Cannes

Shit. I feel like I'm going to puke. It's May 16th, and I'm in Cannes for the International Film Festival. For some reason that is unclear to me now, I got it in my head that the Star Wars Premiere was tonight... It was last night. I'm twelve hours late. I missed it.

One of the reasons I'm on this trip is that I'm tired of only experiencing the world through images of it. I'm tired of seeing pictures/movies of London, Paris, Rome... of the Mona Lisa and the Mediterranean. And yet because of some cosmic force combined with my own stupidity, all I've been able to see here are the newspaper articles and red carpet photos of what happened last night (Natalie Portman shaved her head, btw). And there are posters for the movie everywhere (they taunt me). What was I thinking. I can't believe I didn't look up the schedule again while I was over here (Maybe there are advantages to constant access to the internet). I've been on the verge of crying all day.

They showed A New Hope on the beach last night too. Even that would have been something to see. I wonder, though, if my blog here would have qualified me for a press pass to the show (I would have had to apply for it awhile ago). It worked for the white house...

The festival was pretty nice, though. The only people who get to see the movies, though, are industry and press people who have ID badges. Nevertheless, I'm confident I could have snuck through all that in what was probably a much bigger crowd to see the premiere last night. In walking around today, I found a path through the parking garage that led behind one checkpoint to some stairs that led up to an upper floor of the Palace Cinema. I didn't tempt my fate for whatever they were showing at the moment, though.

Mostly, the general public just gets to stand next to the red carpet and watch the semicelebrities and a few people I actually know walk the red carpet up to their movie showing. I walked around, found the Carlton Hotel where, apparently, the original Star Wars production deal was inked. It had an appropriate set of posters.

As I mentioned they show movies on the beach for the general public at night, for which I stuck around, but the movie was Korean, subtitled in French. So I could only barely follow along. And we had to leave early to catch the last train back to Nice anyway.

I was having a crappy day in Barcelona too.... I should have just gone to Cannes.... damn.