowing people to buy themselves credits in Pussyfoot. The price was based on the size and font of each credit, starting at $35 for a 24 point font to $900 for a 400 point Hummer of a credit. Sales totaled nearly $40,000, and the credits may end up being longer than those for Lord of The Rings.

Sekulović also shared another more immediately useful nugget of knowledge. In order to avoid lousy airplane meals with microwaved meats and gooey breakfast buns that seem baked in the plastic they arrive in, Sekulović suggests ordering the Hindu meal. He particularly enjoys seeing stewardesses walk past him 3 or 4 times while attempting to deliver his special request because they are looking for an Indian person. Of a mixed German, Yugoslavian, and Italian upbringing himself, Sekulović enjoys comedically playing up but also challenging cultural stereotypes. These themes will be revisited in his next feature, a drama about a mute boy in a very conservative town of Southern Italy. 

Here's the official Pussyfoot website.

— Roseann M. Lake

Characters on the Croisette

Characters on the Croisette Part I

36-year-old Christophe Didillon of a small village in Germany has put on his Spider-Man costume and made the pilgrimage to Cannes in a test of his undying love for Kirsten Dunst. His dream is to meet her, illustrate a painting with her, and eventually donate the proceeds of its sale to children with cancer.

He strolls the Croisette holding a small fishing net full of "KirstenDollars" or $1 U.S. dollar bills with her face superimposed on them. He credits his strategic choice of dollars over euros to the fact that Kristen's hair is similar to George Washington's, although he is well aware that greenback's value is pecuniary compared to that of its European counterpart.

Didillon has already made a walk from San Francsico to L.A. in the name of Spider-Man's sweetheart. He has also participated in the Camino de Santiago, collecting donations for Amnesty International against female genital mutilation.

Didillon first noticed Dunst in "Juuu - mon - gee." It remains his favorite movie.

A Beginner's Guide to Surviving Cannes

For an event taking place in France, the logistics behind the Cannes film festival are surprisingly uncomplicated — or at least applying to get in is. If you turn press accreditation documents over in a timely proper manner, it is possible to be promptly outfitted with the coveted badge and bag of maps and screening times that are essential to Palais mobility. The difficulty lies in deciphering what your badge and its accoutrements mean!

A series of guards in light gray suits line the Palais hallways like nippy little gargoyles. Though some are friendly and apologetically send you away when your badge doesn't give you access to a certain area, most will dismiss you rather boorishly. Those are the ones you want to go Donkey Kong on and body slam out of the way because the Palais is enough of a mayhem without being denied access at every entry.

Cannes Press Pandering

The Kung Fu Panda press conference was noteworthy if only for the fact that the world’s press seemed as if they could give a damn that the panel included two-time Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman and Golden Globe nominee and box office comedy star Jack Black.  For the media of the world, everything and everyone else paled and then blurred as a radiant (and discernibly pregnant) Angelina Jolie stepped into the room.  Every camera lens seemed trained on her alone.  The vast majority of questions were aimed at her. The artistic accomplishment of the animated film seemed of little consequence.

No one asked, for example, about the fact the directors opted to fold the mannerisms and expressions of the live actors into the animated character as opposed to using ‘lipstick cam’ footage to recreate exact expressions.  The press cared more about Jolie’s lipstick color. There was in fact a question about what shoes she’d be wearing that night…and, of course, the inevitable prodding for sound bites about her pregnancy and the pending birth of THE twins.  Yet the best lines belonged to Hoffman.  At an arbitrary moment he interrupted the flow of questions-and-answers just to point out: “There was a point in time when Angelina could have chosen between me and Brad.”  When a journalist chose to draw attention to the fact that the star of the classic The Graduate is now doing animation, Hoffman lamented:  “It’s a decline in culture,” before gesturing at the sea of press.  “But,” he said wryly, “it has also reached your profession. We are all in the same bag here together.”

Cannes Day 2: Celeb spotting for all

The thing about Cannes is you never know when you are gonna run into a celeb in an unexpected and arbitrary context.  You may end up sharing an elevator ride with George Lucas (which I did at the Carlton Hotel today) or bump into Gael Garcia Bernal in a hotel lobby (which I did at The Martinez Hotel).  The Angelinas and Spielbergs of this world are often escorted in by boat behind the Palais and whisked out to the Hotel du Cap in Antibes and so do little shoulder-rubbing with street riff-raff.  But every now and then you run into someone you’d never thought you would.  Scrambling to get from the luncheon/interview with the cast of Blindness (I did manage a late screening on Wednesday), I hotfooted it to the Palais in order to join the frenzy of journalists and television crews awaiting the start of Kung Fu Panda press conference.  And on the way there I realized my pace was being matched stride-for-stride by someone in a cream suit on a cell phone asking for directions to the Palais.  [Cream is not Morgan Spurlock’s color, btw].

CANNES 2008: DAY 1

Having attended the Cannes Film Festival for six consecutive years, I have never really doubted the extent to which this annual parade of glitz and glamour captures the popular imagination here in France.  But flipping through channels in a desperate search for something in English, I was treated to not one but two game shows dedicated entirely to questions revolving around the history of the fest.  I am trying to imagine both The Weakest Link and Jeopardy! having only questions all about Oscar in the run up to the Academy Awards. I am one of over four thousand accredited journalists -- the most ever -- to descend on this small seaside town.  On the TGV (i.e. damn fast) train from Paris to Cannes, I was accosted by one of probably hundreds of bloggers and internet journalists that have no press credentials to cover the festival officially but are determined to leverage the star-wattage of the Croisette to boost their sites.  This particular blogger goes by the non-de-plum of Beatrice de la France and with a compact Nokia phone/video camera she began her daily video blog report on Cannes somewhere in the countryside of Provence by turning the camera on herself, myself and any other unsuspecting fellow train travelers, proudly proclaiming her determination to conquer Cannes with little more than that essential little black dress, overly large dark sunglasses and a big dose of chutzpah.