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QUOTE DU JOUR
"I'm surprised at you, Roger. I thought only the British liked Moulin Rouge. They know nothing about cinema." Montreal film fest director Serge Losique to Roger Ebert, on Ebert's positive review of Moulin Rouge.

SYNOPSIS DU JOUR
Oedipus (Greece): "The body of a garage owner is discovered." Who says they don't make 'em like they used to any more?

INTERNATIONAL CINEMA LIVES
There's an Argentine film showing in Critics' Week called Bolivia. And the director's first name is Israel.

IN THE SOMETIMES- YOUR-MIND -CAN-BE-SO -OPEN-THAT -YOUR-BRAIN -FALLS-OUT DEPARTMENT
Overheard in the press room: "I agree that it's a great film. Of course, I found it unwatchable."

Previous Reports
Don't miss John Harkness' other reports from the festival. Jump down to the list.

report date: May 15, 2001

By JOHN HARKNESS

CANNES - The Croisette, the beach neighbourhood, blacked out for about two and a half hours yesterday. Early reports are that the outage was caused by a power overload in the Palais des Festivals that didn't, somehow, affect the Palais - at least not the parts I was watching movies in.

A Lebanese journo was trapped for the full two and half hours in an elevator in the Hotel Grey d'Albion. The frightening thought, given what we know about people's behaviour during blackouts, is that next year there'll be a lot of three-month old babies being dragged along the Croisette, each with his own Prada bag and cellphone.

THE GLOBAL REACH - Of Canadian culture, of all things. When I head up the hill to my hotel at night and switch on the TV, I keep finding CanCon: Avonlea on TeleMonteCarlo, some ultra-cheap, straight-to-cable thriller with Andrew McCarthy as a bad guy on RAI2, and last night on Arte, Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, letterboxed and with subtitles.

SPEAKING OF LETTERBOXING - The techno toy of my dreams is all over the place this year. Almost every stand in the market has a couple of huge, wide-screen, high-definition-video TV screens up and working. If I ever get one of these, I may never leave my house again.

SCARY - Each of the daily papers here (there are about seven of them) has a "jury" of international film critics rating the competition films. On the English side, the film with the highest cumulative score is the animated Shrek.

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