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SPEND A DAY AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL!By JOHN HARKNESS CANNES AWARDS - will be up at 2 pm EDT at the Cannes website, http://www.festival-cannes.fr/default1.php AVALON -- Why would anyone who wasn't Polish make a movie in Polish? Odd move for Japanese anime master Mamoru Oshii, director of The Ghost In The Shell, making his first foray into live action cinema. Odder still that the "game" in this sepia picture isn't very interesting - a standard VR combat game. OUCH -- "Moulin Rouge turns out to be a surprisingly sentimental, mostly badly sung, anti-erotically danced, visually postmodern, claustrophobically designed hodgepodge of musical strategies built around the bizarre assumption that Nicole Kidman is a great musical talent." - Andrew Sarris, The New York Observer CANNES KOAN - If a movie screens in the Marche, and there's no one there to see it, does it make a sale? SPIN CONTROL -- ``There is so much myth surrounding Cannes that it was perhaps necessary this year to have a little less media effervescence in order to regain a sense of reality,'' - Cannes Programme Director Thierry Fremaux on the shortage of American stars. MAYBE IT'S ME - "For ten days, their DV Camera captures and caresses the faces of a thousand children, all orphans, whose parents have died of AIDS. It records tears and laughter, music and silence, life and death. It attests to Africa's sunny resilience to so much suffering and disease" - The Official Program on Abbas Kiarostami's documentary, A.B.C. Africa. Isn't this like saying "Slavery isn't so bad - look at all them happy-go-lucky darkies"? CHILD ABUSE -- ``I really don't get it anymore. I don't get why you'd want to subject your baby to this place.'' - Tim Robbins on why he doesn't want to show any more of his films at Cannes. EVERYBODY LOVES -- No Man's Land, the Bosnian "black comedy" about the Civil War. Ooooh, it's great, ooh, it's brilliant. As my companion at this morning's screening noted, "it's the first pacifist film from Bosnia, how good does it have to be?" Not very. It started to lose me when a soldier in one of the trenches is reading the paper and says "Rwanda, what a mess!" First time director Danis Tanovic plainly shops for irony at K-Mart. PREVIOUS REPORTS:
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